That makes me wonder... What do we do when Obama (just 'cause he's the sitting president) endorses a candidate while still accepting his salary?
Well, when GWB endorsed McCain, he made personal statements about how he thought McCain's past service to the country made him a better candidate. He didn't put a "Vote for McCain" banner at the top of whitehouse.gov
It's a pretty fine line these people have to walk, distinguishing their personal beliefs from official policy, especially in spoken interviews, but communication from "official" channels pretty clearly comes from the Office not the person.
I mean, if I were a greedy fuck (and I kind of am) then I'd want the person controlling the company to do everything he legally can to further the business.
A CEO who will do legal-but-unethical things to benefit the business over society will probably also do legal but unethical things to benefit himself over the business or its shareholders.
What's the difference between a "personal" Facebook account and an "official" one? Fuck all.
The distinction between individual actions and the actions of "legal entities" is part of the foundation of Western law. It what makes it fraudulent for a sheriff to have the jail road gang do landscaping on his personal house or for a candidate to buy himself a boat with campaign funds. It's what keeps an individual county clerk from imposing her personal religious views on the entire county.
Publicly funded organizations may be composed of politically active individuals, but the organizations are supposed to be apolitical. In many places, politicians aren't even supposed to use their government phones for campaign calls. Citizens United does not apply to NASA, the EPA, the CIA, or the Fort Collins school district.
The difference between (1) and (2) is largely meaningless for net neutrality.
The difference between prioritizing packets based on source or service is the key to net neutrality. It may be hard to remember, now that "the internet" is largely HTTP, but there are a lot of different data protocols out there, each designed for different purpose and with different needs. Likewise, every network will be congested at times, so routers need to know how to prioritize data. Serving everything FIFO means your FPS "shoot enemy" packet may have to wait for my "upload another cat picture" packet.
Net neutrality means that Blizzard's ISP can not sell individual WoW players priority through their network, but have to pass all of that traffic using the same rules. They can choose to prioritize WoW traffic on port 3724 above HTTP traffic on port 80 (or vice versa), but they can't choose to prioritize my WoW over yours. Most streaming services use HTTP/HTTPS, so a neutral ISP can't deprioritize Netflix without affecting the entire web.
Usually the way companies get around it if they want to give no notice is pay everybody for the 60 days that they would have still had a job.
I suspect that's very much what was done here. Remember, these people are training their replacements - they've been told about an impending mass layoff, but for the next XX days, they are training Asok in their previous duties. I suspect an additional lump-sum severance is in exchange for not taking a new job that would prevent them from consulting for the old job. Individuals are, no doubt, free to decline those terms and quit immediately. Doing that consulting for "no additional compensation" sounds pretty fishy, and I suspect the contract would say something like 'severance includes non-refundable pre-payment for XX hours of consulting time.'
I mean, companies do try contract scams, where they get you to sign away inalienable rights in hopes that you just don't check, but it's far more productive to have the lawyers write up legally enforceable contracts, especially if you have 1000 lawyers on staff. In this case, they may look at it like a lottery - they've got 100 chances to find someone who believes his word is a bond in the event that the H1B's turn out to be fuckups. That seems completely counter-productive: why not write a legally defensible retainer clause?
I also suspect these contracts would be a lot more negotiable if the 100 affected workers organized themselves and agreed, en masse, not to train their replacements or to remain 'available.' If only there were some mechanism for arranging such collective bargaining...
A severance agreement is supposed to involve compensation.
And that's exactly the way this one works. These deals are something like "Your job has been made redundant, effective today. We can offer a one month contract to train a foreign worker in a newly created job with very similar responsibilities to your old job and a further three months salary equivalent if you agree to make yourself available for consultation over the next two years."
Don't agree to train your replacement, and you're out of a job today, instead of next month. Find that you've forgotten all your old skills when they call you a year later, and they can ask for that 3 month severance back.
This is where a union would be useful. If the company offers that deal to 100 individuals, it's in each person's best interest to take the deal. If one or two uppity fools decline, it doesn't impact operations. If everyone declines the "deal," then the company is fucked. A union is the way to escape the Prisoner's Dilemma that is salary negotiation.
why? you're going to fail around like an idiot for 8 hours+? you might just as well go out and play some real football or enlist in the army.
People like games because their ability to "win" is largely independent of their actual, physical skill. You're going to be much better, with much less effort, at a VR sport game than real sport.
But VR is not going to be good for shooters or sports games. Games that involve you moving around a large physical space, ducking and bobbing your head and body. Too many non-visual stimuli contradicting the visual inputs, which is where nausea comes from. Not to mention the problems of latency and frame rate when you really start moving.
VR is going to be good for exploration/storytelling and simulation type games. Probably even only flight simulations, because car and boat sims will also have enough movement to drive perceptive conflict. This is why the popular demos have been horror stories and flight sims (eg, E:D and Valkyrie). You wouldn't use a racing wheel to play Counter Strike, but it rocks for Need for Speed.
I'm saying BAC isn't a good measure of a persons tolerance for alcohol. One person can do just fine and.08 and another cannot. The measure and number is arbitrary.
And what's your alternative? Do you want people who scored an A on their driving test to be allowed 0.12, but hold people who scored a C to 0.08? Please provide a nice, clean objective measure to BAC that doesn't rely on the judgement of the officer administering the test or of the subject undergoing the test. Something that can be performed quickly and without a database of individualized reference data. Something with a biological rationale.
I'm sure you're in the top 1% of drivers, but in my observations, people who claim to be "just fine" to drive after four or five drinks are not to be believed.
And you're far far more likely to accidentally drown your swimming pool than be killed by a gun; do you advocate that swimming pools are the biggest source of terrorism?
That statistic in only true if you restrict your investigation to children under 14. The actual number of drownings in the US is about 3900/year (CDC), while the number of non-suicide gun deaths is around 12,000/year. (Gun suicides around 21,000/year)
More importantly, the number of people murdered by swimming pools is about 15, so keeping special surveillance of swimming pool owners is not going to reduce the number of homicides very much. 15 drowning murders/10 million swimming pools = 1/670,000. 12,000 gun homicides/100 million gun owners = 1/8,300.
And, relevant to the topic at hand, there's about 1 Islamic terrorist attack in the US per year. 1 Terrorist/3 million Muslims. You know, maybe we should keep an eye on those swimming pool owners.
Also, there are hundreds of thousands of muslims in NY... it's hard to believe the cops singled out those folks for random harassment just 'cause they felt like it. There probably were suspicious indicators that they picked up. Yes, false positives happen... sucks for everyone involved (yes, the gov wasted our tax dollars on that false positive).
The point is that the government surveilled everyone who attended a mosque, because they had the narrative that some terrorists are Muslim, completely ignoring that few Muslims are terrorists. There were hundreds of thousands of false positives. There were so many false positives that they completely obscured any true positives. Profiling that way just doesn't work.
Look, here's some numbers: in the past 20 years, approximately 60 acts of terror on US soil by Muslims, 140 by 'ecoterrorists,' and 270 by 'right wing' groups. Roughly 12% Islamic terrorism, even though Muslims make up only 1% of the US population. Surely, this means a Muslim is 12x more likely to be a terrorist than is a Christian or non-religious person. This means the incidence of terrorists in the Muslim population is 1/1,040,000, so focusing an investigation on Muslims results in approximately 1e6 false positives for every actual terrorist.
The ads are served on a different server. That's how adblock works. It blocks connections to servers that host ads. Ads don't use site bandwidth.
I think that's the point. Ads are free revenue for the site. Sites have no way to know how those ads affect their readers. Third party servers are easy to block.
If you move the ad scripts from the client to the server, set the server to download whatever image and forward it to the reader, then they'll bypass the adblockers, they'll get direct metrics on how much the ads diminish the reader experience, and they can bill advertisers based on the actual cost of production and publication.
The best option would be to charge for energy used directly to your home electricity bill. Add on a small surcharge or percentage to cover maintenance and up-keep, or just roll it into the taxes that pay for highway maintenance.
The problem is that electricity is so cheap that the cost of the metering device and accounting vastly outweighs the actual cost of product.
There was a story in my local news a year or two ago about a guy arrested for plugging his car into a school charger while he was there for a meeting of some sort. The best anyone could figure, after a week or so of number crunching, he "stole" about a nickel worth of electricity.
When 'civilization' collapses, the only thing will matter is loyalty. As long as the banks and the trains work, wealthy people can buy an approximation of loyalty, but that often turns into resentment if monetary power is removed.
So here's this bunch of maintenance, security, and chandler staff, maintaining an elaborate panic-complex for paranoid billionaires. Maybe for decades; probably never to be used. How do you get those people to be loyal enough to those (probably unseen) clients, that they'll choose to spend the rest of their lives in the Vault with Paris Hilton and Donald Trump and let cousin Billy and the hot waitress at Chili's die in a fire? Money is only a motivator when there is a civilization to spend it in.
You seem to be conflating two kinds of shelter: one where a handful of rich elites could hold out against armed, post-apocalyptic mobs, and one where an armed, not-quite apocalyptic force could overcome the defenders. If the facility is not defensible enough for its staff to disable access controls and hold against the evacuating clients, then there's no way said clients could hold against starving mobs.
Let me guess, you plan is to try violence and theft in an emergency?
That's pretty much how the world works now. We've all gotten together and agreed to massive retaliation against anyone who violates our agreed standards of character. Whether it's lopping the hands off thieves or 5 years of prison for getting high, that's a lot of violence and theft being imposed.
A billion dollars buys a lot of power and violence in a stable society, but it's hard to eat entries in a Citibank mainframe when the power goes out. If that time comes, it might be better not to have spent your life using money to make people do things they don't want.
Back in the "good old days," an educated populace was a source of communal pride. Providing everyone with the opportunity to try (and the opportunity to fail) to better themselves through education used to be a way to reward individual initiative and merit. It's why we have land grant schools and the GI Bill. "State" schools were actually funded by the states; they'd let anyone in; and many of them would fail.
Now, it seems that education has become an individual benefit for which the individual should pay. Nobody wants to pay to educate his neighbor's dumb kid. State support for "public" universities has dried up, and they depend on tuition to keep the lights on.
They have discovered market forces. Faculty can bring in more money doing research than teaching students. Students who flunk out don't pay tuition, so retention has become a major issue. Keep the customer happy, comfortable, and hopeful. Don't fail them just because they struggle with a few concepts.
Of course, it used to be that success in college was a good indicator of competency. If (almost) anyone can get a degree in exchange for tuition, then the degree loses that value
Rampage killers are cowards - when confronted by police or counter-force, they typically kill themselves.
Doesn't that suggest that rampage killers are intent on suicide, but want to take a few of their perceived tormentors with them?
In the US, you have easy access to guns, so the suicidal use guns and angry suicidals shoot people. In places with easy access to explosives, angry suicidals blow people up. In some places, effective mental health limits suicides and limited access to tools of easy destruction limits collateral damage.
The vast majority of gun deaths in the united states are criminals either criminals shooting criminals, police shooting criminals or legal gun owners shooting criminals.
The vast majority (2/3) of gun deaths in the US are legal gun owners shooting themselves.
About 10% of gun-homicides are police shootings. About 2% of gun-homicides are "justifiable" shootings by private citizens (ie: legal gun owner shooting criminal). According to the FBI, criminal homicides are pretty evenly split - 1/3 during commission of a felony, 1/3 during arguments, 1/3 unspecified circumstances.
Just because (he claims) most shootings occur in places with high gun control does not imply that all places with high gun control have lots of shootings.
According to Wikipedia, countries with the highest gun-violence are El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Swaziland, and Venezuela, all about 3x the US rate. Most of these countries require licensing and registration of guns. This may technically place them in the set of "high gun control" countries, but I don't think many of them are high on the list of effective enforcement.
This is also the problem of comparing US regions by legal limitations: if one can just go out to the suburbs to avoid DC's "strict" gun control laws, or drive 30 minutes across the state line, then those laws can not be very effective. It's why so many Georgia and Florida guns leave the state
But this really have hurt VW, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are additional models coming up as well on this - even gasoline and hybrids.
This issue is 100% diesel, and there is no way it crosses over to gasoline engines.
VW's low-cost system for reducing NOx requires extra fuel to be burned, keeping the engine at higher temperature, reducing both engine life and fuel economy. Gasoline engines carefully control the fuel/air mix such that NOx are efficiently scrubbed by the catalytic converter. The high-cost clean diesel system used in Audi/Mercedes injects additional chemicals into the exhaust gas to decompose NOx.
So, only VW (among passenger cars), and only diesel has an incentive to turn off the NOx scavenging system: VW's low-end NOx scavenging defeats their reputation for reliability and fuel economy.
Uber "ignores" nothing; they are a broker between private riders and private ride providers. Everybody knows what they are getting and that the usual "protections" from a government-licensed taxi service don't apply.
Uber uses software to allow them to behave like taxis while being legally characterized as "black cab," "car service," or "limosine." Drivers in these legal categories have to meet different requirements and have different limitations on their business freedom, some of which could be considered relics of technologically different times. Uber is disruptive because it performs the on-demand function of a taxi while holding the business flexibility (ie: flexible rates, passenger screening) of a car service.
Eventually, regulations will catch up with the technology. Uber will be absorbed into Taxi-like classification and allowed to pick up airport passengers, or the distinctions among small, for-hire transport will be reduced, and these entities will be able to compete fairly.
That's why you shouldn't fence them in. The problem starts when you block the path. Just put the whole damn thing out in the open where people can move
Even without fences or corrals, a throng of 1e9 people is dangerous. Those guys in back, 7km from the 'stage,' want, at least, to be able to see the venue, and they push, just a little. The guys only 3km from 'stage,' they're also pushing, just a little. What do you think happens when a line of people four or five kilometers long all pushes on the guy in front?
This is what makes lemmings go over cliff faces, and it's why people died at Mecca.
You do know that "computer programming" is something that anyone can do, not just a job title, right? Comparing a girls-only programming camp to an imaginary boys-only "school teacher camp" is a ridiculous MRA analogy.
Gender-exclusive camps are nothing new. The Boy Scouts run a number of boys only hiking and knot-tying camps. Fashion and modeling camps exist and are overwhelmingly but not exclusively girls. A 'boys only' fashion camp seems perfectly reasonable, and I don't imagine they would learn about clothing design and manufacture by driving trucks over bolts of fabric.
stress and nervousness and normal and they are grounds for the interviewers to further explore the line of questioning to check if the nervousness is just nervousness or something more sinister. Why do people think everything has to be so black and white or that the interviewers can't possibly be used to dealing with people that are nervous for reasons beyond lieing.
You're describing a polygraph as being a crutch for an interrogator who can not personally identify the signs of unease and evasion in a subject. That is, that the implements and ritual of the polygraph makes it easier for the interrogator to follow procedures, not that they reveal anything about the subject. Unfortunately, polygraph is presented as an objective, clinical test of the subject.
This is stunningly similar to the discussion of homeopathic "cures," where you have one set of people saying they "work" because the placebo effect is a real thing, and another set saying that the placebo effect is the very definition of not "working."
âoeWe (officers) are like used car salesman. But instead of selling a junky car to someone, we have to sell the idea that confessing is the best thing to do.â Polygraph is like a special deal for today only because the salesman is under deadline to make his quota.
Good Lord, We had no inclination of taking the slew of pharmaceutical drugs back in my day as a teen. Ok, sure, we had plenty of "parking lot" drugs we often had fun with...but as far as systemized drugging of kids, we did just fine without all the anti-depressants turning kids into zombies so early ln life.
But I have a right to be happy all the time. I live in the greatest country earth has ever known and my parents provide me with every possible comfort and advantage. Coasting through life as I have, without any serious challenges or impediments, I should be the happiest kid on earth. If I'm not, it's clearly a neural imbalance, and there's a drug for that.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes me wonder... What do we do when Obama (just 'cause he's the sitting president) endorses a candidate while still accepting his salary?
Well, when GWB endorsed McCain, he made personal statements about how he thought McCain's past service to the country made him a better candidate. He didn't put a "Vote for McCain" banner at the top of whitehouse.gov
It's a pretty fine line these people have to walk, distinguishing their personal beliefs from official policy, especially in spoken interviews, but communication from "official" channels pretty clearly comes from the Office not the person.
I mean, if I were a greedy fuck (and I kind of am) then I'd want the person controlling the company to do everything he legally can to further the business.
A CEO who will do legal-but-unethical things to benefit the business over society will probably also do legal but unethical things to benefit himself over the business or its shareholders.
What's the difference between a "personal" Facebook account and an "official" one? Fuck all.
The distinction between individual actions and the actions of "legal entities" is part of the foundation of Western law. It what makes it fraudulent for a sheriff to have the jail road gang do landscaping on his personal house or for a candidate to buy himself a boat with campaign funds. It's what keeps an individual county clerk from imposing her personal religious views on the entire county.
Publicly funded organizations may be composed of politically active individuals, but the organizations are supposed to be apolitical. In many places, politicians aren't even supposed to use their government phones for campaign calls. Citizens United does not apply to NASA, the EPA, the CIA, or the Fort Collins school district.
The difference between (1) and (2) is largely meaningless for net neutrality.
The difference between prioritizing packets based on source or service is the key to net neutrality. It may be hard to remember, now that "the internet" is largely HTTP, but there are a lot of different data protocols out there, each designed for different purpose and with different needs. Likewise, every network will be congested at times, so routers need to know how to prioritize data. Serving everything FIFO means your FPS "shoot enemy" packet may have to wait for my "upload another cat picture" packet.
Net neutrality means that Blizzard's ISP can not sell individual WoW players priority through their network, but have to pass all of that traffic using the same rules. They can choose to prioritize WoW traffic on port 3724 above HTTP traffic on port 80 (or vice versa), but they can't choose to prioritize my WoW over yours. Most streaming services use HTTP/HTTPS, so a neutral ISP can't deprioritize Netflix without affecting the entire web.
Usually the way companies get around it if they want to give no notice is pay everybody for the 60 days that they would have still had a job.
I suspect that's very much what was done here. Remember, these people are training their replacements - they've been told about an impending mass layoff, but for the next XX days, they are training Asok in their previous duties. I suspect an additional lump-sum severance is in exchange for not taking a new job that would prevent them from consulting for the old job. Individuals are, no doubt, free to decline those terms and quit immediately. Doing that consulting for "no additional compensation" sounds pretty fishy, and I suspect the contract would say something like 'severance includes non-refundable pre-payment for XX hours of consulting time.'
I mean, companies do try contract scams, where they get you to sign away inalienable rights in hopes that you just don't check, but it's far more productive to have the lawyers write up legally enforceable contracts, especially if you have 1000 lawyers on staff. In this case, they may look at it like a lottery - they've got 100 chances to find someone who believes his word is a bond in the event that the H1B's turn out to be fuckups. That seems completely counter-productive: why not write a legally defensible retainer clause?
I also suspect these contracts would be a lot more negotiable if the 100 affected workers organized themselves and agreed, en masse, not to train their replacements or to remain 'available.' If only there were some mechanism for arranging such collective bargaining...
A severance agreement is supposed to involve compensation.
And that's exactly the way this one works. These deals are something like "Your job has been made redundant, effective today. We can offer a one month contract to train a foreign worker in a newly created job with very similar responsibilities to your old job and a further three months salary equivalent if you agree to make yourself available for consultation over the next two years."
Don't agree to train your replacement, and you're out of a job today, instead of next month. Find that you've forgotten all your old skills when they call you a year later, and they can ask for that 3 month severance back.
This is where a union would be useful. If the company offers that deal to 100 individuals, it's in each person's best interest to take the deal. If one or two uppity fools decline, it doesn't impact operations. If everyone declines the "deal," then the company is fucked. A union is the way to escape the Prisoner's Dilemma that is salary negotiation.
why? you're going to fail around like an idiot for 8 hours+? you might just as well go out and play some real football or enlist in the army.
People like games because their ability to "win" is largely independent of their actual, physical skill. You're going to be much better, with much less effort, at a VR sport game than real sport.
But VR is not going to be good for shooters or sports games. Games that involve you moving around a large physical space, ducking and bobbing your head and body. Too many non-visual stimuli contradicting the visual inputs, which is where nausea comes from. Not to mention the problems of latency and frame rate when you really start moving.
VR is going to be good for exploration/storytelling and simulation type games. Probably even only flight simulations, because car and boat sims will also have enough movement to drive perceptive conflict. This is why the popular demos have been horror stories and flight sims (eg, E:D and Valkyrie). You wouldn't use a racing wheel to play Counter Strike, but it rocks for Need for Speed.
I'm saying BAC isn't a good measure of a persons tolerance for alcohol. One person can do just fine and .08 and another cannot. The measure and number is arbitrary.
And what's your alternative? Do you want people who scored an A on their driving test to be allowed 0.12, but hold people who scored a C to 0.08? Please provide a nice, clean objective measure to BAC that doesn't rely on the judgement of the officer administering the test or of the subject undergoing the test. Something that can be performed quickly and without a database of individualized reference data. Something with a biological rationale.
I'm sure you're in the top 1% of drivers, but in my observations, people who claim to be "just fine" to drive after four or five drinks are not to be believed.
And you're far far more likely to accidentally drown your swimming pool than be killed by a gun; do you advocate that swimming pools are the biggest source of terrorism?
That statistic in only true if you restrict your investigation to children under 14. The actual number of drownings in the US is about 3900/year (CDC), while the number of non-suicide gun deaths is around 12,000/year. (Gun suicides around 21,000/year)
More importantly, the number of people murdered by swimming pools is about 15, so keeping special surveillance of swimming pool owners is not going to reduce the number of homicides very much. 15 drowning murders/10 million swimming pools = 1/670,000. 12,000 gun homicides/100 million gun owners = 1/8,300.
And, relevant to the topic at hand, there's about 1 Islamic terrorist attack in the US per year. 1 Terrorist/3 million Muslims. You know, maybe we should keep an eye on those swimming pool owners.
Also, there are hundreds of thousands of muslims in NY... it's hard to believe the cops singled out those folks for random harassment just 'cause they felt like it. There probably were suspicious indicators that they picked up. Yes, false positives happen... sucks for everyone involved (yes, the gov wasted our tax dollars on that false positive).
The point is that the government surveilled everyone who attended a mosque, because they had the narrative that some terrorists are Muslim, completely ignoring that few Muslims are terrorists. There were hundreds of thousands of false positives. There were so many false positives that they completely obscured any true positives. Profiling that way just doesn't work.
Look, here's some numbers: in the past 20 years, approximately 60 acts of terror on US soil by Muslims, 140 by 'ecoterrorists,' and 270 by 'right wing' groups. Roughly 12% Islamic terrorism, even though Muslims make up only 1% of the US population. Surely, this means a Muslim is 12x more likely to be a terrorist than is a Christian or non-religious person. This means the incidence of terrorists in the Muslim population is 1/1,040,000, so focusing an investigation on Muslims results in approximately 1e6 false positives for every actual terrorist.
The ads are served on a different server. That's how adblock works. It blocks connections to servers that host ads. Ads don't use site bandwidth.
I think that's the point. Ads are free revenue for the site. Sites have no way to know how those ads affect their readers. Third party servers are easy to block.
If you move the ad scripts from the client to the server, set the server to download whatever image and forward it to the reader, then they'll bypass the adblockers, they'll get direct metrics on how much the ads diminish the reader experience, and they can bill advertisers based on the actual cost of production and publication.
The best option would be to charge for energy used directly to your home electricity bill. Add on a small surcharge or percentage to cover maintenance and up-keep, or just roll it into the taxes that pay for highway maintenance.
The problem is that electricity is so cheap that the cost of the metering device and accounting vastly outweighs the actual cost of product.
There was a story in my local news a year or two ago about a guy arrested for plugging his car into a school charger while he was there for a meeting of some sort. The best anyone could figure, after a week or so of number crunching, he "stole" about a nickel worth of electricity.
When 'civilization' collapses, the only thing will matter is loyalty. As long as the banks and the trains work, wealthy people can buy an approximation of loyalty, but that often turns into resentment if monetary power is removed.
So here's this bunch of maintenance, security, and chandler staff, maintaining an elaborate panic-complex for paranoid billionaires. Maybe for decades; probably never to be used. How do you get those people to be loyal enough to those (probably unseen) clients, that they'll choose to spend the rest of their lives in the Vault with Paris Hilton and Donald Trump and let cousin Billy and the hot waitress at Chili's die in a fire? Money is only a motivator when there is a civilization to spend it in.
You seem to be conflating two kinds of shelter: one where a handful of rich elites could hold out against armed, post-apocalyptic mobs, and one where an armed, not-quite apocalyptic force could overcome the defenders. If the facility is not defensible enough for its staff to disable access controls and hold against the evacuating clients, then there's no way said clients could hold against starving mobs.
Let me guess, you plan is to try violence and theft in an emergency?
That's pretty much how the world works now. We've all gotten together and agreed to massive retaliation against anyone who violates our agreed standards of character. Whether it's lopping the hands off thieves or 5 years of prison for getting high, that's a lot of violence and theft being imposed.
A billion dollars buys a lot of power and violence in a stable society, but it's hard to eat entries in a Citibank mainframe when the power goes out. If that time comes, it might be better not to have spent your life using money to make people do things they don't want.
Back in the "good old days," an educated populace was a source of communal pride. Providing everyone with the opportunity to try (and the opportunity to fail) to better themselves through education used to be a way to reward individual initiative and merit. It's why we have land grant schools and the GI Bill. "State" schools were actually funded by the states; they'd let anyone in; and many of them would fail.
Now, it seems that education has become an individual benefit for which the individual should pay. Nobody wants to pay to educate his neighbor's dumb kid. State support for "public" universities has dried up, and they depend on tuition to keep the lights on.
They have discovered market forces. Faculty can bring in more money doing research than teaching students. Students who flunk out don't pay tuition, so retention has become a major issue. Keep the customer happy, comfortable, and hopeful. Don't fail them just because they struggle with a few concepts.
Of course, it used to be that success in college was a good indicator of competency. If (almost) anyone can get a degree in exchange for tuition, then the degree loses that value
Rampage killers are cowards - when confronted by police or counter-force, they typically kill themselves.
Doesn't that suggest that rampage killers are intent on suicide, but want to take a few of their perceived tormentors with them?
In the US, you have easy access to guns, so the suicidal use guns and angry suicidals shoot people. In places with easy access to explosives, angry suicidals blow people up. In some places, effective mental health limits suicides and limited access to tools of easy destruction limits collateral damage.
The vast majority of gun deaths in the united states are criminals either criminals shooting criminals, police shooting criminals or legal gun owners shooting criminals.
The vast majority (2/3) of gun deaths in the US are legal gun owners shooting themselves.
About 10% of gun-homicides are police shootings. About 2% of gun-homicides are "justifiable" shootings by private citizens (ie: legal gun owner shooting criminal). According to the FBI, criminal homicides are pretty evenly split - 1/3 during commission of a felony, 1/3 during arguments, 1/3 unspecified circumstances.
Just because (he claims) most shootings occur in places with high gun control does not imply that all places with high gun control have lots of shootings.
According to Wikipedia, countries with the highest gun-violence are El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Swaziland, and Venezuela, all about 3x the US rate. Most of these countries require licensing and registration of guns. This may technically place them in the set of "high gun control" countries, but I don't think many of them are high on the list of effective enforcement.
This is also the problem of comparing US regions by legal limitations: if one can just go out to the suburbs to avoid DC's "strict" gun control laws, or drive 30 minutes across the state line, then those laws can not be very effective. It's why so many Georgia and Florida guns leave the state
But this really have hurt VW, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are additional models coming up as well on this - even gasoline and hybrids.
This issue is 100% diesel, and there is no way it crosses over to gasoline engines.
VW's low-cost system for reducing NOx requires extra fuel to be burned, keeping the engine at higher temperature, reducing both engine life and fuel economy. Gasoline engines carefully control the fuel/air mix such that NOx are efficiently scrubbed by the catalytic converter. The high-cost clean diesel system used in Audi/Mercedes injects additional chemicals into the exhaust gas to decompose NOx.
So, only VW (among passenger cars), and only diesel has an incentive to turn off the NOx scavenging system: VW's low-end NOx scavenging defeats their reputation for reliability and fuel economy.
Uber "ignores" nothing; they are a broker between private riders and private ride providers. Everybody knows what they are getting and that the usual "protections" from a government-licensed taxi service don't apply.
Uber uses software to allow them to behave like taxis while being legally characterized as "black cab," "car service," or "limosine." Drivers in these legal categories have to meet different requirements and have different limitations on their business freedom, some of which could be considered relics of technologically different times. Uber is disruptive because it performs the on-demand function of a taxi while holding the business flexibility (ie: flexible rates, passenger screening) of a car service.
Eventually, regulations will catch up with the technology. Uber will be absorbed into Taxi-like classification and allowed to pick up airport passengers, or the distinctions among small, for-hire transport will be reduced, and these entities will be able to compete fairly.
How about, you know, making the pilgrimage something that is year long event instead of piling in everyone on one day?
How about celebrating Easter in August? Or better yet, Christmas all year round, so we can reduce the people injured in "Black Friday" events.
That's why you shouldn't fence them in. The problem starts when you block the path. Just put the whole damn thing out in the open where people can move
Even without fences or corrals, a throng of 1e9 people is dangerous. Those guys in back, 7km from the 'stage,' want, at least, to be able to see the venue, and they push, just a little. The guys only 3km from 'stage,' they're also pushing, just a little. What do you think happens when a line of people four or five kilometers long all pushes on the guy in front?
This is what makes lemmings go over cliff faces, and it's why people died at Mecca.
You do know that "computer programming" is something that anyone can do, not just a job title, right? Comparing a girls-only programming camp to an imaginary boys-only "school teacher camp" is a ridiculous MRA analogy.
Gender-exclusive camps are nothing new. The Boy Scouts run a number of boys only hiking and knot-tying camps. Fashion and modeling camps exist and are overwhelmingly but not exclusively girls. A 'boys only' fashion camp seems perfectly reasonable, and I don't imagine they would learn about clothing design and manufacture by driving trucks over bolts of fabric.
stress and nervousness and normal and they are grounds for the interviewers to further explore the line of questioning to check if the nervousness is just nervousness or something more sinister. Why do people think everything has to be so black and white or that the interviewers can't possibly be used to dealing with people that are nervous for reasons beyond lieing.
You're describing a polygraph as being a crutch for an interrogator who can not personally identify the signs of unease and evasion in a subject. That is, that the implements and ritual of the polygraph makes it easier for the interrogator to follow procedures, not that they reveal anything about the subject. Unfortunately, polygraph is presented as an objective, clinical test of the subject.
This is stunningly similar to the discussion of homeopathic "cures," where you have one set of people saying they "work" because the placebo effect is a real thing, and another set saying that the placebo effect is the very definition of not "working."
âoeWe (officers) are like used car salesman. But instead of selling a junky car to someone, we have to sell the idea that confessing is the best thing to do.â Polygraph is like a special deal for today only because the salesman is under deadline to make his quota.
Good Lord, We had no inclination of taking the slew of pharmaceutical drugs back in my day as a teen. Ok, sure, we had plenty of "parking lot" drugs we often had fun with...but as far as systemized drugging of kids, we did just fine without all the anti-depressants turning kids into zombies so early ln life.
But I have a right to be happy all the time. I live in the greatest country earth has ever known and my parents provide me with every possible comfort and advantage. Coasting through life as I have, without any serious challenges or impediments, I should be the happiest kid on earth. If I'm not, it's clearly a neural imbalance, and there's a drug for that.