1) Archie bunker was already dead in the 90's from an old age related thing 2) Even if it was young Archie, do you really think something that could make something that looks like that could ever be hot?
I hate how no one on this damn site thinks about these things!
Hmm... the mobile site makes it difficult to read and respond on the same page.
I donâ€(TM)t know why, but I have always measured professionalism based on how well a person was able to measure time without checking their watch all the time. It seems strange, but I can always tell based on blood sugar or something else how much time has passed.
We have clocks on walls, we have clocks on PCs, we have clocks on phones. I suppose I just donâ€(TM)t see the utility to a wearable device.
I am certainly in favor of things like watches that provide genuine medical utility. Maybe a blood sugar monitor for example. And honestly, that far better than watching colleagues stabbing themselves constantly. But a watch that tells you whether you are lazy or not. Or whether you are walking fast enough or not. I see that as something that inevitably fails. Consider whether you remember phone numbers any more. There are just some things you do not want to automate and want to depend on yourself for. If you need a device to measure whether you need to move more... you need to move more:)
In 2018, how is it possible to not have charging your phone as part of your routine?
like - brush teeth - use toilet - plug phone in - go to bed - wake up - clean body - put on clean underwear - etc...
I know I have issues (arrogance is clearly one), but I could not imagine forgetting to charge my phone. Even if I did, I have a laptop and a charger cable in my backpack, a charger on my desk, a charger in the car, etc...
Hmm... to be honest, Iâ€(TM)ve been a smoker most of my life and after quitting smoking, I donâ€(TM)t really buy into the â€oeit tastes better thingâ€. It tastes more, but I generally could always use spices and other taste ingredients to make things taste better.
I also have little or no respect for large scale waste over â€oeit tastes betterâ€. Single unified mass-economy production, inventory and logistics systems will always allow much better management of organic crops. Add robotic vertical indoor farming to the equation and almost all crops could be 100% organic and far cleaner than what youâ€(TM)re advocating.
Family farms are nothing more than a waste of resources, time and money. Unless you think that a loving caring family hugging their plants makes them taste better, itâ€(TM)s typically just a bad idea. The reason we donâ€(TM)t have more organic crops is because we canâ€(TM)t manage them properly. The reason we canâ€(TM)t is because we have too many moms and pops who arenâ€(TM)t part of a unified system.
You canâ€(TM)t possibly advocate both organic and family farming with a straight face. Family farms are exactly the reason we donâ€(TM)t have more organic. We have to use all kinds of nasty magic to make the economics of family farms work. Theyâ€(TM)re just too wasteful.
But if throwing away megatons of food while screwing up the whole planet just so you can have tastier celery thatâ€(TM)s been hugged a bunch makes you feel better... we can go all huggy happy family farmer friendly. On the other hand, if you want skillfully produced, mass scale organic crops that are stored, managed and distributed in a fashion that reduced carbon foot prints by numbers so big even Trump canâ€(TM)t describe them (with words like big and huge and stuff)... the you need to reduce humans involved by several orders of magnitude. You have to greatly reduce companies involved. You have to unify planning, management, logistics, distribution, etc... and you have to treat crops as wholistic ecosystems. I give a shit less about free market economics... Iâ€(TM)m far more concerned with efficiency and long term sustainability.
Medicine, education, transportation, food, and housing... these are all things which should be managed and provided by the governments of any first world country.
These days, farms are A LOT bigger than they used to be. Tractors are being designed now so that 10 tractors can operate side by side with a single operator. Additional tractors are being designed to simply automate the process on a schedule.
Corporate farming is the only logical method of farming anymore. There is simply no point in letting people own their own family farms. We constantly over produce food and there are many reasons for it... a huge reason is that we need to make agriculture profitable. It's time to quit that... we don't need this scale of production. It's stupid and wasteful.
It's better if a few big companies simply take over and if those are preferably the companies who keep doing stupid things like making seed that is genetically altered to produce seedless crops. Just centralize everything, get business agreements into place and then let one of those companies simply buy out John Deere who will then make their profit by optimizing the farming process instead of trying to rape their customers.
I believe that with a strong enough effort, it should be possible to simply eliminate family farms within a decade or two and the result could be far better logistics and far better management of the resources. American farms alone would probably be able to feed two continents if whoever owned all the farms teamed up with someone like Amazon to optimize logistics for distribution.
If I understand correctly, when you offer $40 billion to buy out a company... you're not really buying them out. What you're doing instead is that you're placing an evaluation on the portion of the company you will own at $40 billion. So if you buy 70% of all the shares at $40 billion, then the company is now worth about $57 billion overall. Then you're agreeing that after a merger of the two companies, the joined company will keep your name instead of theirs. Finally, you're taking control of their outstanding shares and exchanging them for shares in your own company.
So if I understand this correctly, this type of transaction is simply placing a weight on the value of the shares which the shareholders in the new company will have. So if I owned 20% of the company being bought which may translated to 8% of the new company, I'll have lost a great deal of control of the old company, but I'd probably have a somewhat large share of control of the new company relative to the other holders.
So, the offer of $40 billion is not really a buyout... it's a method of merging two companies in a way that shareholders understand what name with be on the new stocks they own as well as what percentage of the company the shareholders will have afterwards.
If this is the case, then it's really more of an issue of whether the shareholders in each company are willing to reap the benefits of a newer and larger company while potentially losing some of their say in how it is run.
This merger may or may not make sense from this angle. For example, if I were a shareholder, I would question the agility of the company making the offer. By making this type of offer, they're already saying they don't have a clear plan to combat the shifts in the market and that they've simply chosen to unify their assets with the hope that it will be enough to simply buy or merge with other companies instead of fixing the company they already have.
In the end... I would be extremely skeptical if I were sky... Comcast is admitting that they're basically running their own company blindly into the ground with no plan other than acquisitions and mergers (see HPe or Yahoo for how bad this fails) and if this merger happens, Comcast will take control of Sky's assets and blindly run them into the ground as well.
It seems to me that Comcast seems to believe natural selection is "Only the strong will survive" as opposed the "Adapt or die".
In first world countries, it is assumed that people work for a living and that the average work day spans from around 7am to 5pm with a little time for drifting. As such, in first world countries we have government subsidized day care that operates from 7am to 5pm. This means that everyone should be able to make their work window happen during those hours.
For children who are too young to be home alone before and after school, the schools are open early and there are people watching the playgrounds. Then there are programs sponsored by the government to provide after school activities (similar to day care) for kids up to around 6th grade until 5pm.
In these environments, we don't have school buses... we simply have public transportation. The parents drop off and pick up using public buses... even if you live on a farm 500km from civilization... there should be a regularly serviced bus stop nearby.
Parents often make groups to walk kids to and from school each day... and the single parent with a long way to go to get to and from work generally don't have problems because no one would consider making one of their child's friends mother have to quit their job.
Then there's the issue of making sure that mom or dad don't have that problem. Whether you're a 1%er or you're the bottom 1%, the government pays your child welfare to make sure their have what they need. This pops an extra $300-$500 a month into your bank account. So you can afford to have a slightly more flexible job or even to be a student long enough to make things easier later on.
We pay for this as tax payers in the first world and don't think anything of it. It doesn't matter whether we choose to have children of our own or not. What matters is that the people we work with need to be healthy. The people who work for us need to be healthy. The people who pick up the trash on the road need to be healthy. The people who we pass on the street need to be healthy. Otherwise, you get second world problems like school shootings because people aren't healthy. Or equally disgusting... people live in neighborhoods with security gates and guards because they're terrified of their own lives.
The first world is willing to live with a little less to get a lot more. We have governments with parties who we don't trust, but are smart enough to make sure there are enough parties that they can't make any choices without actually debating those laws openly. So while we don't trust the people in the government... we trust their enmity towards one another to keep them from hurting us. We also trust the government to make sure our tax payer money is spent in a way that will get them reelected because we can see, touch and feel how much better our lives are than the second world Americans on TV.
I unfortunately get stuck in meeting rooms far more than I should. I am regularly involved in purchasing decisions for a million dollars or more at a time. I work in a Cisco world where everything is very expensive.
I generally am stuck in the room for about 45 minutes at a time while waiting for people to finally shut up. There's some screwed up rule that says "If I have an hour to talk with you, we have to spend the first 45 minutes in a powerpoint about our companies. And let me be brutally honest.... I wouldn't be in the meeting room to begin with if I hadn't already checked you out online. So you're just wasting my time.
So, it took years to get used to people checking their phones in meeting rooms all the time. But then it got to the point where we consider it pretty normal behavior... though the person who should be active and engaging will turn their phone off or simply choose to check their messages once or twice under the heading of "Let me check for that on my phone"
Now, people have the watches. And I don't really know whether they realize they're doing it or not, but every time they look at their wrist, they're sending signals of : 1) How much time do I have left 2) I have somewhere else to be 3) I'm getting bored
Among many other things. Checking your watch all the time says that you're not engaged or even listening to what's going on here. I've been at dinner tables where people keep checking their watch because people post things on twitter or facebook and their wrist is constantly being looked at. Every time they do that, people stop talking and wait for them to return to the conversation... at least at first... but when people finally realize what's happening, things get awkward because you're trying to continue talking while not being disturbed by that thing.
When the watch starts turning itself on for notifications even when the person who has it is tasteful enough to ignore it... the people paying attention to that person are distracted from their work.
I have never respected watches...at least not since around the turn of the century. The reason why is that I know you're carrying a clock in your pocket and wearing a watch either shows of vanity because you have a fancy shiny expensive thing... not interested. Or, it means that you have to constantly remind yourself of what time it is which is extremely poor planning and unprofessional.
I can safely say I've seen people ruin sales meetings because of those watches.... customers love nothing more than being constantly signaled that they're not the most important person right now. And sales people end up easily distracted when they think you're constantly checking on other things.
I've also seen as well as heard of job interviews where the person didn't get the job because the candidate actually looked at their watches... in the interview. That's a huge "OH NO HE DIDN'T".
I don't really like the fitbit thing ever... it's kinda lame... it's like "I'm going to wear a watch to find out if I walk enough"... ummm... no... go take a walk and spend some time away from the TV or computer... or if you must... do what I do which is to walk and listen to an audio book instead. When I see people with fitbits... I see people who are so focused on prolonging their lives that they forget to live them.
So... we built F-35s which cost over $100 million plus substantially more for TCO... these are planes that if they are placed in a combat environment which would place them at risk of being damaged or lost at the tax payers cost, would be devastating. Even using them in training exercises is a really bad idea as it's simply too high of a risk financially to make use of them. It's better to use much less expensive planes if absolutely necessary. In addition, using fleets of drones is much better. At under $1 million per drone, militaries can compensate for the shortcomings of a drone by deploying a hundred times as many at far lower cost.
Now, let's talk about soldiers.
The US has 2.2 million active and reserve military members. Then there's the DoD, DoE, etc... The U.S. has tons of planes and tanks and all that crap... and this is good. If the U.S. didn't employ these people, they probably would imprison most of them just to avoid issues with the employment statistics. Hell, the TSA, DHS and other 3 letter organizations are another approximately 2 million people.
But let's be honest... a few hundred tons of styrofoam, a few tons of plastic waste and an automated manufacturing line for motors and a bunch of cheap microcontrollers is about all you need to start making a flying drone army these days. Warlords in SE Asia could start manufacturing exploding remote controlled drones by the millions for little money.
I don't care what any military says... even today, a molotov cocktail will still wipe out troops effectively. Fly a few thousand drones over a few tens of thousands of troops that can either trigger an alcohol explosion or when should would rain fire from the sky, and a million soldiers wouldn't look like much before long.
I don't care how great the AR is... building drones is the only real option... consider that China or India could probably take over the entire world by simply collecting and recycling trash into drones.
And for those people who say "You can't replace a good soldier with a machine" the answer is simple... why replace the soldier? I want something that when it dies I don't care. I don't want children in camouflage pajamas out there getting shot up. Send in machines instead. There's no point debating the issue... it's going to happen eventually... might as well embrace it before someone else does.
Telltale had great games like Sam and Max which were amazing story lines and designed from the very beginning to be played as games. They were AWESOME!
Then Telltale pulled a Lego... by that, I mean that they decided to forfeit their revenue to other companies which had nothing to offer besides branding.
Consider that a movie is a movie... movies are not choose your own adventure story telling systems. They are written in a linear fashion and the result was that Telltale was doing little more than producing movies with "click next to continue" for other peoples stories.
I believe the Telltale had a great format before they started wasting all their money on trying to be a movie studio instead of a game studio. Extended cut scenes were pissing me off and I couldn't bring myself to waste my time playing more than a few minutes of a game... which wasn't a game so much as a "Watch the really long cut scene and then click 5 things and watch another cut scene" format.
I sincerely hope that Telltale manages to go back to basics and stops wasting time and money on making this crappy format. There is a place in this world for fun to play adventure games. They had it... they lost it. Time to scrub the schools to find talented script writers who love the format and then mock them up and perform some market research. As Telltell has proven, it's possible to make short episodes on a schedule. If they make a good story, they could instead start with a game and then get someone like Netflix to buy the rights to the story instead.
25 million lines of code is inexcusable at any level.
The amount of code required to make Linux work is not even a million. Let's assume you can get every feature of interest into a LOT less than that and then depend on modules for everything else.
Consider that the Linux Kernel as it stands today is one massive repository of trash on trash on trash on something less trashy.
Linus mad Linux and he made Git and Git has things like submodules and there are things like GVFS as well in some environments. Why not scale the kernel back to bare minimums and then link modules in separate repositories and make something like a package manager to tie it all together? I mean seriously, there is not now or will there ever be a suitable excuse for such a horrible monstrosity as the Linux kernel.
If Linus is taking a break... maybe it's time to just boot him from the whole thing and get someone in who is more focussed on cleanliness and organization. For example... let the Linux foundation toss the new maintainer $100,000 per million lines of code stripped from the kernel and offloaded into an external project. Rebuild the make config system so that it works based on a series of features and git URLs instead of being one gigantic pile of define nastiness.
I think it's time for a real change to Linux.
BTW... I don't think it's ever possible without a complete rewrite, but it's time to clean up the headers. I mean seriously... have you seen the pile of shit in the linux header directories these days? Github as well as others won't even let you see the directory listing anymore. What about multi-thousand line headers which contain so much crud you can't even read them anymore?
I think Linux is awesome in its scale... but if you've ever written a kernel module, you'd know how severely horrible the current design... or lack of design is.
I work with a lot of people from different backgrounds. They watch things like movies all the time and they see things like science fiction and see it as purely Hollywood and not simply forseeing the ambitions of many creative people around them.
I have a habit of writing documents describing technology that I would implement myself given the time, budget and drive. Examples of this would be RAID systems capable of online live healing and automated scaling with almost zero risk for loss due to transactional strip databases across asymmetric disk sizes with additional attention placed on "intelligent" wear leveling. Another would be a means of employing statistical human behavioral analysis and prerendering technologies based on MPEG spatial and temporal scaling to within MPEG transport streams delivered over HTTP to optimize bitrate based on predicted and perceived areas of interest while watermarking ingress video in such a manor that would survive multiple generations of reencoding.
I release these papers to the public domain which don't tend to take me more than a few hours to write and then companies like Netflix and storage vendors invest in formalizing my theories and implementing the technology to great financial gain to themselves. And the result is that I get to use or buy the technology which I envisioned would benefit me.
This is no different than watching a science fiction film. People making these films are releasing their ideas publicly for all to see. Even today, individuals and military funded organizations work towards implementing many ideas from comic books (bullet proof fabrics for example), Marvel movies (search for Iron Man suit), and science fiction (EMP drive is an example).
We need to stop attempting to assess threats and regulate at a government level after decades of R&D have occurred after someone in the cinema makes some cool technology a kind of holy grail for engineers and scientists.
I work on full body scanners as a hobby. I love the idea of employing three dimensional covnets to 3d sonograms provided by full body airport security scanners to identify medical conditions such as high blood pressures, tumors, damaged tissues, dental anomalies etc... I believe very strongly many of the worlds illnesses are related to severe shortcomings in doctors and more specifically general practitioners. They need to be replaced as soon as possible by machines since a machine can perform a full body scan multiple times a week that is far more thorough and accurate than these fools in their offices who wait until lumps are big enough to see or feel before treating them.
Consider how much money the governments of the world would save on medical treatment of their people if we knew that a cancerous tumor was beginning to form within days of it starting as opposed to waiting a year or two before symptoms became visible. Most cancers would be treatable with little more than a pill or even a focused laser. Instead we have these idiot GPs with their blood pressure devices and thermometers and idiotic blood tests.
Will the stuff I'm working on happen... yes it will. But when will the governments eventually get on board and consider what it means at a federal level? When big pharm is pissed that their poisons for Chemo aren't selling, when universities like Harvard can't find jobs for their medical graduates, etc... they don't focus on that now.
And to be honest... police complain about encryption causing them problems. Tough shit... adapt. Police and lawyers will complain that videos that are perfect fakes are making more or less all video evidence insubmissible... tough shit.. adapt. People like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Watson are really upset that first people try to steal their nudie pictures from their phones... now they complain that instead of trying to get their hands on real videos and pictures, people are making deep fakes of them... deal.
Here's the thing... there are pervs everywhere. Hell I'll admit to being a perv at least at the
So... my baby girl and I went to the store to buy her a new bed for her room. When the sales woman came up to us and started asking questions, my 14 year old daughter stiffened and froze. She panicked and started speaking sign language which she'd been learning from YouTube because a dainty little bubbly sales girl scared her so badly that she couldn't speak. When I explained to her "Sweety, you know I don't speak sign language" she started crying and couldn't move from her spot. I quickly explained to the sales clerk that she has a condition that makes it almost impossible for her to speak around strangers and asked her to bare with me for a minute. So my little girl ended up getting what I bought her instead of what she would have chosen... so... I'd call it a success since I probably saved close to $500 because of it:)
My daughter is in middle school and she IS SMART. She really is smart. She and I sit together factoring polynomials at Starbucks just for fun. She's really interested in science and physics specifically.
But she can't communicate.
We have now altered her entire school schedule to make sure she doesn't have any classes with anyone who she considers scary. No more Spanish class, no more gym class, no more music class. She has an iPhone she listens to death core and death metal on, she has a membership to a climbing place and she already speaks 2 languages and understands 4. So we're not concerned. Next year, she'll begin taking Mandarin.
So... why this long story... I always write books and also, it's necessary to understand this next part.
Now that she's in a class with people she's not particularly scared of, she can present a little better in front of class. She's still terrified of it, but she's able to communicate clearly... but with lots of bad jokes very few kids understand. She's getting better at it. In a few years, I'm hoping she can manage a lot better.
I am also Asperger's though that's a self-diagnosis. I actually speak publicly for weeks at a time... and I'm terrified by it... though no one would ever know it by looking. I have learned over time how to say just the right thing to make people choke on coffee or cookies. This week alone, I've made this happen three times. Kids really need to learn to speak... even if it's only around people who they are comfortable with. The only way to overcome the anxiety is to force it... and to be fair, the only way to force it is to make it more embarrassing not to speak than it would be to just suck it up and go with it.
I must admit that given what i'm watching and listening to now on the session, it seemed to be more of an issue in extreme disappointment in who was chosen as president, not the party or political lines.
I am absolutely disgusted by the state of both major political parties today. Consider that there were dozens of candidates that made it quite far down the road in this election. And yet, when it came time to go to the polls, the American people were left with only two candidates because of the failed system.
You asked an excellent question. "Would you argue it as liberal?". I think that it's not an issue of whether it's conservative or liberal. I think that the issue is that we attempt to demonize one or the other. It is no longer socially acceptable to be a little bit of both. For example, what about a if you're a wealthy white Christian male who goes to church every Sunday, prays, but also believes it's not his right to have a say on abortion whether he approves of the action or not and also drives an electric car because he believes in global warming. This is a person who is clearly by today's standards someone who no longer has a home in America. See, that person is required to be either conservative or liberal though the liberals are probably against his economic and family policies. And saying you're Christian in Silicon Valley is such a big thing that there are TV shows about how big a thing this is. Yet, that same person could never express their more liberal beliefs out loud in a place like Texas.
American has polarized and things like Turducken is considered not only something fun to say... a lot, it's also entirely normal and acceptable. Yet, the human turducken which is a little bit of a mix of everything is no longer allowed because it's not within lines with the American way which is "Please stand in box A or box B... pick a side... you're either part of the solution or part of the problem... etc..."
This video expressed concerns... not over a political party. It expressed concerns over the candidate who won and his generally rash and almost random trial and error approach to everything. Trump has shown throughout the past two years of office that other than manipulating people to build one of the world's largest monuments in history with his name on it, his approach to politics is to just wing it and then just throw some duct tape on. I'm not 100% sure this is the wrong way to handle politics, but he's not nice to people he should be working with but disagrees with. He's actually really mean and he alienates people who he should be embracing. There's nothing wrong with saying "Dude, I love you... you're great! Now, understand, I'm going to make this change and if I'm wrong, you can say I told you so, but I have to try this". Instead, he simply lashes out and attacks.
This is a man who came into the presidential office with such thin skin that he can't handle the attacks made against him by American corporations who exist only by the ability to churn and spew controversy... meaning the press. The news papers are in the business of selling news papers and because Trump is so incredibly outlandish, they can sell A LOT of them. Because of systems he himself strongly embraces and exploited extensively to become the president in the first place by using those systems against his opponents, the entire news world has transitioned from reporting facts and news, to publishing a great deal of supposition as well as opinions. News outlets have always shared their opinions. Walter Cronkite was an excellent example of an altruistic man who would break down and cry when something moved him and his voice and sincerity would move the entire world. But today, we don't publish this. We publish articles that take pot shots. They perform hit and run journalism with a focus on writing the headline that will sell today's paper.
Consider a news source like "The Register" who has a policy of writing absolutely nonsensical headlines as click bait. I've been reading them
Nope... that was back before we had mass real-time media and we didn't fully understand how incredibly fucked the entire government was.
Then there was FDR who had the national radio and used it as a weapon against others in Washington to give him near-dictator powers. And then he completely without foresight fucked up the political system in America by imposing term limits which meant that politicians who have real plans that take more than 8 years to accomplish... won't.
When we got TV and had 1-3 channels, we had hope in people like Kennedy who was raised by a small group to a beacon of hope.
When we got 30 channels, we got CNN and things went rapidly south from there. People found out that we didn't need just 1 hour of news a day... we needed 24.
Then we got C-SPAN, BBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, etc... and we ended up with 10,000 hours of broadcast news a day.
Then the news networks realized that they needed to differentiate themselves from each other in order to earn ratings and keep enough viewers to justify their jobs. So they started catering to groups.
And then came the Internet.
And the RSS feed.
And the Tweets.
And now in order for each news source to survive, they have to offer something. And what do they offer? Sports!!!
They've turned Republicans and Democrats into team Red and team Blue. They have actively stacked the teams... not with political leaders.... not we law makers... not with anything like that. They stacked the decks with "Good TV"!!!
So... the presidential campaigns are now reality TV series which have gone so far as to turn the presidential debates into a competition with a score board and which betting sights actually operate on. They've made sure that all the players on both teams are going to fight each other tooth and nail... not because of right and wrong but because of Team Red and Team Blue.
Both parties... instead of representing the people.... which means ALL THE PEOPLE... not just your own voters have decided instead that Team Red or Team Blue need absolute control of the government to make decisions without discussing anything with the bat shit crazy people on the other team.
No... neither party was ever sane... but what we have now is not democracy... It's the roman senate shortly before it was dissolved and an empire was declared.
Let me tell you something I know... anyone who backs a team is generally incompetent. Anyone who wants one team or player or the other to win... is well... I hope natural selection will eventually do away with those. We are a single team. There is no white hats and black hats. We are in this together. But so long as America has Team Red and Team Blue, there is no hope for American civilization to elevate itself out of the second world again.
I honestly want the monopolies to pretend to strengthen democracy.
At this point in time, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon and news papers and whatever else Satya Nadella is in control of one of the biggest new networks (which slashdotters will never see because it's through Edge and Bing) The Alphabet boys are in control of what almost everyone in the world sees Zuck and Dorsey could easily control a MASSIVE amount of what everyone sees.
What's also important is that most of these people seem to have some inkling of wanting to be good people. They're all stumbling their way through trying to be nice and fair and more powerful than the leaders of the UN nations.
Imagine if Facebook were broken into 20 different news and social media sites that were all controlled by basically the same people? It would be bigger, not smaller than it is today.
So... why can't these megabillionairs launch democracy sites which would break the two party system and allow equal access to all potential candidates. I mean seriously, politics is about gaining votes... which is about visibility. Zuck, Dorsey, Alphabet Boys and Nadella could easily outdo all the other mass media outlets in the world and offer a real political platform where "He who has the billion dollar fund raising power wins" isn't how it will work. They could make it a platform which works somewhat like a game or a reality TV series where interested candidates can compete on the merits of their beliefs over time and build up viewership.
These companies could capitalize by making their own kind of Apprentice style TV series that would allow the people to judge how different candidates lead and make decisions. But instead of making it about "You're fired" which still seems to be a mantra for Trump, make shows that simulate real political situations. Have episodes where they are confronted with issues like trying to mediate between Democrats and Republicans who disagree with each other just because they're both stupid. Or other episodes where as president they are presented with a bill to sign or veto which makes no sense, is nothing but 1000 pages of ear marks with a stupid name that exists only because congress can't discuss anything anymore. I for example would veto it and say "Don't send it back until you've actually read the thing and made the contents reflect what the title says... and actually discuss it... none of this passing the shit around until we get all our earmarks in bullshit. If you do that and the bill still sounds good, and you still have the votes, I'll sign it... otherwise, don't waste my time."
Imagine if it were possible for political science majors in school to learn more about administering the government rather than learning to establish, collect, distribute and manipulate political capital?
These mega-corporations are well positioned to make this happen in the real world. There's nothing wrong with Facebook interfering with what people seem to call the democratic system so long as they actually do it fairly and in the right way.
That being said... we need the mega-monopolies... consider Amazon grocery delivery. Instead of having 10,000 stores spread out over the whole country selling the same shit, there could be 50-100 well managed and automated warehouses. That means a lot of really important things.
1) Waste management... any idea how much meat we produce for no other reason than to stock shelves and make it look more attractive to buy and to provide selection? What about milk? What about vegetables? Do you really think there's a world food shortage? Is there a real resource consumption problem? Consumption means that we... well consume it. We don't. The massive amount of meat, fish, dairy etc... we produce and then simply throw away... in its packaging... is horrifying. If Amazon for example were to centralize and when meat was ordered, then it would be defrosted and processed based on demand... it would make such a massive difference in our overhead to the planet.
Nope... a port to Chrome has very little impact on the cost of porting to Linux. It would still be the cost of an additional platform.
Most modern video games are written using Unreal or Unity and both of those systems support Linux as first class citizens and yet most publishers do not port to Linux. This is because there's just no value in it to them. It's not a mainstream user oriented operating system and it almost certainly wouldn't support the cost of 1-2 additional staff developers to produce the title.
Chrome related operating systems makes sense to companies, because it is a mainstream platform with user counts measured in the millions.
Of course, the reference to whether it will run Crysis is another issue. Crysis was always the joke because of the ridiculous system specification requirements to achieve even mediocre performance. I find it doubtful that Chromebook will ever target high end graphics processing requirements.
The main articles biggest problem was the question. "Is Chromebook threatening other Mac and Windows?" should have been the question.
Consider that the set of tools generally found on Chromebooks is far closer to Mac than to Windows. Windows is a substantially more diverse operating system than Mac and Chrome OS. Linux and Windows are far more similar in nature if you were to compare them side by side.
Consider that both Windows and Linux are well suited for power users and the foundations/companies supporting them are targeting non-casual users. Linux is certainly not user friendly. If for no other reason than you can't Google "How do I copy pictures from my phone to my desktop on Linux" and actually get a result of any meaning whatsoever. Windows is special in the sense that it's an operating system specifically designed from the very foundation upwards to support enterprise scale management. Consider that Windows has had all the features of a MDM (and much more) since Windows 2000 and even earlier.
Now Chrome OS and Mac OS are both very excellent solutions for mainstream users. In fact, I would consider a Chrome OS device for my living room even though I'm a religious Windows Subsystem for Linux zealot. I couldn't figure out how to brush my teeth in the morning unless I had Linux running on Windows to help me. And yet for a casual use laptop, I used to use Mac, but I think that Chrome OS is more attractive now.
It's really funny, in our house, since Apple removed the headphone jack from the telephone, we have only bought one new phone. The iPhone X. We bought the top model and it's sitting on the coffee table in the living room and no one is using it. We're all using iPhone 6S and 6S plus telephones with weakening batteries.
I also used to keep at least one current Mac around for coding iPhone apps, but to be honest, I kinda lost interest in that because Apple actually seems to really only want major developers on their platform and don't care about the little guy anymore.
Chrome OS is our replacement for Mac OS these days. After all, it's pretty much the exact same programs that you would typically use on a Mac. Everything on the platform is App priced instead of application priced. I mean honestly, you would never pay more than $5-$10 for a program on Chrome OS.
Will Chrome OS hurt Windows... sure it will. I think it's an amazing platform for anyone who considers synergy to be a great word.
Will Chrome OS hurt Mac OS.... yeh... considerably.
1) Kids that play video games on PC growing up but use Mac at school probably buy a PC when they get older. 2) Kids that play video games on Android tablets or iPads growing up but use Windows, Chrome or Mac at school will probably buy a Mac or a Chromebook 3) Kids that play video games on Android devices but use Windows or Chrome OS at school will almost certainly consider a Chromebook.
It has to do with what people associate with providing the greatest fashion or value. Apple is always the "Fashion Brand" but they don't provide any real value ove
I love microkernels and have written a few for personal entertainment. I have even been following Fuschia OS's development quite closely... though I can't believe anyone would make something that shitty from the ground up in 2018.
A more or less monolithic with a pluggable and stable ABI and API is often the best of both worlds. Add some form of module signing and code review process and we're in a good place.
After all these years, there has been ample opportunity to optimize microprocessor design to make a better microkernel CPU. There is generally just too much cost involved in the constant context swaps for a desktop OS. Remember that we spent many years trying to trim the fat between application and graphics subsystems. Even today, it's pretty simply to almost devastate the performance of a micro kernel with a massive amount of disk I/O operations.
Last month, I wrote a new Linux kernel module. I needed to implement the Cisco Discovery Protocol on Linux in a less stupid way than it's been done until now. I believe I achieved doing it equally dumb from an opposite direction. This is because the Linux Kernel is an enormous disaster of crap on crap.
Let's talk about something relatively simple that should have been ripped out and entirely moved out of the kernel a LONG time ago... the network stack.
The Linux network stack is amazingly fast and should be given credit for being that way.
It's also a cesspool of shit code from almost end to end. Probably the most important piece of code in the Linux kernel is sk_buff. Oh... sk_buff, you are the biggest, ugliest and shittiest piece of code in the entire world. I mean... you're a buffer... a kinda sorta reference counted buffer which never really gets deleted...except when you do. You're a huge chunk of trash code that looks like you were designed by a drug fuddled preschooler that wanted to try daddy's C compiler while on a series trip.
sk_buff is probably the most critical piece of code to keep the documentation up to date on. This is the code which makes things like kernel panics in the weirdest ways when even the slightest thing goes wrong. And yet, after 27 years of Linux, you guys still can't seem to stabilize the API for the frigging network buffer!!!
Then let's consider procfs...
So... procfs is basically the ability for a user mode application to access a file and it calls procedures for reads and writes... well all files in the kernel work that way, but procfs is a bit special, it was meant to be informative and work in a printf'ish kinda way.
procfs for the most part is nothing more than, open, read, write, seek, close. It doesn't need anything other than that. It's a simple random access file stream.
Somehow, the API is still changing like mad... and worse the transition mechanisms that support the newer APIs are actually getting removed from the kernel... I'm not talking about a few years after stabilizing, I'm talking as soon as the monster code base called the kernel no longer depends on them. Forget that there are external modules build from DKMS other other tools that need to handle different versions. And we're not talking about massive APIs, we're talking about things that support name changes.
I was looking into adding a new address family to the kernel for CDP... and I tried looking at other code for a good example. I absolutely refuse to make pull requests to the Linux kernel unless it's a bug fix (and deleting the whole tree and starting over doesn't count). I believe that tools like DKMS should point to git repositories and download drivers and build them against the kernel. CDP does not need to be part of the mainstream kernel. It's a tool.
Well, as I said, I was looking into it. And after this many years, because of the absolute shitty state of the kernel... I'd at least have to register AF_CDP and PF_CDP somewhere so that I could have my very own protocol number. And for the most part, that would prob
But to be fair, in my house I'm the bread winner. I make about 3-4 times as much as my wife does. There are many reasons for that, but the most important is that I've chosen a career path that lets me sell myself. She chose to be a nurse which more or less is a fixed price market.
I calculated about a year ago how much money we have and how much money we would have if she simply stopped working and instead took up a career as a proper house wife... WAIT!!! I didn't say became a proper house wife. I referred to the career path of housewife. This is a path that can be taken by man or woman and if one person in a house were to spend their time clipping coupons, planning meals, structuring schedules, hiring plumbers, mending clothing, balancing the finances, refinancing the mortgage every second year, etc... the amount of money they would save the household, especially if they took pride in their work would be more than they earned after tax in a normal job. Add the additional tax break for the spouse who is working and the money could be a big gain.
The truth is, our house could easily have an additional $10,000 a year disposable income if my wife didn't work as a nurse, but instead took up housewife as a career.
Now if we got more kids... all that yummy money would go bye bye.
1) The company doesn't pay the 17+63 weeks. They generally pay about 2 weeks. The government pays the rest.
2) It's amazing how societies that have this kind of empathy at a government level don't have the mass shootings problems. The government sets an example that you mean something to the country and the world from the moment you are born.
3) Packing formula or breast milk like a bagged lunch and coming home exhausted after working a full day to a baby who has a lot of needs is the way you breed serial killers. You are being paid by the government to establish a strong relationship and bond with your child. This makes it so that children aren't passed like a joint to an underpaid worker after 2 weeks.
4) We're all paying for this. When we were born, someone paid our mothers to raise us for two weeks, our tax money is used to pay it forward. This is no different than social security in America. You spend your life paying for old people to live through their retirements when they are no longer the optimal components of the work force. When you get old and retire, the next generations will do it for you knowing they will receive those benefits later. Now we could just pay the babies for a year to take care of themselves... but in all honesty, it's more constructive to pay the mothers and fathers to do it. You should try living in a 1st world country for some time and try to keep an open mind about it. I grew up in second world America and watched my parents lose most of their retirement savings when I was sick as a child and their savings were used to buy one insurance policy after the next. I would watch from a hospital window as the Ronald McDonald house had a daily stream of broken parents coming and going while they watched their babies die.. probably many of them because they could afford the good doctors.
I'm out of that now world now... if a parents here wants to have 40 children and they are willing to spend their lives raising them and caring for them, I am more than happy to help out. Of course, that isn't because I agree with them have 40 kids. It's because I would much rather make sure those kids have at least one parent to care for them than to think of the kids raising each other. I also want to make sure those kids have food on their tables as they shouldn't be punished for their parents crimes.
Norway has had a steadily decreasing population because of these social programs. This is because of many reasons. Among them
- People are raised right from birth by parents who are more focused on their physical and mental health since they don't worry about stupid things like how they'll afford to feed them.
- We don't just invest in the initial birth. We invest all through their lives. My son who just started high school received a loan of $600 from the government. The terms of the loan are "Each year of school attended pays off X% of the loan" or "Payment in full is expected on termination of school". Which means that if you drop out, you have to pay back the portion you haven't earned. $600 isn't much, but he plays American football and he'll be able to buy a $450 set of pads an a few jerseys with that. We invest all through a child's life in their mental health, the physical health and their education and upbringing. We do this as a nation. This makes healthier people... who go to work and love what they do.
- Religion. Religion is typically reserved for people who need hope. Hope is for people who are discontent with the current state of their lives and the world as a whole. Hope is for people who feel they lack the power to control their lives or improve the world around them. What would be the attraction of heaven or fear of hell if what came next didn't really matter since it's more important to live for the planet you're on. If you're a good person and you are surrounded by good people, and you work together as good people do to make sure that everyone in general are pretty good people... well you end up with a societ
Norway: 70,812.48 Canada - 51,315.89 US - 53,128.54
Of course we only have 59 weeks or parental leave (at 80% salary or 49 weeks at 100%) following the 12 week maternity leave. Oh and it has none of these silly $1000 a week caps. So, if you're a CEO and you have $500,000 a year salary, you'll receive that the whole time you're out.
Though I'll admit, the job offers I get in D.C. (typically about $300K+) or in S.V. ($250K+) or in NYC ($200K+) are considerably more than the $128K base salary I make now. Though I do get overtime and I have side work for an extra $50K. I do pay A LOT more taxes here than I would there. But the standard of living is substantially higher here than over there. I didn't have to spend month interviewing day care nannies to ensure they won't diddle or beat my children. I didn't have to spend months applying to private schools to keep my kids away from the school shootings. I didn't have to put a penny in the bank for my kids college educations. I didn't pay for the lenses in my childrens glasses. I've never paid for a doctor or dentist appointment for my kids. Honestly, I take home a lot more in the end than my American counter parts.
My daughter dreams of going to MIT one day... I'll have to pay something for cost of living, but I won't spend a dime on the school itself. And she's well on track to get there too. If I lived in the U.S., I'd have to plan taking a second mortgage to cover her education even on those high salaries.
If youâ€(TM)re a consultant, you probably are overcharging for everything to begin with. Travel, food, etc... and the bitch of it is, you probably charge the customer for your time to gain the expertise they assumed you already had when you agreed to take the position.
If youâ€(TM) are salary, you have a job to accomplish and the boss is paying you for that. If you do that in 10 hours a week... we might want to find more responsibilities for you as itâ€(TM)s clear you are severely under utilized. If you need 60 hours a week, as a salary employee, you negotiated a fee to be paid to accomplish a job... well... thatâ€(TM)s your problem.
If you are an hourly employee, you probably are working at McDonalds or are a shift worker. While I am sure that shift workers such as nurses and doctors will sometimes work from the train or bus, the doctor is extremely well compensated for his time and should just do his job. Shift-nurses probably are in a much lower pay grade, but shift nurses generally work in places where their work related mails and such are part of their on-shift schedule.
This sounds like underpaid and under appreciated employees who work shit jobs for asshole bosses who have not placed them on salary trying to justify shorter office hours to make it to the daycare on time to pick up.
If you work for someone who knows you are a parent and knows you have to pick up and drop off and they are giving you grief over your hours, you need to leave the U.S. or the U.K. and move somewhere civilized.
Slashdot Mirror
He calls himself Archie Bunker...
1) Archie bunker was already dead in the 90's from an old age related thing
2) Even if it was young Archie, do you really think something that could make something that looks like that could ever be hot?
I hate how no one on this damn site thinks about these things!
Hmm... the mobile site makes it difficult to read and respond on the same page.
:)
I donâ€(TM)t know why, but I have always measured professionalism based on how well a person was able to measure time without checking their watch all the time. It seems strange, but I can always tell based on blood sugar or something else how much time has passed.
We have clocks on walls, we have clocks on PCs, we have clocks on phones. I suppose I just donâ€(TM)t see the utility to a wearable device.
I am certainly in favor of things like watches that provide genuine medical utility. Maybe a blood sugar monitor for example. And honestly, that far better than watching colleagues stabbing themselves constantly. But a watch that tells you whether you are lazy or not. Or whether you are walking fast enough or not. I see that as something that inevitably fails. Consider whether you remember phone numbers any more. There are just some things you do not want to automate and want to depend on yourself for. If you need a device to measure whether you need to move more... you need to move more
Not sure how to respond to that.
... we are all different :)
In 2018, how is it possible to not have charging your phone as part of your routine?
like
- brush teeth
- use toilet
- plug phone in
- go to bed
- wake up
- clean body
- put on clean underwear
- etc...
I know I have issues (arrogance is clearly one), but I could not imagine forgetting to charge my phone. Even if I did, I have a laptop and a charger cable in my backpack, a charger on my desk, a charger in the car, etc...
But I guess
They need a like button on here.
Haha... I read through all the comments and while Slashdot is almost designed for combative posts... I think you for yours!!!
:)
Thatâ€(TM)s the best comment I have been stuffed with in a while.
Hmm... to be honest, Iâ€(TM)ve been a smoker most of my life and after quitting smoking, I donâ€(TM)t really buy into the â€oeit tastes better thingâ€. It tastes more, but I generally could always use spices and other taste ingredients to make things taste better.
I also have little or no respect for large scale waste over â€oeit tastes betterâ€. Single unified mass-economy production, inventory and logistics systems will always allow much better management of organic crops. Add robotic vertical indoor farming to the equation and almost all crops could be 100% organic and far cleaner than what youâ€(TM)re advocating.
Family farms are nothing more than a waste of resources, time and money. Unless you think that a loving caring family hugging their plants makes them taste better, itâ€(TM)s typically just a bad idea. The reason we donâ€(TM)t have more organic crops is because we canâ€(TM)t manage them properly. The reason we canâ€(TM)t is because we have too many moms and pops who arenâ€(TM)t part of a unified system.
You canâ€(TM)t possibly advocate both organic and family farming with a straight face. Family farms are exactly the reason we donâ€(TM)t have more organic. We have to use all kinds of nasty magic to make the economics of family farms work. Theyâ€(TM)re just too wasteful.
But if throwing away megatons of food while screwing up the whole planet just so you can have tastier celery thatâ€(TM)s been hugged a bunch makes you feel better... we can go all huggy happy family farmer friendly. On the other hand, if you want skillfully produced, mass scale organic crops that are stored, managed and distributed in a fashion that reduced carbon foot prints by numbers so big even Trump canâ€(TM)t describe them (with words like big and huge and stuff)... the you need to reduce humans involved by several orders of magnitude. You have to greatly reduce companies involved. You have to unify planning, management, logistics, distribution, etc... and you have to treat crops as wholistic ecosystems. I give a shit less about free market economics... Iâ€(TM)m far more concerned with efficiency and long term sustainability.
Medicine, education, transportation, food, and housing... these are all things which should be managed and provided by the governments of any first world country.
More importantly, is this really a problem?
These days, farms are A LOT bigger than they used to be. Tractors are being designed now so that 10 tractors can operate side by side with a single operator. Additional tractors are being designed to simply automate the process on a schedule.
Corporate farming is the only logical method of farming anymore. There is simply no point in letting people own their own family farms. We constantly over produce food and there are many reasons for it... a huge reason is that we need to make agriculture profitable. It's time to quit that... we don't need this scale of production. It's stupid and wasteful.
It's better if a few big companies simply take over and if those are preferably the companies who keep doing stupid things like making seed that is genetically altered to produce seedless crops. Just centralize everything, get business agreements into place and then let one of those companies simply buy out John Deere who will then make their profit by optimizing the farming process instead of trying to rape their customers.
I believe that with a strong enough effort, it should be possible to simply eliminate family farms within a decade or two and the result could be far better logistics and far better management of the resources. American farms alone would probably be able to feed two continents if whoever owned all the farms teamed up with someone like Amazon to optimize logistics for distribution.
If I understand correctly, when you offer $40 billion to buy out a company... you're not really buying them out. What you're doing instead is that you're placing an evaluation on the portion of the company you will own at $40 billion. So if you buy 70% of all the shares at $40 billion, then the company is now worth about $57 billion overall. Then you're agreeing that after a merger of the two companies, the joined company will keep your name instead of theirs. Finally, you're taking control of their outstanding shares and exchanging them for shares in your own company.
So if I understand this correctly, this type of transaction is simply placing a weight on the value of the shares which the shareholders in the new company will have. So if I owned 20% of the company being bought which may translated to 8% of the new company, I'll have lost a great deal of control of the old company, but I'd probably have a somewhat large share of control of the new company relative to the other holders.
So, the offer of $40 billion is not really a buyout... it's a method of merging two companies in a way that shareholders understand what name with be on the new stocks they own as well as what percentage of the company the shareholders will have afterwards.
If this is the case, then it's really more of an issue of whether the shareholders in each company are willing to reap the benefits of a newer and larger company while potentially losing some of their say in how it is run.
This merger may or may not make sense from this angle. For example, if I were a shareholder, I would question the agility of the company making the offer. By making this type of offer, they're already saying they don't have a clear plan to combat the shifts in the market and that they've simply chosen to unify their assets with the hope that it will be enough to simply buy or merge with other companies instead of fixing the company they already have.
In the end... I would be extremely skeptical if I were sky... Comcast is admitting that they're basically running their own company blindly into the ground with no plan other than acquisitions and mergers (see HPe or Yahoo for how bad this fails) and if this merger happens, Comcast will take control of Sky's assets and blindly run them into the ground as well.
It seems to me that Comcast seems to believe natural selection is "Only the strong will survive" as opposed the "Adapt or die".
We don't really have those problems here.
In first world countries, it is assumed that people work for a living and that the average work day spans from around 7am to 5pm with a little time for drifting. As such, in first world countries we have government subsidized day care that operates from 7am to 5pm. This means that everyone should be able to make their work window happen during those hours.
For children who are too young to be home alone before and after school, the schools are open early and there are people watching the playgrounds. Then there are programs sponsored by the government to provide after school activities (similar to day care) for kids up to around 6th grade until 5pm.
In these environments, we don't have school buses... we simply have public transportation. The parents drop off and pick up using public buses... even if you live on a farm 500km from civilization... there should be a regularly serviced bus stop nearby.
Parents often make groups to walk kids to and from school each day... and the single parent with a long way to go to get to and from work generally don't have problems because no one would consider making one of their child's friends mother have to quit their job.
Then there's the issue of making sure that mom or dad don't have that problem. Whether you're a 1%er or you're the bottom 1%, the government pays your child welfare to make sure their have what they need. This pops an extra $300-$500 a month into your bank account. So you can afford to have a slightly more flexible job or even to be a student long enough to make things easier later on.
We pay for this as tax payers in the first world and don't think anything of it. It doesn't matter whether we choose to have children of our own or not. What matters is that the people we work with need to be healthy. The people who work for us need to be healthy. The people who pick up the trash on the road need to be healthy. The people who we pass on the street need to be healthy. Otherwise, you get second world problems like school shootings because people aren't healthy. Or equally disgusting... people live in neighborhoods with security gates and guards because they're terrified of their own lives.
The first world is willing to live with a little less to get a lot more. We have governments with parties who we don't trust, but are smart enough to make sure there are enough parties that they can't make any choices without actually debating those laws openly. So while we don't trust the people in the government... we trust their enmity towards one another to keep them from hurting us. We also trust the government to make sure our tax payer money is spent in a way that will get them reelected because we can see, touch and feel how much better our lives are than the second world Americans on TV.
I unfortunately get stuck in meeting rooms far more than I should. I am regularly involved in purchasing decisions for a million dollars or more at a time. I work in a Cisco world where everything is very expensive.
I generally am stuck in the room for about 45 minutes at a time while waiting for people to finally shut up. There's some screwed up rule that says "If I have an hour to talk with you, we have to spend the first 45 minutes in a powerpoint about our companies. And let me be brutally honest.... I wouldn't be in the meeting room to begin with if I hadn't already checked you out online. So you're just wasting my time.
So, it took years to get used to people checking their phones in meeting rooms all the time. But then it got to the point where we consider it pretty normal behavior... though the person who should be active and engaging will turn their phone off or simply choose to check their messages once or twice under the heading of "Let me check for that on my phone"
Now, people have the watches. And I don't really know whether they realize they're doing it or not, but every time they look at their wrist, they're sending signals of :
1) How much time do I have left
2) I have somewhere else to be
3) I'm getting bored
Among many other things. Checking your watch all the time says that you're not engaged or even listening to what's going on here. I've been at dinner tables where people keep checking their watch because people post things on twitter or facebook and their wrist is constantly being looked at. Every time they do that, people stop talking and wait for them to return to the conversation... at least at first... but when people finally realize what's happening, things get awkward because you're trying to continue talking while not being disturbed by that thing.
When the watch starts turning itself on for notifications even when the person who has it is tasteful enough to ignore it... the people paying attention to that person are distracted from their work.
I have never respected watches...at least not since around the turn of the century. The reason why is that I know you're carrying a clock in your pocket and wearing a watch either shows of vanity because you have a fancy shiny expensive thing... not interested. Or, it means that you have to constantly remind yourself of what time it is which is extremely poor planning and unprofessional.
I can safely say I've seen people ruin sales meetings because of those watches.... customers love nothing more than being constantly signaled that they're not the most important person right now. And sales people end up easily distracted when they think you're constantly checking on other things.
I've also seen as well as heard of job interviews where the person didn't get the job because the candidate actually looked at their watches... in the interview. That's a huge "OH NO HE DIDN'T".
I don't really like the fitbit thing ever... it's kinda lame... it's like "I'm going to wear a watch to find out if I walk enough"... ummm... no... go take a walk and spend some time away from the TV or computer... or if you must... do what I do which is to walk and listen to an audio book instead. When I see people with fitbits... I see people who are so focused on prolonging their lives that they forget to live them.
So... we built F-35s which cost over $100 million plus substantially more for TCO... these are planes that if they are placed in a combat environment which would place them at risk of being damaged or lost at the tax payers cost, would be devastating. Even using them in training exercises is a really bad idea as it's simply too high of a risk financially to make use of them. It's better to use much less expensive planes if absolutely necessary. In addition, using fleets of drones is much better. At under $1 million per drone, militaries can compensate for the shortcomings of a drone by deploying a hundred times as many at far lower cost.
Now, let's talk about soldiers.
The US has 2.2 million active and reserve military members. Then there's the DoD, DoE, etc... The U.S. has tons of planes and tanks and all that crap... and this is good. If the U.S. didn't employ these people, they probably would imprison most of them just to avoid issues with the employment statistics. Hell, the TSA, DHS and other 3 letter organizations are another approximately 2 million people.
But let's be honest... a few hundred tons of styrofoam, a few tons of plastic waste and an automated manufacturing line for motors and a bunch of cheap microcontrollers is about all you need to start making a flying drone army these days. Warlords in SE Asia could start manufacturing exploding remote controlled drones by the millions for little money.
I don't care what any military says... even today, a molotov cocktail will still wipe out troops effectively. Fly a few thousand drones over a few tens of thousands of troops that can either trigger an alcohol explosion or when should would rain fire from the sky, and a million soldiers wouldn't look like much before long.
I don't care how great the AR is... building drones is the only real option... consider that China or India could probably take over the entire world by simply collecting and recycling trash into drones.
And for those people who say "You can't replace a good soldier with a machine" the answer is simple... why replace the soldier? I want something that when it dies I don't care. I don't want children in camouflage pajamas out there getting shot up. Send in machines instead. There's no point debating the issue... it's going to happen eventually... might as well embrace it before someone else does.
Telltale had great games like Sam and Max which were amazing story lines and designed from the very beginning to be played as games. They were AWESOME!
Then Telltale pulled a Lego... by that, I mean that they decided to forfeit their revenue to other companies which had nothing to offer besides branding.
Consider that a movie is a movie... movies are not choose your own adventure story telling systems. They are written in a linear fashion and the result was that Telltale was doing little more than producing movies with "click next to continue" for other peoples stories.
I believe the Telltale had a great format before they started wasting all their money on trying to be a movie studio instead of a game studio. Extended cut scenes were pissing me off and I couldn't bring myself to waste my time playing more than a few minutes of a game... which wasn't a game so much as a "Watch the really long cut scene and then click 5 things and watch another cut scene" format.
I sincerely hope that Telltale manages to go back to basics and stops wasting time and money on making this crappy format. There is a place in this world for fun to play adventure games. They had it... they lost it. Time to scrub the schools to find talented script writers who love the format and then mock them up and perform some market research. As Telltell has proven, it's possible to make short episodes on a schedule. If they make a good story, they could instead start with a game and then get someone like Netflix to buy the rights to the story instead.
25 million lines of code is inexcusable at any level.
... or lack of design is.
The amount of code required to make Linux work is not even a million. Let's assume you can get every feature of interest into a LOT less than that and then depend on modules for everything else.
Consider that the Linux Kernel as it stands today is one massive repository of trash on trash on trash on something less trashy.
Linus mad Linux and he made Git and Git has things like submodules and there are things like GVFS as well in some environments. Why not scale the kernel back to bare minimums and then link modules in separate repositories and make something like a package manager to tie it all together? I mean seriously, there is not now or will there ever be a suitable excuse for such a horrible monstrosity as the Linux kernel.
If Linus is taking a break... maybe it's time to just boot him from the whole thing and get someone in who is more focussed on cleanliness and organization. For example... let the Linux foundation toss the new maintainer $100,000 per million lines of code stripped from the kernel and offloaded into an external project. Rebuild the make config system so that it works based on a series of features and git URLs instead of being one gigantic pile of define nastiness.
I think it's time for a real change to Linux.
BTW... I don't think it's ever possible without a complete rewrite, but it's time to clean up the headers. I mean seriously... have you seen the pile of shit in the linux header directories these days? Github as well as others won't even let you see the directory listing anymore. What about multi-thousand line headers which contain so much crud you can't even read them anymore?
I think Linux is awesome in its scale... but if you've ever written a kernel module, you'd know how severely horrible the current design
I work with a lot of people from different backgrounds. They watch things like movies all the time and they see things like science fiction and see it as purely Hollywood and not simply forseeing the ambitions of many creative people around them.
I have a habit of writing documents describing technology that I would implement myself given the time, budget and drive. Examples of this would be RAID systems capable of online live healing and automated scaling with almost zero risk for loss due to transactional strip databases across asymmetric disk sizes with additional attention placed on "intelligent" wear leveling. Another would be a means of employing statistical human behavioral analysis and prerendering technologies based on MPEG spatial and temporal scaling to within MPEG transport streams delivered over HTTP to optimize bitrate based on predicted and perceived areas of interest while watermarking ingress video in such a manor that would survive multiple generations of reencoding.
I release these papers to the public domain which don't tend to take me more than a few hours to write and then companies like Netflix and storage vendors invest in formalizing my theories and implementing the technology to great financial gain to themselves. And the result is that I get to use or buy the technology which I envisioned would benefit me.
This is no different than watching a science fiction film. People making these films are releasing their ideas publicly for all to see. Even today, individuals and military funded organizations work towards implementing many ideas from comic books (bullet proof fabrics for example), Marvel movies (search for Iron Man suit), and science fiction (EMP drive is an example).
We need to stop attempting to assess threats and regulate at a government level after decades of R&D have occurred after someone in the cinema makes some cool technology a kind of holy grail for engineers and scientists.
I work on full body scanners as a hobby. I love the idea of employing three dimensional covnets to 3d sonograms provided by full body airport security scanners to identify medical conditions such as high blood pressures, tumors, damaged tissues, dental anomalies etc... I believe very strongly many of the worlds illnesses are related to severe shortcomings in doctors and more specifically general practitioners. They need to be replaced as soon as possible by machines since a machine can perform a full body scan multiple times a week that is far more thorough and accurate than these fools in their offices who wait until lumps are big enough to see or feel before treating them.
Consider how much money the governments of the world would save on medical treatment of their people if we knew that a cancerous tumor was beginning to form within days of it starting as opposed to waiting a year or two before symptoms became visible. Most cancers would be treatable with little more than a pill or even a focused laser. Instead we have these idiot GPs with their blood pressure devices and thermometers and idiotic blood tests.
Will the stuff I'm working on happen... yes it will. But when will the governments eventually get on board and consider what it means at a federal level? When big pharm is pissed that their poisons for Chemo aren't selling, when universities like Harvard can't find jobs for their medical graduates, etc... they don't focus on that now.
And to be honest... police complain about encryption causing them problems. Tough shit... adapt. Police and lawyers will complain that videos that are perfect fakes are making more or less all video evidence insubmissible... tough shit.. adapt. People like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Watson are really upset that first people try to steal their nudie pictures from their phones... now they complain that instead of trying to get their hands on real videos and pictures, people are making deep fakes of them... deal.
Here's the thing... there are pervs everywhere. Hell I'll admit to being a perv at least at the
So... my baby girl and I went to the store to buy her a new bed for her room. When the sales woman came up to us and started asking questions, my 14 year old daughter stiffened and froze. She panicked and started speaking sign language which she'd been learning from YouTube because a dainty little bubbly sales girl scared her so badly that she couldn't speak. When I explained to her "Sweety, you know I don't speak sign language" she started crying and couldn't move from her spot. I quickly explained to the sales clerk that she has a condition that makes it almost impossible for her to speak around strangers and asked her to bare with me for a minute. So my little girl ended up getting what I bought her instead of what she would have chosen... so... I'd call it a success since I probably saved close to $500 because of it :)
My daughter is in middle school and she IS SMART. She really is smart. She and I sit together factoring polynomials at Starbucks just for fun. She's really interested in science and physics specifically.
But she can't communicate.
We have now altered her entire school schedule to make sure she doesn't have any classes with anyone who she considers scary. No more Spanish class, no more gym class, no more music class. She has an iPhone she listens to death core and death metal on, she has a membership to a climbing place and she already speaks 2 languages and understands 4. So we're not concerned. Next year, she'll begin taking Mandarin.
So... why this long story... I always write books and also, it's necessary to understand this next part.
Now that she's in a class with people she's not particularly scared of, she can present a little better in front of class. She's still terrified of it, but she's able to communicate clearly... but with lots of bad jokes very few kids understand. She's getting better at it. In a few years, I'm hoping she can manage a lot better.
I am also Asperger's though that's a self-diagnosis. I actually speak publicly for weeks at a time... and I'm terrified by it... though no one would ever know it by looking. I have learned over time how to say just the right thing to make people choke on coffee or cookies. This week alone, I've made this happen three times. Kids really need to learn to speak... even if it's only around people who they are comfortable with. The only way to overcome the anxiety is to force it... and to be fair, the only way to force it is to make it more embarrassing not to speak than it would be to just suck it up and go with it.
I must admit that given what i'm watching and listening to now on the session, it seemed to be more of an issue in extreme disappointment in who was chosen as president, not the party or political lines.
... not over a political party. It expressed concerns over the candidate who won and his generally rash and almost random trial and error approach to everything. Trump has shown throughout the past two years of office that other than manipulating people to build one of the world's largest monuments in history with his name on it, his approach to politics is to just wing it and then just throw some duct tape on. I'm not 100% sure this is the wrong way to handle politics, but he's not nice to people he should be working with but disagrees with. He's actually really mean and he alienates people who he should be embracing. There's nothing wrong with saying "Dude, I love you... you're great! Now, understand, I'm going to make this change and if I'm wrong, you can say I told you so, but I have to try this". Instead, he simply lashes out and attacks.
I am absolutely disgusted by the state of both major political parties today. Consider that there were dozens of candidates that made it quite far down the road in this election. And yet, when it came time to go to the polls, the American people were left with only two candidates because of the failed system.
You asked an excellent question. "Would you argue it as liberal?". I think that it's not an issue of whether it's conservative or liberal. I think that the issue is that we attempt to demonize one or the other. It is no longer socially acceptable to be a little bit of both. For example, what about a if you're a wealthy white Christian male who goes to church every Sunday, prays, but also believes it's not his right to have a say on abortion whether he approves of the action or not and also drives an electric car because he believes in global warming. This is a person who is clearly by today's standards someone who no longer has a home in America. See, that person is required to be either conservative or liberal though the liberals are probably against his economic and family policies. And saying you're Christian in Silicon Valley is such a big thing that there are TV shows about how big a thing this is. Yet, that same person could never express their more liberal beliefs out loud in a place like Texas.
American has polarized and things like Turducken is considered not only something fun to say... a lot, it's also entirely normal and acceptable. Yet, the human turducken which is a little bit of a mix of everything is no longer allowed because it's not within lines with the American way which is "Please stand in box A or box B... pick a side... you're either part of the solution or part of the problem... etc..."
This video expressed concerns
This is a man who came into the presidential office with such thin skin that he can't handle the attacks made against him by American corporations who exist only by the ability to churn and spew controversy... meaning the press. The news papers are in the business of selling news papers and because Trump is so incredibly outlandish, they can sell A LOT of them. Because of systems he himself strongly embraces and exploited extensively to become the president in the first place by using those systems against his opponents, the entire news world has transitioned from reporting facts and news, to publishing a great deal of supposition as well as opinions. News outlets have always shared their opinions. Walter Cronkite was an excellent example of an altruistic man who would break down and cry when something moved him and his voice and sincerity would move the entire world. But today, we don't publish this. We publish articles that take pot shots. They perform hit and run journalism with a focus on writing the headline that will sell today's paper.
Consider a news source like "The Register" who has a policy of writing absolutely nonsensical headlines as click bait. I've been reading them
Nope... that was back before we had mass real-time media and we didn't fully understand how incredibly fucked the entire government was.
... instead of representing the people.... which means ALL THE PEOPLE... not just your own voters have decided instead that Team Red or Team Blue need absolute control of the government to make decisions without discussing anything with the bat shit crazy people on the other team.
Then there was FDR who had the national radio and used it as a weapon against others in Washington to give him near-dictator powers. And then he completely without foresight fucked up the political system in America by imposing term limits which meant that politicians who have real plans that take more than 8 years to accomplish... won't.
When we got TV and had 1-3 channels, we had hope in people like Kennedy who was raised by a small group to a beacon of hope.
When we got 30 channels, we got CNN and things went rapidly south from there. People found out that we didn't need just 1 hour of news a day... we needed 24.
Then we got C-SPAN, BBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, etc... and we ended up with 10,000 hours of broadcast news a day.
Then the news networks realized that they needed to differentiate themselves from each other in order to earn ratings and keep enough viewers to justify their jobs. So they started catering to groups.
And then came the Internet.
And the RSS feed.
And the Tweets.
And now in order for each news source to survive, they have to offer something. And what do they offer? Sports!!!
They've turned Republicans and Democrats into team Red and team Blue. They have actively stacked the teams... not with political leaders.... not we law makers... not with anything like that. They stacked the decks with "Good TV"!!!
So... the presidential campaigns are now reality TV series which have gone so far as to turn the presidential debates into a competition with a score board and which betting sights actually operate on. They've made sure that all the players on both teams are going to fight each other tooth and nail... not because of right and wrong but because of Team Red and Team Blue.
Both parties
No... neither party was ever sane... but what we have now is not democracy... It's the roman senate shortly before it was dissolved and an empire was declared.
Let me tell you something I know... anyone who backs a team is generally incompetent. Anyone who wants one team or player or the other to win... is well... I hope natural selection will eventually do away with those. We are a single team. There is no white hats and black hats. We are in this together. But so long as America has Team Red and Team Blue, there is no hope for American civilization to elevate itself out of the second world again.
I honestly want the monopolies to pretend to strengthen democracy.
... is horrifying. If Amazon for example were to centralize and when meat was ordered, then it would be defrosted and processed based on demand... it would make such a massive difference in our overhead to the planet.
At this point in time,
Jeff Bezos owns Amazon and news papers and whatever else
Satya Nadella is in control of one of the biggest new networks (which slashdotters will never see because it's through Edge and Bing)
The Alphabet boys are in control of what almost everyone in the world sees
Zuck and Dorsey could easily control a MASSIVE amount of what everyone sees.
What's also important is that most of these people seem to have some inkling of wanting to be good people. They're all stumbling their way through trying to be nice and fair and more powerful than the leaders of the UN nations.
Imagine if Facebook were broken into 20 different news and social media sites that were all controlled by basically the same people? It would be bigger, not smaller than it is today.
So... why can't these megabillionairs launch democracy sites which would break the two party system and allow equal access to all potential candidates. I mean seriously, politics is about gaining votes... which is about visibility. Zuck, Dorsey, Alphabet Boys and Nadella could easily outdo all the other mass media outlets in the world and offer a real political platform where "He who has the billion dollar fund raising power wins" isn't how it will work. They could make it a platform which works somewhat like a game or a reality TV series where interested candidates can compete on the merits of their beliefs over time and build up viewership.
These companies could capitalize by making their own kind of Apprentice style TV series that would allow the people to judge how different candidates lead and make decisions. But instead of making it about "You're fired" which still seems to be a mantra for Trump, make shows that simulate real political situations. Have episodes where they are confronted with issues like trying to mediate between Democrats and Republicans who disagree with each other just because they're both stupid. Or other episodes where as president they are presented with a bill to sign or veto which makes no sense, is nothing but 1000 pages of ear marks with a stupid name that exists only because congress can't discuss anything anymore. I for example would veto it and say "Don't send it back until you've actually read the thing and made the contents reflect what the title says... and actually discuss it... none of this passing the shit around until we get all our earmarks in bullshit. If you do that and the bill still sounds good, and you still have the votes, I'll sign it... otherwise, don't waste my time."
Imagine if it were possible for political science majors in school to learn more about administering the government rather than learning to establish, collect, distribute and manipulate political capital?
These mega-corporations are well positioned to make this happen in the real world. There's nothing wrong with Facebook interfering with what people seem to call the democratic system so long as they actually do it fairly and in the right way.
That being said... we need the mega-monopolies... consider Amazon grocery delivery. Instead of having 10,000 stores spread out over the whole country selling the same shit, there could be 50-100 well managed and automated warehouses. That means a lot of really important things.
1) Waste management... any idea how much meat we produce for no other reason than to stock shelves and make it look more attractive to buy and to provide selection? What about milk? What about vegetables? Do you really think there's a world food shortage? Is there a real resource consumption problem? Consumption means that we... well consume it. We don't. The massive amount of meat, fish, dairy etc... we produce and then simply throw away... in its packaging
Nope... a port to Chrome has very little impact on the cost of porting to Linux. It would still be the cost of an additional platform.
Most modern video games are written using Unreal or Unity and both of those systems support Linux as first class citizens and yet most publishers do not port to Linux. This is because there's just no value in it to them. It's not a mainstream user oriented operating system and it almost certainly wouldn't support the cost of 1-2 additional staff developers to produce the title.
Chrome related operating systems makes sense to companies, because it is a mainstream platform with user counts measured in the millions.
Of course, the reference to whether it will run Crysis is another issue. Crysis was always the joke because of the ridiculous system specification requirements to achieve even mediocre performance. I find it doubtful that Chromebook will ever target high end graphics processing requirements.
The main articles biggest problem was the question. "Is Chromebook threatening other Mac and Windows?" should have been the question.
Consider that the set of tools generally found on Chromebooks is far closer to Mac than to Windows. Windows is a substantially more diverse operating system than Mac and Chrome OS. Linux and Windows are far more similar in nature if you were to compare them side by side.
Consider that both Windows and Linux are well suited for power users and the foundations/companies supporting them are targeting non-casual users. Linux is certainly not user friendly. If for no other reason than you can't Google "How do I copy pictures from my phone to my desktop on Linux" and actually get a result of any meaning whatsoever. Windows is special in the sense that it's an operating system specifically designed from the very foundation upwards to support enterprise scale management. Consider that Windows has had all the features of a MDM (and much more) since Windows 2000 and even earlier.
Now Chrome OS and Mac OS are both very excellent solutions for mainstream users. In fact, I would consider a Chrome OS device for my living room even though I'm a religious Windows Subsystem for Linux zealot. I couldn't figure out how to brush my teeth in the morning unless I had Linux running on Windows to help me. And yet for a casual use laptop, I used to use Mac, but I think that Chrome OS is more attractive now.
It's really funny, in our house, since Apple removed the headphone jack from the telephone, we have only bought one new phone. The iPhone X. We bought the top model and it's sitting on the coffee table in the living room and no one is using it. We're all using iPhone 6S and 6S plus telephones with weakening batteries.
I also used to keep at least one current Mac around for coding iPhone apps, but to be honest, I kinda lost interest in that because Apple actually seems to really only want major developers on their platform and don't care about the little guy anymore.
Chrome OS is our replacement for Mac OS these days. After all, it's pretty much the exact same programs that you would typically use on a Mac. Everything on the platform is App priced instead of application priced. I mean honestly, you would never pay more than $5-$10 for a program on Chrome OS.
Will Chrome OS hurt Windows... sure it will. I think it's an amazing platform for anyone who considers synergy to be a great word.
Will Chrome OS hurt Mac OS.... yeh... considerably.
1) Kids that play video games on PC growing up but use Mac at school probably buy a PC when they get older.
2) Kids that play video games on Android tablets or iPads growing up but use Windows, Chrome or Mac at school will probably buy a Mac or a Chromebook
3) Kids that play video games on Android devices but use Windows or Chrome OS at school will almost certainly consider a Chromebook.
It has to do with what people associate with providing the greatest fashion or value. Apple is always the "Fashion Brand" but they don't provide any real value ove
There is something in-between.
... I'm not talking about a few years after stabilizing, I'm talking as soon as the monster code base called the kernel no longer depends on them. Forget that there are external modules build from DKMS other other tools that need to handle different versions. And we're not talking about massive APIs, we're talking about things that support name changes.
I love microkernels and have written a few for personal entertainment. I have even been following Fuschia OS's development quite closely... though I can't believe anyone would make something that shitty from the ground up in 2018.
A more or less monolithic with a pluggable and stable ABI and API is often the best of both worlds. Add some form of module signing and code review process and we're in a good place.
After all these years, there has been ample opportunity to optimize microprocessor design to make a better microkernel CPU. There is generally just too much cost involved in the constant context swaps for a desktop OS. Remember that we spent many years trying to trim the fat between application and graphics subsystems. Even today, it's pretty simply to almost devastate the performance of a micro kernel with a massive amount of disk I/O operations.
Last month, I wrote a new Linux kernel module. I needed to implement the Cisco Discovery Protocol on Linux in a less stupid way than it's been done until now. I believe I achieved doing it equally dumb from an opposite direction. This is because the Linux Kernel is an enormous disaster of crap on crap.
Let's talk about something relatively simple that should have been ripped out and entirely moved out of the kernel a LONG time ago... the network stack.
The Linux network stack is amazingly fast and should be given credit for being that way.
It's also a cesspool of shit code from almost end to end. Probably the most important piece of code in the Linux kernel is sk_buff. Oh... sk_buff, you are the biggest, ugliest and shittiest piece of code in the entire world. I mean... you're a buffer... a kinda sorta reference counted buffer which never really gets deleted...except when you do. You're a huge chunk of trash code that looks like you were designed by a drug fuddled preschooler that wanted to try daddy's C compiler while on a series trip.
sk_buff is probably the most critical piece of code to keep the documentation up to date on. This is the code which makes things like kernel panics in the weirdest ways when even the slightest thing goes wrong. And yet, after 27 years of Linux, you guys still can't seem to stabilize the API for the frigging network buffer!!!
Then let's consider procfs...
So... procfs is basically the ability for a user mode application to access a file and it calls procedures for reads and writes... well all files in the kernel work that way, but procfs is a bit special, it was meant to be informative and work in a printf'ish kinda way.
procfs for the most part is nothing more than, open, read, write, seek, close. It doesn't need anything other than that. It's a simple random access file stream.
Somehow, the API is still changing like mad... and worse the transition mechanisms that support the newer APIs are actually getting removed from the kernel
I was looking into adding a new address family to the kernel for CDP... and I tried looking at other code for a good example. I absolutely refuse to make pull requests to the Linux kernel unless it's a bug fix (and deleting the whole tree and starting over doesn't count). I believe that tools like DKMS should point to git repositories and download drivers and build them against the kernel. CDP does not need to be part of the mainstream kernel. It's a tool.
Well, as I said, I was looking into it. And after this many years, because of the absolute shitty state of the kernel... I'd at least have to register AF_CDP and PF_CDP somewhere so that I could have my very own protocol number. And for the most part, that would prob
I don't live in American anymore... thankfully.
But to be fair, in my house I'm the bread winner. I make about 3-4 times as much as my wife does. There are many reasons for that, but the most important is that I've chosen a career path that lets me sell myself. She chose to be a nurse which more or less is a fixed price market.
I calculated about a year ago how much money we have and how much money we would have if she simply stopped working and instead took up a career as a proper house wife... WAIT!!! I didn't say became a proper house wife. I referred to the career path of housewife. This is a path that can be taken by man or woman and if one person in a house were to spend their time clipping coupons, planning meals, structuring schedules, hiring plumbers, mending clothing, balancing the finances, refinancing the mortgage every second year, etc... the amount of money they would save the household, especially if they took pride in their work would be more than they earned after tax in a normal job. Add the additional tax break for the spouse who is working and the money could be a big gain.
The truth is, our house could easily have an additional $10,000 a year disposable income if my wife didn't work as a nurse, but instead took up housewife as a career.
Now if we got more kids... all that yummy money would go bye bye.
Holy sheep balls Batman.
1) The company doesn't pay the 17+63 weeks. They generally pay about 2 weeks. The government pays the rest.
2) It's amazing how societies that have this kind of empathy at a government level don't have the mass shootings problems. The government sets an example that you mean something to the country and the world from the moment you are born.
3) Packing formula or breast milk like a bagged lunch and coming home exhausted after working a full day to a baby who has a lot of needs is the way you breed serial killers. You are being paid by the government to establish a strong relationship and bond with your child. This makes it so that children aren't passed like a joint to an underpaid worker after 2 weeks.
4) We're all paying for this. When we were born, someone paid our mothers to raise us for two weeks, our tax money is used to pay it forward. This is no different than social security in America. You spend your life paying for old people to live through their retirements when they are no longer the optimal components of the work force. When you get old and retire, the next generations will do it for you knowing they will receive those benefits later. Now we could just pay the babies for a year to take care of themselves... but in all honesty, it's more constructive to pay the mothers and fathers to do it. You should try living in a 1st world country for some time and try to keep an open mind about it. I grew up in second world America and watched my parents lose most of their retirement savings when I was sick as a child and their savings were used to buy one insurance policy after the next. I would watch from a hospital window as the Ronald McDonald house had a daily stream of broken parents coming and going while they watched their babies die.. probably many of them because they could afford the good doctors.
I'm out of that now world now... if a parents here wants to have 40 children and they are willing to spend their lives raising them and caring for them, I am more than happy to help out. Of course, that isn't because I agree with them have 40 kids. It's because I would much rather make sure those kids have at least one parent to care for them than to think of the kids raising each other. I also want to make sure those kids have food on their tables as they shouldn't be punished for their parents crimes.
Norway has had a steadily decreasing population because of these social programs. This is because of many reasons. Among them
- People are raised right from birth by parents who are more focused on their physical and mental health since they don't worry about stupid things like how they'll afford to feed them.
- We don't just invest in the initial birth. We invest all through their lives. My son who just started high school received a loan of $600 from the government. The terms of the loan are "Each year of school attended pays off X% of the loan" or "Payment in full is expected on termination of school". Which means that if you drop out, you have to pay back the portion you haven't earned. $600 isn't much, but he plays American football and he'll be able to buy a $450 set of pads an a few jerseys with that. We invest all through a child's life in their mental health, the physical health and their education and upbringing. We do this as a nation. This makes healthier people... who go to work and love what they do.
- Religion. Religion is typically reserved for people who need hope. Hope is for people who are discontent with the current state of their lives and the world as a whole. Hope is for people who feel they lack the power to control their lives or improve the world around them. What would be the attraction of heaven or fear of hell if what came next didn't really matter since it's more important to live for the planet you're on. If you're a good person and you are surrounded by good people, and you work together as good people do to make sure that everyone in general are pretty good people... well you end up with a societ
Norway: 70,812.48
Canada - 51,315.89
US - 53,128.54
Of course we only have 59 weeks or parental leave (at 80% salary or 49 weeks at 100%) following the 12 week maternity leave. Oh and it has none of these silly $1000 a week caps. So, if you're a CEO and you have $500,000 a year salary, you'll receive that the whole time you're out.
Though I'll admit, the job offers I get in D.C. (typically about $300K+) or in S.V. ($250K+) or in NYC ($200K+) are considerably more than the $128K base salary I make now. Though I do get overtime and I have side work for an extra $50K. I do pay A LOT more taxes here than I would there. But the standard of living is substantially higher here than over there. I didn't have to spend month interviewing day care nannies to ensure they won't diddle or beat my children. I didn't have to spend months applying to private schools to keep my kids away from the school shootings. I didn't have to put a penny in the bank for my kids college educations. I didn't pay for the lenses in my childrens glasses. I've never paid for a doctor or dentist appointment for my kids. Honestly, I take home a lot more in the end than my American counter parts.
My daughter dreams of going to MIT one day... I'll have to pay something for cost of living, but I won't spend a dime on the school itself. And she's well on track to get there too. If I lived in the U.S., I'd have to plan taking a second mortgage to cover her education even on those high salaries.
Thanks for this... my daughter has officially added this to her arsenal of mamma jokes that only a handful of people understand.
I will admit though, she already had :
"Your mamma's so fat that her spiritual guide refers to her aura as an event horizon"
If youâ€(TM)re a consultant, you probably are overcharging for everything to begin with. Travel, food, etc... and the bitch of it is, you probably charge the customer for your time to gain the expertise they assumed you already had when you agreed to take the position.
If youâ€(TM) are salary, you have a job to accomplish and the boss is paying you for that. If you do that in 10 hours a week... we might want to find more responsibilities for you as itâ€(TM)s clear you are severely under utilized. If you need 60 hours a week, as a salary employee, you negotiated a fee to be paid to accomplish a job... well... thatâ€(TM)s your problem.
If you are an hourly employee, you probably are working at McDonalds or are a shift worker. While I am sure that shift workers such as nurses and doctors will sometimes work from the train or bus, the doctor is extremely well compensated for his time and should just do his job. Shift-nurses probably are in a much lower pay grade, but shift nurses generally work in places where their work related mails and such are part of their on-shift schedule.
This sounds like underpaid and under appreciated employees who work shit jobs for asshole bosses who have not placed them on salary trying to justify shorter office hours to make it to the daycare on time to pick up.
If you work for someone who knows you are a parent and knows you have to pick up and drop off and they are giving you grief over your hours, you need to leave the U.S. or the U.K. and move somewhere civilized.