My parents live a bit further south than you, Ohio, but their solar install paid its self off in 7 years if memory serves. Having a house that is hemorrhaging energy into the outdoors is definitely where the problem is at for most people. Drafts used to be essential when the primary in home heating was fireplaces, but we're a long ways from that time and people really should invest the minimal effort in sealing up their homes.
I think a lot of the trouble with diesels in cold weather is from them not being designed for extreme cold. I imagine though that it's a design compromise of some sort. My family owned a Belarus tractor when I was a kid. I remember my Father being concerned one morning because it was below 0 F and he had forgotten to plug in the block heater before he needed to drive it somewhere. He decided to try it anyways and it started right up.
The "speed" at concern in regards to Net Neutrality is all about how fast a packet is delivered to you. High bandwidth is frequently conflated with speed, this is because with more bandwidth you can receive more packets at any given time. Bandwidth won't help though if your ISP decides that all packets coming from a specific source will be delivered to you slower than packets from their preferred source. Without Net Neutrality there is nothing stopping your ISP from deciding that they will deliver all Netflix content you request fives minutes after you click the link for it.
When I was talking about not being able to buy better latency I was speaking about the current situation. What the FCC is doing is essentially allowing ISPs to create a market for latency by deliberately slowing down network traffic they aren't being paid to serve. Once the new rules go through I fully expect my ISP to start extorting money out of popular websites to treat their traffic preferentially, and possibly offer me service plans to not kneecap my network traffic with websites that won't play ball with them.
I wonder if they would interpret #6 to cover reading via mechanical means, or only via human eye.
If mechanical means aren't covered then perhaps a license plate frame with very bright IR LED's would be possible. And maybe such a frame could include a bright white flash that is triggered by detecting another flash going off.
Nope, the speed has always been a function of the hardware in your area. The bandwidth has been something that was available in differently priced tiers. This is readily apparent if you look at the burger as a packet. It wasn't the case that the employee couldn't push the burger across the counter slowly but that they weren't allowed to hand it over until some arbitrary time had passed.
I can pay my ISP more money to get more bandwidth, but for some things latency is more important. And no amount of bandwidth will make up for bad latency. It might be possible to pay an ISP for better latency but I'm sure the cost would be exorbitant as it'd require upgrading all kinds of infrastructure.
What's funny to me is that were I work contractors actually cost more than regular employees per slot. However that doesn't usually translate to the individual contractors being paid more. When I hired on as a contractor, I somehow was given a form that I probably wasn't supposed to see. That form detailed how much the company was paying for the slot I was filling, my salary accounted for less than 40% of that. Now it is true that employees cost more than just their salary, however in this case there was almost none of that outside of health insurance. When I finally got hired on as a regular employee I got a significant pay increase immediately, regular salary increases tied to time on the job plus annual cost of living raises, retirement benefits, 401k matching, far and away better health insurance coverage, more vacation and sick time. Years down the road now I'm making 20% more than I hired on at and my total cost to the company is still only about 75% of what the contractor company was getting nearly a decade ago. Why does my company use contractor companies for ? I can only imagine that it's tied to some good old boy system.
That's not really a fair assessment. It is entirely possible his parents are still living and own property. Or he wasn't an only child and the family home was sold and the profits split among siblings. This is simply one of the downsides of gentrification. But there is no guarantee in our society that anyone will be able to continue living in any given area as time progresses.
I grew up in an area where I can't afford to live myself. Well that's probably not totally true. I could probably afford to buy a home there if I was able to find work nearby. That would likely require me to commute an hour or more each way for work and I'm not willing to do that. And buying in such an expensive area would also likely set my retirement back considerably as I'd have to cut back on retirement savings.
I feel for the guy, as I miss being able to raise my kids where I was as well. But such is life, and it isn't a problem exclusive to Silicon Valley and it's neighboring communities.
If I owned a house in Silicon Valley I wouldn't care a whit about what my employer thought. I'd sell the house and move somewhere where the property values are at 20% or less. Then I'd worry about finding work. Hell if the sale of the house went well enough working might not be necessary anymore. If I got a million dollars right now, I might not be able to retire immediately on it. But it would definitely shorten my retirement horizon, and or mean I could switch to more of a lifestyle maintenance job. At 2 million I'd definitely be retiring to a cabin in the woods somewhere.
It's interesting that anyone would think that "the US domestic population can't stand a prolonged conflict". I mean we're still fighting in Afghanistan and we've been there for 16+ years now. I mean WW2 only lasted 6 years, I'm pretty sure we're going to triple that in Afghanistan. If anything I'd expect people to view the USA as being incapable of pulling out once the military gets involved.
That's what the House is for. The Senate, with every state regardless of all other factors getting two votes, is meant as a check against a tyrannical majority. It'd be nice to see the House get back to 1 representative per 30,000 citizens. That way we'd have 10,000+ congress critters in the house, and corporations would have to spend a lot more money to buy their votes.
Why would you think someone couldn't easily break a taillight? They aren't made of tempered glass or anything, just cheap plastic. Depending on how the light assembly is mounted it might not even take an impact from an elbow or knee.
I tried to have a similar conversation with a friend recently. He was very excited about an economic boom in his area that was all about natural resource extraction and how it was going to bring long term wealth to his area. He seemed to expect that the industry would be building constantly for decades and that those jobs weren't going to vanish at some point. And somehow the average Joe was going to be profiting off the sale of those natural resources.
More than a few times I've seen people try to order something off the menu only to be told that item is out of stock. So asking if you can order something makes some sense. Though I've gotta say I get really annoyed when that kind of thing happens, is it really so difficult to put up a sign saying you're out of some popular item. The worst was a little lunch place that only served 3 main items, one day when I was eating there they were out of chicken but the guy taking orders couldn't be bothered to tell people they were out until they asked for it.
Who is making such horribly unreliable cars that at 10-15 years old they break down so often? Even when I was driving a PoS 20+ year old Porsche it didn't break down 6 times or even 3 times in a year. I've owned a similarly aged Nissan Z car, a Chrysler sedan, and a large Pontiac I could have put historic plates on. None of them were so unreliable as you seem to think a 10-15 year old car would be. And as my wife would happily tell you I'm horrible about maintaining my cars, the rain provides free wash services and I'll take them for an oil change when the sticker is faded to illegibility. I drove a 20+ year old Corolla for awhile that's only failing was a tape deck that was jammed up, I sold it when I inherited the wife's newer Corolla because she wanted a "family" vehicle.
Water temperatures are obviously not homogeneous between layers, as you acknowledged when wondering why the sharks didn't just swim deeper. Temperatures can also vary by areas even at the same depths. For instance I would expect shallow areas like beaches with gradual slopes to be colder than water at the surface over deep water. I suppose it's possible that beaches could actually be generating colder water during this kind of weather. Since cold water is denser that warmer water it could form currents where it sinks to the bottom and flows down hill. A shark that swims near enough to shore might start to get too cold, dive to find warmer water but end up in a current of even colder water flowing away from the beach. I don't know a lot about shark biology and how rapidly they respond to changes in temperature, but we can probably agree that people should be good at this, and yet people freeze to death from hypothermia every year because they don't recognize the danger quickly enough or respond adequately.
Air resistance is a problem because of the heat it generates not necessarily because it prevents you from hitting escape velocities, right? So why not heat shield the launch vehicle such that it can withstand the intense heat. Even with the extra shielding you'd likely end up having to accelerate less mass.
I expect it'd be a logistical nightmare but I wonder if you couldn't suspend a vacuum tube from a ground based launcher up to significant altitudes using dirigibles.
It is a funny way to catch out "friends" that aren't paying attention. Every year a few people will post to congratulate me on my 100+ year birthday on January 1st.
Ha, I'm the reverse. I have a nice, though not fancy or ostentatious, watch and don't carry a phone.
Wearables don't appeal to me either though. Maybe if they ever get to the point that we can plug them into our heads or augmented reality glasses I'll think about it. As it is even my 8" tablet is annoyingly small and painful to use, it primarily serves as my reading device on the porcelain throne. My primary use for computers is to play games anyways and I think it'll be some decades before wearables or phones/tablets can come anywhere close to competing with a desktop for that.
Hasn't ever been true for Fed employees so far as I can tell. The retirement system you're probably thinking of, CSRS, was closed to new employees back in the late 1980's. Everyone since then that hires on is part of FERS, which includes a much smaller pension that can't be drawn from until you're 57, possibly earlier if they're looking to reduce staff and offer early retirement. If you wait until age 62 you get 1.1% per year of service. The rest of FERS is essentially the same as what anyone else can get as it's just Social Security and some matching in a 401K plan called TSP.
CSRS is the older system that was killed off in 1987. It was pretty generous in that the pension was larger, and required fewer years of service. However There was no 401k/TSP matching. CSRS employees were also exempt from Social Security so while they didn't have to put any money into that, they also wouldn't get any money out. It is also worth mentioning that just because you had put in the time to earn the pension didn't mean you could go home at 40 and start collecting checks. You didn't start getting pension checks until age 55.
So to sum it all up, yes, Federal workers do get a pension. However it is smaller than many people think. The pay rate the pension is based on is lower than commercial sector averages. And you can't collect any of that money until you're around the standard retirement age, which is around two decades past 40.
You could possibly do 20 years in one of the armed services, retire at 38 and immediately start drawing a pension check. However military pay is even worse than civilian and is inflated by all kinds of allowances such that the 50% retirement benefit is often far less than people expect. I have yet to meet a military retiree under 50 that didn't go directly to work in another job because they had to make ends meet. I wouldn't doubt that such people exist but they are a rare breed, as most people will refuse to reduce their standard of living to the point that they can live on so little income.
I read an article about this kind of problem awhile back, only the algorithm being discussed was used by court systems to project the risk of a person becoming a repeat offender. A major problem with the system was that it was being used in ways that didn't match its intended use. But there were also real problems with the training data that was used. Historic racism for example distorts crime statistics for as long as they are viewed as relevant. Even today you have programs like 'Stop and Frisk' which perpetuate racist policing and all the resulting prosecutions from that continue to weigh the statistics down.
None of that should be surprising, and I'm not really against using algorithms for helping to make decisions. But those algorithms should not be black boxes, especially whenever they are used by government or institutions backed by government. And there should always be a route for an individual to obtain a breakdown of the algorithms analysis pertaining to them so that it can be contested when flawed.
Oh, it is so much worse than you might imagine. For decades the interstate commerce clause has been abused in some absurd contortions of the law. If I remember correctly, there was actually a case where the Feds successfully argued in court that the commerce clause allowed them to regulate a farmer who grew wheat for feeding his own livestock. The Fed argued that because the farmer grew extra wheat he then participated less in the marketplace which would include wheat from out of state, thus his farming activities had an affect on interstate commerce.
The one singular advantage that I can think of for mining resources in space is that it would keep the pollution for those activities off our planet and so outside of our ecosystem. There would have to be some tipping point though where the cost to clean up the pollution of mining the resources terrestrially out weighs to cost of developing, implementing, and maintaining a space mining operation.
Shell Shock was just the worst of PTSD cases where you couldn't just hand wave away the symptoms. Society was different then, and a guy who couldn't hold his temper in check to avoid beating his wife and kids wasn't such a big deal. Today that kind of behavior is generally inexcusable and will result in the police getting involved. War was also very different in the first half of the 20th century than now. There were clearly delineated lines of battle with fronts. Troops would typically be rotated to the front lines for awhile then spend time in the rear were it was essentially safe. Today we are engaged in asymmetrical warfare where there is no real safe place when you are in a combat theater, you are under constant threat from ambush, IED, and mortar attacks. That situation pushes people into a constant state of very high stress for months at a time.
Our medical science has advanced incredibly which is a boon in that more soldiers can survive wounds that would historically have been mortal. The downside to those medical advances though is that just because a soldier survives, doesn't mean they aren't physically and or mentally maimed for the rest of their lives. I've also seen some reports that with the prevalence of IED attacks that more soldiers are suffering brain injuries than from previous wars where bullets, shrapnel, and disease were more the order of the day.
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My parents live a bit further south than you, Ohio, but their solar install paid its self off in 7 years if memory serves. Having a house that is hemorrhaging energy into the outdoors is definitely where the problem is at for most people. Drafts used to be essential when the primary in home heating was fireplaces, but we're a long ways from that time and people really should invest the minimal effort in sealing up their homes.
You forgot the step to bury it in soft peat for three months before recycling it as firelighters.
I think a lot of the trouble with diesels in cold weather is from them not being designed for extreme cold. I imagine though that it's a design compromise of some sort. My family owned a Belarus tractor when I was a kid. I remember my Father being concerned one morning because it was below 0 F and he had forgotten to plug in the block heater before he needed to drive it somewhere. He decided to try it anyways and it started right up.
The "speed" at concern in regards to Net Neutrality is all about how fast a packet is delivered to you. High bandwidth is frequently conflated with speed, this is because with more bandwidth you can receive more packets at any given time. Bandwidth won't help though if your ISP decides that all packets coming from a specific source will be delivered to you slower than packets from their preferred source. Without Net Neutrality there is nothing stopping your ISP from deciding that they will deliver all Netflix content you request fives minutes after you click the link for it.
When I was talking about not being able to buy better latency I was speaking about the current situation. What the FCC is doing is essentially allowing ISPs to create a market for latency by deliberately slowing down network traffic they aren't being paid to serve. Once the new rules go through I fully expect my ISP to start extorting money out of popular websites to treat their traffic preferentially, and possibly offer me service plans to not kneecap my network traffic with websites that won't play ball with them.
I wonder if they would interpret #6 to cover reading via mechanical means, or only via human eye.
If mechanical means aren't covered then perhaps a license plate frame with very bright IR LED's would be possible. And maybe such a frame could include a bright white flash that is triggered by detecting another flash going off.
Nope, the speed has always been a function of the hardware in your area. The bandwidth has been something that was available in differently priced tiers. This is readily apparent if you look at the burger as a packet. It wasn't the case that the employee couldn't push the burger across the counter slowly but that they weren't allowed to hand it over until some arbitrary time had passed.
I can pay my ISP more money to get more bandwidth, but for some things latency is more important. And no amount of bandwidth will make up for bad latency. It might be possible to pay an ISP for better latency but I'm sure the cost would be exorbitant as it'd require upgrading all kinds of infrastructure.
What's funny to me is that were I work contractors actually cost more than regular employees per slot. However that doesn't usually translate to the individual contractors being paid more. When I hired on as a contractor, I somehow was given a form that I probably wasn't supposed to see. That form detailed how much the company was paying for the slot I was filling, my salary accounted for less than 40% of that. Now it is true that employees cost more than just their salary, however in this case there was almost none of that outside of health insurance. When I finally got hired on as a regular employee I got a significant pay increase immediately, regular salary increases tied to time on the job plus annual cost of living raises, retirement benefits, 401k matching, far and away better health insurance coverage, more vacation and sick time. Years down the road now I'm making 20% more than I hired on at and my total cost to the company is still only about 75% of what the contractor company was getting nearly a decade ago. Why does my company use contractor companies for ? I can only imagine that it's tied to some good old boy system.
That's not really a fair assessment. It is entirely possible his parents are still living and own property. Or he wasn't an only child and the family home was sold and the profits split among siblings. This is simply one of the downsides of gentrification. But there is no guarantee in our society that anyone will be able to continue living in any given area as time progresses.
I grew up in an area where I can't afford to live myself. Well that's probably not totally true. I could probably afford to buy a home there if I was able to find work nearby. That would likely require me to commute an hour or more each way for work and I'm not willing to do that. And buying in such an expensive area would also likely set my retirement back considerably as I'd have to cut back on retirement savings.
I feel for the guy, as I miss being able to raise my kids where I was as well. But such is life, and it isn't a problem exclusive to Silicon Valley and it's neighboring communities.
If I owned a house in Silicon Valley I wouldn't care a whit about what my employer thought. I'd sell the house and move somewhere where the property values are at 20% or less. Then I'd worry about finding work. Hell if the sale of the house went well enough working might not be necessary anymore. If I got a million dollars right now, I might not be able to retire immediately on it. But it would definitely shorten my retirement horizon, and or mean I could switch to more of a lifestyle maintenance job. At 2 million I'd definitely be retiring to a cabin in the woods somewhere.
It's interesting that anyone would think that "the US domestic population can't stand a prolonged conflict". I mean we're still fighting in Afghanistan and we've been there for 16+ years now. I mean WW2 only lasted 6 years, I'm pretty sure we're going to triple that in Afghanistan. If anything I'd expect people to view the USA as being incapable of pulling out once the military gets involved.
That's what the House is for. The Senate, with every state regardless of all other factors getting two votes, is meant as a check against a tyrannical majority. It'd be nice to see the House get back to 1 representative per 30,000 citizens. That way we'd have 10,000+ congress critters in the house, and corporations would have to spend a lot more money to buy their votes.
Why would you think someone couldn't easily break a taillight? They aren't made of tempered glass or anything, just cheap plastic. Depending on how the light assembly is mounted it might not even take an impact from an elbow or knee.
I tried to have a similar conversation with a friend recently. He was very excited about an economic boom in his area that was all about natural resource extraction and how it was going to bring long term wealth to his area. He seemed to expect that the industry would be building constantly for decades and that those jobs weren't going to vanish at some point. And somehow the average Joe was going to be profiting off the sale of those natural resources.
More than a few times I've seen people try to order something off the menu only to be told that item is out of stock. So asking if you can order something makes some sense. Though I've gotta say I get really annoyed when that kind of thing happens, is it really so difficult to put up a sign saying you're out of some popular item. The worst was a little lunch place that only served 3 main items, one day when I was eating there they were out of chicken but the guy taking orders couldn't be bothered to tell people they were out until they asked for it.
Who is making such horribly unreliable cars that at 10-15 years old they break down so often? Even when I was driving a PoS 20+ year old Porsche it didn't break down 6 times or even 3 times in a year. I've owned a similarly aged Nissan Z car, a Chrysler sedan, and a large Pontiac I could have put historic plates on. None of them were so unreliable as you seem to think a 10-15 year old car would be. And as my wife would happily tell you I'm horrible about maintaining my cars, the rain provides free wash services and I'll take them for an oil change when the sticker is faded to illegibility. I drove a 20+ year old Corolla for awhile that's only failing was a tape deck that was jammed up, I sold it when I inherited the wife's newer Corolla because she wanted a "family" vehicle.
Water temperatures are obviously not homogeneous between layers, as you acknowledged when wondering why the sharks didn't just swim deeper. Temperatures can also vary by areas even at the same depths. For instance I would expect shallow areas like beaches with gradual slopes to be colder than water at the surface over deep water. I suppose it's possible that beaches could actually be generating colder water during this kind of weather. Since cold water is denser that warmer water it could form currents where it sinks to the bottom and flows down hill. A shark that swims near enough to shore might start to get too cold, dive to find warmer water but end up in a current of even colder water flowing away from the beach. I don't know a lot about shark biology and how rapidly they respond to changes in temperature, but we can probably agree that people should be good at this, and yet people freeze to death from hypothermia every year because they don't recognize the danger quickly enough or respond adequately.
Air resistance is a problem because of the heat it generates not necessarily because it prevents you from hitting escape velocities, right? So why not heat shield the launch vehicle such that it can withstand the intense heat. Even with the extra shielding you'd likely end up having to accelerate less mass.
I expect it'd be a logistical nightmare but I wonder if you couldn't suspend a vacuum tube from a ground based launcher up to significant altitudes using dirigibles.
It is a funny way to catch out "friends" that aren't paying attention. Every year a few people will post to congratulate me on my 100+ year birthday on January 1st.
Ha, I'm the reverse. I have a nice, though not fancy or ostentatious, watch and don't carry a phone.
Wearables don't appeal to me either though. Maybe if they ever get to the point that we can plug them into our heads or augmented reality glasses I'll think about it. As it is even my 8" tablet is annoyingly small and painful to use, it primarily serves as my reading device on the porcelain throne. My primary use for computers is to play games anyways and I think it'll be some decades before wearables or phones/tablets can come anywhere close to competing with a desktop for that.
Hasn't ever been true for Fed employees so far as I can tell. The retirement system you're probably thinking of, CSRS, was closed to new employees back in the late 1980's. Everyone since then that hires on is part of FERS, which includes a much smaller pension that can't be drawn from until you're 57, possibly earlier if they're looking to reduce staff and offer early retirement. If you wait until age 62 you get 1.1% per year of service. The rest of FERS is essentially the same as what anyone else can get as it's just Social Security and some matching in a 401K plan called TSP.
CSRS is the older system that was killed off in 1987. It was pretty generous in that the pension was larger, and required fewer years of service. However There was no 401k/TSP matching. CSRS employees were also exempt from Social Security so while they didn't have to put any money into that, they also wouldn't get any money out. It is also worth mentioning that just because you had put in the time to earn the pension didn't mean you could go home at 40 and start collecting checks. You didn't start getting pension checks until age 55.
So to sum it all up, yes, Federal workers do get a pension. However it is smaller than many people think. The pay rate the pension is based on is lower than commercial sector averages. And you can't collect any of that money until you're around the standard retirement age, which is around two decades past 40.
You could possibly do 20 years in one of the armed services, retire at 38 and immediately start drawing a pension check. However military pay is even worse than civilian and is inflated by all kinds of allowances such that the 50% retirement benefit is often far less than people expect. I have yet to meet a military retiree under 50 that didn't go directly to work in another job because they had to make ends meet. I wouldn't doubt that such people exist but they are a rare breed, as most people will refuse to reduce their standard of living to the point that they can live on so little income.
I read an article about this kind of problem awhile back, only the algorithm being discussed was used by court systems to project the risk of a person becoming a repeat offender. A major problem with the system was that it was being used in ways that didn't match its intended use. But there were also real problems with the training data that was used. Historic racism for example distorts crime statistics for as long as they are viewed as relevant. Even today you have programs like 'Stop and Frisk' which perpetuate racist policing and all the resulting prosecutions from that continue to weigh the statistics down.
None of that should be surprising, and I'm not really against using algorithms for helping to make decisions. But those algorithms should not be black boxes, especially whenever they are used by government or institutions backed by government. And there should always be a route for an individual to obtain a breakdown of the algorithms analysis pertaining to them so that it can be contested when flawed.
Oh, it is so much worse than you might imagine. For decades the interstate commerce clause has been abused in some absurd contortions of the law. If I remember correctly, there was actually a case where the Feds successfully argued in court that the commerce clause allowed them to regulate a farmer who grew wheat for feeding his own livestock. The Fed argued that because the farmer grew extra wheat he then participated less in the marketplace which would include wheat from out of state, thus his farming activities had an affect on interstate commerce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The one singular advantage that I can think of for mining resources in space is that it would keep the pollution for those activities off our planet and so outside of our ecosystem. There would have to be some tipping point though where the cost to clean up the pollution of mining the resources terrestrially out weighs to cost of developing, implementing, and maintaining a space mining operation.
Shell Shock was just the worst of PTSD cases where you couldn't just hand wave away the symptoms. Society was different then, and a guy who couldn't hold his temper in check to avoid beating his wife and kids wasn't such a big deal. Today that kind of behavior is generally inexcusable and will result in the police getting involved. War was also very different in the first half of the 20th century than now. There were clearly delineated lines of battle with fronts. Troops would typically be rotated to the front lines for awhile then spend time in the rear were it was essentially safe. Today we are engaged in asymmetrical warfare where there is no real safe place when you are in a combat theater, you are under constant threat from ambush, IED, and mortar attacks. That situation pushes people into a constant state of very high stress for months at a time.
Our medical science has advanced incredibly which is a boon in that more soldiers can survive wounds that would historically have been mortal. The downside to those medical advances though is that just because a soldier survives, doesn't mean they aren't physically and or mentally maimed for the rest of their lives. I've also seen some reports that with the prevalence of IED attacks that more soldiers are suffering brain injuries than from previous wars where bullets, shrapnel, and disease were more the order of the day.
I fear that if such a thing was done those of use that survived would be stuck with no mouth and the need to scream.