Unfortunately they didn't say that. Those were just lab tests of stability and sterility. In order to be convinced, I'd have to see a study of actual patients who successfully learned to do their own epinephrine injections. That would be a hard study to do, since anaphylaxis is relatively rare.
I never claimed my links said that. They only proved that pre-filled syringes are a viable choice for those people who claim "We can't use syringes because of dosage concerns or worries that people won't fill them correctly or they'll lose time in doing all that for people inexperienced with them." Those things are the reasons always trotted out for why syringes aren't a reasonable alternative, but most of them are solved with a pre-filled syringe... which my links note is a viable way to store the drug until use.
Anyhow, you seriously want a STUDY showing normal people can successfully do an injection?? There are THOUSANDS of diabetics who inject themselves every day in the U.S.
(The other problem was that ephinephrine degrades after 3 months, while the EpiPen lasts 12 months.)
No, do you think the epinephrine in the EpiPens is "magic" or something? It doesn't degrade as fast because it's sealed. Epinephrine in a sealed vial or ampule would generally also last 12 months. Trained medical personnel who are used to drawing syringes quickly in emergency scenarios would have no problem with that stuff. So yes, putting in a pre-filled syringe cuts down the guaranteed stable lifespan. Anyhow, it's easy enough to swap out the syringes on a schedule. Is it less convenient and possible people will forget? Sure. But I think it's also likely some other people are more prone to forget to get a new EpiPen every year, since there's a much longer time between replacements.
My basic reaction to your post is, you can't know that something is going to work until you've done a well-designed study in the real world.
I never said it was guaranteed to be BETTER than an EpiPen -- and for that, I agree it would require a proper study. What I'm saying is that it's a reasonable, inexpensive, and reliable alternative that should be offered to patients who might want to consider alternatives.
Obviously an EpiPen -- used properly -- is probably less fuss and easier. However, I think it's irresponsible for physicians, pharmacists, and the news media to not mention the cheap, simple alternative that is clearly available.
(You also mentioned something about a media source claiming syringes require "extensive medical training" or something... I call BS. Again, diabetics deal with this all the time. There are some precautions, but most are similar to EpiPens, and the additional warnings can easily be explained in a few minutes. You also may want to check into the credentials of that medical professional -- I've seen some media quotes in stories in the past few days saying similar, but it turns out they work for allergy societies that get a huge amount of support from the manufacturer of EpiPens, which at a minimum presents a significant conflict of interest. Please note that many of the major allergy societies have been relatively silent in the past weeks as the EpiPen controversy has grown -- they get a lot of funding from the EpiPen company, so they haven't really been speaking out about what is clearly a patient advocacy issue. Horrifying all around.)
1. The school nurse and teachers were trained to use the EpiPen, not your homebrew syringe kit, when your kid has an emergency reaction to errant peanut butter in the lunch area.
Syringes are just as easy to use with 5 minutes of training. Particularly a licensed school nurse should certainly be able to handle that without extra training.
2. Syringes are typically controlled medical supplies here in the United States because they can also be used to inject illegal drugs. They don't just sell empty syringes over the counter and most schools here in the US would probably freak out over "drug paraphernalia" if they spotted your kid with a bag of pre-filled syringes.
Most states do in fact sell syringes over the counter, e.g., for diabetics. Some do put limits on sales to prevent drug use. But all of this is solved by -- ya know -- a prescription, just like you'd get for an EpiPen.
By the way, I guess you just proved my point. Our insane "war against drugs" nonsense is likely why we want to suck hundreds of dollars out of families for no good reason to force them to get the "EpiPen" while refusing to tell them about a cheap, reasonable alternative. Or, worse yet -- the families who go without an EpiPen because of expense or hope that an expired one still works... how many kids are we willing to kill or rush to the hospital with a severe allergic reaction because "ACK NEEDLES!!"
3. Emergency medical personnel are not troubled by the first two problems, but they aren't there when your kid needs them.
If you need someone to actually withdraw a dose from an ampule or vial, be sure to get the proper dose, be sure there's no air bubbles, etc. -- sure I'd agree that paramedics with experience will be better at it in a tense scenario.
But you put a pre-filled syringe in a kit, and it's ready to go. There are some things you need to know (e.g., do NOT inject into a blood vessel, but that's true of EpiPens too), but again that can be covered in 5-10 minutes of training... not significantly more than an EpiPen.
So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away.
Thankfully, someone has found a third option. Don't want to bring in the Trump apocalypse but hate voting for Clinton? Pair up with an "anti-Hillary" voter and negate each other while throwing your support to a candidate you'd prefer!
Yes, I'm assuming that's how the FBI must have recovered a lot of the "missing" ones. Given how the server was wiped, I'm not sure what their other source would be.
This isn't, by any definition whatsoever, a free market. This is in fact a government granted monopoly. You cannot have both a free market AND a monopoly in most cases. That said, I don't quite understand why we give i.e. patent holders, copyright holders, etc free reign on how, when, where, and how much they can charge for anything with the sky being the limit.
Since there seems to be a lot of confusion in the media about the real issue here, the EpiPen problem (1) has nothing to do with drug patents, and (2) has relatively little to do with patent protection in general.
Just to be clear, the drug here (epinephrine) has been around for many decades and is patent-free. You can easily get a dose of it for a few cents: hospitals directly inject the generic all the time. And the EpiPen is basically out of patent protection. There apparently is still an active patent for some aspect of the device, but the manufacturer settled a lawsuit already that would allow generic manufacture.
So what's the real problem here? There are two. The first is the FDA. Epipens fall under the category of both "drugs" and "medical devices" for approval purposes, and the byzantine set of processes necessary for approval take forever. They also require standards for effectiveness that are probably impossible to meet in this case, because of the high rate of EpiPen (and generic autoinjector) user error. There were supposedly 26 incidents of "incorrect dosage" from Auvi-Q before the recall, but none were actually confirmed and the devices involved did not seem to be malfunctioning. So why the wrong dose?
This is the dirty secret of this whole autoinjector business -- people actually screw up using them quite a bit. (The second issue.) The most common user errors: (1) forget to take safety cap off, (2) use wrong end, (3) don't inject for adequate time (usually recommended for 10 seconds). You introduce a slightly different procedure (with another cap, oh gosh!) and that makes alternatives like Adrenaclick even more likely to be misused.
This whole discussion in the media, to my mind, has been highjacked by people who want to draw attention to the high prices of drugs in the U.S. And that's a very noble goal, because it is ridiculous.
But in this particular case, there is a simple, viable, CHEAP alternative -- a syringe with epinephrine. The primary objections are that people could draw up the wrong dose in a panic or whatever -- but this is solved simply. Have your syringe prefilled by a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist. You'll also hear misinformed doctors saying, "But it isn't guaranteed to be sterile" or "it will degrade." Again, we have research on this issue -- see here and here. Basically, as long as the syringe is stored in darkness (e.g., in a simple tube or something), it's sterile and stable for at least 3 months.
And guess what -- you don't have any of those annoying problems with people screwing up using their autoinjectors. (1) forgot to take safety cap off? Nope -- you actually see the drug go in, so if there's some sort of safety put on the needle to prevent accidental discharge, it'll be clear if you didn't take it off. (2) Used the wrong end? Nope -- even a 4-year-old knows which end of the syringe has to go in. (3) Don't inject long enough? Nope -- again, you see the stuff go in. You push the needle until the pre-measured dose is completely out.
Giving yourself or someone else an injection is not rocket science, and with pre-filled syringes it's probably less error-prone than "autoinjectors." And here's the best part: the total cost is probably about $5 for one (including the syringe and the pre-filling to correct dose). If you were willing to buy syringes and a larger bottle of epinephrine yourself, you could make it even cheaper, but we're already down to $20/year with replacements every
Contested cases where the Custodial Father (meaning the child currently lives with the father) retains custody: 17%
Contested cases where the Custodial Mother retains custody: 83%
Could you maybe provide a citation when you quote numbers like this? Because your figures suspiciously add up to 100% here, even though you're claiming success rates for two different groups. Are you sure you don't just mean something like, "In contested custody cases, 17% go to the father and 83% go to the mother"? Because those numbers roughly mirror the the split between custodial parents overall (roughly 80-85% mothers, 15-20% fathers. which has been roughly the same over the past 25 years at least).
Anyhow, I agree that there are often still lingering inequalities and prejudice in the court system against fathers, despite the overturning of the "Tender Years" doctrine.
However, I'd also offer some important advice to fathers here: if you're actually concerned about this statistic (and not just trying to win some internet argument) -- spend time with your kids.
Seriously. While prejudice does still exist in the court system, you know another reason why mothers get custody a lot more? Because moms disproportionately spend more time with the kids and taking care of them, thus they can prove they are the "primary caregiver." Who ends up taking off work when the kid is sick, leaving early to attend a parent-teacher conference, maybe even rearranging the whole work schedule to be home in the afternoons with the kids? MANY more moms than dads do these sorts of things, and if you look at estimated time parents spend doing childcare-related activities each week, you'll see that moms disproportionately take a LOT more of the work in most families.
This is the flip side to those of you who are complaining about women who "want equal pay" but can't work as long hours "because of the kids." Well -- if you're the dad who is working long hours and never sees his kids, you're making a choice about your priorities in life. And if divorce happens -- and many people think it could never happen to them -- the court has a greater chance of siding with the parent who demonstrated greater interest and time commitment with the kids.
I've personally seen this sort of stuff happen with a couple friends -- they didn't realize how little time they were spending with kids until it was too late, and then they ended up with even less time in a custody agreement. In fact, lots of dads seem to prefer this stuff -- they are driven to work long hours, and many aren't particularly interested in spending a lot of time with kids (particularly small ones).
So, if we're TRULY going to have this argument, perhaps we need to have some real statistics that take such trends into account. You know -- like those who say, "But women just aren't as interested in engineering -- they put their time into other things and want to be nurses and such!" Well, most dads are less interested in child-rearing, and they demonstrate this on a regular basis by spending less time with the kids. Do you really need to wonder why mothers win more custody battles -- which are often decided on the basis of which parents the kids "have a closer bond" with and which parent "will be less disruptive to their routine already in place"? If the mom if already spending four times as much time doing childcare-related stuff each week as the dad (not at all uncommon), it's likely to be less disruptive for the kids to stay with mom. It's that simple.
You want to keep your kids? Maybe it's time to reconsider all those complaints about women who "have to leave work early because of kids" and maybe volunteer to do it yourself sometime.
And you know what? Your kids will actually love it, and they'll love you more for it. Unless of course you don't really want to spend that much time with your kids -- in which case, when you later fight a custody battle, is it really about spending time with the kids, or is just to "win" against the ex-wife you now hate?
I am not sure how old you are but that is the story of one of the first cable companies as well.
It wasn't just cable companies -- the first cable channels distributed widely often had significantly reduced ad time (commercials maybe every 30 minutes or every 15), or no effective advertisements at all. (Well, even the ones without ads might run an ad for other programs on their channel or related ones every 30 minutes or hour or something, or sometimes between movies.) Here's an article from the New York Times in 1981 speculating about how cable TV will be transformed if it's "invaded by commercials."
I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either ignorant, or disingenuous.
Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they were requested from the House as part of an official investigation. She chose to print out everything she claimed was relevant (probably to avoid giving away metadata in headers, etc.) and then effectively "burned" the server, including (by her lawyer's own admission) tens of thousands of messages.
FBI investigations have now come up with thousands of emails which were NOT turned over in that paper dump. How many could have been part of those that were deleted and then lost when the server was wiped? We'll never know. Many of them were likely deleted in error, with her lawyers not realizing which ones should have been retained as they were going through tens of thousands of documents. But were ALL of these official state department emails recovered by the FBI (now 15,000+) deleted "in error"?
That's what's troubling about all of this. We have no way of knowing whether there may have been significant spoliation of evidence here (that's the legal term for intentionally, recklessly, or negligently destroying evidence). If this were a corporation who had been issued a subpoena and they acted in this manner, and it was later proven that they "lost" over ten thousand relevant documents in the process of their destruction of "irrelevant" documents, they would likely face significant legal sanctions, perhaps even criminal charges.
Legally, the safe course in this instance would have been to put the server in a secure location with legal supervision by Clinton's counsel until the matter could be resolved. Clinton's use of BleachBit is not surprising here -- not because it's proper protocol to delete secure information, but because it's the only reasonable way to delete potentially incriminating evidence of spoliation (even if most of it was accidental or whatever). If they hadn't used a very secure deletion protocol, then Clinton's attorneys would have been doing a VERY poor job at protecting her legally.
Personally, I'm not sure it's likely there was any "evil memo" buried among the State Department correspondence that could prove anything. (And if there were, I'm not convinced Clinton realized it.) On the other hand, I'm sure she had a bunch of private email dealings that she wouldn't want to get out -- if for nothing else then for bad public relations. Hence the destruction of everything on the server -- it's in line with the privacy paranoia that likely caused her to set up the server in the first place. But could there have been worse stuff there too? Maybe. Doesn't seem like we'll ever know, though, does it?
So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away.
That logic only follows if you believe that voting for any losing candidate is "throwing your vote away."
I completely agree with you that we have a horrific two-party duopoly and that it is reinforced by the first-past-the-post voting.
HOWEVER, that system only indicates a trend toward a two-party system -- it doesn't guarantee that those two parties will be the only parties for all time, nor does it guarantee that the platforms of those parties will remain stable for all time.
The losing party in a Presidential election will most certainly pay some attention to what went wrong in the previous election, and if a huge number of votes were siphoned off to a third party, they might consider taking some action to prevent that from happening in the future. That might involve tweaking the platform or something to avoid losing those voters again.
Or, even better -- a large enough showing by a 3rd-party candidate could finally break the MEDIA reinforcement of the duopoly, since that's truly where the problem lies today. Perot's run was essentially a one-off, but the alternatives in most election years are durable parties (like the Libertarians, the Greens, etc.). If one of them actually could succeed in getting even 10% of votes, it might be harder for media folks to ignore them continuously as they do in most election years.
That's the real battle -- trying to get media attention. Because this year is truly a year that anything could happen. It's why the two parties fought so hard to keep the 3rd parties out of public debates. (That's the big mistake the parties made with Perot in 1992, and had he not dropped out for a while before rejoining the race again, he likely would have ended up with even higher numbers of support.)
So many people hate BOTH Clinton and Trump that if you put a better option on a national stage with them, a significant number of people might actually start thinking "Huh, maybe there are better options out there!" Recall all the massive swings in support that happened during the primaries this year due to the debates... now imagine you actually put somebody on stage that starts making sense next to the person the majority of Americans think is a liar and the person the majority of Americans think is loud-mouthed blowhard.
But go ahead -- keep up your "throw your vote away" nonsense and reinforcing the duopoly.
A similar situation: The tea party folks were incredibly upset that Obama ran a big deficit. You wouldn't know it to listen to them now, but for many years the deficit was the most important thing in the political world and proof that Obama was trying to destroy the USA.
But the deficit under Obama shrunk every year, while the deficit under Bush Junior grew every year. Yet the tea party folks never made a peep of complaint when Bush grew the deficit.
So the most likely explanation is that the tea party folks never really cared about the deficit; they are just whining partisan idiots.
I'm neither a fan of Bush nor Obama, but what you've stated here is incredibly misleading (as well as factually inaccurate).
According to the non-partisan CBO data, the on-budget deficit under Bush began at $32 billion in 2001, ballooned to $568 billion in 2004, then decreased again until 2008 (the 2007 deficit was "merely" $342 billion), after which it spiked (due to the financial crisis, bail-outs, etc. with 2008 concluding with $642 billion deficit).
Under Obama, the deficit began at $1.55 TRILLION in 2009 and stayed above Bush's 2008 maximum of $642 billion in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Only in 2014 and 2015 has Obama's deficit dropped below the MAXIMUM Bush ever attained in deficit spending. Now, you might argue that inflation should be taken into account, but you'll come up with somewhat similar figures if you take percentage of GDP instead of actual deficit amount -- the first four years under Obama all were above ALL of Bush's deficits in percentage of GDP.
Or, another way to see this is that the total debt under Bush grew from $3.4 trillion at the end of 2000 to $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008, an increase of about 70%. Under Obama, the debt has grown from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008 to $13.1 trillion by the end of 2015 (and he still has a year to go), an increase of 125% (more than doubled).
Personally, I think a lot of the Tea Party's logic makes no sense, and I think deficit spending is really essential for all sorts of reasons.
But you've also just outed yourself as a "partisan idiot" for attempting to make it look like Obama's deficits are less concerning than Bush's (to people who might care about stuff). Except by any metric the Obama deficits have been much larger, regardless of whether they are trending up or down... so to me it seems pretty logical that people who actually care about deficit spending might be concerned about the fact that it more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2009 and has stayed above 2007 levels ever since.
Intent comes to play in guilt or acquittal in accordance with the charge. Intent to kill marks the difference between murder and manslaughter, for example. Holding some coke and possessing with intent to sell are wholly different charges, applied well before the penalty phase, turning on the question of intent, which is a question for the fact-finder (don't confuse this with plea-bargaining).
Intent is important in some charges. I don't know whether or not it is relevant to the Clinton case or not, and frankly I don't care to bother trying to sort it all out. However, it is clear the "negligence" or "gross negligence" can result in conviction for mishandling classified information, regardless of intent.
And as long as it's literally a Web Search away (shill?), howabout a link to this story about that Navy person who facing 20 years to life for disposing of a phone.
I'm not sure whether this is the case or not (I don't follow such cases), but literally the first hit that came up in a web search is this one, where a navy sailor has now been sentenced to a year in prison (had been facing 5-6 years under federal sentencing guidelines) for taking photos on a submarine. According to the link, he actually made a legal appeal for probation based on the recent precedent set by the FBI ruling on the Clinton investigation!
Anyhow, you can easily find dozens of cases like this one where people end up with prison terms for mishandling classified information in relatively "innocent" ways.
I haven't seen any evidence that the wiping was done during the email investigation; do you have a citation that says otherwise?
It wasn't done during the FBI investigation, but it seems to have been done after the State Department requested her emails pursuant to an investigation by the House about Benghazi.
As discussed in the New York Times timeline on the investigation, the select committee in the House to investigate Benghazi was formed in May 2014 and began negotiating with Clinton in July 2014 to obtain all of her emails. The State Department turned over "a handful of emails from Mrs. Clinton, all from her private account" in August 2014, and the House committee requested the remainder of the emails. As noted in the Politifact story above, Clinton's lawyer said the "review" of Clinton's emails to separate personal correspondence, etc. happened in fall of 2014. Clinton apparently finally turned over (what she claimed to be) the remainder to the State Department in December (almost two years after leaving office), after which she deleted the rest. On March 10, 2015, the New York Times reported that Clinton had deleted 32,000 emails. After finding classified information, the FBI began its investigation in July 2015.
So, yes, the emails were deleted before the FBI investigation began. But they were deleted after repeated requests to turn over all her correspondence by the House committee.
Personally, I have my doubts that there was some sort of "evil memo" smoking gun to be found in this mass of stuff, but the fact is that the server was wiped AFTER an investigation (at that time limited to Benghazi) and official government request for all her email happened. It at least has to go in the "somewhat shady" category that Clinton only gave paper copies of emails and wiped the server clean at this point. (Why they were delivered on 55,000 pages of paper is still unclear, but it would have potentially erased a lot of metadata -- the redigitized email I've seen had no detailed headers. Oh, and the redigitization process required more than 2400 man-hours of work.)
It seems more likely (to me) that if there were anything "shady" going it, it was probably to delete personal correspondence -- rather than State Department business -- that would make her look really bad if it ever got out. But I guess we'll never know.
Those good old days of cyberanarchistic freedom, gone forever now, I guess, but still fondly remembered.
And about as true to reality as the good old days of when people used to leave their front doors unlocked.
(1) It was "true to reality," and it likely would still be true today except router "setup wizards" started enabling security and passwords by default. (And some routers even come with preconfigured unique passwords or passphrases for wireless.) Most users have no clue and would have blithely continued buying routers and having open wireless had it not become industry standard to lock them down. (I'm sure the router manufacturers were probably pressured to do so by ISPs and folks like the RIAA and MPAA, since there were a number of copyright infringement court cases back then that were immediately tossed when an open wireless network was involved.)
That said, I don't know how many people actually realized they were effectively sharing their connection with everyone. But it was the norm for several years after wireless started to become common.
(2) People still leave doors unlocked. I have family members who live in a small town who do.
Begging the question is NOT "Brings up the question". It is assuming a question that is not asked and assuming it to be true.
That's a pretty poor explanation of the petitio principii fallacy, but I'm going to assume that's what you were trying to say.
Anyhow, it doesn't mean that anymore. I'm tired of explaining this, so I'll just link to a previous post on the issue.
TL;DR - outside of philosophy journals and angry posts by usage pedants, the phrase hasn't meant petitio principii in a long time. If you use it that way, the vast majority of English speakers (even well-educated ones) won't understand you.
Language changes. Deal with it.
Which brings up the question of why/. editors didn't fix that:)
Well, it appears they did change it now. But it doesn't matter because I'm certain EVERYONE who read the old summary understood what it meant in this context, even you. (And by the way, I'm as pedantic as they come when dealing with English usage, but I also recognize when a battle is pointless. We have at least three or four other clear expressions for that particular logical fallacy -- choose one of them instead, rather than some bastardized English translation based on a bastardized Latin translation that never made sense anyway.)
Say what? 2000 called, and they want you stop trying to install their linuxes.
What a ridiculous rant, from someone who obviously has little to no experience with Ubuntu or any of the other more popular, modern distros.
I agree with you that GP is completely exaggerating, but "2000" is also an exaggeration. GP's rant would have been completely valid in 2005, and it's perfectly feasible that he still might be encountering stuff like that regularly ca. 2010.
But today? Not so much... and definitely not on any distro that's meant to be particularly user-friendly, like Mint.
In the past few years, I've installed Linux on old laptops for two family members after they became unusable due to "Windows rot." Both of these people are folks I'd hardly call "tech savvy," and they wouldn't know a command prompt to save their lives. One of them used this computer -- now "superpowered," as I was told, because it ran faster than it ever did with Windows -- as a primary computer for two more years... and I never got any tech support email queries from them over that time. (Contrast that with previously, when I was to the point of having a long phone conversation with the person every month or so trying to figure out why something in Windows had stopped working -- and then whether they had a virus, or installed an anti-virus program with the wrong settings that was causing their computer to slow to a crawl, or whether it was just Windows being Windows...)
Trust me -- I wouldn't hesitate to complain about Linux and have in the past. Even though I've used it as my primary OS for about a decade (and off-and-on on desktops before that back to 1999 or so), I spent many years frustrated by it. If you search through my comments over the years here, you'll probably find a couple similar rants from a few years back. No more, though -- Linux has made tremendous strides in the "just works" department for normal desktop use in the past 5 years or so.
Sure, if you're trying to do more "advanced" stuff, you may still need to do some command line configuration. But for the basic everyday desktop tasks, it's pretty darn stable and easy to use.
So it's illegal for me to give me co-worker a ride to work without paying this onerous tax?
So it's illegal to give a friend a ride somewhere without paying this onerous tax?
So it's illegal to give wome you just met a ride without paying this onerous tax?
No, no, and no. It's not illegal to give a ride to anyone.
Now, when you start charging money for rides, then it becomes a little more complicated. But again, there's a difference between your co-worker chipping in for gas to carpool vs. getting paid as to drive strangers for hours at a time.
These sorts of arguments are always amazing to me. Do you seriously think it's impossible to define a difference between a personal, informal transaction vs. a large-scale business??
If a friend comes over for dinner, I'm not running a restaurant. Even if the friend chips in some money for the ingredients and "for my trouble" in preparing it, I'm not a restaurant. When I have 100 strangers coming over for dinner per evening on a regular basis, I'm probably operating a restaurant and will need to be regulated as one.
If a friend asks me to hold some money for him at my house while he's out of town, I'm not a bank. If I hold money for 100 strangers at my house and start using their money to make a profit while I'm holding it, I'm probably a bank and will need to be regulated as one.
Etc., etc. And if I give someone a ride periodically and even charge someone for it, I'm not a taxi driver. But if I'm giving a few dozen strangers rides every day and charging for them, I'm probably a taxi driver.
Is there some sort of arbitrary dividing line there somewhere in each case? Sure. But the argument you're making here is just some weird variant of the ancient sorites paradox, or "paradox of the heap." Basically, the argument goes: a million grains of sand is a "heap" of sand, but taking away one grain from a "heap" can't make a distinction, so 999,999 grains is still a "heap." Keep going, and eventually you claim that 1 grain is a "heap," which is obviously nonsense. Or you can go the other way and start with 1 grain, which obviously isn't a "heap," and keep adding grains on the premise that 1 grain can't make the difference between a "heap" and a "non-heap," so you conclude that "heaps" of sand don't exist.
That's effectively what these arguments try to do. Giving one ride to a stranger obviously doesn't mean you're operating a taxi service, so therefore a company that organizes over a million such rides per day "isn't a taxi company." But I think any reasonable person can agree that what Uber is doing is a little bit different from periodically carpooling with your coworker.
(P.S. Obviously we can have arguments about whether this regulation and other regulations are necessary for businesses. But that's a separate discussion from whether Uber is actually operating a de facto taxi business... which it is.)
If so, it just sounds like they're doing an experiment to see if hiring more people but working them less produces better results (Hint, it does in non-dysfunctional workplaces.)
Actually, at least to a point, hiring the same number of people but working them less produces better results.
That's how we got the 40-hour work-week to begin with. It's generally assumed that time working has decreased over the centuries, but that isn't quite true. Medieval farmers, laborers, and craftsmen did work long days (perhaps 9-12 hours), but winter conditions and lack of light with short days meant that these long days were only for short segments of the year. Yes, during planting and harvest, the farmers might work like crazy, but then they'd have a long winter of time to recuperate. This combination works well both physically and mentally, which is the reason studies tend to show that people who never take "vacations" (especially extended ones) tend to be less productive than those who do.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution and the migration of poor laborers to big factories, along with advances in tech, power, etc. that workers could be exploited with long hours essentially year-round. The average medieval or renaissance peasant or laborer probably worked around the number of hours a 40-hour/week worker works today. But by the 19th century, factory workers dramatically increased that -- often working 70+ hours most weeks, sometimes with 14-16 hour days. Factory owners mistakenly thought that working their laborers to death (often quite literally) would maximize profit. What instead happened was increased accidents, along with unhappy exhausted workers who would fall ill and need to be replaced with other untrained laborers. (Reforms (sometimes violent) eventually brought limitations down to 12 or even 10-hour days in some places during the 19th century. Unions fought a piecemeal battle to try to get the requirements lower.)
But the largest reform happened in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford actually experimented with shorter work-weeks (i.e., our standard 5-day, 40-hour week) and realized it (1) increased productivity (not just productivity per hour but productivity per worker), (2) decreased accidents and errors (which were a major cause of decreased productivity on assembly lines, since a major accident could shut down the line for a long time), and (3) increased retention for trained, skilled workers, and (4) also had the side benefit of increasing worker happiness. In many cases, the actual weekly output of the same amount of workers who decreased hours from 60 to 40 per week increased by 50%.
Most of the classic studies of productivity have been done on laborers, and they have generally shown productivity is maximized somewhere between 40 and 50 hours per week. But that's laborers, and those classic studies have been undermined by subsequent studies in Europe in the past couple decades which seem to show people doing even fewer (30-35 hours/week) often are more productive than the classic 40-50 hour folks. Also, the summary mentions "engineers and tech staff," whose "labor" is primarily mental. Productivity studies are harder to design for those sorts of jobs, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to discover that for some jobs the maximum productivity occurs at quite a bit lower than 40 hours/week.
Here's the difference today, though -- Ford paid his workers well, in fact increasing his salaries when he decreased the hours, because he saw the productivity increases. His workers responded well and did better work, because they likely remembered grandpa coming home exhausted from the mines and dying from black lung at age 55 -- and the 40/hour week with decent salary was amazing. Fast forward 80-90 years, though, and executives are all about cutting salaries as much as possible, viewing workers as completely ex
Those MBA types keep thinking any jackass can be hired to do the job. Well, this is what happens when you hire a jackass to do chemistry. You get green pools to put out for the whole freaking world to see. And you end up looking cheap and stupid. Well, us chemists are laughing our asses off while we stand in the unemployment line.
While I agree with you about the plight of chemists in recent years (I have a friend in the field who was laid off recently), I also think that pool management doesn't really require complex chemistry. There are just a handful of common chemicals used in pools, and they all have very specific ways they should be used (and ways they should NOT be used, as in this instance). Idiot-proof testing strips, etc. are available to make sure you get concentrations right, etc.
Millions of people without degrees in chemistry somehow manage to keep their home pools clean and not green, and millions of other pools are serviced by people who don't have chemistry degrees.
Should the Olympics have a trained chemist available to test the water and make sure things are ready? Sure. In a high-profile situation like this where precision is required for an international competition, obviously you want somebody with adequate training to be checking water quality.
And maybe they did hire somebody, but the "trained chemist" was an idiot with a chemistry degree from the worst school but hired on the cheap by some corrupt government official. Or maybe the "trained chemist" wasn't paying attention to his/her job. Or maybe the "trained chemist" was circumvented when somebody else on the athletic management team had a "bright idea" to get the pool more "sparkling clean" and added hydrogen peroxide without consulting other people. There are lots of possible issues here.
Anyhow, while I agree with you that they should have had a good chemist (particularly given water quality issues in Rio in general), I also just want to point out that this error is something that doesn't require a degree in chemistry to spot. Anyone who knows anything about pool treatment (even some high-school dropout who's been working at a pool treatment company for a week) should have been able to point out the stupidity of what happened here.
People just don't want unbreakable security. They like the idea that if they forget the passcode or if they pass away, someone will be able to break in. They want things to be just secure enough to deter "criminals" but no further. (Sure, such a line is impossible to draw. It doesn't mean users don't want it both ways: impossible for the "bad guys" to break, possible for the "good guys" to break when necessary.)
This is true. People want "unbreakable phone security" as much as they want "unbreakable home locks" -- "unbreakable" sounds great until they accidentally get locked out and need to call a locksmith.
Same goes for phones. A small minority want unbreakable encryption. The rest of people have some small number of edge cases where they really would want to be able to call up someone and get the phone unlocked.
I won't say it doesn't matter at all but it's not the place it once was. Perhaps the new management can fix that though I'm not holding my breath...
Indeed. Despite my relatively high ID, I first read Slashdot back around 1999 or 2000 for a while. I don't think I ever registered for an account then (and if I did, I've long since forgotten what I might have used as a log-on or password).
Anyhow, then I went away for a few years, but I started reading again about a decade ago. Then I registered and started posting. And that was after the heyday had already passed, but still somewhat better than now.
What I've seen so far of the new management is worse editing than ever before. (It was never great, but the number of actual typos even in headlines lately has just been egregious.) More ads, and the summaries/stories just aren't great.
I've been heading over the Soylent lately. It's a lot better than when I first checked in, and the community seems to be growing. If you hadn't been there lately, I'd suggest taking a look -- still seems to be a smaller community than here, but it may finally be time to get away from the corporate nonsense around here. They're just never going to find a way to make enough money off of us to satisfy some corporate conglomerate, and the site quality is therefore just going to degrade even more over time.
Slashdot, or Twitter, or the comments section of Huffington Post, or wherever else doesn't have to let you say whatever you want. Most of those sites have rules or terms of service that you agree to when you create an account there. If you violate those terms of service, they are free to turf you.
That's true.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean you get a free venue to be an asshole. It means you can talk. It doesn't mean anyone has to listen, and it doesn't mean anyone has to give you a forum to spout your views from.
See, now you're talking about government protection of free speech (based on the First Amendment). I think you completely missed the point GP was trying to make.
A site doesn't have to allow "free speech," as you rightly point out, because they are a private business with their own rules or whatever. HOWEVER, they are still restricting free speech if they do so. They aren't infringing on your legal rights. But they are still saying you aren't allowed to speak freely through their service, etc.
So, it's still a "free speech" issue. Just not one having to do with the specific legal right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment.
In practice, most private businesses and indeed most people on their own property tend to restrict free speech. If you knock on my door and I invite you in, and then you start swearing at me and yelling random wacko stuff in front of my family and guests, I may very well ask you to leave. I am denying you the ability to speak freely at my house, which is my right as the owner of the property. But just because you have no legal recourse to sue me over it doesn't mean that I haven't restricted your "free speech."
The issue when we come to very big services like Twitter or Facebook or whatever these days is that they have become de facto public utilities, transmitting information and data for billions of people. So, there should be a legitimate dialogue about when and where it's appropriate for them to censor free speech. They may not have a legal obligation to transmit all speech, but there are moral reasons why censorship can still be wrong, even by private entities.
it's not that a 50 year old can't work 70+ hours a week, it's that by the time you reach that age you have realized you DON'T WANT TO... nor should you have to.
Indeed. Sometimes I read comments that seem to think anyone over the age of 30 or 35 must be senile, confused, and ready to park in a recliner and nap all day. In reality, 50-year-olds may not be in top physical condition, but they are certainly capable of accomplishing mental tasks for long hours.
I'm not that old (yet), but as the years go by, I realize how crucial "free" time is. Not just for relaxation or family or whatever. Study after study shows that downtime increases productivity (up to a point). When I have a large block of uninterrupted free time with no other responsibilities, that's the time I'm most productive in terms of learning new things, exploring, doing stuff I'd never do otherwise, etc. And those sorts of experiences are just about being more "well-rounded," they're actually about increasing intelligence, adaptability, and skills to deal with novel situations.
"Cramming" is never good for long-term skill building or retention. One semester in college I got overrides to basically take a load that was over twice what was typical for a student. I don't think I remember a single thing from that semester. Sure, I did fine in the classes, but it was a pointless exercise except for the fact that it got me closer to a piece of paper a little faster. (Actually, it didn't -- because I ended up with more than one major in the end, so it just allowed me to get two pieces of paper in the same amount of time.)
At some point, in any activity, there are diminishing returns by trying to do too much at one time. An athlete -- even an Olympic one -- who tried to train a specific skill 70+ hours per week would end up exhausted and likely injured. Similarly, your brain just isn't going to absorb information effectively in the same area or set of coding skills working 70+ hours per week.
50-year-olds know this. They also have a broader perspective on life where they realize that -- ultimately -- all you have is time. Finding a balance between how you manage your time in life is essential for most people in being satisfied and happy long-term. The earlier you realize this, the less of your life you waste being on the edge of "burn-out" and being less productive and simultaneously less happy than you could otherwise be.
That said, there are a small minority of people who seem to thrive on being ALWAYS busy and working. If they're not doing that, they don't know what else they could ever do with their time. They're the folks who still insist on 12-hour days when they're 60 years old. I've occasionally met those people, and about 5% of them are the most brilliant people you'd ever meet, and the rest are generally just suffering some sort of mental disorder or are "afraid" of life, but aren't actually more competent or knowledgeable than the average person. Anyhow, all of these "workaholics" are outliers. The rest of humanity doesn't tend to maximize productivity at 70+ hours/week.
My grandmother used to say "Betty Crocker didn't spend a million dollars developing a cake mix that makes shit cakes". I think her point was that it's easy and good enough, so why bother doing it "from scratch".
I guess it depends on what your standards for "good enough" are. Cake mixes are fine if you like what they taste like -- they tend to have a few distinctive textures (depending on type and flavor). But there's only so much you can do with a mix that you dump together in two steps and just add eggs and water (maybe oil). There are certain textures you can only get from creaming together butter and sugar for several minutes. There are certain textures you can only get by slowly adding eggs one-at-a-time while whipping, or by whipping egg whites separately or whatever. Certain flavors are fresher in cakes made with certain ingredients (rather than in a dry mix). Etc.
I'm NOT saying cake mixes are bad -- my favorite cake when I was a little kid was made from a box by my grandmother, who added some sliced strawberries and topped with Cool-Whip mixed with strawberries. But they are limited. Other techniques and ingredients open other possibilities... and it's also easier to tweak a "from scratch" recipe to get the exact results you want. (Perhaps more relevant to GP's point, making a variety of cakes from scratch also teaches you how to tweak a recipe to get what you want, whereas if you just have a packet or two of "stuff" to dump together with some water, it's much harder to imagine how to do things differently to "fix" your cake the way you want.)
If I don't know how to cook something I can find a step-by-step video or article telling me exactly how. Thanks to the internet, this knowledge isn't lost forever even if the required skills are a bit rusty. If this generation isn't cooking, I think it's more because they don't want to, not because they can't.
While I agree with your sentiment in general, I also think we've seen a marked decrease in the value of learned and practiced skills in the past decade or so, particularly with the growth of the internet.
There's this sense that "I can always just look up X online" which leads us to think anything is possible, just a click away. On the other hand, a lot of stuff benefits from practice over time. I have a science background and know all sorts of stuff about how important measuring with care is, and precision of technique, etc., but I've been cooking for decades and still find myself falling short occasionally when I try a new recipe or cook a new food I haven't worked with before.
You can watch all the videos on Youtube that you want, but often I find it takes at least 3 or 4 times making a dish until I get it to the quality level I'm satisfied with... and I learn a lot along the way.
And this is from someone who cooks and bakes on a regular basis, so I have experience to troubleshoot and figure out a lot of stuff when things go wrong. When I first started baking bread (maybe 15 years ago), I was just "stumbling in the dark" for a long time. No one in my family had much experience with bread-baking. I read all I could find in books, searching the internet (which even back then had tons of resources and forums), etc. And with all of that, I'd say it probably took about 3 or 4 years of experimentation along with reading and re-reading various sources before I feel like I could make passable bread in lots of varieties (I have a pretty high standard) and troubleshoot problems efficiently.
If I were working with a master bread-baker, I have no doubt that I probably could pick all of that up in a few months instead. And that's the real loss here. Yes, we have information online that stores up knowledge, but there are all sorts of little details that go into developing skills that simply can't be explained in a 5-minute step-by-step video, particularly for people who don't have any cooking background to begin with. Years ago, you'd just work with your mother in the kitchen as you were growing up, and she'd just gradually correct those errors and hone your skills without you even realizing it, and magically you'd pick up all this implicit knowledge about cooking.
As with just about anything, basic cooking is pretty easy, and there are plenty of dishes that are "idiot-proof" to make. But there's a lot of stuff that goes into learning a skill over periods of time... and thus, yes, I'd say that more people today CAN'T cook in the sense that it would take them many years to get to a skill level of their grandmother or whatever. People also "don't want to" play the bassoon or the trombone, but they also CAN'T -- they might watch videos or step-by-step instructions online, but it will still take many months or years of practice to develop sufficient skills.
Almost no one can start a fire with a flint nor build a workable bow or arrow tips anymore. Almost now one knows how weave their own fabric, nor preserve meats with salt, beneficial molds, fermentation or smoking. Almost no one can make antiseptics out of urine, bile and herbs.
And you know what, we are fine.
Well, yeah, "we are fine," except we have an unprecedented obesity epidemic which has significant social, economic, and environmental costs.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not some "natural foods" nutter. On the other hand, we are in fact literally "what we eat." Our bodies gain nutrition and rebuild themselves from the food we eat.
I'm NOT blaming the obesity epidemic just on "processed foods," though it's hard to believe that there aren't SOME aspects of them which contribute to it. Processed foods are often created to maximize certain flavor responses that trick our bodies and metabolisms in various ways. Companies that are driven by profit have little reason to "tone down" such tendencies, but they have significant motivation to try to get consumers to buy their stuff more. And thus we get excess sugar and fat and whatever added to more stuff which isn't really necessary, but some focus tasting group liked the stuff 2% more, which could generate more sales. Meanwhile, if you were baking the same product at home yourself, you might look at the recipe and say, "Huh... they want me to add HOW much oil!?!"
Obviously whenever obesity comes up we'll get a huge debate about personal responsibility, motivation, etc. And that's important. But bad eating habits are also a function of biological effects, cravings driven by various chemicals (which are in turn stimulated in different ways by the foods we consume), etc.
Is home cooking a "cure-all" for any of this? No. But it's one good place to start thinking about what could be done better. While the loss of other skills like your examples may have minor impacts, I'd wager to say that the loss of cooking knowledge combined with the trust we have in large-scale industrial food processing has the potential for a much greater impact on us (i.e., quite literally the stuff that makes up our bodies) than the other things you mention.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately they didn't say that. Those were just lab tests of stability and sterility. In order to be convinced, I'd have to see a study of actual patients who successfully learned to do their own epinephrine injections. That would be a hard study to do, since anaphylaxis is relatively rare.
I never claimed my links said that. They only proved that pre-filled syringes are a viable choice for those people who claim "We can't use syringes because of dosage concerns or worries that people won't fill them correctly or they'll lose time in doing all that for people inexperienced with them." Those things are the reasons always trotted out for why syringes aren't a reasonable alternative, but most of them are solved with a pre-filled syringe... which my links note is a viable way to store the drug until use.
Anyhow, you seriously want a STUDY showing normal people can successfully do an injection?? There are THOUSANDS of diabetics who inject themselves every day in the U.S.
(The other problem was that ephinephrine degrades after 3 months, while the EpiPen lasts 12 months.)
No, do you think the epinephrine in the EpiPens is "magic" or something? It doesn't degrade as fast because it's sealed. Epinephrine in a sealed vial or ampule would generally also last 12 months. Trained medical personnel who are used to drawing syringes quickly in emergency scenarios would have no problem with that stuff. So yes, putting in a pre-filled syringe cuts down the guaranteed stable lifespan. Anyhow, it's easy enough to swap out the syringes on a schedule. Is it less convenient and possible people will forget? Sure. But I think it's also likely some other people are more prone to forget to get a new EpiPen every year, since there's a much longer time between replacements.
My basic reaction to your post is, you can't know that something is going to work until you've done a well-designed study in the real world.
I never said it was guaranteed to be BETTER than an EpiPen -- and for that, I agree it would require a proper study. What I'm saying is that it's a reasonable, inexpensive, and reliable alternative that should be offered to patients who might want to consider alternatives.
Obviously an EpiPen -- used properly -- is probably less fuss and easier. However, I think it's irresponsible for physicians, pharmacists, and the news media to not mention the cheap, simple alternative that is clearly available.
(You also mentioned something about a media source claiming syringes require "extensive medical training" or something... I call BS. Again, diabetics deal with this all the time. There are some precautions, but most are similar to EpiPens, and the additional warnings can easily be explained in a few minutes. You also may want to check into the credentials of that medical professional -- I've seen some media quotes in stories in the past few days saying similar, but it turns out they work for allergy societies that get a huge amount of support from the manufacturer of EpiPens, which at a minimum presents a significant conflict of interest. Please note that many of the major allergy societies have been relatively silent in the past weeks as the EpiPen controversy has grown -- they get a lot of funding from the EpiPen company, so they haven't really been speaking out about what is clearly a patient advocacy issue. Horrifying all around.)
1. The school nurse and teachers were trained to use the EpiPen, not your homebrew syringe kit, when your kid has an emergency reaction to errant peanut butter in the lunch area.
Syringes are just as easy to use with 5 minutes of training. Particularly a licensed school nurse should certainly be able to handle that without extra training.
2. Syringes are typically controlled medical supplies here in the United States because they can also be used to inject illegal drugs. They don't just sell empty syringes over the counter and most schools here in the US would probably freak out over "drug paraphernalia" if they spotted your kid with a bag of pre-filled syringes.
Most states do in fact sell syringes over the counter, e.g., for diabetics. Some do put limits on sales to prevent drug use. But all of this is solved by -- ya know -- a prescription, just like you'd get for an EpiPen.
By the way, I guess you just proved my point. Our insane "war against drugs" nonsense is likely why we want to suck hundreds of dollars out of families for no good reason to force them to get the "EpiPen" while refusing to tell them about a cheap, reasonable alternative. Or, worse yet -- the families who go without an EpiPen because of expense or hope that an expired one still works... how many kids are we willing to kill or rush to the hospital with a severe allergic reaction because "ACK NEEDLES!!"
3. Emergency medical personnel are not troubled by the first two problems, but they aren't there when your kid needs them.
If you need someone to actually withdraw a dose from an ampule or vial, be sure to get the proper dose, be sure there's no air bubbles, etc. -- sure I'd agree that paramedics with experience will be better at it in a tense scenario.
But you put a pre-filled syringe in a kit, and it's ready to go. There are some things you need to know (e.g., do NOT inject into a blood vessel, but that's true of EpiPens too), but again that can be covered in 5-10 minutes of training... not significantly more than an EpiPen.
So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away.
Thankfully, someone has found a third option. Don't want to bring in the Trump apocalypse but hate voting for Clinton? Pair up with an "anti-Hillary" voter and negate each other while throwing your support to a candidate you'd prefer!
Yes, I'm assuming that's how the FBI must have recovered a lot of the "missing" ones. Given how the server was wiped, I'm not sure what their other source would be.
This isn't, by any definition whatsoever, a free market. This is in fact a government granted monopoly. You cannot have both a free market AND a monopoly in most cases. That said, I don't quite understand why we give i.e. patent holders, copyright holders, etc free reign on how, when, where, and how much they can charge for anything with the sky being the limit.
Since there seems to be a lot of confusion in the media about the real issue here, the EpiPen problem (1) has nothing to do with drug patents, and (2) has relatively little to do with patent protection in general.
Just to be clear, the drug here (epinephrine) has been around for many decades and is patent-free. You can easily get a dose of it for a few cents: hospitals directly inject the generic all the time. And the EpiPen is basically out of patent protection. There apparently is still an active patent for some aspect of the device, but the manufacturer settled a lawsuit already that would allow generic manufacture.
So what's the real problem here? There are two. The first is the FDA. Epipens fall under the category of both "drugs" and "medical devices" for approval purposes, and the byzantine set of processes necessary for approval take forever. They also require standards for effectiveness that are probably impossible to meet in this case, because of the high rate of EpiPen (and generic autoinjector) user error. There were supposedly 26 incidents of "incorrect dosage" from Auvi-Q before the recall, but none were actually confirmed and the devices involved did not seem to be malfunctioning. So why the wrong dose?
This is the dirty secret of this whole autoinjector business -- people actually screw up using them quite a bit. (The second issue.) The most common user errors: (1) forget to take safety cap off, (2) use wrong end, (3) don't inject for adequate time (usually recommended for 10 seconds). You introduce a slightly different procedure (with another cap, oh gosh!) and that makes alternatives like Adrenaclick even more likely to be misused.
This whole discussion in the media, to my mind, has been highjacked by people who want to draw attention to the high prices of drugs in the U.S. And that's a very noble goal, because it is ridiculous.
But in this particular case, there is a simple, viable, CHEAP alternative -- a syringe with epinephrine. The primary objections are that people could draw up the wrong dose in a panic or whatever -- but this is solved simply. Have your syringe prefilled by a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist. You'll also hear misinformed doctors saying, "But it isn't guaranteed to be sterile" or "it will degrade." Again, we have research on this issue -- see here and here. Basically, as long as the syringe is stored in darkness (e.g., in a simple tube or something), it's sterile and stable for at least 3 months.
And guess what -- you don't have any of those annoying problems with people screwing up using their autoinjectors. (1) forgot to take safety cap off? Nope -- you actually see the drug go in, so if there's some sort of safety put on the needle to prevent accidental discharge, it'll be clear if you didn't take it off. (2) Used the wrong end? Nope -- even a 4-year-old knows which end of the syringe has to go in. (3) Don't inject long enough? Nope -- again, you see the stuff go in. You push the needle until the pre-measured dose is completely out.
Giving yourself or someone else an injection is not rocket science, and with pre-filled syringes it's probably less error-prone than "autoinjectors." And here's the best part: the total cost is probably about $5 for one (including the syringe and the pre-filling to correct dose). If you were willing to buy syringes and a larger bottle of epinephrine yourself, you could make it even cheaper, but we're already down to $20/year with replacements every
Contested cases where the Custodial Father (meaning the child currently lives with the father) retains custody: 17%
Contested cases where the Custodial Mother retains custody: 83%
Could you maybe provide a citation when you quote numbers like this? Because your figures suspiciously add up to 100% here, even though you're claiming success rates for two different groups. Are you sure you don't just mean something like, "In contested custody cases, 17% go to the father and 83% go to the mother"? Because those numbers roughly mirror the the split between custodial parents overall (roughly 80-85% mothers, 15-20% fathers. which has been roughly the same over the past 25 years at least).
Anyhow, I agree that there are often still lingering inequalities and prejudice in the court system against fathers, despite the overturning of the "Tender Years" doctrine.
However, I'd also offer some important advice to fathers here: if you're actually concerned about this statistic (and not just trying to win some internet argument) -- spend time with your kids.
Seriously. While prejudice does still exist in the court system, you know another reason why mothers get custody a lot more? Because moms disproportionately spend more time with the kids and taking care of them, thus they can prove they are the "primary caregiver." Who ends up taking off work when the kid is sick, leaving early to attend a parent-teacher conference, maybe even rearranging the whole work schedule to be home in the afternoons with the kids? MANY more moms than dads do these sorts of things, and if you look at estimated time parents spend doing childcare-related activities each week, you'll see that moms disproportionately take a LOT more of the work in most families.
This is the flip side to those of you who are complaining about women who "want equal pay" but can't work as long hours "because of the kids." Well -- if you're the dad who is working long hours and never sees his kids, you're making a choice about your priorities in life. And if divorce happens -- and many people think it could never happen to them -- the court has a greater chance of siding with the parent who demonstrated greater interest and time commitment with the kids.
I've personally seen this sort of stuff happen with a couple friends -- they didn't realize how little time they were spending with kids until it was too late, and then they ended up with even less time in a custody agreement. In fact, lots of dads seem to prefer this stuff -- they are driven to work long hours, and many aren't particularly interested in spending a lot of time with kids (particularly small ones).
So, if we're TRULY going to have this argument, perhaps we need to have some real statistics that take such trends into account. You know -- like those who say, "But women just aren't as interested in engineering -- they put their time into other things and want to be nurses and such!" Well, most dads are less interested in child-rearing, and they demonstrate this on a regular basis by spending less time with the kids. Do you really need to wonder why mothers win more custody battles -- which are often decided on the basis of which parents the kids "have a closer bond" with and which parent "will be less disruptive to their routine already in place"? If the mom if already spending four times as much time doing childcare-related stuff each week as the dad (not at all uncommon), it's likely to be less disruptive for the kids to stay with mom. It's that simple.
You want to keep your kids? Maybe it's time to reconsider all those complaints about women who "have to leave work early because of kids" and maybe volunteer to do it yourself sometime.
And you know what? Your kids will actually love it, and they'll love you more for it. Unless of course you don't really want to spend that much time with your kids -- in which case, when you later fight a custody battle, is it really about spending time with the kids, or is just to "win" against the ex-wife you now hate?
I am not sure how old you are but that is the story of one of the first cable companies as well.
It wasn't just cable companies -- the first cable channels distributed widely often had significantly reduced ad time (commercials maybe every 30 minutes or every 15), or no effective advertisements at all. (Well, even the ones without ads might run an ad for other programs on their channel or related ones every 30 minutes or hour or something, or sometimes between movies.) Here's an article from the New York Times in 1981 speculating about how cable TV will be transformed if it's "invaded by commercials."
I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either ignorant, or disingenuous.
Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they were requested from the House as part of an official investigation. She chose to print out everything she claimed was relevant (probably to avoid giving away metadata in headers, etc.) and then effectively "burned" the server, including (by her lawyer's own admission) tens of thousands of messages.
FBI investigations have now come up with thousands of emails which were NOT turned over in that paper dump. How many could have been part of those that were deleted and then lost when the server was wiped? We'll never know. Many of them were likely deleted in error, with her lawyers not realizing which ones should have been retained as they were going through tens of thousands of documents. But were ALL of these official state department emails recovered by the FBI (now 15,000+) deleted "in error"?
That's what's troubling about all of this. We have no way of knowing whether there may have been significant spoliation of evidence here (that's the legal term for intentionally, recklessly, or negligently destroying evidence). If this were a corporation who had been issued a subpoena and they acted in this manner, and it was later proven that they "lost" over ten thousand relevant documents in the process of their destruction of "irrelevant" documents, they would likely face significant legal sanctions, perhaps even criminal charges.
Legally, the safe course in this instance would have been to put the server in a secure location with legal supervision by Clinton's counsel until the matter could be resolved. Clinton's use of BleachBit is not surprising here -- not because it's proper protocol to delete secure information, but because it's the only reasonable way to delete potentially incriminating evidence of spoliation (even if most of it was accidental or whatever). If they hadn't used a very secure deletion protocol, then Clinton's attorneys would have been doing a VERY poor job at protecting her legally.
Personally, I'm not sure it's likely there was any "evil memo" buried among the State Department correspondence that could prove anything. (And if there were, I'm not convinced Clinton realized it.) On the other hand, I'm sure she had a bunch of private email dealings that she wouldn't want to get out -- if for nothing else then for bad public relations. Hence the destruction of everything on the server -- it's in line with the privacy paranoia that likely caused her to set up the server in the first place. But could there have been worse stuff there too? Maybe. Doesn't seem like we'll ever know, though, does it?
So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away.
That logic only follows if you believe that voting for any losing candidate is "throwing your vote away."
I completely agree with you that we have a horrific two-party duopoly and that it is reinforced by the first-past-the-post voting.
HOWEVER, that system only indicates a trend toward a two-party system -- it doesn't guarantee that those two parties will be the only parties for all time, nor does it guarantee that the platforms of those parties will remain stable for all time.
The losing party in a Presidential election will most certainly pay some attention to what went wrong in the previous election, and if a huge number of votes were siphoned off to a third party, they might consider taking some action to prevent that from happening in the future. That might involve tweaking the platform or something to avoid losing those voters again.
Or, even better -- a large enough showing by a 3rd-party candidate could finally break the MEDIA reinforcement of the duopoly, since that's truly where the problem lies today. Perot's run was essentially a one-off, but the alternatives in most election years are durable parties (like the Libertarians, the Greens, etc.). If one of them actually could succeed in getting even 10% of votes, it might be harder for media folks to ignore them continuously as they do in most election years.
That's the real battle -- trying to get media attention. Because this year is truly a year that anything could happen. It's why the two parties fought so hard to keep the 3rd parties out of public debates. (That's the big mistake the parties made with Perot in 1992, and had he not dropped out for a while before rejoining the race again, he likely would have ended up with even higher numbers of support.)
So many people hate BOTH Clinton and Trump that if you put a better option on a national stage with them, a significant number of people might actually start thinking "Huh, maybe there are better options out there!" Recall all the massive swings in support that happened during the primaries this year due to the debates... now imagine you actually put somebody on stage that starts making sense next to the person the majority of Americans think is a liar and the person the majority of Americans think is loud-mouthed blowhard.
But go ahead -- keep up your "throw your vote away" nonsense and reinforcing the duopoly.
A similar situation: The tea party folks were incredibly upset that Obama ran a big deficit. You wouldn't know it to listen to them now, but for many years the deficit was the most important thing in the political world and proof that Obama was trying to destroy the USA.
But the deficit under Obama shrunk every year, while the deficit under Bush Junior grew every year. Yet the tea party folks never made a peep of complaint when Bush grew the deficit.
So the most likely explanation is that the tea party folks never really cared about the deficit; they are just whining partisan idiots.
I'm neither a fan of Bush nor Obama, but what you've stated here is incredibly misleading (as well as factually inaccurate).
According to the non-partisan CBO data, the on-budget deficit under Bush began at $32 billion in 2001, ballooned to $568 billion in 2004, then decreased again until 2008 (the 2007 deficit was "merely" $342 billion), after which it spiked (due to the financial crisis, bail-outs, etc. with 2008 concluding with $642 billion deficit).
Under Obama, the deficit began at $1.55 TRILLION in 2009 and stayed above Bush's 2008 maximum of $642 billion in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Only in 2014 and 2015 has Obama's deficit dropped below the MAXIMUM Bush ever attained in deficit spending. Now, you might argue that inflation should be taken into account, but you'll come up with somewhat similar figures if you take percentage of GDP instead of actual deficit amount -- the first four years under Obama all were above ALL of Bush's deficits in percentage of GDP.
Or, another way to see this is that the total debt under Bush grew from $3.4 trillion at the end of 2000 to $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008, an increase of about 70%. Under Obama, the debt has grown from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008 to $13.1 trillion by the end of 2015 (and he still has a year to go), an increase of 125% (more than doubled).
Personally, I think a lot of the Tea Party's logic makes no sense, and I think deficit spending is really essential for all sorts of reasons.
But you've also just outed yourself as a "partisan idiot" for attempting to make it look like Obama's deficits are less concerning than Bush's (to people who might care about stuff). Except by any metric the Obama deficits have been much larger, regardless of whether they are trending up or down... so to me it seems pretty logical that people who actually care about deficit spending might be concerned about the fact that it more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2009 and has stayed above 2007 levels ever since.
Intent comes to play in guilt or acquittal in accordance with the charge. Intent to kill marks the difference between murder and manslaughter, for example. Holding some coke and possessing with intent to sell are wholly different charges, applied well before the penalty phase, turning on the question of intent, which is a question for the fact-finder (don't confuse this with plea-bargaining).
Intent is important in some charges. I don't know whether or not it is relevant to the Clinton case or not, and frankly I don't care to bother trying to sort it all out. However, it is clear the "negligence" or "gross negligence" can result in conviction for mishandling classified information, regardless of intent.
And as long as it's literally a Web Search away (shill?), howabout a link to this story about that Navy person who facing 20 years to life for disposing of a phone.
I'm not sure whether this is the case or not (I don't follow such cases), but literally the first hit that came up in a web search is this one, where a navy sailor has now been sentenced to a year in prison (had been facing 5-6 years under federal sentencing guidelines) for taking photos on a submarine. According to the link, he actually made a legal appeal for probation based on the recent precedent set by the FBI ruling on the Clinton investigation!
Anyhow, you can easily find dozens of cases like this one where people end up with prison terms for mishandling classified information in relatively "innocent" ways.
I haven't seen any evidence that the wiping was done during the email investigation; do you have a citation that says otherwise?
It wasn't done during the FBI investigation, but it seems to have been done after the State Department requested her emails pursuant to an investigation by the House about Benghazi.
According to Clinton's lawyer, the emails must have been deleted sometime between December 5, 2014 and March 27, 2015. That article is from last year, so perhaps they've managed to narrow the window further.
As discussed in the New York Times timeline on the investigation, the select committee in the House to investigate Benghazi was formed in May 2014 and began negotiating with Clinton in July 2014 to obtain all of her emails. The State Department turned over "a handful of emails from Mrs. Clinton, all from her private account" in August 2014, and the House committee requested the remainder of the emails. As noted in the Politifact story above, Clinton's lawyer said the "review" of Clinton's emails to separate personal correspondence, etc. happened in fall of 2014. Clinton apparently finally turned over (what she claimed to be) the remainder to the State Department in December (almost two years after leaving office), after which she deleted the rest. On March 10, 2015, the New York Times reported that Clinton had deleted 32,000 emails. After finding classified information, the FBI began its investigation in July 2015.
So, yes, the emails were deleted before the FBI investigation began. But they were deleted after repeated requests to turn over all her correspondence by the House committee.
Personally, I have my doubts that there was some sort of "evil memo" smoking gun to be found in this mass of stuff, but the fact is that the server was wiped AFTER an investigation (at that time limited to Benghazi) and official government request for all her email happened. It at least has to go in the "somewhat shady" category that Clinton only gave paper copies of emails and wiped the server clean at this point. (Why they were delivered on 55,000 pages of paper is still unclear, but it would have potentially erased a lot of metadata -- the redigitized email I've seen had no detailed headers. Oh, and the redigitization process required more than 2400 man-hours of work.)
It seems more likely (to me) that if there were anything "shady" going it, it was probably to delete personal correspondence -- rather than State Department business -- that would make her look really bad if it ever got out. But I guess we'll never know.
Those good old days of cyberanarchistic freedom, gone forever now, I guess, but still fondly remembered.
And about as true to reality as the good old days of when people used to leave their front doors unlocked.
(1) It was "true to reality," and it likely would still be true today except router "setup wizards" started enabling security and passwords by default. (And some routers even come with preconfigured unique passwords or passphrases for wireless.) Most users have no clue and would have blithely continued buying routers and having open wireless had it not become industry standard to lock them down. (I'm sure the router manufacturers were probably pressured to do so by ISPs and folks like the RIAA and MPAA, since there were a number of copyright infringement court cases back then that were immediately tossed when an open wireless network was involved.)
That said, I don't know how many people actually realized they were effectively sharing their connection with everyone. But it was the norm for several years after wireless started to become common.
(2) People still leave doors unlocked. I have family members who live in a small town who do.
Begging the question is NOT "Brings up the question". It is assuming a question that is not asked and assuming it to be true.
That's a pretty poor explanation of the petitio principii fallacy, but I'm going to assume that's what you were trying to say.
Anyhow, it doesn't mean that anymore. I'm tired of explaining this, so I'll just link to a previous post on the issue.
TL;DR - outside of philosophy journals and angry posts by usage pedants, the phrase hasn't meant petitio principii in a long time. If you use it that way, the vast majority of English speakers (even well-educated ones) won't understand you.
Language changes. Deal with it.
Which brings up the question of why /. editors didn't fix that :)
Well, it appears they did change it now. But it doesn't matter because I'm certain EVERYONE who read the old summary understood what it meant in this context, even you. (And by the way, I'm as pedantic as they come when dealing with English usage, but I also recognize when a battle is pointless. We have at least three or four other clear expressions for that particular logical fallacy -- choose one of them instead, rather than some bastardized English translation based on a bastardized Latin translation that never made sense anyway.)
Say what? 2000 called, and they want you stop trying to install their linuxes.
What a ridiculous rant, from someone who obviously has little to no experience with Ubuntu or any of the other more popular, modern distros.
I agree with you that GP is completely exaggerating, but "2000" is also an exaggeration. GP's rant would have been completely valid in 2005, and it's perfectly feasible that he still might be encountering stuff like that regularly ca. 2010.
But today? Not so much... and definitely not on any distro that's meant to be particularly user-friendly, like Mint.
In the past few years, I've installed Linux on old laptops for two family members after they became unusable due to "Windows rot." Both of these people are folks I'd hardly call "tech savvy," and they wouldn't know a command prompt to save their lives. One of them used this computer -- now "superpowered," as I was told, because it ran faster than it ever did with Windows -- as a primary computer for two more years... and I never got any tech support email queries from them over that time. (Contrast that with previously, when I was to the point of having a long phone conversation with the person every month or so trying to figure out why something in Windows had stopped working -- and then whether they had a virus, or installed an anti-virus program with the wrong settings that was causing their computer to slow to a crawl, or whether it was just Windows being Windows...)
Trust me -- I wouldn't hesitate to complain about Linux and have in the past. Even though I've used it as my primary OS for about a decade (and off-and-on on desktops before that back to 1999 or so), I spent many years frustrated by it. If you search through my comments over the years here, you'll probably find a couple similar rants from a few years back. No more, though -- Linux has made tremendous strides in the "just works" department for normal desktop use in the past 5 years or so.
Sure, if you're trying to do more "advanced" stuff, you may still need to do some command line configuration. But for the basic everyday desktop tasks, it's pretty darn stable and easy to use.
So it's illegal for me to give me co-worker a ride to work without paying this onerous tax?
So it's illegal to give a friend a ride somewhere without paying this onerous tax?
So it's illegal to give wome you just met a ride without paying this onerous tax?
No, no, and no. It's not illegal to give a ride to anyone.
Now, when you start charging money for rides, then it becomes a little more complicated. But again, there's a difference between your co-worker chipping in for gas to carpool vs. getting paid as to drive strangers for hours at a time.
These sorts of arguments are always amazing to me. Do you seriously think it's impossible to define a difference between a personal, informal transaction vs. a large-scale business??
If a friend comes over for dinner, I'm not running a restaurant. Even if the friend chips in some money for the ingredients and "for my trouble" in preparing it, I'm not a restaurant. When I have 100 strangers coming over for dinner per evening on a regular basis, I'm probably operating a restaurant and will need to be regulated as one.
If a friend asks me to hold some money for him at my house while he's out of town, I'm not a bank. If I hold money for 100 strangers at my house and start using their money to make a profit while I'm holding it, I'm probably a bank and will need to be regulated as one.
Etc., etc. And if I give someone a ride periodically and even charge someone for it, I'm not a taxi driver. But if I'm giving a few dozen strangers rides every day and charging for them, I'm probably a taxi driver.
Is there some sort of arbitrary dividing line there somewhere in each case? Sure. But the argument you're making here is just some weird variant of the ancient sorites paradox, or "paradox of the heap." Basically, the argument goes: a million grains of sand is a "heap" of sand, but taking away one grain from a "heap" can't make a distinction, so 999,999 grains is still a "heap." Keep going, and eventually you claim that 1 grain is a "heap," which is obviously nonsense. Or you can go the other way and start with 1 grain, which obviously isn't a "heap," and keep adding grains on the premise that 1 grain can't make the difference between a "heap" and a "non-heap," so you conclude that "heaps" of sand don't exist.
That's effectively what these arguments try to do. Giving one ride to a stranger obviously doesn't mean you're operating a taxi service, so therefore a company that organizes over a million such rides per day "isn't a taxi company." But I think any reasonable person can agree that what Uber is doing is a little bit different from periodically carpooling with your coworker.
(P.S. Obviously we can have arguments about whether this regulation and other regulations are necessary for businesses. But that's a separate discussion from whether Uber is actually operating a de facto taxi business... which it is.)
If so, it just sounds like they're doing an experiment to see if hiring more people but working them less produces better results (Hint, it does in non-dysfunctional workplaces.)
Actually, at least to a point, hiring the same number of people but working them less produces better results.
That's how we got the 40-hour work-week to begin with. It's generally assumed that time working has decreased over the centuries, but that isn't quite true. Medieval farmers, laborers, and craftsmen did work long days (perhaps 9-12 hours), but winter conditions and lack of light with short days meant that these long days were only for short segments of the year. Yes, during planting and harvest, the farmers might work like crazy, but then they'd have a long winter of time to recuperate. This combination works well both physically and mentally, which is the reason studies tend to show that people who never take "vacations" (especially extended ones) tend to be less productive than those who do.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution and the migration of poor laborers to big factories, along with advances in tech, power, etc. that workers could be exploited with long hours essentially year-round. The average medieval or renaissance peasant or laborer probably worked around the number of hours a 40-hour/week worker works today. But by the 19th century, factory workers dramatically increased that -- often working 70+ hours most weeks, sometimes with 14-16 hour days. Factory owners mistakenly thought that working their laborers to death (often quite literally) would maximize profit. What instead happened was increased accidents, along with unhappy exhausted workers who would fall ill and need to be replaced with other untrained laborers. (Reforms (sometimes violent) eventually brought limitations down to 12 or even 10-hour days in some places during the 19th century. Unions fought a piecemeal battle to try to get the requirements lower.)
But the largest reform happened in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford actually experimented with shorter work-weeks (i.e., our standard 5-day, 40-hour week) and realized it (1) increased productivity (not just productivity per hour but productivity per worker), (2) decreased accidents and errors (which were a major cause of decreased productivity on assembly lines, since a major accident could shut down the line for a long time), and (3) increased retention for trained, skilled workers, and (4) also had the side benefit of increasing worker happiness. In many cases, the actual weekly output of the same amount of workers who decreased hours from 60 to 40 per week increased by 50%.
Most of the classic studies of productivity have been done on laborers, and they have generally shown productivity is maximized somewhere between 40 and 50 hours per week. But that's laborers, and those classic studies have been undermined by subsequent studies in Europe in the past couple decades which seem to show people doing even fewer (30-35 hours/week) often are more productive than the classic 40-50 hour folks. Also, the summary mentions "engineers and tech staff," whose "labor" is primarily mental. Productivity studies are harder to design for those sorts of jobs, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to discover that for some jobs the maximum productivity occurs at quite a bit lower than 40 hours/week.
Here's the difference today, though -- Ford paid his workers well, in fact increasing his salaries when he decreased the hours, because he saw the productivity increases. His workers responded well and did better work, because they likely remembered grandpa coming home exhausted from the mines and dying from black lung at age 55 -- and the 40/hour week with decent salary was amazing. Fast forward 80-90 years, though, and executives are all about cutting salaries as much as possible, viewing workers as completely ex
Those MBA types keep thinking any jackass can be hired to do the job. Well, this is what happens when you hire a jackass to do chemistry. You get green pools to put out for the whole freaking world to see. And you end up looking cheap and stupid. Well, us chemists are laughing our asses off while we stand in the unemployment line.
While I agree with you about the plight of chemists in recent years (I have a friend in the field who was laid off recently), I also think that pool management doesn't really require complex chemistry. There are just a handful of common chemicals used in pools, and they all have very specific ways they should be used (and ways they should NOT be used, as in this instance). Idiot-proof testing strips, etc. are available to make sure you get concentrations right, etc.
Millions of people without degrees in chemistry somehow manage to keep their home pools clean and not green, and millions of other pools are serviced by people who don't have chemistry degrees.
Should the Olympics have a trained chemist available to test the water and make sure things are ready? Sure. In a high-profile situation like this where precision is required for an international competition, obviously you want somebody with adequate training to be checking water quality.
And maybe they did hire somebody, but the "trained chemist" was an idiot with a chemistry degree from the worst school but hired on the cheap by some corrupt government official. Or maybe the "trained chemist" wasn't paying attention to his/her job. Or maybe the "trained chemist" was circumvented when somebody else on the athletic management team had a "bright idea" to get the pool more "sparkling clean" and added hydrogen peroxide without consulting other people. There are lots of possible issues here.
Anyhow, while I agree with you that they should have had a good chemist (particularly given water quality issues in Rio in general), I also just want to point out that this error is something that doesn't require a degree in chemistry to spot. Anyone who knows anything about pool treatment (even some high-school dropout who's been working at a pool treatment company for a week) should have been able to point out the stupidity of what happened here.
People just don't want unbreakable security. They like the idea that if they forget the passcode or if they pass away, someone will be able to break in. They want things to be just secure enough to deter "criminals" but no further. (Sure, such a line is impossible to draw. It doesn't mean users don't want it both ways: impossible for the "bad guys" to break, possible for the "good guys" to break when necessary.)
This is true. People want "unbreakable phone security" as much as they want "unbreakable home locks" -- "unbreakable" sounds great until they accidentally get locked out and need to call a locksmith.
Same goes for phones. A small minority want unbreakable encryption. The rest of people have some small number of edge cases where they really would want to be able to call up someone and get the phone unlocked.
I won't say it doesn't matter at all but it's not the place it once was. Perhaps the new management can fix that though I'm not holding my breath...
Indeed. Despite my relatively high ID, I first read Slashdot back around 1999 or 2000 for a while. I don't think I ever registered for an account then (and if I did, I've long since forgotten what I might have used as a log-on or password).
Anyhow, then I went away for a few years, but I started reading again about a decade ago. Then I registered and started posting. And that was after the heyday had already passed, but still somewhat better than now.
What I've seen so far of the new management is worse editing than ever before. (It was never great, but the number of actual typos even in headlines lately has just been egregious.) More ads, and the summaries/stories just aren't great.
I've been heading over the Soylent lately. It's a lot better than when I first checked in, and the community seems to be growing. If you hadn't been there lately, I'd suggest taking a look -- still seems to be a smaller community than here, but it may finally be time to get away from the corporate nonsense around here. They're just never going to find a way to make enough money off of us to satisfy some corporate conglomerate, and the site quality is therefore just going to degrade even more over time.
Slashdot, or Twitter, or the comments section of Huffington Post, or wherever else doesn't have to let you say whatever you want. Most of those sites have rules or terms of service that you agree to when you create an account there. If you violate those terms of service, they are free to turf you.
That's true.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean you get a free venue to be an asshole. It means you can talk. It doesn't mean anyone has to listen, and it doesn't mean anyone has to give you a forum to spout your views from.
See, now you're talking about government protection of free speech (based on the First Amendment). I think you completely missed the point GP was trying to make.
A site doesn't have to allow "free speech," as you rightly point out, because they are a private business with their own rules or whatever. HOWEVER, they are still restricting free speech if they do so. They aren't infringing on your legal rights. But they are still saying you aren't allowed to speak freely through their service, etc.
So, it's still a "free speech" issue. Just not one having to do with the specific legal right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment.
In practice, most private businesses and indeed most people on their own property tend to restrict free speech. If you knock on my door and I invite you in, and then you start swearing at me and yelling random wacko stuff in front of my family and guests, I may very well ask you to leave. I am denying you the ability to speak freely at my house, which is my right as the owner of the property. But just because you have no legal recourse to sue me over it doesn't mean that I haven't restricted your "free speech."
The issue when we come to very big services like Twitter or Facebook or whatever these days is that they have become de facto public utilities, transmitting information and data for billions of people. So, there should be a legitimate dialogue about when and where it's appropriate for them to censor free speech. They may not have a legal obligation to transmit all speech, but there are moral reasons why censorship can still be wrong, even by private entities.
it's not that a 50 year old can't work 70+ hours a week, it's that by the time you reach that age you have realized you DON'T WANT TO... nor should you have to.
Indeed. Sometimes I read comments that seem to think anyone over the age of 30 or 35 must be senile, confused, and ready to park in a recliner and nap all day. In reality, 50-year-olds may not be in top physical condition, but they are certainly capable of accomplishing mental tasks for long hours.
I'm not that old (yet), but as the years go by, I realize how crucial "free" time is. Not just for relaxation or family or whatever. Study after study shows that downtime increases productivity (up to a point). When I have a large block of uninterrupted free time with no other responsibilities, that's the time I'm most productive in terms of learning new things, exploring, doing stuff I'd never do otherwise, etc. And those sorts of experiences are just about being more "well-rounded," they're actually about increasing intelligence, adaptability, and skills to deal with novel situations.
"Cramming" is never good for long-term skill building or retention. One semester in college I got overrides to basically take a load that was over twice what was typical for a student. I don't think I remember a single thing from that semester. Sure, I did fine in the classes, but it was a pointless exercise except for the fact that it got me closer to a piece of paper a little faster. (Actually, it didn't -- because I ended up with more than one major in the end, so it just allowed me to get two pieces of paper in the same amount of time.)
At some point, in any activity, there are diminishing returns by trying to do too much at one time. An athlete -- even an Olympic one -- who tried to train a specific skill 70+ hours per week would end up exhausted and likely injured. Similarly, your brain just isn't going to absorb information effectively in the same area or set of coding skills working 70+ hours per week.
50-year-olds know this. They also have a broader perspective on life where they realize that -- ultimately -- all you have is time. Finding a balance between how you manage your time in life is essential for most people in being satisfied and happy long-term. The earlier you realize this, the less of your life you waste being on the edge of "burn-out" and being less productive and simultaneously less happy than you could otherwise be.
That said, there are a small minority of people who seem to thrive on being ALWAYS busy and working. If they're not doing that, they don't know what else they could ever do with their time. They're the folks who still insist on 12-hour days when they're 60 years old. I've occasionally met those people, and about 5% of them are the most brilliant people you'd ever meet, and the rest are generally just suffering some sort of mental disorder or are "afraid" of life, but aren't actually more competent or knowledgeable than the average person. Anyhow, all of these "workaholics" are outliers. The rest of humanity doesn't tend to maximize productivity at 70+ hours/week.
My grandmother used to say "Betty Crocker didn't spend a million dollars developing a cake mix that makes shit cakes". I think her point was that it's easy and good enough, so why bother doing it "from scratch".
I guess it depends on what your standards for "good enough" are. Cake mixes are fine if you like what they taste like -- they tend to have a few distinctive textures (depending on type and flavor). But there's only so much you can do with a mix that you dump together in two steps and just add eggs and water (maybe oil). There are certain textures you can only get from creaming together butter and sugar for several minutes. There are certain textures you can only get by slowly adding eggs one-at-a-time while whipping, or by whipping egg whites separately or whatever. Certain flavors are fresher in cakes made with certain ingredients (rather than in a dry mix). Etc.
I'm NOT saying cake mixes are bad -- my favorite cake when I was a little kid was made from a box by my grandmother, who added some sliced strawberries and topped with Cool-Whip mixed with strawberries. But they are limited. Other techniques and ingredients open other possibilities... and it's also easier to tweak a "from scratch" recipe to get the exact results you want. (Perhaps more relevant to GP's point, making a variety of cakes from scratch also teaches you how to tweak a recipe to get what you want, whereas if you just have a packet or two of "stuff" to dump together with some water, it's much harder to imagine how to do things differently to "fix" your cake the way you want.)
If I don't know how to cook something I can find a step-by-step video or article telling me exactly how. Thanks to the internet, this knowledge isn't lost forever even if the required skills are a bit rusty. If this generation isn't cooking, I think it's more because they don't want to, not because they can't.
While I agree with your sentiment in general, I also think we've seen a marked decrease in the value of learned and practiced skills in the past decade or so, particularly with the growth of the internet.
There's this sense that "I can always just look up X online" which leads us to think anything is possible, just a click away. On the other hand, a lot of stuff benefits from practice over time. I have a science background and know all sorts of stuff about how important measuring with care is, and precision of technique, etc., but I've been cooking for decades and still find myself falling short occasionally when I try a new recipe or cook a new food I haven't worked with before.
You can watch all the videos on Youtube that you want, but often I find it takes at least 3 or 4 times making a dish until I get it to the quality level I'm satisfied with... and I learn a lot along the way.
And this is from someone who cooks and bakes on a regular basis, so I have experience to troubleshoot and figure out a lot of stuff when things go wrong. When I first started baking bread (maybe 15 years ago), I was just "stumbling in the dark" for a long time. No one in my family had much experience with bread-baking. I read all I could find in books, searching the internet (which even back then had tons of resources and forums), etc. And with all of that, I'd say it probably took about 3 or 4 years of experimentation along with reading and re-reading various sources before I feel like I could make passable bread in lots of varieties (I have a pretty high standard) and troubleshoot problems efficiently.
If I were working with a master bread-baker, I have no doubt that I probably could pick all of that up in a few months instead. And that's the real loss here. Yes, we have information online that stores up knowledge, but there are all sorts of little details that go into developing skills that simply can't be explained in a 5-minute step-by-step video, particularly for people who don't have any cooking background to begin with. Years ago, you'd just work with your mother in the kitchen as you were growing up, and she'd just gradually correct those errors and hone your skills without you even realizing it, and magically you'd pick up all this implicit knowledge about cooking.
As with just about anything, basic cooking is pretty easy, and there are plenty of dishes that are "idiot-proof" to make. But there's a lot of stuff that goes into learning a skill over periods of time... and thus, yes, I'd say that more people today CAN'T cook in the sense that it would take them many years to get to a skill level of their grandmother or whatever. People also "don't want to" play the bassoon or the trombone, but they also CAN'T -- they might watch videos or step-by-step instructions online, but it will still take many months or years of practice to develop sufficient skills.
Almost no one can start a fire with a flint nor build a workable bow or arrow tips anymore. Almost now one knows how weave their own fabric, nor preserve meats with salt, beneficial molds, fermentation or smoking. Almost no one can make antiseptics out of urine, bile and herbs.
And you know what, we are fine.
Well, yeah, "we are fine," except we have an unprecedented obesity epidemic which has significant social, economic, and environmental costs.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not some "natural foods" nutter. On the other hand, we are in fact literally "what we eat." Our bodies gain nutrition and rebuild themselves from the food we eat.
I'm NOT blaming the obesity epidemic just on "processed foods," though it's hard to believe that there aren't SOME aspects of them which contribute to it. Processed foods are often created to maximize certain flavor responses that trick our bodies and metabolisms in various ways. Companies that are driven by profit have little reason to "tone down" such tendencies, but they have significant motivation to try to get consumers to buy their stuff more. And thus we get excess sugar and fat and whatever added to more stuff which isn't really necessary, but some focus tasting group liked the stuff 2% more, which could generate more sales. Meanwhile, if you were baking the same product at home yourself, you might look at the recipe and say, "Huh... they want me to add HOW much oil!?!"
Obviously whenever obesity comes up we'll get a huge debate about personal responsibility, motivation, etc. And that's important. But bad eating habits are also a function of biological effects, cravings driven by various chemicals (which are in turn stimulated in different ways by the foods we consume), etc.
Is home cooking a "cure-all" for any of this? No. But it's one good place to start thinking about what could be done better. While the loss of other skills like your examples may have minor impacts, I'd wager to say that the loss of cooking knowledge combined with the trust we have in large-scale industrial food processing has the potential for a much greater impact on us (i.e., quite literally the stuff that makes up our bodies) than the other things you mention.