- The original is public domain, someone is making it available which is entirely legal.
Well, maybe not. According to this, the original manuscripts were never actually published until a critical scholarly edition came out in 1986.
And apparently under applicable law in 1986, what may matter is not when they were written, but when they were published. Apparently posthumous publication in some circumstances remained under copyright until 50 years after the first date of publication -- the date of the death of the author in this case is irrelevant. This provision about posthumous copyright was dropped in 1995 in the EU, but apparently the law was also written in such a way so as not to diminish any copyright term that went into force before 1995.
That's the problem with copyright law -- it not only depends on the country, but also exactly when copyright was first granted. Different eras are often under different rules, depending on when the laws changed.
Why would the adapters claim copyright on the original by virtue of its adaptions?
Apparently that's NOT what's being claimed here. It's not the adaptation that is the issue, but rather the effective publication date of the original manuscript. Now, I don't know much about the details of the case, but apparently there is some applicable law that has been used to support the arguments of those claiming rights. (By the way, I absolutely agree from a moral perspective that this SHOULD be in the public domain by now. But it may not be under applicable law.)
If that were the case, numerous people would be able to claim copyright on all biblical manuscripts or someone claiming copyright on papyrus artifacts or stone tablets at museums.
Well, no -- because no one could claim copyright on most biblical manuscripts, since their contents has mostly been published for many centuries.
On the other hand, for recent scholarly finds, there actually have been cases made for copyright of portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example. In this case, the text required significant deciphering and editing (including lots of interpolation of letters and words, etc.) to make sense of passages. Without a modern edition, the original sources would be meaningless to everyone except experts in ancient writing and languages, so it does makes sense in some cases that modern editions should be granted copyright.
A Hub, is designed to handle deliveries within a days travel, they will load up the trucks with a day's worth of goods.
Depends on the hub and the delivery area. Some trucks can go back to the hub multiple times per day.
To give direct delivery from the Hub to your home, and back to the hub, would make delivery extremely expensive.
Which is the reason it's next to impossible for me to order same-day local delivery of flowers from a national floral service. And why it costs a ridiculous sum to get a pizza within 30 minutes from a national chain to arrive at my home.
Oh wait... those business models have successfully existed for years. It's just that they actually built the local infrastructure for delivery of goods, since those goods were perishable and required fast delivery. Yet somehow I can get them without paying a huge delivery fee.
The Drones (50 lbs), being electrical, flying, and automated makes it much cheaper to get an individual package from hub/warehouse to home. Then it would take for a Person (200lbs), a gasoline vehicle (1000+lbs) and driving to drop off you 5 lbs of goods.
Yes, and that's ridiculous, but that's a strawman. Just like florists or pizza delivery guys, they could drive a smaller (less expensive) car and many of their delivery runs could be shorter while still generally serving multiple customers per run.
Let's think about what's really going on here. Amazon doesn't have the infrastructure to deliver goods on that timescale, that's what. They started out as a bookstore... and if they had chosen a different route, they perhaps could have set up a partnership with local bookstores (as florists do, independent businesses but participating in national networks).
But oh... yeah, Amazon put most of them out of business, thus ruining the distribution centers that could have already existed.
And obviously local bookstore inventory would always be a bit limited, just like your local florist might not have some exotic flowers or something. So if you want something special, it could take a little longer or you could pay more. That's where perhaps the drones would really be helpful.
But let's be clear about this -- Amazon wants to "win the game" and outcompete almost all local retail. They don't want to share profits, even if in the short term it might be cheaper and easier. They want to drive the competition out, so the only thing left is having the drone drop something off. Yes, it's a gamble, but in the long run if they generate the monopoly they obviously want, then yes, they "win the game."
Let's not pretend their aren't other options which would be cheaper and easier than single drones carrying single packages, though -- at least for delivery of common goods that you'd likely be able to find in a local store anyhow. Amazon just doesn't want to play that game, though, because it would likely require sharing their greed with other businesses instead of creating a monopoly. Same-day fast delivery is the last thing necessary (in their view) to create that monopoly and finally destroy local retail forever.
And don't get me wrong -- I completely understand Amazon's choice here as a business. But I also think we'll lose something if we lose local retail. The browsing experience in a local store is simply different from what happens online (not all bad -- worse in some ways, but better in others).
The story is current because Obama just mentioned teaching code in the SOTU.
Duh. Read my post again. I didn't say the story (in the beginning of TFS) wasn't current; in fact, I said it was and encouraged discussion of current initiatives/proposals if people want to talk about that.
I said TFS was designed to be a Troll, and you know this because it concludes with a speech from a decade ago and a quotation from it designed to rile people up here. That latter element is NOT current.
"I want them to go as far as their dreams may take them. And, unfortunately because of long historic discrimination in the areas of gender, we can't be assured of that."
Can we all just mod the Summary as "-1 Troll"?
I'm absolutely serious. There are clearly lots of stories posted on Slashdot which seem designed to create flamewars, but this one is incredibly blatant. Rather than just discussing a current speech of Obama and his ideas, we get a final sentence which appears to be referencing gender discrimination in IT, which the OP obviously knows will rile people up here.
Except there are number of problematic things there:
(1) The link is to a speech Obama gave in 2006. Why is that news?
(2) The speech is given before a diversity advocacy organization (NCWIT = National Center for Women & Information Technology), and if you listen to the context of the speech, that's clearly why he brings it up. Any politician invited to give a speech at an event like that obviously is going to try to find a way to complement the work the organization is doing.
(3) If you listen to the context of the quotation, it's actually not about IT. He mentions a number of different disciplines and a number of career paths, mostly not in IT. So, TFS is deliberately distorting the quotation to rile up Slashdot.
(4) Note the placement of the quotation -- it's the last thing in TFS, guaranteed to be the last thing people read before posting. So, you read the beginning and all the crappy flamewars about Obama and how he doesn't understand IT or whatever start coming up, but then you get to the last sentence and you're clearly supposed to be outraged and ready to start flaming.
JUST STOP IT. Can we skip all the stupid debates over gender and women in IT today? I'm not a big fan of Obama, but if you do want to discuss Obama's recent speech or possible initiatives, can we skip a bunch of crap concerning a speech from a decade ago with a quotation taken out of context??
But when you say, "Well, then have a smaller yard," uh...yeah, no. It doesn't work like that. You are confusing leaves...which do not come from the ground...with a lawn.
No, I'm not confusing anything. I'm pointing out that good planning and yard design can make maintenance less. The vast majority of people I see out with leaf blowers are cleaning off large lawns primarily. Yes, there are flower beds and other things, but I see LOTS of people clearly wide swaths of grass.
Leaves (which fall from trees...FYI on that one) still land on flower beds; the flowers do not have magical force fields to disintegrate the leaves. And you can't rake flowers...which leaves you with only one option. Using a leaf blower!
Hmm... despite being a jerk, I'll give you a tip here. People actually lived before leaf blowers existed. They actually sometimes had flower beds too. Think about that for one second. Somehow they survived.
If you have beds filled with tall-growing perennials, ground covers that are more than a few inches, etc., leaves probably aren't even that noticeable a problem -- and even if they are under big trees, these sorts of plants are hardy and can often stand up to some rough treatment like raking around them.
If you're planting crappy pretty short-growing annuals everywhere, then yeah, leaves could fall on them. Here's a tip -- don't plant them under trees that are known to shed their leaves during blooming season for those flowers. Choose other things for those beds -- hardier ground covers or even taller shrubs or something.
It sounds like maybe you should get out in the yard yourself and try some of this stuff out, so that you see how it actually works...or perhaps you live in a >1-floor home with no yard to care for, in which case you shouldn't be putting forth your uninformed opinion on these things in the first place?
Ad hominem. Nice. The refuge of jerks and ignorati. Look -- most of the issues you mention with flowers can be solved by what I've already said: put beds in reasonable places where they won't accumulate excessive leaves during blooming, and where you do expect lots of leaves, plant taller stuff (where you won't notice the leaves or they won't be a problem interfering with the plants' growth) or hardier stuff that can stand up to occasional raking. Doing otherwise is poor design, which is why I recommended consulting a landscaping expert if you don't know what you're doing and want to lower maintenance.
The rest of the problem would generally be solved if people just didn't get as worried about keeping a yard "perfect" all the time. If leaves are lying around in your flower beds, who cares? It's often reasonable fertilizer, and usually that tends to happen in the fall with most trees, when most flowers aren't even blooming, so it hardly hurt the aesthetics of the flowers. And, as I said, if you planted your flowers in a place where they bloom at the same time the leaves fall from a tree above them, well, that's just dumb.
Until we mandate that kid start memorizing the survival guide's key points in elementary school, specifically "6: Do Not Resign!", a resignation is the marker of a successful victimization, not an admission of guilt.
Did you read TFA as GP said? Did you read anything about this situation? The guy wasn't just accused by one questionable person and then forced to resign. It was a pattern of behavior involving lots of cases over the course of at least a decade, and he was originally asked by the university to sign away his right to keep tenure if he committed any future offenses. That doesn't generally happen unless there's some SERIOUS pressure from not only the administration, but the rest of the faculty at a university (which usually have pretty strict rules about keeping tenure and only violating it in the most extreme cases). And eventually that punishment wasn't seen as strong enough, so the rest of the faculty in his own department teamed up on him and pressured him to resign. That sort of thing just doesn't happen to an established tenured scholar unless something pretty egregious has occurred.
Bonus points: SJWs have stretched the word "sexist" to the point that it now means anything or nothing at all, but only when men say it, so the only way to interpret "sexist remarks" is as "words from a man".
Well, I don't know about "sexist," but "harassment" is pretty easy to define. It often really only comes down to one guideline:
Don't be creepy.
Since you clearly don't have a sense of what that means, let me explain it. In general, it means don't treat people like "sex objects." Things like -- Don't touch people without their explicit permission and encouragement. Don't comment on people's appearance unless you are explicitly asked. Don't engage in sexual banter, pervasive innuendo, or other lewd conversation unless invited. Etc. Oh, and if the other person in question is your subordinate, generally just don't ever do any of this stuff, because power relationships usually make it problematic even if it seems like the subordinate is "open to it."
Believe it or not, this really isn't that hard to do if you're a professional person who is capable of not being a complete jerk. Just treat people around you like people rather than potential sex partners. If you act professional, it's really unlikely to be accused of "harassment."
Note to slashdot editors: Please keep the SJW stories coming. Each one turns a few more people to the alt-right, and inoculates dozens more.
It's posts like yours which make me wonder if I should abandon Slashdot. I remember when I was younger and went through a phase where I thought the world was out to get males and how you had to be "extra careful" around all women to avoid getting some trumped up charge. But later when I "grew up" and saw what it's like to interact with women in real workplaces, I realized that that's mostly either paranoia or excuses guys who tend to be creepy jerks give to try to justify their behavior or lament the fact that they can't "play grabass" in the office anymore.
And yes those latter guys are still around -- I've seen inappropriate things happen to women around me with my own eyes. It's more common among men who are over 50 or so, and it does seem less common with younger guys, but it's still there. I've heard even more stories from women about men who clearly come across as "creepy" and say/do inappropriate things. Meanwhile, the number of "oversensitive" women I've met who seem the type who would complain about nothing or trump up charges I can count on one hand -- and mostly everybody knows who they are and complains about them... both men and women tend to avoid them and distance themselves from their idiocy.
So, with all this in mind, and given your low ID number, you should be old enough to know better. Thus, I'm forced to conclude you likely fit into one of these categories:
I already have an environmentally friendly, much much quieter leaf mover called a rake. And best of all it is cheap to own and maintain.
Exactly.
And if you have a lot of leaves, buy a cheap heavy tarp. Rake leaves onto tarp. Drag tarp to desired location to deposit leaves. Done.
Not only that, but it's exercise. I'm always amazed at the people who show up at the gym or go running around the neighborhood, but they don't take advantage of natural opportunities for exercise. Instead of buying the leaf blower, buy the rake. Instead of the riding mower or the "self-propelled" push mower, buy a decent reel mower (they are a lot better than they used to be) and run around the yard with it. Instead of buying the power edger, get the manual one and dig. Rather than the rototiller for your garden, dig it up and turn the soil with a shovel. A lot of times you get a decent workout while actually accomplishing something, and you frequently end up using different sets of muscles for different yard tasks, rather than having to come up with an artificial "routine" to try to keep your whole body fit.
And if you say, "But, but... my yard is too big for this sort of thing -- it would take me way too long to maintain it manually." Well, then have a smaller yard. Even if you have a large piece of property, install perennial flower beds, install ground covers that don't require cutting every week (and often excessive fertilizer and irrigation), plant some trees. If you're rich enough to own a large piece of property and pay people to keep it like a golf course, pay a landscape designer to make it lower maintenance and with greater variety than a giant lawn or whatever.
That's actually the real problem behind all the leaf blower noise -- Americans in the suburbs often have giant pieces of property with unnecessary huge lawns and unreasonable expectations that they be kept up continuously as if they were part of a golf course. Maybe we should attack the underlying problem -- like avoiding giant unneeded lawns or getting rid of this notion that any leaves on the ground are bad or "untidy" (they can actually be good fertilizer if they aren't excessive).
If it was the old, classic, manual thermostat I bet she'd have zero trouble.
I think you underestimate the technical illiteracy of older people.
For months after my grandmother first had central AC installed in her house, we'd come over to visit and find her shivering in a house that was in the mid-60s F.
We'd then reset it, but it happened again. Eventually we figured out that she didn't understand the concept that the thermostat regulates temperature. Instead, she was used to using her thermostat only to regulate heat before, and she assumed that when you turned it up higher, it caused the system to work more.
So, when the manual thermostat regulated AC, she assumed that when the AC was working too much, she just needed to "turn it down," like you'd turn the volume down on a stereo or something. Of course, that just caused it to work harder.
And I've seen otherwise intelligent people fiddling with thermostats to do similar things -- I've seen lots of people end up with a hot house in the middle of winter. What happened? "Well, I felt cold, and the furnace didn't seem to be heating fast enough, so I turned it up to 85." Somehow they think the furnace goes "faster" if you turn the manual dial further up.
Bottom line -- you'd be amazed at how (1) people don't understand how temperature works, and (2) people don't understand how thermostats and heating/cooling systems work.
Perhaps you don't get as much science by sending a human, but humans relate to the experience of another human far better than what can be done remotely via camera and sensor.
I don't know -- maybe we just need to make a movie about sending a human, make that human act like he's having an emotional experience, and everyone will just think the story is true?
When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, which was hardly one of the most peaceful years on record, the whole world stopped and watched. An entire generation of aerospace engineers was energized and motivated. It was a seminal moment in a turbulent era that defined what humans are capable of when we try.
It also was a different era. Although concern about things like Vietnam and culture wars with college students was heating up, there still was less cynicism than today.
For average people, you'd probably get much more "bang for your buck" by making movies like The Martian ("Based on a 'true' story") in terms of inspiring the masses. For educated folks like engineers today -- well, just take a look at a typical Slashdot discussion when stuff like this comes up.
Unlike 1969, educated folk like engineers all know it's technically feasible to send a human to Mars. In 1969, it was a serious technical problem, and there were huge numbers of unknowns.
Now the major problem is money. Achieving that is a lot less interesting to technical folks. But today I have absolutely no doubt that we could easily build the stuff and launch the stuff to put a guy on Mars with unlimited cash. But why would you?
The Apollo program was worth 10x what we paid for it, and as a highly taxed citizen of the US, I'd happily pay to see my generation's moment when we step onto another planet for the first time in our species existence.
If I thought it would actually create the kind of inspiration you assume it would, I'd agree with you. But I just think we live in a different culture now -- one that's more cynical about "inspirational figures," one where there's more distractions rather than the possibility of a widespread communal focus on such an achievement, and one that's more likely to "move on" to the next news cycle after a few weeks or months and forget about the billions and billions (trillions?) of dollars spent.
I just don't think it's very likely to cause the same sort of major cultural revolution that led up to and extended beyond the Apollo program. And meanwhile, we have a LOT of serious problems on Earth to worry about, which that money could be really useful for.
I'm not exactly against it, but I think we'd need a good reason to consider it other than the outside possibility of "inspiration."
A programmable thermostat that has been correctly set up is much more efficient and much less expensive
Agreed. Now, if we could only take the next step -- making coupled thermostats with humidity monitors more common.
In my experience, in humid climates the most useful measure of comfort is NOT temperature (or even relative humidity), but rather dewpoint. Comfort is a little more complex than that, but I'd much rather have a device that kept my house in the summer at roughly constant dewpoint (essentially constant absolute humidity), rather than constant temperature. With low humidity, 80+ degrees F can be perfectly comfortable. With 100% humidity, 70 degrees F can be unbearable and led you to be awash in sweat with even minimal exertion. A humidistat is also not quite an answer either, particularly if it tries to maintain static relative humidity -- again, that's not the best measure of comfort either across wide temperature ranges.
When seasons change, I'm often making on-the-fly adjustments to my programmable thermostat over several weeks, trying to strike a balance between, "I don't really need to have my AC running continuously at 70F just to remove humidity on some days" and "If I set the AC at a high temperature that would work when it's 100F, it isn't warm enough outside to make the AC run and the house will be unbearably humid."
(I know the Nest does measure humidity and can react to it, though I don't know how effective its programming is in this regard. And I would never use one anyway.)
I'd save more energy and effort adjusting my programmable thermostat if we just ignored temperature altogether. It's easy to measure, but it's simply not a good measure of human comfort.
So all you've shown is that people with families do sometimes get discriminated against in the workplace. Or was there something else that indicated that your sister actually faced discrimination because her gender?
I don't know the whole story here, but I've seen the "double standard" at work. I've seen fathers who occasionally have to take a half-day off with a sick kid praised by coworkers as an "involved dad." I've seen mothers with the exact same behavior complained about as an "unfocused parent" who created some minor inconvenience for others but needs to "pay more attention to her work."
Is this less common than it was a couple decades ago? I'm sure. But it's there. I don't have enough information about GP's situation to know what's going on, but I absolutely have seen first-hand where older colleagues have judged women to have become less dedicated to a job even just by getting pregnant -- even before they had a kid.
And just to be clear -- it's not just male bias. Often the harshest critics of women are other women. However, to be fair, I also know from first-hand experience that women are often advised (by other women) to HIDE the fact that they need to rearrange a schedule to deal with a kid rather than reveal it at work. Which makes it a self-perpetuating problem.
Unless your sister is stellar and could create her own position to which she could be promoted, most companies don't want more managers just for the sake of having them
I think you need to re-read GP's post again. He was NOT saying, "My sister was forced to wait until this guy retired, and that's unfair."
He WAS saying: "My sister was told for the past FIVE years that she was in line for this guy's job when he retires, but now that his retirement is getting closer, she's been told maybe she will NOT get it because she takes too much vacation time and had kids."
Let's say I was a competitive weightlifter, and decided to take a year off to have a kid. And when I came back a year later, I couldn't hit the bench for five hours a day like I used to because I was fulfilling the necessary task of taking care of said kid.
I think competitive weightlifting is a GREAT comparison to how things should work in the real world. Why? Because even competitive weightlifters mostly wouldn't recommend training more than 40 hours per week -- you'll suffer injury, fatigue, and it will actually be counterproductive since your muscles need to rest periodically to rejuvenate and grow.
Frankly, the same thing is true of your brain. Studies have shown that overall productivity is greater if people take vacations -- they more than make up for the "lost time" by taking a break periodically. Same thing goes for working too many hours -- sure, you're at the job longer, so it LOOKS like you must be working harder, but it's often increasingly hard to focus for those long stretches of time.
Anyhow, going back to GP -- the person currently in the position takes even MORE vacation time and takes 3-day weekends. GP's sister is being told she can't handle the job, though, even when she takes less vacation time (and presumably doesn't take 3-day weekends). Setting aside the ridiculous but common use of "taking vacation time" as a negative in job performance[**SEE NOTE], there seems to be an explicitly different standard invoked. Obviously we don't know the whole story, but the facts don't surprise me one bit.
I still recall when my wife went to a professional conference when she was pregnant. She ran into a senior colleague who used to admire her work, and his first reaction seeing her pregnant was, "Well... I see you've chosen a different path..."
Or, for another example, when my son was small, there was a time when my job permitted me to keep my schedule a little more flexible, so I would do more of the picking up from daycare/preschool and such. When I very occasionally had to schedule a meeting around this or something, my colleagues were generally really supportive -- they seemed to think I was "being a good, involved dad."
On the other hand, my wife was advised by numerous friends, family members, and colleagues NEVER to say she needed to take a day off or needed to schedule a meeting around a sick kid or something. To do so would brand her as yet another "unreliable mother" whose parenting was hurting job performance.
The double-standard is real. Maybe it isn't everywhere, or it's stronger in some places than others. Regardless, like the competitive weight-trainers, the vast majority of jobs simply don't require somebody to be completely focused doing specific duties 60 hours/week. (And if they do, most of those jobs should probably be split and more people hired.) In many cases, women are disadvantaged because of the APPEARANCE of less involvement at work -- perhaps they don't go out for as many dinners or drinks with colleagues because they need to get home to kids or whatever, or they spend a few less hours in the office, but they make up for it with work they take home or in more concentrated bursts during the day.
And I know some other poster will reply and tell some story about some woman who was completely unreliable once she had kids, etc. Yes, that does happen. And sometimes men become
If that's what he meant, I still don't understand it. Everything else in the post was basically true, so you're suggesting that one word was used sarcastically in a way that doesn't make much sense. Whatever...
So yes, he's trying to get a discussion going, aka trolling. That appears to have worked because here we are discussing it.
Why call it "trolling" exactly? A stereotypical "troll" isn't generally interested in "trying to get a discussion going" -- a troll usually wants to avoid substantive discussion and drive things into flamewars and emotional outbursts. In addition, trolls are usually insincere, disrupting reasonable discussion for their own amusement.
Almost none of that is here. Here's a guy whose aim appears sincere and who wants to get a reasonable discussion going on serious topic. He's putting a proposal out there, and perhaps reaction will lead to the development of a better solution. Perhaps his proposal is unworkable and naive, but it's certainly after a fairly reasonable result.
And also, I think most people here would agree that it would be better if lawmakers actually didn't ram through the first ridiculous legislation that comes into their brains, but threw out some ideas, got some reaction, and crafted something more reasonable.
You can criticize him as stupid or naive or ignorant of how the internet or the law works, but "trolling"??
So joke notwithstanding, education is still something the feds don't have (complete) control over.
True, but the crime here theoretically is walking alone; school is only the destination.
I can imagine all sorts of ways SCOTUS could shoehorn that into "interstate commerce." For a more outrageous one, note that there's an international sex trade in human trafficking, and estimates are that roughly 20% are children.
It is known that kids tend to be abducted more frequently when out of a guardian's care than within one. (Actually, the difference isn't as much as most people think, but there is one.) So, by letting your child walk to school alone, you are in effect offering him/her up for national/international sex trade! Interstate commerce! BINGO!
Oh, "but that can't be right," you object. After all, selling kids as sex slaves is obviously illegal, and most sane parents wouldn't want to sell their kids. So how could they possibly be considered at participating in interstate commerce?
Well, that's where the marijuana case comes in. It may be illegal to sell marijuana across state borders, and you may have no intent to sell your homegrown marijuana, but you still can be regulated by federal law. Even if you don't use it, you can still be arrested for possession -- you're homegrown marijuana theoretically "competes" in the marketplace.
The analogy then follows: you have no intent to sell your kids across state borders (perhaps even send them out with pepper spray and instructions not to talk to strangers), and you have no intent to sell them at all, having "grown" them at home, but they still can be regulated by federal law. And since it's well-documented that family members are by far much more likely to sexually abuse kids than strangers, it's pretty clear that by "growing your own" kids at home, you're producing a product that competes in the marketplace for child sex, making you or family members less likely to purchase a sex slave.
(Obviously this is more than a bit ridiculous. But lawyers 100 years ago would think that the kinds of actions now called "Constitutional" were ridiculous interpretations of law as understood back then. If the U.S. ever needs to regulate kids for some reason -- whether to prevent overpopulation or perhaps to restrict the number of "undesirable babies" had by minorities or poor people or whatever, look for legal logic similar to this. We aren't there today -- but the federal government basically takes control over whatever it wants; your "line in the sand" of Lopez is an extreme outlier in SCOTUS decisions over the past 75 years.)
The boy, Lucan, decided to walk to school on his own, two miles away, and was about halfway there when a business owner spotted him and called the cops.
This is something often not pointed out -- yes, police sometimes choose to intervene in such cases on their own. But very frequently they only take these actions because some neighborhood busybody calls the cops -- who then feel they need to take action.
I remember reading about this story back when it happened, and the business owner may have had a legitimate concern about how busy the streets were on the kid's route.
But the important thing is to compare the reaction to that situation a few decades ago. Fifty years ago if a local business owner noticed something like that, he'd go out and ask the kid where he was going. And then he'd offer to call the parent if he thought it was dangerous. And if the parent didn't answer, he might call the local policeman and ask if they could drive the kid, who would just do so without making a big deal. Or the business owner might even offer to close up his shop for five minutes and drive the kid the rest of the way to school himself.
These days if a business owner did the latter, the kid would likely start screaming "pedophile! offered me a ride in his car!" and the business owner would have ended up in jail along with the mom. Heck, somebody else might even think it suspicious if he went outside to ask the kid whether the kid was all right -- "unknown man approaching a child," some other passersby might think... and then THEY would call the cops on the man.
So, he did the only thing an adult male can do in the U.S. when he sees an unaccompanied child and is concerned -- he called the police without even approaching the kid and asking the kid about the situation. Instead of a reasonable community reaction to help a kid get to school, hysteria causes everyone to act in unreasonable ways.
I can just see it now: a kid stops and rests on a bench to eat a sandwich on the way home from school. Suddenly, the Feds screech up in black SUVs, a helicopter swoops in overheard. "Freeze! Put down the sandwich -- slowly! We have reason to believe that that sandwich contains a contraband tomato slice, grown on your property in violation of the Godawful Ugly Grocery Produce for All Americans Act of 2016. (Otherwise known as the GUGPAA! Act, which is the sound most Americans make when they spit out flavorless store-bought tomatoes.) We will have to confiscate the sandwich, fine you for violating the Act, and escort you to a holding facility until your parents can be re-educated into proper patriotic procedures, like buying your tomatoes at the supermarket!"
And heaven help the kid if he trades sandwiches with the Native American kid at school, since the Constitution explicitly allows not only regulation of interstate commerce, but also commerce "with the Indian tribes."
Statistically, children are far more likely to run into pedophiles in their family or in positions of authority than randomly on the street.
Indeed. Estimates vary, but most studies seem to put the number of stranger abductions as less than 5% of all child abductions. If you restrict it to "stereotypical stranger abduction scenarios" (child transported far away, detained overnight, and either held with intention to keep the child for a long time, ransomed, or killed), then you're talking about a tiny fraction of 1% of all abductions.
While we're invoking stats, it's also helpful to keep in mind that the VAST majority (~90%) of "missing children" are either "unintentionally" missing (miscommunicated plans, lost, whatever) or runaways. Of those who go missing, by far the most likely abduction scenario is a family member or close acquaintance. Even if children are abducted by a stranger, it's often close to home and they remain close to home, and often returned the same day. And though we mostly worry about young kids and pedophiles (i.e., those who prey on pre-pubescent kids), the vast majority of "child abductions" and sexual molestations, etc. are against (post-pubescent) teenagers.
In short, parents need to worry less about their little kid being abducted by a pedophile stranger and issuing an Amber Alert -- and they need to think more about their young teen being attacked by a coach or uncle or teacher or minister or close family friend.
This part of the law is just designed to prevent isolated municipalities from nutty interpretations of existing law.
There have been a few recent examples of private citizens reporting unaccompanied children to the police.
I don't think you appreciate the scale of this problem. Yes, only "a few recent examples" probably reached the attention of the national media, but they are indicative of a much more widespread and more common problem. This site is obviously biased in one way, but it's dedicated to tracking stories like this. It's pretty common to see some rather outrageous intervention at least every couple weeks or so... somewhere in the U.S.
Generally, the kids are walking short distances (~1 mile).
Or an 11-year-old sitting alone in a car outside a store.
Once the police get involved, they often feel the need to charge someone, and generally find a way to fit "leaving your 8 year old child unattended for 20 minutes" into some form of neglect or endangerment. I'm not sure if any of these have resulted in actual conviction, but they have certainly resulted in handcuffings, arrests, and (perhaps most importantly) court fees.
This shows a gross misunderstanding of the worst issue for most parents. Yes, some parents end up held in jail for a day or something, and there are court fees.
But that's the relatively mild part and only the beginning of the nightmare that often follows. In many cases, Child Protective Services removes the kids from the parents, from anywhere to a few days to weeks to months in some cases. And even when parents fight to get their kids back, they are often subjected to various indignities -- mandatory parenting classes where they are taught how "not to neglect" their kids, periodic "check-ins" by CPS services at their homes, who have been known to find ridiculously minor "violations" or "concerns" (like a cluttered living room where kids have been playing -- too messy for CPS).
Poke around a bit and read the kinds of things that can happen. Also, keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of kids are removed by CPS to foster care in the U.S. every year, statistics compiled from CPS show that in somewhere around 1/3 of cases (about 100,000 kids), investigations eventually show that there was no credible threat at all to kids. That's not even covering cases where there was an "apparent" threat that was determined not to be significant enough to warrant removal -- these are thousands and thousands of cases where CPS takes kids and later says, "My bad. Turns out the removal wasn't really necessary." (Actually, of course, they never admit it that in those words. But they basically determine whatever evidence was used to justify removal was incomplete, a misunderstanding, or just a bogus report.)
And let's not even get into the stats on abuse and neglect in foster care, which tends to happen at higher rates than in homes with parents. So CPS is often removing kids from a safe house without investigating thoroughly and putting kids in places where they are more likely to be harmed. (Obviously, CPS also takes action in many, many cases every year where there IS serious abuse, and they should be commended for that -- but tell this to any parent whose child is taken away for no apparent reason.)
Perhaps this is getting a bit off-topic from TFA, but these are related issues. We have a culture that tends to assume any child alone (and by "child," states now often mean kids up to
If we lived with the stuff we had in the 1930s you would not have had the economy boom you experienced in the second half of the 20th century.
There's certainly some truth to this, but it oversimplifies things.
Without that demand, nobody would have had a job and no economic growth would have happened.
But take the premise in TFA seriously for a second. Keynes's prediction should have the average work-week around 20 hours by now. To have our current productivity, we would therefore need twice as many jobs as we currently have. But we were reach full employment long before that, so we would have to have significantly lower productivity and consumption while still having enough jobs to go around.
And of course the objection is -- "But don't people who work 20-hour weeks get paid less?" And the point of TFA is that NO -- they still get paid a living wage. The difference in the Keynes future prediction and what we actually got is that that extra money has been siphoned off to the richest folks, rather than rewarding average workers, who might then have to work less hours to still live comfortably.
(Of course, whether that could actually happen given human nature is a separate issue...)
Today the desire remains, what's lacking is the money to actually do it, and as soon as the money for consumption was gone the economy plummeted.
This is also far too oversimplified. Our economy doesn't just depend on consumption -- it depends on irrational assumptions of continuous and perpetual GROWTH of consumption.
You can't have a large corporation today and just continue making the same stuff every year and getting moderate profits that keep up with inflation. Well, you can, but nobody's going to invest in you, because Wall Street has taught us that speculation in growth is normal. Thus, if you're going to attract investors, you need to promise them an irrational and illogical perpetual growth machine that will always beat inflation in its returns.
The consequences of this logic are profound, because it's simply impossible for businesses to sustain such growth over any extended period. Once market saturation occurs, where else do you go? Well, you start doing what we see big corporations in America doing for the past few decades -- you need to keep up the illusion that profits are going up, but you can't get more revenue due to market saturation, so how do you keep up the GROWTH demand of investors?
First, you have the cost of employees. Those darn Americans and their unions cost too much. So, you send manufacturing jobs offshore. Nowadays with the lower cost of global communication, you send service jobs offshore too. And those effects continue to trickle up the offshore game -- to save money, to make greater profits, to satisfy the investment illusion that perpetual growth is possible.
But then you need more money, 'cause you've already sent all your manufacturing (and JOBS! don't forget that's what we were trying to keep in the US!) to China or whatever. But you've exhausted the revenue increases from offshoring, so you make cheaper products, which will break. You make them in such a way that they can't be repaired. Repair shops (which used to be a significant service elements in most American cities) also go out of business... more jobs lost.
You create "planned obsolescence." You spend more and more money on marketing to convince people that they need the newest gadget every year. That marketing money doesn't go to support middle or lower class workers (JOBS!) -- instead it goes to white-collar advertising agencies and such.
Eventually, you need to start tricking people into spending huge amounts of money on your products -- so, you expand the "razor/razorblades" model to products that cost hundreds of dollars. Yeah, you get a "free" iPhone every few years, but it comes with a commitment to a $100+/month phone plan. People wou
To the point where saying "there is no safe level of alcohol consumption" is misleading to the point of deception.
Agreed. I actually basically said this toward the end of my last post.
Because there is a level of alcohol consumption below which, according to the best evidence, risk of various negative effects increases rather than decreases.
On the whole as a population study, sure. But obviously a double-blind study of alcohol consumption is impossible. And without that, it's hard to separate out the causality here. Alcohol consumption, for example, is highly correlated with social behavior. More social people tend to be in better mental and physical health. People who get older tend to drink less and become less healthy -- the "non-drinkers" in many studies tend to be skewed toward older people, who are more likely to have health problems. There are a number of studies that show when you try to break down people into groups and do more of a "case control" analysis, rather than simply aggregating drinkers and non-drinkers, you actually see many of the correlations lessen significantly or even disappear.
Personally, after looking at many of these studies over the years, I've come to the conclusion -- like you -- that there still is some small but robust correlation. But I'm very suspicious of the causation, since alcohol tends to be tied up so much in culture, social activities, and other lifestyle behaviors, which are also known to have impacts on health.
Ethanol is known to have at least superficial deleterious effects on the human body, even in small doses. And we know the way it is metabolized produces bad things for the body. So, until we have a plausible mechanism by which we think its positive effects work, I think it's premature to start telling people to start drinking if they don't already -- and that's really the important question that comes about with causality.
For years I've been looking for a study on people who START drinking just for "health benefits" but don't otherwise alter their lifestyles significantly. That's what you really need, along with a matched control group. It's not as good as a blind study, but then you'll at least get rid of many of the possibilities for confounding factors.
Repeated studies have shown that alcohol in moderation prolongs life: it reduces the risk of heart disease and strokes. In fact the benefits of alcohol in preventing strokes and heart disease are far clearer than the negatives of drinking.
Well, this is a little misleading. Alcohol is correlated with reduced risks of heart disease and strokes when consumed in moderation.
Is the cause alcohol itself, or is it something that tends to be associated with alcohol consumption, such as less stress, being more relaxed, etc.? This has come up with, for example, studies of pregnant women which seem to show slightly better outcomes (in some studies) for women who drink only a couple drinks per week, compared with women who abstain completely. In some cases, babies seem to do slightly better, achieve certain developmental goals slightly faster, etc. with the occasional drink rather than without one.
But we also know very well that alcohol is bad for developing fetuses. So what gives? Does moderate ethanol in a fetus's system actually help it, despite the fact that we know it basically does bad things for brain development and function, as well as converting into poisonous compounds when metabolized? Should we really advise women who don't normally drink to have an occasional one "just for the baby"??
Or is there a more likely explanation, such as that a pregnant woman who takes an occasional drink when she feels stressed and finds alcohol to be soothing might be overall benefitting the baby by being less stressed? Studies have shown that stress does harm to fetuses too. Pregnant women today are often also given more and more restrictive dietary guidelines, and those who fret too much over everything they eat may actually be doing worse for a developing baby.
Maybe women who are "laid-back" enough not to worry about an occasional glass of wine when pregnant are just less anxiety-prone in general, and THAT is where the benefit comes from?
Perhaps. I don't have the answers.
But the point is that I don't think there's convincing evidence that one should go out and start drinking if you don't like it or don't enjoy it (and some people just enjoy it more than others, just like anything) -- just for some minor cardiovascular benefit. In fact, many health experts who recognize the supposed "benefits" of alcohol also do NOT recommend you just start drinking if you don't already... because they understand the causality issues here.
By the way, I have no problem with drinking, and I think the puritanical "all alcohol is poison" stuff does much more harm than good. There's little reason to worry about people who drink in moderation. But let's be clear what this association between alcohol and health is likely about -- it is just a correlation, and many studies show that it is barely significant (or even not statistically significant at all) when various confounding factors are taken into account.
Slashdot Mirror
- The original is public domain, someone is making it available which is entirely legal.
Well, maybe not. According to this, the original manuscripts were never actually published until a critical scholarly edition came out in 1986.
And apparently under applicable law in 1986, what may matter is not when they were written, but when they were published. Apparently posthumous publication in some circumstances remained under copyright until 50 years after the first date of publication -- the date of the death of the author in this case is irrelevant. This provision about posthumous copyright was dropped in 1995 in the EU, but apparently the law was also written in such a way so as not to diminish any copyright term that went into force before 1995.
That's the problem with copyright law -- it not only depends on the country, but also exactly when copyright was first granted. Different eras are often under different rules, depending on when the laws changed.
Why would the adapters claim copyright on the original by virtue of its adaptions?
Apparently that's NOT what's being claimed here. It's not the adaptation that is the issue, but rather the effective publication date of the original manuscript. Now, I don't know much about the details of the case, but apparently there is some applicable law that has been used to support the arguments of those claiming rights. (By the way, I absolutely agree from a moral perspective that this SHOULD be in the public domain by now. But it may not be under applicable law.)
If that were the case, numerous people would be able to claim copyright on all biblical manuscripts or someone claiming copyright on papyrus artifacts or stone tablets at museums.
Well, no -- because no one could claim copyright on most biblical manuscripts, since their contents has mostly been published for many centuries.
On the other hand, for recent scholarly finds, there actually have been cases made for copyright of portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example. In this case, the text required significant deciphering and editing (including lots of interpolation of letters and words, etc.) to make sense of passages. Without a modern edition, the original sources would be meaningless to everyone except experts in ancient writing and languages, so it does makes sense in some cases that modern editions should be granted copyright.
A Hub, is designed to handle deliveries within a days travel, they will load up the trucks with a day's worth of goods.
Depends on the hub and the delivery area. Some trucks can go back to the hub multiple times per day.
To give direct delivery from the Hub to your home, and back to the hub, would make delivery extremely expensive.
Which is the reason it's next to impossible for me to order same-day local delivery of flowers from a national floral service. And why it costs a ridiculous sum to get a pizza within 30 minutes from a national chain to arrive at my home.
Oh wait... those business models have successfully existed for years. It's just that they actually built the local infrastructure for delivery of goods, since those goods were perishable and required fast delivery. Yet somehow I can get them without paying a huge delivery fee.
The Drones (50 lbs), being electrical, flying, and automated makes it much cheaper to get an individual package from hub/warehouse to home. Then it would take for a Person (200lbs), a gasoline vehicle (1000+lbs) and driving to drop off you 5 lbs of goods.
Yes, and that's ridiculous, but that's a strawman. Just like florists or pizza delivery guys, they could drive a smaller (less expensive) car and many of their delivery runs could be shorter while still generally serving multiple customers per run.
Let's think about what's really going on here. Amazon doesn't have the infrastructure to deliver goods on that timescale, that's what. They started out as a bookstore... and if they had chosen a different route, they perhaps could have set up a partnership with local bookstores (as florists do, independent businesses but participating in national networks).
But oh... yeah, Amazon put most of them out of business, thus ruining the distribution centers that could have already existed.
And obviously local bookstore inventory would always be a bit limited, just like your local florist might not have some exotic flowers or something. So if you want something special, it could take a little longer or you could pay more. That's where perhaps the drones would really be helpful.
But let's be clear about this -- Amazon wants to "win the game" and outcompete almost all local retail. They don't want to share profits, even if in the short term it might be cheaper and easier. They want to drive the competition out, so the only thing left is having the drone drop something off. Yes, it's a gamble, but in the long run if they generate the monopoly they obviously want, then yes, they "win the game."
Let's not pretend their aren't other options which would be cheaper and easier than single drones carrying single packages, though -- at least for delivery of common goods that you'd likely be able to find in a local store anyhow. Amazon just doesn't want to play that game, though, because it would likely require sharing their greed with other businesses instead of creating a monopoly. Same-day fast delivery is the last thing necessary (in their view) to create that monopoly and finally destroy local retail forever.
And don't get me wrong -- I completely understand Amazon's choice here as a business. But I also think we'll lose something if we lose local retail. The browsing experience in a local store is simply different from what happens online (not all bad -- worse in some ways, but better in others).
The story is current because Obama just mentioned teaching code in the SOTU.
Duh. Read my post again. I didn't say the story (in the beginning of TFS) wasn't current; in fact, I said it was and encouraged discussion of current initiatives/proposals if people want to talk about that.
I said TFS was designed to be a Troll, and you know this because it concludes with a speech from a decade ago and a quotation from it designed to rile people up here. That latter element is NOT current.
"I want them to go as far as their dreams may take them. And, unfortunately because of long historic discrimination in the areas of gender, we can't be assured of that."
Can we all just mod the Summary as "-1 Troll"?
I'm absolutely serious. There are clearly lots of stories posted on Slashdot which seem designed to create flamewars, but this one is incredibly blatant. Rather than just discussing a current speech of Obama and his ideas, we get a final sentence which appears to be referencing gender discrimination in IT, which the OP obviously knows will rile people up here.
Except there are number of problematic things there:
(1) The link is to a speech Obama gave in 2006. Why is that news?
(2) The speech is given before a diversity advocacy organization (NCWIT = National Center for Women & Information Technology), and if you listen to the context of the speech, that's clearly why he brings it up. Any politician invited to give a speech at an event like that obviously is going to try to find a way to complement the work the organization is doing.
(3) If you listen to the context of the quotation, it's actually not about IT. He mentions a number of different disciplines and a number of career paths, mostly not in IT. So, TFS is deliberately distorting the quotation to rile up Slashdot.
(4) Note the placement of the quotation -- it's the last thing in TFS, guaranteed to be the last thing people read before posting. So, you read the beginning and all the crappy flamewars about Obama and how he doesn't understand IT or whatever start coming up, but then you get to the last sentence and you're clearly supposed to be outraged and ready to start flaming.
JUST STOP IT. Can we skip all the stupid debates over gender and women in IT today? I'm not a big fan of Obama, but if you do want to discuss Obama's recent speech or possible initiatives, can we skip a bunch of crap concerning a speech from a decade ago with a quotation taken out of context??
They say "28% more creative", but that number sounds like 100% bullshit, depending on how they drew that conclusion.
This comment is exactly 28% more insightful than any others I've read on this thread so far.
But when you say, "Well, then have a smaller yard," uh...yeah, no. It doesn't work like that. You are confusing leaves...which do not come from the ground...with a lawn.
No, I'm not confusing anything. I'm pointing out that good planning and yard design can make maintenance less. The vast majority of people I see out with leaf blowers are cleaning off large lawns primarily. Yes, there are flower beds and other things, but I see LOTS of people clearly wide swaths of grass.
Leaves (which fall from trees...FYI on that one) still land on flower beds; the flowers do not have magical force fields to disintegrate the leaves. And you can't rake flowers...which leaves you with only one option. Using a leaf blower!
Hmm... despite being a jerk, I'll give you a tip here. People actually lived before leaf blowers existed. They actually sometimes had flower beds too. Think about that for one second. Somehow they survived.
If you have beds filled with tall-growing perennials, ground covers that are more than a few inches, etc., leaves probably aren't even that noticeable a problem -- and even if they are under big trees, these sorts of plants are hardy and can often stand up to some rough treatment like raking around them.
If you're planting crappy pretty short-growing annuals everywhere, then yeah, leaves could fall on them. Here's a tip -- don't plant them under trees that are known to shed their leaves during blooming season for those flowers. Choose other things for those beds -- hardier ground covers or even taller shrubs or something.
It sounds like maybe you should get out in the yard yourself and try some of this stuff out, so that you see how it actually works...or perhaps you live in a >1-floor home with no yard to care for, in which case you shouldn't be putting forth your uninformed opinion on these things in the first place?
Ad hominem. Nice. The refuge of jerks and ignorati. Look -- most of the issues you mention with flowers can be solved by what I've already said: put beds in reasonable places where they won't accumulate excessive leaves during blooming, and where you do expect lots of leaves, plant taller stuff (where you won't notice the leaves or they won't be a problem interfering with the plants' growth) or hardier stuff that can stand up to occasional raking. Doing otherwise is poor design, which is why I recommended consulting a landscaping expert if you don't know what you're doing and want to lower maintenance.
The rest of the problem would generally be solved if people just didn't get as worried about keeping a yard "perfect" all the time. If leaves are lying around in your flower beds, who cares? It's often reasonable fertilizer, and usually that tends to happen in the fall with most trees, when most flowers aren't even blooming, so it hardly hurt the aesthetics of the flowers. And, as I said, if you planted your flowers in a place where they bloom at the same time the leaves fall from a tree above them, well, that's just dumb.
Until we mandate that kid start memorizing the survival guide's key points in elementary school, specifically "6: Do Not Resign!", a resignation is the marker of a successful victimization, not an admission of guilt.
Did you read TFA as GP said? Did you read anything about this situation? The guy wasn't just accused by one questionable person and then forced to resign. It was a pattern of behavior involving lots of cases over the course of at least a decade, and he was originally asked by the university to sign away his right to keep tenure if he committed any future offenses. That doesn't generally happen unless there's some SERIOUS pressure from not only the administration, but the rest of the faculty at a university (which usually have pretty strict rules about keeping tenure and only violating it in the most extreme cases). And eventually that punishment wasn't seen as strong enough, so the rest of the faculty in his own department teamed up on him and pressured him to resign. That sort of thing just doesn't happen to an established tenured scholar unless something pretty egregious has occurred.
Bonus points: SJWs have stretched the word "sexist" to the point that it now means anything or nothing at all, but only when men say it, so the only way to interpret "sexist remarks" is as "words from a man".
Well, I don't know about "sexist," but "harassment" is pretty easy to define. It often really only comes down to one guideline: Don't be creepy.
Since you clearly don't have a sense of what that means, let me explain it. In general, it means don't treat people like "sex objects." Things like -- Don't touch people without their explicit permission and encouragement. Don't comment on people's appearance unless you are explicitly asked. Don't engage in sexual banter, pervasive innuendo, or other lewd conversation unless invited. Etc. Oh, and if the other person in question is your subordinate, generally just don't ever do any of this stuff, because power relationships usually make it problematic even if it seems like the subordinate is "open to it."
Believe it or not, this really isn't that hard to do if you're a professional person who is capable of not being a complete jerk. Just treat people around you like people rather than potential sex partners. If you act professional, it's really unlikely to be accused of "harassment."
Note to slashdot editors: Please keep the SJW stories coming. Each one turns a few more people to the alt-right, and inoculates dozens more.
It's posts like yours which make me wonder if I should abandon Slashdot. I remember when I was younger and went through a phase where I thought the world was out to get males and how you had to be "extra careful" around all women to avoid getting some trumped up charge. But later when I "grew up" and saw what it's like to interact with women in real workplaces, I realized that that's mostly either paranoia or excuses guys who tend to be creepy jerks give to try to justify their behavior or lament the fact that they can't "play grabass" in the office anymore.
And yes those latter guys are still around -- I've seen inappropriate things happen to women around me with my own eyes. It's more common among men who are over 50 or so, and it does seem less common with younger guys, but it's still there. I've heard even more stories from women about men who clearly come across as "creepy" and say/do inappropriate things. Meanwhile, the number of "oversensitive" women I've met who seem the type who would complain about nothing or trump up charges I can count on one hand -- and mostly everybody knows who they are and complains about them... both men and women tend to avoid them and distance themselves from their idiocy.
So, with all this in mind, and given your low ID number, you should be old enough to know better. Thus, I'm forced to conclude you likely fit into one of these categories:
(
I already have an environmentally friendly, much much quieter leaf mover called a rake. And best of all it is cheap to own and maintain.
Exactly.
And if you have a lot of leaves, buy a cheap heavy tarp. Rake leaves onto tarp. Drag tarp to desired location to deposit leaves. Done.
Not only that, but it's exercise. I'm always amazed at the people who show up at the gym or go running around the neighborhood, but they don't take advantage of natural opportunities for exercise. Instead of buying the leaf blower, buy the rake. Instead of the riding mower or the "self-propelled" push mower, buy a decent reel mower (they are a lot better than they used to be) and run around the yard with it. Instead of buying the power edger, get the manual one and dig. Rather than the rototiller for your garden, dig it up and turn the soil with a shovel. A lot of times you get a decent workout while actually accomplishing something, and you frequently end up using different sets of muscles for different yard tasks, rather than having to come up with an artificial "routine" to try to keep your whole body fit.
And if you say, "But, but... my yard is too big for this sort of thing -- it would take me way too long to maintain it manually." Well, then have a smaller yard. Even if you have a large piece of property, install perennial flower beds, install ground covers that don't require cutting every week (and often excessive fertilizer and irrigation), plant some trees. If you're rich enough to own a large piece of property and pay people to keep it like a golf course, pay a landscape designer to make it lower maintenance and with greater variety than a giant lawn or whatever.
That's actually the real problem behind all the leaf blower noise -- Americans in the suburbs often have giant pieces of property with unnecessary huge lawns and unreasonable expectations that they be kept up continuously as if they were part of a golf course. Maybe we should attack the underlying problem -- like avoiding giant unneeded lawns or getting rid of this notion that any leaves on the ground are bad or "untidy" (they can actually be good fertilizer if they aren't excessive).
If it was the old, classic, manual thermostat I bet she'd have zero trouble.
I think you underestimate the technical illiteracy of older people.
For months after my grandmother first had central AC installed in her house, we'd come over to visit and find her shivering in a house that was in the mid-60s F.
We'd then reset it, but it happened again. Eventually we figured out that she didn't understand the concept that the thermostat regulates temperature. Instead, she was used to using her thermostat only to regulate heat before, and she assumed that when you turned it up higher, it caused the system to work more.
So, when the manual thermostat regulated AC, she assumed that when the AC was working too much, she just needed to "turn it down," like you'd turn the volume down on a stereo or something. Of course, that just caused it to work harder.
And I've seen otherwise intelligent people fiddling with thermostats to do similar things -- I've seen lots of people end up with a hot house in the middle of winter. What happened? "Well, I felt cold, and the furnace didn't seem to be heating fast enough, so I turned it up to 85." Somehow they think the furnace goes "faster" if you turn the manual dial further up.
Bottom line -- you'd be amazed at how (1) people don't understand how temperature works, and (2) people don't understand how thermostats and heating/cooling systems work.
Perhaps you don't get as much science by sending a human, but humans relate to the experience of another human far better than what can be done remotely via camera and sensor.
I don't know -- maybe we just need to make a movie about sending a human, make that human act like he's having an emotional experience, and everyone will just think the story is true?
When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, which was hardly one of the most peaceful years on record, the whole world stopped and watched. An entire generation of aerospace engineers was energized and motivated. It was a seminal moment in a turbulent era that defined what humans are capable of when we try.
It also was a different era. Although concern about things like Vietnam and culture wars with college students was heating up, there still was less cynicism than today.
For average people, you'd probably get much more "bang for your buck" by making movies like The Martian ("Based on a 'true' story") in terms of inspiring the masses. For educated folks like engineers today -- well, just take a look at a typical Slashdot discussion when stuff like this comes up.
Unlike 1969, educated folk like engineers all know it's technically feasible to send a human to Mars. In 1969, it was a serious technical problem, and there were huge numbers of unknowns.
Now the major problem is money. Achieving that is a lot less interesting to technical folks. But today I have absolutely no doubt that we could easily build the stuff and launch the stuff to put a guy on Mars with unlimited cash. But why would you?
The Apollo program was worth 10x what we paid for it, and as a highly taxed citizen of the US, I'd happily pay to see my generation's moment when we step onto another planet for the first time in our species existence.
If I thought it would actually create the kind of inspiration you assume it would, I'd agree with you. But I just think we live in a different culture now -- one that's more cynical about "inspirational figures," one where there's more distractions rather than the possibility of a widespread communal focus on such an achievement, and one that's more likely to "move on" to the next news cycle after a few weeks or months and forget about the billions and billions (trillions?) of dollars spent.
I just don't think it's very likely to cause the same sort of major cultural revolution that led up to and extended beyond the Apollo program. And meanwhile, we have a LOT of serious problems on Earth to worry about, which that money could be really useful for.
I'm not exactly against it, but I think we'd need a good reason to consider it other than the outside possibility of "inspiration."
A programmable thermostat that has been correctly set up is much more efficient and much less expensive
Agreed. Now, if we could only take the next step -- making coupled thermostats with humidity monitors more common.
In my experience, in humid climates the most useful measure of comfort is NOT temperature (or even relative humidity), but rather dewpoint. Comfort is a little more complex than that, but I'd much rather have a device that kept my house in the summer at roughly constant dewpoint (essentially constant absolute humidity), rather than constant temperature. With low humidity, 80+ degrees F can be perfectly comfortable. With 100% humidity, 70 degrees F can be unbearable and led you to be awash in sweat with even minimal exertion. A humidistat is also not quite an answer either, particularly if it tries to maintain static relative humidity -- again, that's not the best measure of comfort either across wide temperature ranges.
When seasons change, I'm often making on-the-fly adjustments to my programmable thermostat over several weeks, trying to strike a balance between, "I don't really need to have my AC running continuously at 70F just to remove humidity on some days" and "If I set the AC at a high temperature that would work when it's 100F, it isn't warm enough outside to make the AC run and the house will be unbearably humid."
(I know the Nest does measure humidity and can react to it, though I don't know how effective its programming is in this regard. And I would never use one anyway.)
I'd save more energy and effort adjusting my programmable thermostat if we just ignored temperature altogether. It's easy to measure, but it's simply not a good measure of human comfort.
So all you've shown is that people with families do sometimes get discriminated against in the workplace. Or was there something else that indicated that your sister actually faced discrimination because her gender?
I don't know the whole story here, but I've seen the "double standard" at work. I've seen fathers who occasionally have to take a half-day off with a sick kid praised by coworkers as an "involved dad." I've seen mothers with the exact same behavior complained about as an "unfocused parent" who created some minor inconvenience for others but needs to "pay more attention to her work."
Is this less common than it was a couple decades ago? I'm sure. But it's there. I don't have enough information about GP's situation to know what's going on, but I absolutely have seen first-hand where older colleagues have judged women to have become less dedicated to a job even just by getting pregnant -- even before they had a kid.
And just to be clear -- it's not just male bias. Often the harshest critics of women are other women. However, to be fair, I also know from first-hand experience that women are often advised (by other women) to HIDE the fact that they need to rearrange a schedule to deal with a kid rather than reveal it at work. Which makes it a self-perpetuating problem.
Unless your sister is stellar and could create her own position to which she could be promoted, most companies don't want more managers just for the sake of having them
I think you need to re-read GP's post again. He was NOT saying, "My sister was forced to wait until this guy retired, and that's unfair."
He WAS saying: "My sister was told for the past FIVE years that she was in line for this guy's job when he retires, but now that his retirement is getting closer, she's been told maybe she will NOT get it because she takes too much vacation time and had kids."
Let's say I was a competitive weightlifter, and decided to take a year off to have a kid. And when I came back a year later, I couldn't hit the bench for five hours a day like I used to because I was fulfilling the necessary task of taking care of said kid.
I think competitive weightlifting is a GREAT comparison to how things should work in the real world. Why? Because even competitive weightlifters mostly wouldn't recommend training more than 40 hours per week -- you'll suffer injury, fatigue, and it will actually be counterproductive since your muscles need to rest periodically to rejuvenate and grow.
Frankly, the same thing is true of your brain. Studies have shown that overall productivity is greater if people take vacations -- they more than make up for the "lost time" by taking a break periodically. Same thing goes for working too many hours -- sure, you're at the job longer, so it LOOKS like you must be working harder, but it's often increasingly hard to focus for those long stretches of time.
Anyhow, going back to GP -- the person currently in the position takes even MORE vacation time and takes 3-day weekends. GP's sister is being told she can't handle the job, though, even when she takes less vacation time (and presumably doesn't take 3-day weekends). Setting aside the ridiculous but common use of "taking vacation time" as a negative in job performance[**SEE NOTE], there seems to be an explicitly different standard invoked. Obviously we don't know the whole story, but the facts don't surprise me one bit.
I still recall when my wife went to a professional conference when she was pregnant. She ran into a senior colleague who used to admire her work, and his first reaction seeing her pregnant was, "Well... I see you've chosen a different path..."
Or, for another example, when my son was small, there was a time when my job permitted me to keep my schedule a little more flexible, so I would do more of the picking up from daycare/preschool and such. When I very occasionally had to schedule a meeting around this or something, my colleagues were generally really supportive -- they seemed to think I was "being a good, involved dad."
On the other hand, my wife was advised by numerous friends, family members, and colleagues NEVER to say she needed to take a day off or needed to schedule a meeting around a sick kid or something. To do so would brand her as yet another "unreliable mother" whose parenting was hurting job performance.
The double-standard is real. Maybe it isn't everywhere, or it's stronger in some places than others. Regardless, like the competitive weight-trainers, the vast majority of jobs simply don't require somebody to be completely focused doing specific duties 60 hours/week. (And if they do, most of those jobs should probably be split and more people hired.) In many cases, women are disadvantaged because of the APPEARANCE of less involvement at work -- perhaps they don't go out for as many dinners or drinks with colleagues because they need to get home to kids or whatever, or they spend a few less hours in the office, but they make up for it with work they take home or in more concentrated bursts during the day.
And I know some other poster will reply and tell some story about some woman who was completely unreliable once she had kids, etc. Yes, that does happen. And sometimes men become
If that's what he meant, I still don't understand it. Everything else in the post was basically true, so you're suggesting that one word was used sarcastically in a way that doesn't make much sense. Whatever...
So yes, he's trying to get a discussion going, aka trolling. That appears to have worked because here we are discussing it.
Why call it "trolling" exactly? A stereotypical "troll" isn't generally interested in "trying to get a discussion going" -- a troll usually wants to avoid substantive discussion and drive things into flamewars and emotional outbursts. In addition, trolls are usually insincere, disrupting reasonable discussion for their own amusement.
Almost none of that is here. Here's a guy whose aim appears sincere and who wants to get a reasonable discussion going on serious topic. He's putting a proposal out there, and perhaps reaction will lead to the development of a better solution. Perhaps his proposal is unworkable and naive, but it's certainly after a fairly reasonable result.
And also, I think most people here would agree that it would be better if lawmakers actually didn't ram through the first ridiculous legislation that comes into their brains, but threw out some ideas, got some reaction, and crafted something more reasonable.
You can criticize him as stupid or naive or ignorant of how the internet or the law works, but "trolling"??
So joke notwithstanding, education is still something the feds don't have (complete) control over.
True, but the crime here theoretically is walking alone; school is only the destination.
I can imagine all sorts of ways SCOTUS could shoehorn that into "interstate commerce." For a more outrageous one, note that there's an international sex trade in human trafficking, and estimates are that roughly 20% are children.
It is known that kids tend to be abducted more frequently when out of a guardian's care than within one. (Actually, the difference isn't as much as most people think, but there is one.) So, by letting your child walk to school alone, you are in effect offering him/her up for national/international sex trade! Interstate commerce! BINGO!
Oh, "but that can't be right," you object. After all, selling kids as sex slaves is obviously illegal, and most sane parents wouldn't want to sell their kids. So how could they possibly be considered at participating in interstate commerce?
Well, that's where the marijuana case comes in. It may be illegal to sell marijuana across state borders, and you may have no intent to sell your homegrown marijuana, but you still can be regulated by federal law. Even if you don't use it, you can still be arrested for possession -- you're homegrown marijuana theoretically "competes" in the marketplace.
The analogy then follows: you have no intent to sell your kids across state borders (perhaps even send them out with pepper spray and instructions not to talk to strangers), and you have no intent to sell them at all, having "grown" them at home, but they still can be regulated by federal law. And since it's well-documented that family members are by far much more likely to sexually abuse kids than strangers, it's pretty clear that by "growing your own" kids at home, you're producing a product that competes in the marketplace for child sex, making you or family members less likely to purchase a sex slave.
(Obviously this is more than a bit ridiculous. But lawyers 100 years ago would think that the kinds of actions now called "Constitutional" were ridiculous interpretations of law as understood back then. If the U.S. ever needs to regulate kids for some reason -- whether to prevent overpopulation or perhaps to restrict the number of "undesirable babies" had by minorities or poor people or whatever, look for legal logic similar to this. We aren't there today -- but the federal government basically takes control over whatever it wants; your "line in the sand" of Lopez is an extreme outlier in SCOTUS decisions over the past 75 years.)
The boy, Lucan, decided to walk to school on his own, two miles away, and was about halfway there when a business owner spotted him and called the cops.
This is something often not pointed out -- yes, police sometimes choose to intervene in such cases on their own. But very frequently they only take these actions because some neighborhood busybody calls the cops -- who then feel they need to take action.
I remember reading about this story back when it happened, and the business owner may have had a legitimate concern about how busy the streets were on the kid's route.
But the important thing is to compare the reaction to that situation a few decades ago. Fifty years ago if a local business owner noticed something like that, he'd go out and ask the kid where he was going. And then he'd offer to call the parent if he thought it was dangerous. And if the parent didn't answer, he might call the local policeman and ask if they could drive the kid, who would just do so without making a big deal. Or the business owner might even offer to close up his shop for five minutes and drive the kid the rest of the way to school himself.
These days if a business owner did the latter, the kid would likely start screaming "pedophile! offered me a ride in his car!" and the business owner would have ended up in jail along with the mom. Heck, somebody else might even think it suspicious if he went outside to ask the kid whether the kid was all right -- "unknown man approaching a child," some other passersby might think... and then THEY would call the cops on the man.
So, he did the only thing an adult male can do in the U.S. when he sees an unaccompanied child and is concerned -- he called the police without even approaching the kid and asking the kid about the situation. Instead of a reasonable community reaction to help a kid get to school, hysteria causes everyone to act in unreasonable ways.
This does not effect state or local law enforcement, unless you believe that kids walking to school are engaging in interstate commerce.
Well, given that "interstate commerce" has been extended to include growing food on your own property for the consumption of your family and your own animals, I think it's pretty easy for a kid walking to school to engage in it, assuming he eats a homegrown snack along the way.
I can just see it now: a kid stops and rests on a bench to eat a sandwich on the way home from school. Suddenly, the Feds screech up in black SUVs, a helicopter swoops in overheard. "Freeze! Put down the sandwich -- slowly! We have reason to believe that that sandwich contains a contraband tomato slice, grown on your property in violation of the Godawful Ugly Grocery Produce for All Americans Act of 2016. (Otherwise known as the GUGPAA! Act, which is the sound most Americans make when they spit out flavorless store-bought tomatoes.) We will have to confiscate the sandwich, fine you for violating the Act, and escort you to a holding facility until your parents can be re-educated into proper patriotic procedures, like buying your tomatoes at the supermarket!"
And heaven help the kid if he trades sandwiches with the Native American kid at school, since the Constitution explicitly allows not only regulation of interstate commerce, but also commerce "with the Indian tribes."
Statistically, children are far more likely to run into pedophiles in their family or in positions of authority than randomly on the street.
Indeed. Estimates vary, but most studies seem to put the number of stranger abductions as less than 5% of all child abductions. If you restrict it to "stereotypical stranger abduction scenarios" (child transported far away, detained overnight, and either held with intention to keep the child for a long time, ransomed, or killed), then you're talking about a tiny fraction of 1% of all abductions.
While we're invoking stats, it's also helpful to keep in mind that the VAST majority (~90%) of "missing children" are either "unintentionally" missing (miscommunicated plans, lost, whatever) or runaways. Of those who go missing, by far the most likely abduction scenario is a family member or close acquaintance. Even if children are abducted by a stranger, it's often close to home and they remain close to home, and often returned the same day. And though we mostly worry about young kids and pedophiles (i.e., those who prey on pre-pubescent kids), the vast majority of "child abductions" and sexual molestations, etc. are against (post-pubescent) teenagers.
In short, parents need to worry less about their little kid being abducted by a pedophile stranger and issuing an Amber Alert -- and they need to think more about their young teen being attacked by a coach or uncle or teacher or minister or close family friend.
This part of the law is just designed to prevent isolated municipalities from nutty interpretations of existing law.
There have been a few recent examples of private citizens reporting unaccompanied children to the police.
I don't think you appreciate the scale of this problem. Yes, only "a few recent examples" probably reached the attention of the national media, but they are indicative of a much more widespread and more common problem. This site is obviously biased in one way, but it's dedicated to tracking stories like this. It's pretty common to see some rather outrageous intervention at least every couple weeks or so... somewhere in the U.S.
Generally, the kids are walking short distances (~1 mile).
Or an 11-year-old sitting alone in a car outside a store.
Or, ya know, an 11-year-old playing alone in his own yard unsupervised. Parents arrested on felony charges. Apparently your kid doesn't even need to be walking alone.
Once the police get involved, they often feel the need to charge someone, and generally find a way to fit "leaving your 8 year old child unattended for 20 minutes" into some form of neglect or endangerment. I'm not sure if any of these have resulted in actual conviction, but they have certainly resulted in handcuffings, arrests, and (perhaps most importantly) court fees.
This shows a gross misunderstanding of the worst issue for most parents. Yes, some parents end up held in jail for a day or something, and there are court fees.
But that's the relatively mild part and only the beginning of the nightmare that often follows. In many cases, Child Protective Services removes the kids from the parents, from anywhere to a few days to weeks to months in some cases. And even when parents fight to get their kids back, they are often subjected to various indignities -- mandatory parenting classes where they are taught how "not to neglect" their kids, periodic "check-ins" by CPS services at their homes, who have been known to find ridiculously minor "violations" or "concerns" (like a cluttered living room where kids have been playing -- too messy for CPS).
Poke around a bit and read the kinds of things that can happen. Also, keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of kids are removed by CPS to foster care in the U.S. every year, statistics compiled from CPS show that in somewhere around 1/3 of cases (about 100,000 kids), investigations eventually show that there was no credible threat at all to kids. That's not even covering cases where there was an "apparent" threat that was determined not to be significant enough to warrant removal -- these are thousands and thousands of cases where CPS takes kids and later says, "My bad. Turns out the removal wasn't really necessary." (Actually, of course, they never admit it that in those words. But they basically determine whatever evidence was used to justify removal was incomplete, a misunderstanding, or just a bogus report.)
And let's not even get into the stats on abuse and neglect in foster care, which tends to happen at higher rates than in homes with parents. So CPS is often removing kids from a safe house without investigating thoroughly and putting kids in places where they are more likely to be harmed. (Obviously, CPS also takes action in many, many cases every year where there IS serious abuse, and they should be commended for that -- but tell this to any parent whose child is taken away for no apparent reason.)
Perhaps this is getting a bit off-topic from TFA, but these are related issues. We have a culture that tends to assume any child alone (and by "child," states now often mean kids up to
If we lived with the stuff we had in the 1930s you would not have had the economy boom you experienced in the second half of the 20th century.
There's certainly some truth to this, but it oversimplifies things.
Without that demand, nobody would have had a job and no economic growth would have happened.
But take the premise in TFA seriously for a second. Keynes's prediction should have the average work-week around 20 hours by now. To have our current productivity, we would therefore need twice as many jobs as we currently have. But we were reach full employment long before that, so we would have to have significantly lower productivity and consumption while still having enough jobs to go around.
And of course the objection is -- "But don't people who work 20-hour weeks get paid less?" And the point of TFA is that NO -- they still get paid a living wage. The difference in the Keynes future prediction and what we actually got is that that extra money has been siphoned off to the richest folks, rather than rewarding average workers, who might then have to work less hours to still live comfortably.
(Of course, whether that could actually happen given human nature is a separate issue...)
Today the desire remains, what's lacking is the money to actually do it, and as soon as the money for consumption was gone the economy plummeted.
This is also far too oversimplified. Our economy doesn't just depend on consumption -- it depends on irrational assumptions of continuous and perpetual GROWTH of consumption.
You can't have a large corporation today and just continue making the same stuff every year and getting moderate profits that keep up with inflation. Well, you can, but nobody's going to invest in you, because Wall Street has taught us that speculation in growth is normal. Thus, if you're going to attract investors, you need to promise them an irrational and illogical perpetual growth machine that will always beat inflation in its returns.
The consequences of this logic are profound, because it's simply impossible for businesses to sustain such growth over any extended period. Once market saturation occurs, where else do you go? Well, you start doing what we see big corporations in America doing for the past few decades -- you need to keep up the illusion that profits are going up, but you can't get more revenue due to market saturation, so how do you keep up the GROWTH demand of investors?
First, you have the cost of employees. Those darn Americans and their unions cost too much. So, you send manufacturing jobs offshore. Nowadays with the lower cost of global communication, you send service jobs offshore too. And those effects continue to trickle up the offshore game -- to save money, to make greater profits, to satisfy the investment illusion that perpetual growth is possible.
But then you need more money, 'cause you've already sent all your manufacturing (and JOBS! don't forget that's what we were trying to keep in the US!) to China or whatever. But you've exhausted the revenue increases from offshoring, so you make cheaper products, which will break. You make them in such a way that they can't be repaired. Repair shops (which used to be a significant service elements in most American cities) also go out of business... more jobs lost.
You create "planned obsolescence." You spend more and more money on marketing to convince people that they need the newest gadget every year. That marketing money doesn't go to support middle or lower class workers (JOBS!) -- instead it goes to white-collar advertising agencies and such.
Eventually, you need to start tricking people into spending huge amounts of money on your products -- so, you expand the "razor/razorblades" model to products that cost hundreds of dollars. Yeah, you get a "free" iPhone every few years, but it comes with a commitment to a $100+/month phone plan. People wou
To the point where saying "there is no safe level of alcohol consumption" is misleading to the point of deception.
Agreed. I actually basically said this toward the end of my last post.
Because there is a level of alcohol consumption below which, according to the best evidence, risk of various negative effects increases rather than decreases.
On the whole as a population study, sure. But obviously a double-blind study of alcohol consumption is impossible. And without that, it's hard to separate out the causality here. Alcohol consumption, for example, is highly correlated with social behavior. More social people tend to be in better mental and physical health. People who get older tend to drink less and become less healthy -- the "non-drinkers" in many studies tend to be skewed toward older people, who are more likely to have health problems. There are a number of studies that show when you try to break down people into groups and do more of a "case control" analysis, rather than simply aggregating drinkers and non-drinkers, you actually see many of the correlations lessen significantly or even disappear.
Personally, after looking at many of these studies over the years, I've come to the conclusion -- like you -- that there still is some small but robust correlation. But I'm very suspicious of the causation, since alcohol tends to be tied up so much in culture, social activities, and other lifestyle behaviors, which are also known to have impacts on health.
Ethanol is known to have at least superficial deleterious effects on the human body, even in small doses. And we know the way it is metabolized produces bad things for the body. So, until we have a plausible mechanism by which we think its positive effects work, I think it's premature to start telling people to start drinking if they don't already -- and that's really the important question that comes about with causality.
For years I've been looking for a study on people who START drinking just for "health benefits" but don't otherwise alter their lifestyles significantly. That's what you really need, along with a matched control group. It's not as good as a blind study, but then you'll at least get rid of many of the possibilities for confounding factors.
Repeated studies have shown that alcohol in moderation prolongs life: it reduces the risk of heart disease and strokes. In fact the benefits of alcohol in preventing strokes and heart disease are far clearer than the negatives of drinking.
Well, this is a little misleading. Alcohol is correlated with reduced risks of heart disease and strokes when consumed in moderation.
Is the cause alcohol itself, or is it something that tends to be associated with alcohol consumption, such as less stress, being more relaxed, etc.? This has come up with, for example, studies of pregnant women which seem to show slightly better outcomes (in some studies) for women who drink only a couple drinks per week, compared with women who abstain completely. In some cases, babies seem to do slightly better, achieve certain developmental goals slightly faster, etc. with the occasional drink rather than without one.
But we also know very well that alcohol is bad for developing fetuses. So what gives? Does moderate ethanol in a fetus's system actually help it, despite the fact that we know it basically does bad things for brain development and function, as well as converting into poisonous compounds when metabolized? Should we really advise women who don't normally drink to have an occasional one "just for the baby"??
Or is there a more likely explanation, such as that a pregnant woman who takes an occasional drink when she feels stressed and finds alcohol to be soothing might be overall benefitting the baby by being less stressed? Studies have shown that stress does harm to fetuses too. Pregnant women today are often also given more and more restrictive dietary guidelines, and those who fret too much over everything they eat may actually be doing worse for a developing baby.
Maybe women who are "laid-back" enough not to worry about an occasional glass of wine when pregnant are just less anxiety-prone in general, and THAT is where the benefit comes from?
Perhaps. I don't have the answers.
But the point is that I don't think there's convincing evidence that one should go out and start drinking if you don't like it or don't enjoy it (and some people just enjoy it more than others, just like anything) -- just for some minor cardiovascular benefit. In fact, many health experts who recognize the supposed "benefits" of alcohol also do NOT recommend you just start drinking if you don't already... because they understand the causality issues here.
By the way, I have no problem with drinking, and I think the puritanical "all alcohol is poison" stuff does much more harm than good. There's little reason to worry about people who drink in moderation. But let's be clear what this association between alcohol and health is likely about -- it is just a correlation, and many studies show that it is barely significant (or even not statistically significant at all) when various confounding factors are taken into account.
Control it from your iPhone and it posts the setting of the switch to your Facebook page. :)
Finally, a realistic explanation of the "poke" option on Facebook...
Or maybe ... Heisenballs?
And thus began the worst porn parody ever...
That's right... oooh...aaah... Now... Say my name!
Heisenballs.
You're goddamn right.