If the point is to spread terror, the destroying an aircraft seems to be more effective than blowing up a queue. Not only is the visual of an aircraft crashing to the earth more vivid, but it demonstrates that security itself is ineffective.
Depends on the size of the bomb. Anything that could get through airport security is likely going to be somewhat limited in size. You could have multiple suitcase-size bombs in security at once and effectively blow up an entire airport with several of them. You don't think the "visuals" of that would spread terror?
The empirical evidence is absolutely clear -- if terrorists REALLY wanted to spread terror, they have opportunities EVERYWHERE to do it. And many countries which have actually had a terror problem have seen it: buses blowing up, people blowing up in a major city square, etc. That kind of stuff would be much more effective in spreading terror, because it impacts people's everyday lives... getting on buses or subways or going to work. Most people don't fly on planes everyday, but if they start worrying that going to the mall puts them at risk because people are congregating there, that starts to seriously disrupt everyday lives.
As we saw clearly a few months ago, if you really wanted to spread terror, it's just as effective (if not more so) to do it in an unexpected way -- e.g., rent a big truck and just drive through a crowd on a holiday. The fact that this doesn't happen on a regular basis (despite extremist leaders calling for people to run over people with trucks for nearly a decade -- seriously, look it up) just goes to show how small the number of mentally ill people willing to execute terrorist acts really is.
Actually, the countries were singled out by the Obama administration.
Why do people keep saying this? Trump issued the ban. Trump has told us almost every day for the past year that he's smarter than everyone else, that he's the one "with the facts," that he's got "tremendous" people working for him who are the smartest and greatest, etc.
So why are you (presumably a Trump supporter) so anxious to "pass the buck" and claim this has anything to do with Obama? Surely the man who's smarter than everyone else and has all these "tremendous" people working for him should be able to make changes to a list of countries if all of his superior access to facts warranted a change, right?
(And regardless of what the Obama administration may have said or done about this list of countries, they obviously didn't think a travel ban was necessary, so claiming this is in anyway related to Obama is completely disingenuous. And I say this as someone who thinks Obama's presidency in general was a horrific disappointment, by the way.)
There are, however, travel restrictions that affect incoming flights from certain countries known to harbor large numbers of people who have threatened to kill large numbers of Americans in as spectacular a fashion as they can muster.
Hmm... and yet we don't get countries that actually are KNOWN to harbor terrorists and which HAVE actually been the origin of terrorist events in the U.S. on this banned list. Biggest example: Saudi Arabia, but there are plenty of others known to have large numbers of people who hate the U.S. too.
Oh wait, restricting travel with a place like Saudi Arabia might interfere with business deals and such.... well, we can't have THAT happening. Who cares if some more pesky terrorists get through from there, as long as our business deals are intact? (The true priorities here are very clear.)
Five years worth of OS support? Really? That's totally impractical or very expensive for any non-Linux professional.
Well, you have a point. But I'd note that it was only a few years back that LTS was only 3 years for Ubuntu, and if you really wanted a functional system, you probably should be updating with every 6-month release (which would finally make some things work but inevitably break other things). This is one of the reasons I abandoned Ubuntu several years ago. It's gotten a lot better in the past 5 years or so, and the support for releases has been extended.
Not that this should excuse anything, but this is longer than it used to be.
Another important thing to note, however, is that Linux tends to be more stable across OS versions, so you can often upgrade after 3-5 years to the new OS version and carry most of your old stuff directly with little disruption in interface or problems with incompatibility between old and new software versions. (Of course, as with everything, YMMV.)
But it's NOT like, say, Windows, where you often get stuck learning a completely new interface every few years. Even if the default environment changes from release to release, you can generally still choose among the standard ones.
I am also very sceptical to your claim that "FBI is allowed to distribute child pornography". To what end? Entrapment?
Yes. A quick internet search will clearly show multiple incidents where the FBI has run dozens of child porn websites. Generally, this seems to have happened when they've taken control of an illegal site, and then they keep it running for months to try to catch users, but frankly it wouldn't surprise me at all if this were sometimes expanded to blatant distribution for entrapment purposes.
It brings up all sorts of questions, and I'm really not sure how one can justify it legally. In the U.S., the logic seems to be that the mere act of possessing child pornography is a crime against the victims or against potential future victims (by creating a "market" for it). Unless the FBI could somehow completely control the distribution and limit it ONLY to people it could catch (seems unlikely), keeping child porn sites going for weeks or months seems to be going against the very legal principles the laws are set up under.
Anyhow, this is a well-known practice by the FBI, and there have been a number of stories about it over the past few years (including here on Slashdot).
But is it legal for a city to restrict public roads like that? I think there would be some legal road blocks with that concept(pun intended).
Yes, it is legal for a city to do such things, particularly in the name of public safety. Residential areas are frequently zoned, parcelled, and otherwise designed with an expected traffic volume. Increase that volume significantly with a bunch of frantic rush-hour drivers, and suddenly your school is no longer located on a "safe" street, and hazards are created by pedestrians, frequent driveways, kids playing, etc.
Controlling traffic on streets to try to keep it to its designed volume for safety reasons is no different from prohibiting you from parking near an intersection or next to a fire hydrant or whatever on a "public road," also in the name of safety.
By the way, the actions I mentioned were obviously things done only after "normal" traffic control mechanisms (stop signs, traffic lights, speed zones, etc.) failed to decrease traffic volume.
Are the roads paid for by public taxes? They're public roads.
Well, for one, commuters frequently are cutting through roads which aren't in their own community. So, unless it's a state road or something, they may not be paying taxes for these roads.
Second, neighborhoods are often planned and zoned based on assumed traffic patterns. For example, they may choose to put a school or tight residential areas farther away from heavy traffic commuter highways -- for safety reasons. If you suddenly start routing rush-hour traffic through there, it can create hazards with pedestrians, driveways, kids playing, etc.
The problem isn't new, though -- and many towns and cities even have policies on the books to deal with it. The difference is that in years past traffic patterns would change over years or decades, whereas now they can be altered quite suddenly with a map app's algorithm. Long before stuff like Waze, the city I used to live in had a series of progressive restrictions it would make on streets that exceeded their designed traffic load for the zoning, etc.
They'd put in more one-way streets to make it more difficult to navigate the area without a lot of turns, then introduce things like raised crossings to slow people down (and help point out places where pedestrians might be very common), eventually they'd covert some streets to cul-de-sacs, and in a worst case scenario might even put a mid-block barrier to stop traffic going through entirely.
These weren't actions undertaken by citizens -- this was official stuff in the municipal code of the city, authorized by the city's governing council, elected by the city's taxpayers who paid for the city's road maintenance. If you're a commuter who doesn't like those policies... drive on somebody else's "public roads."
Hasn't elinks been abandoned? The last unstable update was 5 years ago, and the last stable version was 3 years before that. Out of curiosity, I just checked the website and almost all the links to user forums, dev forums, etc. are dead. Lynx and Links (the latter having some features of elinks) are at least actively maintained.
Except that the filtration and *chlorination* systems are often NOT up to par, certainly not in a manner that will kill, well, shit, cholera, skin disease, etc.
If I don't smell chlorine in the air, i don't get in the pool.
If I don't both feel and taste the hints of chlorine in the pool, i get out.
What's hilarious about this comment is how utter ignorance actually results in the OPPOSITE behavior of what you desire. If you smell chlorine and the water stings your eyes, etc., it's chemical proof that (1) the pool is likely not be being treated correctly and/or (2) the pool has elevated concentrations of urine, sweat, and other bodily junk -- which produce the chemical byproducts that you smell. That's NOT the chlorine itself -- it's a sign NOT to go into the water if you're fearful of those things.
If the pool "stinks of chlorine," it's likely much more full of urine.
but is it realistic to imagine Bay area tech workers spending their weekends baking bread, peeling potatoes, cleaning resulting dishes and doing whatever else it takes to minimize food costs?
As others have said, there are "no knead" bread recipes which are well-known which literally take a couple minutes of measuring ingredients and stirring. With some recipes, you can even store the resulting dough in the fridge, cut off a piece for a weekday dinner, take 30 seconds to shape let sit on the counter for an hour, and bake for fresh bread any day of the week. Bread is one of those things that CAN take hours of attention if you want, but it can also be done with minimal time and attention.
Peeling potatoes? First, as someone else said, just leave the skin on. And don't these people with disposable incomes to get takeout every day have dishwashers?
There are lots of ways to make cooking and food prep more efficient, and plenty of books that can tell you how. The simplest thing to do for an exceptionally busy person is to learn several slow-cooker recipes. Many of these things can literally be dumped into a slow-cooker on the weekend in a matter of a few minutes, and then 8 hours later, you have a complete dish that can be frozen in portions for later use. Near instant "TV dinner," and generally for a tiny fraction of the cost. Do a different dish in bulk every weekend, and pretty soon you have a freezer of dinner options for the weekdays.
But that's for the person who literally has no time on weekdays. If you even have 10-15 minutes for prep, you can do a lot more variety and interesting (and fresher) stuff once you know how to be efficient with your time. It can often be faster than running out to the local take-out joint if you know what you're doing.
Even in the Bay area, I can feed an individual human pretty decently for under $100/month
You can feed a person for that much. "Decently"? I would dispute that. They aren't going to starve if that's what you are saying but it won't be an ideal sort of diet.
Depends on what you mean by "ideal sort of diet." Will it have a lot of variety? Perhaps not. For example, a lot of beans, lentils, etc. for protein instead of meats. A lot of it is also how much prep you're willing to do (usually necessary if you want more variety -- you can still do it cheap and balanced if you just want to dump a bunch of lentils in slow cookers or whatever).
Anyhow, it's certainly possible to eat a nutritious diet with a budget like that. You just need to know a little about what you're doing.
Oh, and by the way, I want to be clear I'm not some "natural foods" nutter, nor do I have some sort of militant belief in avoiding anything "processed" because of some mysterious "chemicals" or whatever. I simply found over the years that I can make foods a lot better at home than most stuff I can buy that's pre-packaged. We didn't set out to make our kid this way. He just happened to be born into a household that just didn't buy a lot of stuff from the junk food aisles... and I think it significantly affected his default assumptions about food.
Let's have a focus group of 5 years old and see if they prefer Doritos or fresh halibut.
What culture were the 5-year-olds raised in? What foods were they exposed to? Seriously: food preferences and cultural preferences start developing at a much younger age.
Even foods "all kids love" may not really be so. My son hated sweets until he was 3 years old. HATED them. We gave him a piece of his first birthday cake, and he spit it out and literally scraped the remainder off of his tongue with his hands. We never tended to have sweets in the house, so he was never exposed to anything like that before. I think he had the same reaction I do now to regular Coke -- it's so sickeningly sweet that I'm repulsed by it. It's positively unnatural.
My kid instead barely experienced refined carbs probably for the first couple years of his life. I baked at home for him the only bread he consumed. We weren't trying to "hide" sweets from him -- in fact, we offered them to him quite a few times. Inevitably, he'd take a small bite of the cookie or whatever and then put it down. We didn't eat a lot of the stuff either, so it didn't matter to us. One thing his mother really likes though is ice cream, so she kept trying to introduce that, and he'd spit it out.
His favorite foods when he was 2 included things like sauted bitter greens and eating beans basically right out of a can. Oh yeah, and bacon. And just about any kind of meat. But sweets? Absolutely not. Any kind of "chip"? Once he was old enough, we offered, and he hated them. It wasn't until he was 6 or so that he actually started to be interested in things like potato chips, but Doritos would still be summarily rejected.
He simply grew up without a lot of processed foods in the house, so they were unfamiliar and weird to him -- often with extreme and bizarre flavors, so he rejected them.
So weren't we shocked when for his 3rd birthday party he requested cupcakes! Huh? The kid who for years rejected every sweet thing we offered for years? Turns out that unbeknownst to us, his new daycare facility (the first time he had been in regular daycare) served cupcakes to all the kids as a treat on every kid's birthday. So he came to associate cupcakes with celebration, and that was finally enough to overcome his revulsion of things that were too sweet. It was the ASSOCIATION of sweets that made them appealing, not the flavor by itself. (Note that he loved stuff like fruits since he was a baby... it was only the stuff that was a lot sweeter like candy and cookies and cakes that he rejected.)
I'm sure not all kids would be like this, even if they weren't exposed to as many processed foods at a young age. But keep in mind that it's NOT flavor alone that makes processed foods appealing -- it's what they do to your body. They are cheap easy calories, often packaged conveniently with little or no preparation, and they cause metabolic reactions that often lead to overeating (especially stuff like Doritos, which fool your body with flavors that mimic savory stuff but only provide cheap carbs and fats, which leads your body to say, almost literally, "Where's the beef?" and thus encourage more eating....).
If you don't get far enough with processed foods to experience those reactions, the taste alone may not be enough to hook you. Try spending a few months away from the "junk food aisles" and learn to cook things for yourself, and see how much you really miss. Sure, there are a few specific cravings I still may get for the junk food stuff, but mostly I now find the flavors less significantly appealing than "real food."
Farming hardware - tractors, harvesters, etc - has traditionally been *very* reliable and long-lived. In other words, what you might call "overbuilt". They have a hard time comprehending why their computers don't last longer than 3-4 years. I have to try to explain modern economics to them.
Is there perhaps a larger moral to be learned from this? Is there something about farm equipment -- or FARMERS -- that's different?
Just a thought, but farming is one job that actually requires long-term financial planning. I've known a surprising number of people who appear to live "paycheck-to-paycheck." Even smart people with advanced degrees -- some of them with advanced math skills. But they simply can't manage money enough to not spend basically everything that's in their bank account before the next paycheck comes in.
And our modern systems of credit make this possible. Decades ago, loans were rare; a large percentage of people saved up even for big purchases (cars, etc.) rather than taking out credit. But today everything is split up into convenient monthly chunks, spread out over a pay period or two.
Farmers can't plan like that. They plant stuff one season and won't see profit until the end of the year. And droughts and pests and unusual hot/cold spells occur, and this year's crops don't live up. So, as a farmer, you MUST have to still think in terms of saving for "hard times" and in a multi-year budget span, or you'll likely go backrupt in just a few years. (Admittedly, this is something I heard a couple decades ago from old farmers; I don't know what the business is like these days where small family-owned farms have become such a rarity.)
So -- coming back to the parent's example: is it coincidence that farming equipment has maintained standards for durability as farmers have to plan for decades of expenses to justify a purchase for a large piece of equipment? While meanwhile most of American society happily accepts lower prices in exchange for junk products with shorter lifespans? -- the same people who carry balances on credit cards with ridiculous interest rates?
The unfortunate trend is that even the old "reliable" manufacturers of things like appliances seem to have bought into the "planned obsolesence" ideology, so even if you parents had an appliance that lasted for 20, 30, or even 40+ years, it may be likely that the same brand product will only last 5 years for you... even if they are still charging a premium price for their "brand reputation." I personally would happily pay a much higher cost for something if I know it's worth it in terms of durability in the long-run, but I find it harder and harder to find product lines that I trust enough to take a chance on the higher expense.
Just wondering -- is Trump responsible for the ever more invasive ads here? Because it's over the top now. Beyond the pale.
I started my migration to SoylentNews about 6 months ago. I've still be checking in here periodically, but if these ads don't stop, I'm DONE with Slashdot. I know everyone says that, but the ads now are simply unacceptable.
(And yeah, I can and do run adblockers, but I sometimes view the site without them... this is terrible.)
When I read the reports I *never* got the idea that they were recommending refined flours, sugar, or other similar sources of sugar or starch. The closest I can come is a recommendation for baked potatoes...which is still sort of valid, though now we (or at least I) worry more about the starch.
Here's a story from Luise Light, who was a leading nutritionist at the USDA when the "Food Pyramid" was originally adopted. After the nutritionists submitted their recommended guidelines to the Secretary of Agriculture, here's what happened:
When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. For instance, the Ag Secretaryâ(TM)s office altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed itâ(TM)d hurt sales of full-fat products; it also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers happy. The meat lobby got the final word on the color of the saturated fat/cholesterol guideline which was changed from red to purple because meat producers worried that using red to signify âoebadâ fat would be linked to red meat in consumersâ(TM) minds.
Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings (changed to 5-7 servings a couple of years later because an anti-cancer campaign by another government agency, the National Cancer Institute, forced the USDA to adopt the higher standard). Our recommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed to a whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed baked goods made with white flour â" including crackers, sweets and other low-nutrient foods laden with sugars and fats â" at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they be eaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the âoerevisedâ Food Guide, they were now made part of the Pyramidâ(TM)s base.
Light's account of this has appeared elsewhere in lots of sources. Although we probably can't verify every one of her personal memories, it seems clear that the nutritional guidelines WERE deliberately altered to emphasize processed foods, including starches and sugars... granted, part of the alternations weren't really about encouragement, but rather removing warnings against them. But still -- it's pretty much "smoking gun" evidence against what you said.
(BTW -- apologies for the all the crappy characters showing up. I used to edit stuff I pasted in to conform to Slashdot's archaic encoding standards... but since they are now barraging me with invasive ads, I can't be bothered to respect this site anymore and will likely be leaving permanently anyway...)
You apparently feel no blame at all should fall on anyone but Trump, even though Trump didn't come into the picture until recently and the shooter has been falling for years. Yet you twist the truth to blame Trump for a tragedy much longer in the making - sick man, you are as sick as the shooter or heading that way.
And yet, from your previous post, you "apparently feel no blame at all should fall on anyone but Obama." I quote:
What triggers this shooting was a vet who couldn't get assistance from the VA [wibw.com]. After eight years, that is on Obama - as is Obama and supporters stirring racial tension and giving focus to a violent angry drunk man.
Look -- I feel like I have to say this on the internet every other day now, but events can have multiple causes. They certainly always have various factors that have to be in place for them to come to pass.
I frankly don't know this man. I haven't researched his story in detail. And I certainly don't feel that *I* have any business pontificating on the internet about what "triggered" this event.
In legal terms, this is generally known as the "proximate cause," something more immediate in the chain of causality. For all I know, this guy could have been ultimately set off because somebody gave him the green Jell-O instead of the red Jell-O in the lunchline that day.
Anyhow, YES, if this guy was denied proper care from the VA because of some shortfalls under Obama, SOME of the causality may be blamed on Obama (or, probably more likely, on various underlings who made poor decisions too).
On the other hand, Donald Trump has spent nearly the past 2 years creating a climate of xenophobia and hatred against immigrants in his rhetoric. GP wants to blame this entirely on Trump, but I'm sure that's not the case. On the other hand, you seem to want to shift the blame entirely AWAY from Trump and focus on a potentially more remote cause. (And note -- even if this guy was denied VA care, do you have specific proof that it was an Obama policy that denied him that care? Did Barack Obama personally reject a request from him for care? Or was this part of a chain of causality that actually makes more sense to blame someone who made poor decisions at a lower level?)
I really don't know. But I do know that Trump tries to get attention every day. He seems to thrive on "speaking" (tweeting) directly to the "people." If some of his anti-immigration rhetoric was heard by this guy, could it have had some significant impact?Maybe, as the news story you cite says, "this wasn't who he normally was," but a combination of mental problems AND pervasive news stories on immigrants as enemies in the conservative media... maybe that was something?
Again, I certainly don't have all the facts. But can we all just take a step back here and CALM THE [BLEEP] DOWN!?! Stop trying to find the one person to blame for anything. As I mentioned above, Obama was not the single person in charge of every decision at the VA. And Trump is certainly has been created by plenty of other supporters egging him on and encouraging him to continue his rhetoric.
There's lots of blame to go around. But can we all just acknowledge that -- regardless of the proximate causality chain here -- the current climate of xenophobia is likely to result in increased violence against immigrants overall??
> What error in judgement did they make that makes them liable?
That's not the legal, or fair, standard. The results of my actions are the results, whether I made an error in judgement or just got unlucky.
Actually, you probably will want to read up on tort law, specifically standards for negligence. In the most detailed legal analysis, there are a number of elements to proving negligence. Along the line, you must establish that a defendant had a "duty" to act in a certain way and then "breached" that duty in some way. But you also not only need to prove that the defendant's actions caused something, but that they were a direct and legally relevant cause of the harm. Events always have multiple causes -- a lot of tort law is about sorting out which causes are legally relevant and which aren't.
Example: if you run over a pedestrian because you were drinking a soda and not paying attention to the road, a plaintiff generally can't bring a successful action against the shop that sold you the soda. Yes, the fact that you were distracted due to the soda was a cause of the accident, but it wasn't a legally relevant cause, because you were the one driving poorly, and your choice of distraction isn't the fault of the soda shop.
On the other hand, if you run over a pedestrian because you were drinking a bottle of whiskey, and you had bought that bottle after walking into a liquor store noticeably drunk, and surveillance footage has you on camera saying, "Yes, I'm gonna drink this and I'm gonna be drivin' all over town tonight -- I'd do give a crap if I hit someone..." -- well, in that case, the pedestrian who was struck might actually have a case to sue the liquor store, because they sold a dangerous item to someone already in a state unable to handle it and someone declaring he was going to use it improperly.
We could just as easily create scenarios with your "log in the road" example too where one person bears primary legal responsibility, or another party, or both.
The problem with accidents and driving is that, unlike most other tort cases, the pervasive and required "insurance" has led to default assumptions about where liability must lie in almost all scenarios. Thus, even in cases where a provable manufacturer defect was the primary cause of a crash, you'll frequently still see insurance companies of the drivers arguing over having to pay damages too. That's just not always the case in most other legal scenarios -- in some cases, the product manufacturer may be primarily liable and a suit against the user could NOT be successful (and would even be summarily dismissed by a court) depending on the assumptions of "normal" product use and what happened.
According to your legal theory of negligence, consumers in fact could NEVER sue product manufacturers, since the "results of your action are the results"... and you're apparently solely responsible for them, even if the product blows up unexpectedly on you -- it was your fault for using it in the first place.
Maybe such a thing will be sold some day. Right now, cruise control amd automatic braking aren't anywhere near what you've described.
Then the cars aren't actually "self-driving." Until a car has the ability to handle ALL reasonably foreseeable road conditions as well as (or better than) a human driver, it should not be sold as a "self-driving car." And note that "reasonably foreseeable" has to do with the legal issue again. Just like the soda shop can't reasonably foresee that you'd hold a soda cup up in front of your face for a full 10 seconds while driving before plowing into a pedestrian, there are likely going to be scenarios where people try to operate "self-driving cars" in situations that a car manufacturer might never consider. But there will also be plenty of conditions it WILL consider "reasonable," and if the car causes an accident in those circumstances, they sh
If most people swap jobs every few years, does it really make sense for employers to be responsible for their retirement savings?
I have to agree with you that the whole "mandatory retirement contribution" thing is pretty much just an annoyance for all concerned today. I understand the rationale for it (because most people are incapable of long-term planning), but it's a terrible idea for people who are in jobs for a short term and need to deal with all sorts of different retirement accounts spread out in various systems.
When I was younger, I took a few short-term jobs and once worked as a state employee for a couple years. In all of these I was required to make mandatory "contributions" out of my pay toward retirement accounts. Well, with the state employee system, I was told when I left that I didn't have enough years to qualify for a pension, so unless I returned to the system, my account would accrue interest for 5 years, after which it would become dormant. I could withdraw the money and put it in an IRA or something at any time, but by doing so, I would forfeit the years of experience I had accrued in the system.
Anyhow, at first I wanted to keep options open, so I didn't withdraw immediately. And then the interest rates the account was paying was pretty good compared to how things were going in the market at the time, so I figured I'd just withdraw after the 5 years. Well, after 5 years, I contacted them, and the money was GONE. Turns out they changed the policy since I was employed, and rather making accounts just dormant after 5 years, you were summarily deleted from the system, and all of your retirement money was forfeited and returned to the state pension pool.
Next, I had a very short-term gig (actually indirectly for a different state government) and was again required to contribute mandatory retirement. In this case, it was only a few hundred dollars, but they didn't really notify me of all the details, so I wasn't even aware of this balance or where it went. A couple years later, I had moved, but they decided to send my money to some 3rd-party account management service, which charged a $15/month fee to hold my money. I wasn't aware of any of this (because I had moved and wasn't even really aware that I was owed benefits) until the 3rd-party company finally located me and sent me a statement that this account was being closed, since my balance had fallen to $12 (all the rest had gone to fees), and they could no longer maintain it... so they literally sent me a check for $12 after taking all the rest of my retirement money.
I'm currently fighting to get another small amount out of such a 3rd-party company because of other retirement benefits I wasn't even made aware of for a short-term contractual position nearly a decade ago.
Cumulatively, all of the money I've lost isn't that much compared to my main retirement savings, but it's preposterous that people all the time are making forced contributions to retirement accounts for short-term employment -- sometimes where they're not even told clearly that they even are being given those benefits other than on an unclear line on a paystub -- and then having to jump through hoops to track down or keep that money, and then deal with the hassle of moving it to other accounts.
This is easily mitigated these days: don't have a family. Now you only have to worry about making enough money for yourself, and saving enough for yourself on days you don't have any work.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic. But if you're serious -- Even assuming you can personally save enough money to avoid begging on the street, you do realize that most people in the world have families whether they like it or not?? E.g., Parents, who might get ill and can't take care of themselves on their own, or even siblings who might end up out of work or whatever. Just because you don't have kids to feed doesn't mean you won't end up with any family obligations to help support. Such situations happen more commonly than you might think, and it can be a significant strain on people who have low incomes.
The "gig" economy is a bullshit attempt to glamorize and hide the real issue, which is a population outpacing the availability stable employment that provides necessary benefits.
In some cases, this is being driven by population vs. employment. But in many cases, simple greed is a major contributing factor. It's so much cheaper to operate a business with a bunch of part-time workers. Many businesses would prefer it, if they could get away with it.
Instability should never be viewed as a good thing.
Yeah, unfortunately most folks in the past couple generations never had to see what the "gig" economies of the past were actually like. Back when you'd go to your local town square or down to the docks or whatever, and stand in line waiting for some potential employer to choose you for work FOR THE DAY. And then you'd break your back doing labor for the day, make enough money to feed your kids, and you'd be off again begging for work the next morning. If you hurt your back or got sick or whatever, you and your family were screwed. End of story.
This was what employment was like for LOTS of people for millennia. Skilled workers like craftsmen could sometimes get more stable jobs, because their skills increased the productivity of the business and employers recognized that.
But for laborer jobs or other things you could likely be trained to do in an hour or two? Not so much. And that's what many modern "gig economy" employers are exploiting again -- can you drive a car? Fine: you're a part-time Uber driver. Be sure to show up on time and be pleasant enough to keep the high ratings, or you won't have a job tomorrow.
Lots of people today criticize unions (sometimes rightly) for corruption, etc. But what unions fought so hard for for a century or so was to finally get modern civilization out of that and recognize that even laborers and unskilled workers deserve to be treated with dignity in their jobs, rather than discarded at the end of the day.
But no more -- I'm frankly shocked at how many younger folks seem brainwashed by all the hooplah over the supposed benefits of the "gig economy." People who know anything about history, on the other hand, see this as exactly what it is: an opportunity for businesses to return to a model where they make greater profits and don't have any obligations to their workers beyond today.
The problem is that someone (I think intentionally) co-opted "fake news" to mean "biased reporting"- that's not originally what it meant at all and a lot of people are still using the term to mean something else. "Fake news" originally (as in a couple of months ago) meant completely fabricated stories.
You gotta understand free expression of language these days -- I guess they're just "free wielding" the term.
(Or, at least that's what I'm guessing these two words from TFS might mean when put in sequence. But from the summary, I still can't understand exactly what Zuckerberg's note was "wielding." Didn't know Slashdot was into actually spawning NEW eggcorns.)
Well, as other posts have already replied to you, the strict distinction you're trying to make here doesn't really hold in English. Both accidentally and inadvertently can easily apply to something that was trying to be avoided.
But I sense a problem with the headline too, and I think the real issue is -- why are the POTTERS mentioned at all? There's a kind of implication with the way the headline is worded that the potters "recorded" information, except they had no concept of what such recording might amount to or what that information might be. Really, the potters had no intentionality here at all.
This is even worse in the original NPR headline, which is "Iron Age Potters CAREFULLY Recorded Earth's Magnetic Field -- By Accident." That's more problematic from an English usage standpoint, because "carefully" implies they did something with care... specifically they "recorded" with care. But they didn't know they were recording anything, so how could they do it with care?
The more clear way to word all of this would of course be to take the potters out of it completely, since they weren't "recording" anything -- intentionally or unintentionally. They were making pottery. A better headline might just be "Strength of Earth's Magnetic Field Recorded in Structure of Iron Age Pottery" or something. Even better, leave "record" out of it entirely, since that usually implies intentionally preserving information to begin with -- maybe "Historical Variance in Earth's Magnetic Field Strength Measured Using Iron Age Pottery" or something.
Those that are quite horrifying. I'm thinking call center jobs or any such service level position. Ones where you are not measured by how well you resolve the customer's issue but how many calls you get through and how quickly you do it.
Yeah, exactly. And this is NOTHING new. A couple of decades I took a summer job in a collections department. It was a horrid job, but it paid reasonably well for a summer position. Our productivity was measured almost solely in the number of accounts we handled and the amount of money we brought in through collections. Whether we actually handled the accounts "well" wasn't really a factor (which led to gross inefficiencies and hoards of "problem accounts" that simply went more and more delinquent as they were passed off because nobody wanted to take the time to deal with them). I managed to figure out ways to make my own account handling more efficient, so I actually processed significantly more accounts than anyone else in the office.
Anyhow, after I had been there for a couple months, they decided we still weren't "efficient" enough and they weren't tracking us enough. (We spent more time filing in stupid useless spreadsheets tracking all the calls we did so that someone in management could monitor our "productivity" than we frequently did making calls.)
And so they instituted a policy that we had to "log in" to our phones while we were at our desks, and log out whenever we were on break or at lunch or whatever.
About two weeks after this policy started, one day I ended up skipping lunch because I was dealing with a particularly problematic account. But then I took a longer afternoon break to make up for it and was out for 18 or 19 minutes instead of 10 minutes -- I figured this wouldn't be a problem, since I had given up my 30-minute lunch break and effectively worked "for free" for 20 extra minutes that day.
The next day, I get called over to my boss's desk, where she had been instructed by company-wide memo to reprimand me, because my name ended up at the top of some list of people who took extra-long breaks. My boss was apologetic, since she knew I was more productive than anyone else in the department, but this is what management were wasting their time doing by sorting some spreadsheet column or whatever and looking only at how long somebody was out for a single break.
Anyhow, with only a few weeks in the summer left, I simply said, "Sorry, these are unacceptable working conditions -- I'll pack up my things and leave," and simply left the job on the spot. (There had been other similar crap leading up to this too.) Only time in my life that I did that, but I think it was entirely justified. Last I heard, the entire collections division ended up shut down and outsourced a few months later, probably because workers were spending twice as much time filling out spreadsheets and logging into phones to prove how "productive" they were rather than actually doing work. Idiots.
Both items were passed off as "news" by seemingly legitimate news organizations. Both items are fake news - literally fake.
You seem to not understand the difference between "fake" and "incorrect/erroneous" If you hand a bouncer a "fake ID" at a bar, it doesn't mean you accidentally handed them someone else's ID or maybe accidentally handed credentials that were expired or otherwise unacceptable to get into a bar. A "fake ID" implies that you KNOWINGLY manufactured a false ID (or had someone do it for you) with intent to pass it off as real.
Do you have evidence that the reporters in question actually INTENTIONALLY passed along false information? If not, they were not "fake news" according to the standard definition of the English word "fake."
And they offered corrections. Here's the detailed account from Time about the MLK bust. The reporter corrected his tweets as soon as he had recognized an error. That's NOT what actual "fake news" sites do -- because fake news sites KNOW their information is false when they MAKE IT UP, so they don't offer corrections.
As for the other incident, it's yet another example of poor reporting, but only because the Olympian gave an interview that IMPLIED a connection with Trump's immigration policies and only FOUR DAYS LATER tweeted that actually the incident occurred in December. Again, we should be critical for poor reporting here that then made an EXPLICIT connection with Trump, it should have fact-checked when the event actually occurred, but the Olympian in question was vague in her original interview and implied it had happened recently.
So, who exactly is at fault here? The Olympian was expressing concern over current immigration policies and made a vague reference to detention, which was only later clarified. Was she part of some massive media "conspiracy" to hide the truth until four days later? Or did she just innocently make reference in an interview to an unpleasant experience that occurred to her in immigration recently -- and some media articles misinterpreted her vague timeline?
I'm NOT going to excuse those media reporters who implied a Trump connection -- they made a serious journalistic error by not doing appropriate fact-checking. We should condemn their actions and poor journalism.
But once more detailed information became available, they corrected their stories -- once again, that's NOT the practice of "fake news."
There are various bad journalistic practices in the world. And we should condemn them, and even fire journalists sometimes for making truly egregious errors or showing unreasonable bias or whatever. BUT UNINTENTIONAL ERRORS ARE NOT "FAKE NEWS." Fake news is a separate problem -- and a serious one that we ignore by misusing the English word "fake" or redefining it to dilute its meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
If the point is to spread terror, the destroying an aircraft seems to be more effective than blowing up a queue. Not only is the visual of an aircraft crashing to the earth more vivid, but it demonstrates that security itself is ineffective.
Depends on the size of the bomb. Anything that could get through airport security is likely going to be somewhat limited in size. You could have multiple suitcase-size bombs in security at once and effectively blow up an entire airport with several of them. You don't think the "visuals" of that would spread terror?
The empirical evidence is absolutely clear -- if terrorists REALLY wanted to spread terror, they have opportunities EVERYWHERE to do it. And many countries which have actually had a terror problem have seen it: buses blowing up, people blowing up in a major city square, etc. That kind of stuff would be much more effective in spreading terror, because it impacts people's everyday lives... getting on buses or subways or going to work. Most people don't fly on planes everyday, but if they start worrying that going to the mall puts them at risk because people are congregating there, that starts to seriously disrupt everyday lives.
As we saw clearly a few months ago, if you really wanted to spread terror, it's just as effective (if not more so) to do it in an unexpected way -- e.g., rent a big truck and just drive through a crowd on a holiday. The fact that this doesn't happen on a regular basis (despite extremist leaders calling for people to run over people with trucks for nearly a decade -- seriously, look it up) just goes to show how small the number of mentally ill people willing to execute terrorist acts really is.
Actually, the countries were singled out by the Obama administration.
Why do people keep saying this? Trump issued the ban. Trump has told us almost every day for the past year that he's smarter than everyone else, that he's the one "with the facts," that he's got "tremendous" people working for him who are the smartest and greatest, etc.
So why are you (presumably a Trump supporter) so anxious to "pass the buck" and claim this has anything to do with Obama? Surely the man who's smarter than everyone else and has all these "tremendous" people working for him should be able to make changes to a list of countries if all of his superior access to facts warranted a change, right?
(And regardless of what the Obama administration may have said or done about this list of countries, they obviously didn't think a travel ban was necessary, so claiming this is in anyway related to Obama is completely disingenuous. And I say this as someone who thinks Obama's presidency in general was a horrific disappointment, by the way.)
There are, however, travel restrictions that affect incoming flights from certain countries known to harbor large numbers of people who have threatened to kill large numbers of Americans in as spectacular a fashion as they can muster.
Hmm... and yet we don't get countries that actually are KNOWN to harbor terrorists and which HAVE actually been the origin of terrorist events in the U.S. on this banned list. Biggest example: Saudi Arabia, but there are plenty of others known to have large numbers of people who hate the U.S. too.
Oh wait, restricting travel with a place like Saudi Arabia might interfere with business deals and such.... well, we can't have THAT happening. Who cares if some more pesky terrorists get through from there, as long as our business deals are intact? (The true priorities here are very clear.)
Five years worth of OS support? Really? That's totally impractical or very expensive for any non-Linux professional.
Well, you have a point. But I'd note that it was only a few years back that LTS was only 3 years for Ubuntu, and if you really wanted a functional system, you probably should be updating with every 6-month release (which would finally make some things work but inevitably break other things). This is one of the reasons I abandoned Ubuntu several years ago. It's gotten a lot better in the past 5 years or so, and the support for releases has been extended.
Not that this should excuse anything, but this is longer than it used to be.
Another important thing to note, however, is that Linux tends to be more stable across OS versions, so you can often upgrade after 3-5 years to the new OS version and carry most of your old stuff directly with little disruption in interface or problems with incompatibility between old and new software versions. (Of course, as with everything, YMMV.)
But it's NOT like, say, Windows, where you often get stuck learning a completely new interface every few years. Even if the default environment changes from release to release, you can generally still choose among the standard ones.
I am also very sceptical to your claim that "FBI is allowed to distribute child pornography". To what end? Entrapment?
Yes. A quick internet search will clearly show multiple incidents where the FBI has run dozens of child porn websites. Generally, this seems to have happened when they've taken control of an illegal site, and then they keep it running for months to try to catch users, but frankly it wouldn't surprise me at all if this were sometimes expanded to blatant distribution for entrapment purposes.
It brings up all sorts of questions, and I'm really not sure how one can justify it legally. In the U.S., the logic seems to be that the mere act of possessing child pornography is a crime against the victims or against potential future victims (by creating a "market" for it). Unless the FBI could somehow completely control the distribution and limit it ONLY to people it could catch (seems unlikely), keeping child porn sites going for weeks or months seems to be going against the very legal principles the laws are set up under.
Anyhow, this is a well-known practice by the FBI, and there have been a number of stories about it over the past few years (including here on Slashdot).
But is it legal for a city to restrict public roads like that? I think there would be some legal road blocks with that concept(pun intended).
Yes, it is legal for a city to do such things, particularly in the name of public safety. Residential areas are frequently zoned, parcelled, and otherwise designed with an expected traffic volume. Increase that volume significantly with a bunch of frantic rush-hour drivers, and suddenly your school is no longer located on a "safe" street, and hazards are created by pedestrians, frequent driveways, kids playing, etc.
Controlling traffic on streets to try to keep it to its designed volume for safety reasons is no different from prohibiting you from parking near an intersection or next to a fire hydrant or whatever on a "public road," also in the name of safety.
By the way, the actions I mentioned were obviously things done only after "normal" traffic control mechanisms (stop signs, traffic lights, speed zones, etc.) failed to decrease traffic volume.
Are the roads paid for by public taxes? They're public roads.
Well, for one, commuters frequently are cutting through roads which aren't in their own community. So, unless it's a state road or something, they may not be paying taxes for these roads.
Second, neighborhoods are often planned and zoned based on assumed traffic patterns. For example, they may choose to put a school or tight residential areas farther away from heavy traffic commuter highways -- for safety reasons. If you suddenly start routing rush-hour traffic through there, it can create hazards with pedestrians, driveways, kids playing, etc.
The problem isn't new, though -- and many towns and cities even have policies on the books to deal with it. The difference is that in years past traffic patterns would change over years or decades, whereas now they can be altered quite suddenly with a map app's algorithm. Long before stuff like Waze, the city I used to live in had a series of progressive restrictions it would make on streets that exceeded their designed traffic load for the zoning, etc.
They'd put in more one-way streets to make it more difficult to navigate the area without a lot of turns, then introduce things like raised crossings to slow people down (and help point out places where pedestrians might be very common), eventually they'd covert some streets to cul-de-sacs, and in a worst case scenario might even put a mid-block barrier to stop traffic going through entirely.
These weren't actions undertaken by citizens -- this was official stuff in the municipal code of the city, authorized by the city's governing council, elected by the city's taxpayers who paid for the city's road maintenance. If you're a commuter who doesn't like those policies... drive on somebody else's "public roads."
Hasn't elinks been abandoned? The last unstable update was 5 years ago, and the last stable version was 3 years before that. Out of curiosity, I just checked the website and almost all the links to user forums, dev forums, etc. are dead. Lynx and Links (the latter having some features of elinks) are at least actively maintained.
Except that the filtration and *chlorination* systems are often NOT up to par, certainly not in a manner that will kill, well, shit, cholera, skin disease, etc.
If I don't smell chlorine in the air, i don't get in the pool.
If I don't both feel and taste the hints of chlorine in the pool, i get out.
What's hilarious about this comment is how utter ignorance actually results in the OPPOSITE behavior of what you desire. If you smell chlorine and the water stings your eyes, etc., it's chemical proof that (1) the pool is likely not be being treated correctly and/or (2) the pool has elevated concentrations of urine, sweat, and other bodily junk -- which produce the chemical byproducts that you smell. That's NOT the chlorine itself -- it's a sign NOT to go into the water if you're fearful of those things.
If the pool "stinks of chlorine," it's likely much more full of urine.
but is it realistic to imagine Bay area tech workers spending their weekends baking bread, peeling potatoes, cleaning resulting dishes and doing whatever else it takes to minimize food costs?
As others have said, there are "no knead" bread recipes which are well-known which literally take a couple minutes of measuring ingredients and stirring. With some recipes, you can even store the resulting dough in the fridge, cut off a piece for a weekday dinner, take 30 seconds to shape let sit on the counter for an hour, and bake for fresh bread any day of the week. Bread is one of those things that CAN take hours of attention if you want, but it can also be done with minimal time and attention.
Peeling potatoes? First, as someone else said, just leave the skin on. And don't these people with disposable incomes to get takeout every day have dishwashers?
There are lots of ways to make cooking and food prep more efficient, and plenty of books that can tell you how. The simplest thing to do for an exceptionally busy person is to learn several slow-cooker recipes. Many of these things can literally be dumped into a slow-cooker on the weekend in a matter of a few minutes, and then 8 hours later, you have a complete dish that can be frozen in portions for later use. Near instant "TV dinner," and generally for a tiny fraction of the cost. Do a different dish in bulk every weekend, and pretty soon you have a freezer of dinner options for the weekdays.
But that's for the person who literally has no time on weekdays. If you even have 10-15 minutes for prep, you can do a lot more variety and interesting (and fresher) stuff once you know how to be efficient with your time. It can often be faster than running out to the local take-out joint if you know what you're doing.
Even in the Bay area, I can feed an individual human pretty decently for under $100/month
You can feed a person for that much. "Decently"? I would dispute that. They aren't going to starve if that's what you are saying but it won't be an ideal sort of diet.
Depends on what you mean by "ideal sort of diet." Will it have a lot of variety? Perhaps not. For example, a lot of beans, lentils, etc. for protein instead of meats. A lot of it is also how much prep you're willing to do (usually necessary if you want more variety -- you can still do it cheap and balanced if you just want to dump a bunch of lentils in slow cookers or whatever).
Anyhow, it's certainly possible to eat a nutritious diet with a budget like that. You just need to know a little about what you're doing.
Oh, and by the way, I want to be clear I'm not some "natural foods" nutter, nor do I have some sort of militant belief in avoiding anything "processed" because of some mysterious "chemicals" or whatever. I simply found over the years that I can make foods a lot better at home than most stuff I can buy that's pre-packaged. We didn't set out to make our kid this way. He just happened to be born into a household that just didn't buy a lot of stuff from the junk food aisles... and I think it significantly affected his default assumptions about food.
Let's have a focus group of 5 years old and see if they prefer Doritos or fresh halibut.
What culture were the 5-year-olds raised in? What foods were they exposed to? Seriously: food preferences and cultural preferences start developing at a much younger age.
Even foods "all kids love" may not really be so. My son hated sweets until he was 3 years old. HATED them. We gave him a piece of his first birthday cake, and he spit it out and literally scraped the remainder off of his tongue with his hands. We never tended to have sweets in the house, so he was never exposed to anything like that before. I think he had the same reaction I do now to regular Coke -- it's so sickeningly sweet that I'm repulsed by it. It's positively unnatural.
My kid instead barely experienced refined carbs probably for the first couple years of his life. I baked at home for him the only bread he consumed. We weren't trying to "hide" sweets from him -- in fact, we offered them to him quite a few times. Inevitably, he'd take a small bite of the cookie or whatever and then put it down. We didn't eat a lot of the stuff either, so it didn't matter to us. One thing his mother really likes though is ice cream, so she kept trying to introduce that, and he'd spit it out.
His favorite foods when he was 2 included things like sauted bitter greens and eating beans basically right out of a can. Oh yeah, and bacon. And just about any kind of meat. But sweets? Absolutely not. Any kind of "chip"? Once he was old enough, we offered, and he hated them. It wasn't until he was 6 or so that he actually started to be interested in things like potato chips, but Doritos would still be summarily rejected.
He simply grew up without a lot of processed foods in the house, so they were unfamiliar and weird to him -- often with extreme and bizarre flavors, so he rejected them.
So weren't we shocked when for his 3rd birthday party he requested cupcakes! Huh? The kid who for years rejected every sweet thing we offered for years? Turns out that unbeknownst to us, his new daycare facility (the first time he had been in regular daycare) served cupcakes to all the kids as a treat on every kid's birthday. So he came to associate cupcakes with celebration, and that was finally enough to overcome his revulsion of things that were too sweet. It was the ASSOCIATION of sweets that made them appealing, not the flavor by itself. (Note that he loved stuff like fruits since he was a baby... it was only the stuff that was a lot sweeter like candy and cookies and cakes that he rejected.)
I'm sure not all kids would be like this, even if they weren't exposed to as many processed foods at a young age. But keep in mind that it's NOT flavor alone that makes processed foods appealing -- it's what they do to your body. They are cheap easy calories, often packaged conveniently with little or no preparation, and they cause metabolic reactions that often lead to overeating (especially stuff like Doritos, which fool your body with flavors that mimic savory stuff but only provide cheap carbs and fats, which leads your body to say, almost literally, "Where's the beef?" and thus encourage more eating....).
If you don't get far enough with processed foods to experience those reactions, the taste alone may not be enough to hook you. Try spending a few months away from the "junk food aisles" and learn to cook things for yourself, and see how much you really miss. Sure, there are a few specific cravings I still may get for the junk food stuff, but mostly I now find the flavors less significantly appealing than "real food."
Farming hardware - tractors, harvesters, etc - has traditionally been *very* reliable and long-lived. In other words, what you might call "overbuilt". They have a hard time comprehending why their computers don't last longer than 3-4 years. I have to try to explain modern economics to them.
Is there perhaps a larger moral to be learned from this? Is there something about farm equipment -- or FARMERS -- that's different?
Just a thought, but farming is one job that actually requires long-term financial planning. I've known a surprising number of people who appear to live "paycheck-to-paycheck." Even smart people with advanced degrees -- some of them with advanced math skills. But they simply can't manage money enough to not spend basically everything that's in their bank account before the next paycheck comes in.
And our modern systems of credit make this possible. Decades ago, loans were rare; a large percentage of people saved up even for big purchases (cars, etc.) rather than taking out credit. But today everything is split up into convenient monthly chunks, spread out over a pay period or two.
Farmers can't plan like that. They plant stuff one season and won't see profit until the end of the year. And droughts and pests and unusual hot/cold spells occur, and this year's crops don't live up. So, as a farmer, you MUST have to still think in terms of saving for "hard times" and in a multi-year budget span, or you'll likely go backrupt in just a few years. (Admittedly, this is something I heard a couple decades ago from old farmers; I don't know what the business is like these days where small family-owned farms have become such a rarity.)
So -- coming back to the parent's example: is it coincidence that farming equipment has maintained standards for durability as farmers have to plan for decades of expenses to justify a purchase for a large piece of equipment? While meanwhile most of American society happily accepts lower prices in exchange for junk products with shorter lifespans? -- the same people who carry balances on credit cards with ridiculous interest rates?
The unfortunate trend is that even the old "reliable" manufacturers of things like appliances seem to have bought into the "planned obsolesence" ideology, so even if you parents had an appliance that lasted for 20, 30, or even 40+ years, it may be likely that the same brand product will only last 5 years for you... even if they are still charging a premium price for their "brand reputation." I personally would happily pay a much higher cost for something if I know it's worth it in terms of durability in the long-run, but I find it harder and harder to find product lines that I trust enough to take a chance on the higher expense.
Donald Trump broke this place.
Just wondering -- is Trump responsible for the ever more invasive ads here? Because it's over the top now. Beyond the pale. I started my migration to SoylentNews about 6 months ago. I've still be checking in here periodically, but if these ads don't stop, I'm DONE with Slashdot. I know everyone says that, but the ads now are simply unacceptable.
(And yeah, I can and do run adblockers, but I sometimes view the site without them... this is terrible.)
When I read the reports I *never* got the idea that they were recommending refined flours, sugar, or other similar sources of sugar or starch. The closest I can come is a recommendation for baked potatoes...which is still sort of valid, though now we (or at least I) worry more about the starch.
Here's a story from Luise Light, who was a leading nutritionist at the USDA when the "Food Pyramid" was originally adopted. After the nutritionists submitted their recommended guidelines to the Secretary of Agriculture, here's what happened:
When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. For instance, the Ag Secretaryâ(TM)s office altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed itâ(TM)d hurt sales of full-fat products; it also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers happy. The meat lobby got the final word on the color of the saturated fat/cholesterol guideline which was changed from red to purple because meat producers worried that using red to signify âoebadâ fat would be linked to red meat in consumersâ(TM) minds.
Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings (changed to 5-7 servings a couple of years later because an anti-cancer campaign by another government agency, the National Cancer Institute, forced the USDA to adopt the higher standard). Our recommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed to a whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed baked goods made with white flour â" including crackers, sweets and other low-nutrient foods laden with sugars and fats â" at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they be eaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the âoerevisedâ Food Guide, they were now made part of the Pyramidâ(TM)s base.
Light's account of this has appeared elsewhere in lots of sources. Although we probably can't verify every one of her personal memories, it seems clear that the nutritional guidelines WERE deliberately altered to emphasize processed foods, including starches and sugars... granted, part of the alternations weren't really about encouragement, but rather removing warnings against them. But still -- it's pretty much "smoking gun" evidence against what you said.
(BTW -- apologies for the all the crappy characters showing up. I used to edit stuff I pasted in to conform to Slashdot's archaic encoding standards... but since they are now barraging me with invasive ads, I can't be bothered to respect this site anymore and will likely be leaving permanently anyway...)
You apparently feel no blame at all should fall on anyone but Trump, even though Trump didn't come into the picture until recently and the shooter has been falling for years. Yet you twist the truth to blame Trump for a tragedy much longer in the making - sick man, you are as sick as the shooter or heading that way.
And yet, from your previous post, you "apparently feel no blame at all should fall on anyone but Obama." I quote:
What triggers this shooting was a vet who couldn't get assistance from the VA [wibw.com]. After eight years, that is on Obama - as is Obama and supporters stirring racial tension and giving focus to a violent angry drunk man.
Look -- I feel like I have to say this on the internet every other day now, but events can have multiple causes. They certainly always have various factors that have to be in place for them to come to pass.
I frankly don't know this man. I haven't researched his story in detail. And I certainly don't feel that *I* have any business pontificating on the internet about what "triggered" this event.
In legal terms, this is generally known as the "proximate cause," something more immediate in the chain of causality. For all I know, this guy could have been ultimately set off because somebody gave him the green Jell-O instead of the red Jell-O in the lunchline that day.
Anyhow, YES, if this guy was denied proper care from the VA because of some shortfalls under Obama, SOME of the causality may be blamed on Obama (or, probably more likely, on various underlings who made poor decisions too).
On the other hand, Donald Trump has spent nearly the past 2 years creating a climate of xenophobia and hatred against immigrants in his rhetoric. GP wants to blame this entirely on Trump, but I'm sure that's not the case. On the other hand, you seem to want to shift the blame entirely AWAY from Trump and focus on a potentially more remote cause. (And note -- even if this guy was denied VA care, do you have specific proof that it was an Obama policy that denied him that care? Did Barack Obama personally reject a request from him for care? Or was this part of a chain of causality that actually makes more sense to blame someone who made poor decisions at a lower level?)
I really don't know. But I do know that Trump tries to get attention every day. He seems to thrive on "speaking" (tweeting) directly to the "people." If some of his anti-immigration rhetoric was heard by this guy, could it have had some significant impact?Maybe, as the news story you cite says, "this wasn't who he normally was," but a combination of mental problems AND pervasive news stories on immigrants as enemies in the conservative media... maybe that was something?
Again, I certainly don't have all the facts. But can we all just take a step back here and CALM THE [BLEEP] DOWN!?! Stop trying to find the one person to blame for anything. As I mentioned above, Obama was not the single person in charge of every decision at the VA. And Trump is certainly has been created by plenty of other supporters egging him on and encouraging him to continue his rhetoric.
There's lots of blame to go around. But can we all just acknowledge that -- regardless of the proximate causality chain here -- the current climate of xenophobia is likely to result in increased violence against immigrants overall??
> What error in judgement did they make that makes them liable?
That's not the legal, or fair, standard. The results of my actions are the results, whether I made an error in judgement or just got unlucky.
Actually, you probably will want to read up on tort law, specifically standards for negligence. In the most detailed legal analysis, there are a number of elements to proving negligence. Along the line, you must establish that a defendant had a "duty" to act in a certain way and then "breached" that duty in some way. But you also not only need to prove that the defendant's actions caused something, but that they were a direct and legally relevant cause of the harm. Events always have multiple causes -- a lot of tort law is about sorting out which causes are legally relevant and which aren't.
Example: if you run over a pedestrian because you were drinking a soda and not paying attention to the road, a plaintiff generally can't bring a successful action against the shop that sold you the soda. Yes, the fact that you were distracted due to the soda was a cause of the accident, but it wasn't a legally relevant cause, because you were the one driving poorly, and your choice of distraction isn't the fault of the soda shop.
On the other hand, if you run over a pedestrian because you were drinking a bottle of whiskey, and you had bought that bottle after walking into a liquor store noticeably drunk, and surveillance footage has you on camera saying, "Yes, I'm gonna drink this and I'm gonna be drivin' all over town tonight -- I'd do give a crap if I hit someone..." -- well, in that case, the pedestrian who was struck might actually have a case to sue the liquor store, because they sold a dangerous item to someone already in a state unable to handle it and someone declaring he was going to use it improperly.
We could just as easily create scenarios with your "log in the road" example too where one person bears primary legal responsibility, or another party, or both. The problem with accidents and driving is that, unlike most other tort cases, the pervasive and required "insurance" has led to default assumptions about where liability must lie in almost all scenarios. Thus, even in cases where a provable manufacturer defect was the primary cause of a crash, you'll frequently still see insurance companies of the drivers arguing over having to pay damages too. That's just not always the case in most other legal scenarios -- in some cases, the product manufacturer may be primarily liable and a suit against the user could NOT be successful (and would even be summarily dismissed by a court) depending on the assumptions of "normal" product use and what happened.
According to your legal theory of negligence, consumers in fact could NEVER sue product manufacturers, since the "results of your action are the results"... and you're apparently solely responsible for them, even if the product blows up unexpectedly on you -- it was your fault for using it in the first place.
Maybe such a thing will be sold some day. Right now, cruise control amd automatic braking aren't anywhere near what you've described.
Then the cars aren't actually "self-driving." Until a car has the ability to handle ALL reasonably foreseeable road conditions as well as (or better than) a human driver, it should not be sold as a "self-driving car." And note that "reasonably foreseeable" has to do with the legal issue again. Just like the soda shop can't reasonably foresee that you'd hold a soda cup up in front of your face for a full 10 seconds while driving before plowing into a pedestrian, there are likely going to be scenarios where people try to operate "self-driving cars" in situations that a car manufacturer might never consider. But there will also be plenty of conditions it WILL consider "reasonable," and if the car causes an accident in those circumstances, they sh
If most people swap jobs every few years, does it really make sense for employers to be responsible for their retirement savings?
I have to agree with you that the whole "mandatory retirement contribution" thing is pretty much just an annoyance for all concerned today. I understand the rationale for it (because most people are incapable of long-term planning), but it's a terrible idea for people who are in jobs for a short term and need to deal with all sorts of different retirement accounts spread out in various systems.
When I was younger, I took a few short-term jobs and once worked as a state employee for a couple years. In all of these I was required to make mandatory "contributions" out of my pay toward retirement accounts. Well, with the state employee system, I was told when I left that I didn't have enough years to qualify for a pension, so unless I returned to the system, my account would accrue interest for 5 years, after which it would become dormant. I could withdraw the money and put it in an IRA or something at any time, but by doing so, I would forfeit the years of experience I had accrued in the system.
Anyhow, at first I wanted to keep options open, so I didn't withdraw immediately. And then the interest rates the account was paying was pretty good compared to how things were going in the market at the time, so I figured I'd just withdraw after the 5 years. Well, after 5 years, I contacted them, and the money was GONE. Turns out they changed the policy since I was employed, and rather making accounts just dormant after 5 years, you were summarily deleted from the system, and all of your retirement money was forfeited and returned to the state pension pool.
Next, I had a very short-term gig (actually indirectly for a different state government) and was again required to contribute mandatory retirement. In this case, it was only a few hundred dollars, but they didn't really notify me of all the details, so I wasn't even aware of this balance or where it went. A couple years later, I had moved, but they decided to send my money to some 3rd-party account management service, which charged a $15/month fee to hold my money. I wasn't aware of any of this (because I had moved and wasn't even really aware that I was owed benefits) until the 3rd-party company finally located me and sent me a statement that this account was being closed, since my balance had fallen to $12 (all the rest had gone to fees), and they could no longer maintain it... so they literally sent me a check for $12 after taking all the rest of my retirement money.
I'm currently fighting to get another small amount out of such a 3rd-party company because of other retirement benefits I wasn't even made aware of for a short-term contractual position nearly a decade ago.
Cumulatively, all of the money I've lost isn't that much compared to my main retirement savings, but it's preposterous that people all the time are making forced contributions to retirement accounts for short-term employment -- sometimes where they're not even told clearly that they even are being given those benefits other than on an unclear line on a paystub -- and then having to jump through hoops to track down or keep that money, and then deal with the hassle of moving it to other accounts.
This is easily mitigated these days: don't have a family. Now you only have to worry about making enough money for yourself, and saving enough for yourself on days you don't have any work.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic. But if you're serious -- Even assuming you can personally save enough money to avoid begging on the street, you do realize that most people in the world have families whether they like it or not?? E.g., Parents, who might get ill and can't take care of themselves on their own, or even siblings who might end up out of work or whatever. Just because you don't have kids to feed doesn't mean you won't end up with any family obligations to help support. Such situations happen more commonly than you might think, and it can be a significant strain on people who have low incomes.
The "gig" economy is a bullshit attempt to glamorize and hide the real issue, which is a population outpacing the availability stable employment that provides necessary benefits.
In some cases, this is being driven by population vs. employment. But in many cases, simple greed is a major contributing factor. It's so much cheaper to operate a business with a bunch of part-time workers. Many businesses would prefer it, if they could get away with it.
Instability should never be viewed as a good thing.
Yeah, unfortunately most folks in the past couple generations never had to see what the "gig" economies of the past were actually like. Back when you'd go to your local town square or down to the docks or whatever, and stand in line waiting for some potential employer to choose you for work FOR THE DAY. And then you'd break your back doing labor for the day, make enough money to feed your kids, and you'd be off again begging for work the next morning. If you hurt your back or got sick or whatever, you and your family were screwed. End of story.
This was what employment was like for LOTS of people for millennia. Skilled workers like craftsmen could sometimes get more stable jobs, because their skills increased the productivity of the business and employers recognized that.
But for laborer jobs or other things you could likely be trained to do in an hour or two? Not so much. And that's what many modern "gig economy" employers are exploiting again -- can you drive a car? Fine: you're a part-time Uber driver. Be sure to show up on time and be pleasant enough to keep the high ratings, or you won't have a job tomorrow.
Lots of people today criticize unions (sometimes rightly) for corruption, etc. But what unions fought so hard for for a century or so was to finally get modern civilization out of that and recognize that even laborers and unskilled workers deserve to be treated with dignity in their jobs, rather than discarded at the end of the day.
But no more -- I'm frankly shocked at how many younger folks seem brainwashed by all the hooplah over the supposed benefits of the "gig economy." People who know anything about history, on the other hand, see this as exactly what it is: an opportunity for businesses to return to a model where they make greater profits and don't have any obligations to their workers beyond today.
The problem is that someone (I think intentionally) co-opted "fake news" to mean "biased reporting"- that's not originally what it meant at all and a lot of people are still using the term to mean something else. "Fake news" originally (as in a couple of months ago) meant completely fabricated stories.
You gotta understand free expression of language these days -- I guess they're just "free wielding" the term.
(Or, at least that's what I'm guessing these two words from TFS might mean when put in sequence. But from the summary, I still can't understand exactly what Zuckerberg's note was "wielding." Didn't know Slashdot was into actually spawning NEW eggcorns.)
Well, as other posts have already replied to you, the strict distinction you're trying to make here doesn't really hold in English. Both accidentally and inadvertently can easily apply to something that was trying to be avoided.
But I sense a problem with the headline too, and I think the real issue is -- why are the POTTERS mentioned at all? There's a kind of implication with the way the headline is worded that the potters "recorded" information, except they had no concept of what such recording might amount to or what that information might be. Really, the potters had no intentionality here at all.
This is even worse in the original NPR headline, which is "Iron Age Potters CAREFULLY Recorded Earth's Magnetic Field -- By Accident." That's more problematic from an English usage standpoint, because "carefully" implies they did something with care... specifically they "recorded" with care. But they didn't know they were recording anything, so how could they do it with care?
The more clear way to word all of this would of course be to take the potters out of it completely, since they weren't "recording" anything -- intentionally or unintentionally. They were making pottery. A better headline might just be "Strength of Earth's Magnetic Field Recorded in Structure of Iron Age Pottery" or something. Even better, leave "record" out of it entirely, since that usually implies intentionally preserving information to begin with -- maybe "Historical Variance in Earth's Magnetic Field Strength Measured Using Iron Age Pottery" or something.
Those that are quite horrifying. I'm thinking call center jobs or any such service level position. Ones where you are not measured by how well you resolve the customer's issue but how many calls you get through and how quickly you do it.
Yeah, exactly. And this is NOTHING new. A couple of decades I took a summer job in a collections department. It was a horrid job, but it paid reasonably well for a summer position. Our productivity was measured almost solely in the number of accounts we handled and the amount of money we brought in through collections. Whether we actually handled the accounts "well" wasn't really a factor (which led to gross inefficiencies and hoards of "problem accounts" that simply went more and more delinquent as they were passed off because nobody wanted to take the time to deal with them). I managed to figure out ways to make my own account handling more efficient, so I actually processed significantly more accounts than anyone else in the office.
Anyhow, after I had been there for a couple months, they decided we still weren't "efficient" enough and they weren't tracking us enough. (We spent more time filing in stupid useless spreadsheets tracking all the calls we did so that someone in management could monitor our "productivity" than we frequently did making calls.)
And so they instituted a policy that we had to "log in" to our phones while we were at our desks, and log out whenever we were on break or at lunch or whatever.
About two weeks after this policy started, one day I ended up skipping lunch because I was dealing with a particularly problematic account. But then I took a longer afternoon break to make up for it and was out for 18 or 19 minutes instead of 10 minutes -- I figured this wouldn't be a problem, since I had given up my 30-minute lunch break and effectively worked "for free" for 20 extra minutes that day.
The next day, I get called over to my boss's desk, where she had been instructed by company-wide memo to reprimand me, because my name ended up at the top of some list of people who took extra-long breaks. My boss was apologetic, since she knew I was more productive than anyone else in the department, but this is what management were wasting their time doing by sorting some spreadsheet column or whatever and looking only at how long somebody was out for a single break.
Anyhow, with only a few weeks in the summer left, I simply said, "Sorry, these are unacceptable working conditions -- I'll pack up my things and leave," and simply left the job on the spot. (There had been other similar crap leading up to this too.) Only time in my life that I did that, but I think it was entirely justified. Last I heard, the entire collections division ended up shut down and outsourced a few months later, probably because workers were spending twice as much time filling out spreadsheets and logging into phones to prove how "productive" they were rather than actually doing work. Idiots.
Both items were passed off as "news" by seemingly legitimate news organizations. Both items are fake news - literally fake.
You seem to not understand the difference between "fake" and "incorrect/erroneous" If you hand a bouncer a "fake ID" at a bar, it doesn't mean you accidentally handed them someone else's ID or maybe accidentally handed credentials that were expired or otherwise unacceptable to get into a bar. A "fake ID" implies that you KNOWINGLY manufactured a false ID (or had someone do it for you) with intent to pass it off as real.
Do you have evidence that the reporters in question actually INTENTIONALLY passed along false information? If not, they were not "fake news" according to the standard definition of the English word "fake."
And they offered corrections. Here's the detailed account from Time about the MLK bust. The reporter corrected his tweets as soon as he had recognized an error. That's NOT what actual "fake news" sites do -- because fake news sites KNOW their information is false when they MAKE IT UP, so they don't offer corrections.
As for the other incident, it's yet another example of poor reporting, but only because the Olympian gave an interview that IMPLIED a connection with Trump's immigration policies and only FOUR DAYS LATER tweeted that actually the incident occurred in December. Again, we should be critical for poor reporting here that then made an EXPLICIT connection with Trump, it should have fact-checked when the event actually occurred, but the Olympian in question was vague in her original interview and implied it had happened recently.
So, who exactly is at fault here? The Olympian was expressing concern over current immigration policies and made a vague reference to detention, which was only later clarified. Was she part of some massive media "conspiracy" to hide the truth until four days later? Or did she just innocently make reference in an interview to an unpleasant experience that occurred to her in immigration recently -- and some media articles misinterpreted her vague timeline?
I'm NOT going to excuse those media reporters who implied a Trump connection -- they made a serious journalistic error by not doing appropriate fact-checking. We should condemn their actions and poor journalism.
But once more detailed information became available, they corrected their stories -- once again, that's NOT the practice of "fake news."
There are various bad journalistic practices in the world. And we should condemn them, and even fire journalists sometimes for making truly egregious errors or showing unreasonable bias or whatever. BUT UNINTENTIONAL ERRORS ARE NOT "FAKE NEWS." Fake news is a separate problem -- and a serious one that we ignore by misusing the English word "fake" or redefining it to dilute its meaning.