I work at a big national laboratory that is funded by the US government. [...] Sadly I don't have a good idea for a solution.
Socialism.
Given the number of papers written by just US government funded researchers, it seems that there would be sufficient numbers to easily fill up government funded journals in all the major research areas. (Phys, chem, geo, bio/med, psych/soc, and a bunch for engineering.) Since the govt holds the purse-strings, they can, with the stroke of a pen, require that all government funded research papers are published first in the official govt run journals. Publish those journals for free electronically, with paper copies at cost of materials/distribution. And scientists/depts/agencies/etc can then still distribute their own material as they see fit in addition.
Given the number of government funded researchers in the world, would expand nicely into best-of "International" versions of these journals. And universities should quickly opt in, especially when so much research in major universities comes from government funding, so will be bound by the new rule anyway. And once you've got all the world's government and university researchers... Elsevier and co are already dead.
["Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." - Das Capital]
The common use of "...which begs the question" means "...which prompts me to ask". While the variant of the circular reasoning fallacy called "Begging the Question" is used to mean "assuming or forcing the answer in the wording of the question".
[Since the "Begging" in the latter is a rare/archaic/obscure term for "assuming", it seems unreasonable to pour scorn on people who use the common English meanings of "begs" and "the question".]
Now you've turned a 1kg micro-experiment which consists of some seeds stuck to nutrient-soaked tissue paper inside a clear plastic panel with a webcam attached, bolted onto the side of someone else's lander, into something that requires perhaps a cubic metre of volume, lights, heaters, an irrigation system, months of air, and a power-source that can survive 14 days of continuous darkness every month, and almost certainly a dedicated launch (and lander).
The number of representatives in Congress is based on the population of the state as given by the Census. It is not based on the number of actual or eligible voters. So giving the slaves any value as "persons" increased the number of representatives of the slave states, even if the slaves couldn't vote.
But what's interesting about the 3/5ths clause is that it's the slavers at the founding who wanted to have slaved counted as "whole persons" (for the purpose of the Census and subsequent portioning of representation in Congress), while the non-slave states didn't want them counted at all (being property.) However, stupidly, the non-slave states wanted slaves counted as whole persons for the purposed of taxation (and now the slavers said not persons, property). The compromise was to adopt 3/5th for both. However, had the non-slave states instead insisted on slaves being counted as property (for both tax and representative purposes), the slave states would have lost the numbers in Congress long before they did, and long before the two controversies that led to the Civil War arose (the slave-status of the new territories, and the power given to slave states to run possés into non-slave states to essentially kidnap any black person into slavery on the sworn statement of any slave-owner that they are a "runaway slave", regardless of how long they have lived free (which in some cases was over 20 years.)) Therefore by the time these issues did arise, the south would have long gotten used to the humiliation of its weakened position, and, instead of throwing a tantrum like spoiled children and nearly wrecking the whole country when they didn't get their way, they'd shut the fuck up lest they gave the abolitionists cause to end slavery once and for all.
[Or maybe not. It's been 150 years and the old slave states still throw tantrums and nearly wreck the country when they don't get their way.]
Interestingly, if you don't copy the name or logo of the brand, you can sell a perfect replica (or "unsafe cheap junk") without any "intellectual property" laws standing in your way. Only trademarks are considered IP in fashion. All of fashion, much larger than all the copyright industry put together, survives with rampant "piracy" and no laws to stop it, let alone massively abused over-regulation like DMCA.
Hell, the shoe industry alone is 40% larger than the entire global music industry.
[Actually footwear probably has tech patents in addition to trademarks.]
It's bizarre how much the copyright industry has convinced people that it is this huge important thing that must be protected, when actually it's pretty trivial. I say nationalise the whole industry, then kill copyright entirely. Bam! Done. All that angst, all that fussing, all goes away. And one by one, without the US lobby constantly at them, other countries will follow. Global freedom.
Some achievement tracking is justified and useful (and even necessary) for the project itself.
Apparently the system they use to assess students and teachers is based on "stacked ranking", an employee performance system that Gates introduced at Microsoft, and continued under Ballmer for a decade, but which Microsoft has more recently dropped utterly.
Importantly, this policy has already been introduced in over 30 states for teacher assessment, thanks to Gates' donation to the Obama administration, and the administration tying the adoption of the system to education grants. Teacher job satisfaction in the affected states has dropped from 62% to 39% in four years. With such a sharp drop in morale, and apparently high level of stress created by the program, you can imagine how actual teacher performance would have suffered.
"Stacked ranking effectively crippled Microsoft's ability to innovate. Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft. It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies." Or in the case of teachers, leads to them undermining each other rather than focus on doing the best for their own students.
And now Microsoft has completely eliminated the "stacked rank" policy. That's easy for a company to do, but how long do you think it will take to unwrap it from national and state education policies?
Throw in the fact that Microsoft has now completely dropped the employee training and assessment policy that BG is basing his education programs around. Yet one of the main arguments used to support introducing it into schools is that it was successful at "knowledge companies" like Microsoft. The problem is that, unlike a company, once it's got its claws into education policy you can't remove it by putting a new person in charge (as at Microsoft HR), it'll be a decade after there's a general consensus from educators that it has failed before any senior decision-maker will dare make a change on the same scale.
The bags are light enough to blow out of bins and away from landfill. They are also a form of litter that tends not to stay where it was littered. Again, it's the nature of the material, not just the tonnage.
How about making the tax a deposit-refund scheme? Return a bunch of qualifying/specially marketed bags to a recycling centre, get money. Every bin-scab and hobo in the region will be scouring land-fills, parks and storm-drains looking for bags. Worked brilliantly for drink containers in my state.
[Although the same state banned the thin-type shopping bags, rather than piss around with fees.]
Aside:
I'm actually OK with being charged for the bags if the money collected is allocated to a system that actually addresses a direct bag created issue such as upgrading recycling facilities
No. Any additional funding that comes from a specific levy always results in a reduction in funding from general taxation. In effect it's as if the levy just went into general revenue anyway. Single purpose levies rarely result in an actual increase in funding for the target item. (And given the administration cost of the levy is taken from the levy, you sometimes end up with a net reduction in funding.) Either you accept the levy in its own right, or you don't. Never be tricked into accepting a levy your don't agree with to fund something you do. It's a classic politicians' con.
[Recognizing that you weren't the original poster, but replying as if...]
So you keep 20 reusable bags in a cupboard in your home so one is available when you go out of your home and walk past your car on the way to buy your Sunday cheese and baguette? While keeping none in the car that you use every week to buy your bulk household food and groceries?
How does that possibly make more sense than doing the opposite?
Some incompetence, not total simultaneous incompetence. Not even incompetence by the standards of a routine event at the time. Just incompetence by the standards we retrospectively demand of such an important issue.
It was a novel situation, clearly no one knew how to handle it. The autopsy was handled as they would any autopsy - they didn't foresee the level of suspicion and demand for additional information that would arise almost immediately, and grow exponentially. If they had, they would have documented everything to a fine degree, stored every sample in a specially built centre, brought in the leading experts in every appropriate field, run every test that existed. Instead, they just did a standard limited autopsy on someone whose head had been very publicly blown off. Cause of death: "Well, duh".
Likewise the CIA/FBI monitoring of Oswald. He defected to Russia, then changed his mind and came back, he was written off as an idiot by everyone, US, Russians, Cubans, so of course they kept him only under low level surveillance. They were probably hoping he would defect to Cuba so they'd be rid of him, but the Cubans didn't want him either. (That's what fuels much of the conspiracy nonsense, I think. That such a low-level douche-bag like Oswald could kill an American President! But they always turn out to be low-level douche-bags. Kennedy, Lennon, Reagan, Oklahoma City, Boston Marathon...)
It's the same with the Secret Service. By the standard of the modern Secret Service, the Dallas motorcade was a violation of every possible protocol, and the response to the first shot a massive failure of training. But, of course, those protocols and training were brought in precisely because of the Kennedy assassination.
The problem with shopping bags isn't the mass-equivalence, it's the form. Apparently shopping bags are close to the perfect design for killing the maximum numbers of wildlife and for spreading great distances on wind and water. It's why that specific form is fixated on by researchers.
I personally hate most of the plastic liner bags my wife buys.
Make it your responsibility to buy the bin liners. Typical rolls last a long time, so buying three/four at a time should be only an occasional chore. This replaces a daily or twice daily eye-rolling annoyance with a once-per-quarter-year 5 minute chore one day on your way to/from work.
[Your wife must be buying shit brands if they rip more easily than typical thin shopping-bags. Ditto if they don't have handles. Hell, I have to go out of my way to avoid the brands with handles and ties and a stupid draw-string.]
The number of shopping bags used as bin liners is vastly smaller than the shopping bags that end up as rubbish. Hence the additional number of bin liners purchased is a small fraction of the reduction in shopping bags when bans/taxes/fees are brought in. (At least according to people who track such things, when such a ban was introduced here in my part of Australia.)
Errr, why don't you keep the rest in the boot (or trunk or regionally-named-subvehicular-enclosed-storage-area)? What value are they serving in your house?
Bring one in, still have 19 left in the boot. When the pile inside gets noticeable, take them back out to the car. (This is what I do. Although more like 6 than 20.)
Slashdot Mirror
Asked and answered.
That's "Fulfilment Centre", you insensitive clod.
I work at a big national laboratory that is funded by the US government.
[...]
Sadly I don't have a good idea for a solution.
Socialism.
Given the number of papers written by just US government funded researchers, it seems that there would be sufficient numbers to easily fill up government funded journals in all the major research areas. (Phys, chem, geo, bio/med, psych/soc, and a bunch for engineering.) Since the govt holds the purse-strings, they can, with the stroke of a pen, require that all government funded research papers are published first in the official govt run journals. Publish those journals for free electronically, with paper copies at cost of materials/distribution. And scientists/depts/agencies/etc can then still distribute their own material as they see fit in addition.
Given the number of government funded researchers in the world, would expand nicely into best-of "International" versions of these journals. And universities should quickly opt in, especially when so much research in major universities comes from government funding, so will be bound by the new rule anyway. And once you've got all the world's government and university researchers... Elsevier and co are already dead.
["Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.
The expropriators are expropriated." - Das Capital]
Neither use means "avoiding the question".
The common use of "...which begs the question" means "...which prompts me to ask". While the variant of the circular reasoning fallacy called "Begging the Question" is used to mean "assuming or forcing the answer in the wording of the question".
[Since the "Begging" in the latter is a rare/archaic/obscure term for "assuming", it seems unreasonable to pour scorn on people who use the common English meanings of "begs" and "the question".]
Not only is it not universal, it will also still be really small. About 9 nanometres.
Now you've turned a 1kg micro-experiment which consists of some seeds stuck to nutrient-soaked tissue paper inside a clear plastic panel with a webcam attached, bolted onto the side of someone else's lander, into something that requires perhaps a cubic metre of volume, lights, heaters, an irrigation system, months of air, and a power-source that can survive 14 days of continuous darkness every month, and almost certainly a dedicated launch (and lander).
If the work is 'forged' how can we trust it?
With an even temper.
And those whining about Spotify want to treat "plays" as if they were purchases.
The number of representatives in Congress is based on the population of the state as given by the Census. It is not based on the number of actual or eligible voters. So giving the slaves any value as "persons" increased the number of representatives of the slave states, even if the slaves couldn't vote.
But what's interesting about the 3/5ths clause is that it's the slavers at the founding who wanted to have slaved counted as "whole persons" (for the purpose of the Census and subsequent portioning of representation in Congress), while the non-slave states didn't want them counted at all (being property.) However, stupidly, the non-slave states wanted slaves counted as whole persons for the purposed of taxation (and now the slavers said not persons, property). The compromise was to adopt 3/5th for both. However, had the non-slave states instead insisted on slaves being counted as property (for both tax and representative purposes), the slave states would have lost the numbers in Congress long before they did, and long before the two controversies that led to the Civil War arose (the slave-status of the new territories, and the power given to slave states to run possés into non-slave states to essentially kidnap any black person into slavery on the sworn statement of any slave-owner that they are a "runaway slave", regardless of how long they have lived free (which in some cases was over 20 years.)) Therefore by the time these issues did arise, the south would have long gotten used to the humiliation of its weakened position, and, instead of throwing a tantrum like spoiled children and nearly wrecking the whole country when they didn't get their way, they'd shut the fuck up lest they gave the abolitionists cause to end slavery once and for all.
[Or maybe not. It's been 150 years and the old slave states still throw tantrums and nearly wreck the country when they don't get their way.]
Interestingly, if you don't copy the name or logo of the brand, you can sell a perfect replica (or "unsafe cheap junk") without any "intellectual property" laws standing in your way. Only trademarks are considered IP in fashion. All of fashion, much larger than all the copyright industry put together, survives with rampant "piracy" and no laws to stop it, let alone massively abused over-regulation like DMCA.
Hell, the shoe industry alone is 40% larger than the entire global music industry.
[Actually footwear probably has tech patents in addition to trademarks.]
It's bizarre how much the copyright industry has convinced people that it is this huge important thing that must be protected, when actually it's pretty trivial. I say nationalise the whole industry, then kill copyright entirely. Bam! Done. All that angst, all that fussing, all goes away. And one by one, without the US lobby constantly at them, other countries will follow. Global freedom.
Some achievement tracking is justified and useful (and even necessary) for the project itself.
Apparently the system they use to assess students and teachers is based on "stacked ranking", an employee performance system that Gates introduced at Microsoft, and continued under Ballmer for a decade, but which Microsoft has more recently dropped utterly.
Importantly, this policy has already been introduced in over 30 states for teacher assessment, thanks to Gates' donation to the Obama administration, and the administration tying the adoption of the system to education grants. Teacher job satisfaction in the affected states has dropped from 62% to 39% in four years. With such a sharp drop in morale, and apparently high level of stress created by the program, you can imagine how actual teacher performance would have suffered.
Meanwhile... ...stacked ranking was being blamed for Microsoft's decline. "Microsoft's Lost Decade".
"Stacked ranking effectively crippled Microsoft's ability to innovate. Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft. It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies." Or in the case of teachers, leads to them undermining each other rather than focus on doing the best for their own students.
And now Microsoft has completely eliminated the "stacked rank" policy. That's easy for a company to do, but how long do you think it will take to unwrap it from national and state education policies?
Throw in the fact that Microsoft has now completely dropped the employee training and assessment policy that BG is basing his education programs around. Yet one of the main arguments used to support introducing it into schools is that it was successful at "knowledge companies" like Microsoft. The problem is that, unlike a company, once it's got its claws into education policy you can't remove it by putting a new person in charge (as at Microsoft HR), it'll be a decade after there's a general consensus from educators that it has failed before any senior decision-maker will dare make a change on the same scale.
Long, long after.
Apparently also pushed white supremacist groups, believing that the US was on the brink of a race war.
The bags are light enough to blow out of bins and away from landfill. They are also a form of litter that tends not to stay where it was littered. Again, it's the nature of the material, not just the tonnage.
O, and the car is in an underground garage.
I concede the point, m'lord, though I confess the tune escapes me.
How about making the tax a deposit-refund scheme? Return a bunch of qualifying/specially marketed bags to a recycling centre, get money. Every bin-scab and hobo in the region will be scouring land-fills, parks and storm-drains looking for bags. Worked brilliantly for drink containers in my state.
[Although the same state banned the thin-type shopping bags, rather than piss around with fees.]
Aside:
I'm actually OK with being charged for the bags if the money collected is allocated to a system that actually addresses a direct bag created issue such as upgrading recycling facilities
No. Any additional funding that comes from a specific levy always results in a reduction in funding from general taxation. In effect it's as if the levy just went into general revenue anyway. Single purpose levies rarely result in an actual increase in funding for the target item. (And given the administration cost of the levy is taken from the levy, you sometimes end up with a net reduction in funding.) Either you accept the levy in its own right, or you don't. Never be tricked into accepting a levy your don't agree with to fund something you do. It's a classic politicians' con.
[Recognizing that you weren't the original poster, but replying as if...]
So you keep 20 reusable bags in a cupboard in your home so one is available when you go out of your home and walk past your car on the way to buy your Sunday cheese and baguette? While keeping none in the car that you use every week to buy your bulk household food and groceries?
How does that possibly make more sense than doing the opposite?
Some incompetence, not total simultaneous incompetence. Not even incompetence by the standards of a routine event at the time. Just incompetence by the standards we retrospectively demand of such an important issue.
It was a novel situation, clearly no one knew how to handle it. The autopsy was handled as they would any autopsy - they didn't foresee the level of suspicion and demand for additional information that would arise almost immediately, and grow exponentially. If they had, they would have documented everything to a fine degree, stored every sample in a specially built centre, brought in the leading experts in every appropriate field, run every test that existed. Instead, they just did a standard limited autopsy on someone whose head had been very publicly blown off. Cause of death: "Well, duh".
Likewise the CIA/FBI monitoring of Oswald. He defected to Russia, then changed his mind and came back, he was written off as an idiot by everyone, US, Russians, Cubans, so of course they kept him only under low level surveillance. They were probably hoping he would defect to Cuba so they'd be rid of him, but the Cubans didn't want him either. (That's what fuels much of the conspiracy nonsense, I think. That such a low-level douche-bag like Oswald could kill an American President! But they always turn out to be low-level douche-bags. Kennedy, Lennon, Reagan, Oklahoma City, Boston Marathon...)
It's the same with the Secret Service. By the standard of the modern Secret Service, the Dallas motorcade was a violation of every possible protocol, and the response to the first shot a massive failure of training. But, of course, those protocols and training were brought in precisely because of the Kennedy assassination.
Ah. Is here.
(Annoys me. Idiotic rule.)
The problem with shopping bags isn't the mass-equivalence, it's the form. Apparently shopping bags are close to the perfect design for killing the maximum numbers of wildlife and for spreading great distances on wind and water. It's why that specific form is fixated on by researchers.
Make it your responsibility to buy the bin liners. Typical rolls last a long time, so buying three/four at a time should be only an occasional chore. This replaces a daily or twice daily eye-rolling annoyance with a once-per-quarter-year 5 minute chore one day on your way to/from work.
[Your wife must be buying shit brands if they rip more easily than typical thin shopping-bags. Ditto if they don't have handles. Hell, I have to go out of my way to avoid the brands with handles and ties and a stupid draw-string.]
The number of shopping bags used as bin liners is vastly smaller than the shopping bags that end up as rubbish. Hence the additional number of bin liners purchased is a small fraction of the reduction in shopping bags when bans/taxes/fees are brought in. (At least according to people who track such things, when such a ban was introduced here in my part of Australia.)
given the vectors for disease that uncooked foodstuffs provide
Isn't almost everything you buy already wrapped?
Errr, why don't you keep the rest in the boot (or trunk or regionally-named-subvehicular-enclosed-storage-area)? What value are they serving in your house?
Bring one in, still have 19 left in the boot. When the pile inside gets noticeable, take them back out to the car. (This is what I do. Although more like 6 than 20.)