And then every long-haul truck driver registers their truck in the state with the lowest per-mile taxes... An odometer reading system is too stupid to know if you're destroying in-state roads or some other state.
And how is the other state you're driving through going to collect on those per-mile taxes to maintain their roads? With fuel taxes, you're probably going to fill-up your tank away from home at some point, so the other state collects some of your money. But you can't collect per-mile fees from out-of-state drivers without toll-roads or some such.
Full electric or plug-in cars can use no gas, but they sure as heck don't have zero impact on the roads.
They are incredibly insignificant next to high axle weight vehicles like semis, which aren't ever going to be able to switch to battery power.
It's a problem that has to be solved at some point
No it doesn't... Half of road maintenance is already paid for from the general fund, rather than fuel taxes. Almost everybody has a car, and those few who don't are still getting a huge benefit from the road network around them, so why not take what you can get from an increased fuel tax, and cover the rest from income and property taxes?
everybody bought a hybrid today, next year almost no road repairs would get done, because we wouldn't have the tax revenue.
Hybrids still need gasoline. And only about HALF of road work is paid for by fuel taxes... Crank up the gas taxes to compensate for the shortfall and be done with it. Those that burn the most fuel SHOULD be paying for more of the government programs. It's a fairly small incentive to buy a hybrid or an EV, and those vehicles have hugely positive knock-on effect so anything that encourages them is good.
Even if all cars were replaced with EVs tomorrow... Pickups, SUVs, buses, and tractor-trailers would still be burning quite a bit of gas / diesel, because they just can't carry enough batteries, and they will continue to pay the fuel taxes. What's more, high axle-weight vehicles like tractor-trailers are inordinately destructive to the roads, so even 20 years ago, they SHOULD have been paying much higher fuel taxes. Hybrid car drivers really are insignificant where road wear and tear is concerned, next to the semis.
the real program will not use that, it will use odometer checks
Awesome! Most vehicles have two little wires that you can cut to disable the speedometer and odometer. Maybe wire it to a switch under the dashboard so you can reach down and shut it off while cruising on the freeway, to erase all those miles, and just turn it on when you need to check your speed or measure a trip.
And why is the state of Oregon going to be taxing their citizens on all the miles they may have incurred driving on out-of-state roads? Sounds like something that might run afoul of that whole Interstate Commerce clause.
You could compare to Australia, which is very similar to states in the US in other ways, but has had successful gun restrictions put in place for a while now.
Actually, we need more time to determine if it will have a positive effect...
"because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this finding isn't statistically significant."
I've given up on the Daily Show. It has become extremely heavy-handed and preachy on any topics the host or writer feel strongly about. They're serious and political when they want to be, and write it off as being a comedy show when they don't want to take responsibility or justify what they've said.
Moderately Mediocre is 12 major releases beyond Almost Awesome, so we'll see it in late 2019.
First you'll have to trek deep into the Amazonian rain forest, and discover a new species, so that you can name it a "Red-breasted Mediocre", in order for it to be a possible Ubuntu product name.
ya. It is really cute when the article flat out states that things wont change for Tesla until they buy more politicians. Sensibility, reasonableness, will of the people... all of these and more get left out in the cold until you pony up the big bucks.
Actually, money in politics is usually about buying "the people". Put out a slick commercial that airs on every channel, and you can get popular opinion on your side, and drag the politicians along with it...
Only because of the courts... NY, D.C., and others, basically outlawed guns, until the courts overturned the rules.
I'm a registered Democrat, who has never owned or fired a gun, yet I'm disgusted at the faith-based gun control laws being advocated, despite all evidence EVER, showing they only have the opposite effects. And worse, exploiting dead children to push for gun control laws that undeniably wouldn't have saved any of those children. Universal background checks are a great idea, but all other gun control laws currently suggested are pure idiocy.
Showing them how its done accomplishes nothing, because they do not watch and learn but simply let you do the work, then they go on break or go home content that the work is over.
There are plenty of ways to deal with such people... The best is that you (IT) demand that computer related tasks are treated as any other job function. So IT trains managers how to do a task, the managers train supervisors, and the supervisors train employees. This critically gets IT out of the loop in employee training for departments with ridiculously high turn-over, or unhappy and useless minimum-wage slaves. It also drastically reduces the number of calls, as problems filter up the chain of command, instead of 20 people calling about a printer not working... But the supervisor/manager/director of IT must be willing to stick to the principle of shooting down any calls from regular employees or supervisors, with a blanket response of "Ask your manager". Managers don't like wasting their time any more than IT does, but they have numerous options to address that kind of a problem in their department with their underlings, while IT has none.
Another option, or a supplement for the above, is to have WRITTEN procedures, in a binder, in the supervisor's desk. So when they call screaming about error number 7905495 popping-up on their screen, and how the world is coming to an end, you just tell them you won't help them unless they look it up in the binder and follow the official procedure described there. This one really helps reduce the 3am calls (after you yell at them for not looking in the binder the first couple times).
Another option is to adjust your response time around how useless a particular person or group happens to be... Well-behaved departments get quick responses to any questions they have, while badly-behaved departments that don't learn (and might even expect IT is supposed to do the "computer" part of their job for them), get a callback the second Tuesday of next month. This usually results in the idiots missing some deadline or another, and getting in trouble. When they blame IT, you'd better have a few facts and figures in your back pocket, that show the inordinate number of hours IT staff has spent with group X explaining and re-explaining Y. But this is generally a good thing, because getting high-ranking attention focused on the problems IT faces is rare. And because they're the ones dealing with the money, and know that an IT employee is earning 5X more than the idiot taking up all of IT's time, they're likely to work towards fixing the problem, or at the very least, you'll get an obvious justification for IT projects being behind schedule, and can suggest hiring another IT employee right in-front of the guys who need to sign-off on that.
Why is this a problem? Is the admin going to see a countdown someday that says "answer this question that was on the 3rd trimester final in year two of an EE curriculum in 30 seconds or the computer melts into slag"?
You can definitely tell the difference between those who have a rather formal understanding of a technology (whether from a course or reading a good book on the subject cover-to-cover), versus those who learned "computers" through just experience and trial-and-error without a good theoretical basis. The former tend to be those who can track a problem, in sequence, from top to bottom, and quickly narrow down where the problem lies. The latter tend to be superstitious types, who will swap monitors to try and resolve a system crash...
I'm far from a blind advocate for a C.S. degree. In fact I'd say the majority of 4-year degrees objectively aren't worth the massive student-loan debt it takes to earn them, that will be hanging over your head for decades. Studies showing the benefits of a degree are just correlations that are caused by self-selection bias (more smart and/or rich people attend college). However, there are real benefits to be had from a formal CS education.
What you learn in college, other than techniques like ways to attack and solve a problem, are going to be horribly out of date anyway.
You're suggesting we won't be using C, bubble sort algorithms, TCP/IP, Cisco routers, Unix-compatible OSes, 4+ years from now? In fact the bulk of those are over 40 years old, now, aren't they?
There are lots of people without college degrees who can see complex and difficult things through to completion, but that is much harder to glean from glancing at a resume for two seconds.
Uhh, no. In two seconds you'll see the list of major projects your prospective employee has completed at former jobs. College degree is only really important if the person has no job experience.
MANY job listings these days say "4-year degree OR equivalent work experience" for just that reason.
most companies are less interested in employees who are smart than those who can follow instructions and work (however inefficiently) until they finish something.
I suppose that's true, as "most" jobs are minimum wage mindless tedium.
Linux geeks are used to thinking about computer programmers as being smart, but that's not how the business world sees them. Coders are a commodity to be bought and sold like corn (and just as lacking in useful content).
Except any decently large shop will have at least one highly skilled (and well-paid) coder that works on the big problems, and helps out the rest of the group when they run into issues.
That's not the fault of "progress", it's just a Linux thing... Same thing happened with audio, file systems, and much more.
The BSDs:
* haven't changed their audio systems since their inception.
* Kept their file systems backwards-compatible for decades, and did not have a flood of XFS/JFS/ReiserFS/etc. options. There have been changes recently, but incredibly few by comparison.
* Used the powerful and simple IPF as their stateful firewall dating back before many/.ers were born... at least 1993 or so. Only changed to PF (with very similar syntax) after IPF's license was changed, and all the BSD still use it. There are some alternative projects, but again, even with several BSDs, there's still less churn than with Linux.
Compare the command syntax of an iptables rule to a PF rule, and get back to me. There's good reason OpenBSD is commonly used as a firewall, while Linux almost never is...
Well all low rise buildings don't perform that well in earthquakes
Non-masonry structures absolutely perform MUCH better with the twisting stresses caused by earthquakes. That goes triple for old, unreinforced masonry...
Wood-frame buildings can be significantly improved at trivial cost by just switching to HurriQuake nails.
They've never had me do anything like that - no stock OS reinstall, BIOS updates or anything else. But then I don't deal with their low-end crap.
Nope, that's just observation bias, NOT a result of going "high-end" or anything else you can think of. You just haven't dealt with them enough to see all the nonsense. We've got 4-hour mission-critical support, and they've had us applying all the BIOS & firmware updates, even if just weeks newer than what we had... making BIOS setting changes, and much more, on their SERVERS, where the system was crashing day after day.
Yet the price of oil collapsed while Standard Oil was an EVIL MONOPOLY.
Cost reductions due to technological improvements and similar, still occur despite monopolies. They were probably just there at the right time to ride the wave of falling prices. They still kept the prices higher than they would have been with healthy competition.
the best way to make your company an EVIL MONOPOLY is to get the government to impose regulations that make the cost of starting a company to compete with you unaffordable.
Nope, being able to set prices does quite a bit better, as you can directly undercut your upstart competitor and make sure they can't turn a profit. Which is exactly what Standard Oil did.
Today that would no longer be a problem, since the government wouldn't let anyone build a refinery.
They aren't stopping anyone. The government did screw-up, as is commonly done, by allowing existing refineries to be grandfathered-in without meeting newer safety standards and pollution controls, while still allowing some expansion. If they'd imposed those regulations on existing refineries, you'd see oil companies jumping to build new ones, rather than keeping the old ones just barely limping along.
Besides, refineries are a wonderful tool for collusion and price-fixing between the few oil companies... Any shortfall or shutdown drives the price of gasoline through the roof, and they all benefit from having zero excess capacity...
The other extreme is true, too... Any random moron can slap [citation needed] and dozens of other tags into an article. It takes almost no effort, and there are no consequences for the idiot doing it without putting in any effort of being completely misinformed. Meanwhile, tracking down citations is obviously significant work in the best of cases. So some high quality articles have [citation needed] or [dubious] tags all over the place, left there for years. While some horribly slanted articles with only a few bad sources have no obvious indication of any problems.
Stone and brick performs terribly in earthquake country, still need ample routine maintenance (mortar deteriorates), and the framing is only a small part of the depreciation... Bringing old homes up to modern codes can be far more expensive than bulldozing and building new.
The longevity of that building is just a fluke, not evidence of superiority. There will always be outliers, and I'm sure you can find wooden homes from the same era still around as well.
Standard Oil dramatically lowered retail consumer prices [...] and was generally beneficial to the consumer, not an anti-competitive extractor of monopoly rents.
Absolutely not true:
"The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Co. charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which leaves even the Standard little or no profit, and which more often leaves no profit to the competitor, whose costs are ordinarily somewhat higher."
Though I'd say you're being a bit too hard on them, your experience with Dell is the same nonsense I go through, managing thousands of servers. The time-wasting useless procedure checklist crap needs to stop!
Their technicians also range from below average to bad... I've seen things like a defective DRAC problem being treated by a motherboard being replaced. That was of course followed by us complaining, and the same dummy coming back the next day to fix the actual problem... Or a system with a single defective DIMM that resulted in half a dozen on-site visits, that went from just swapping DIMMs around, to installing new DIMMs (the tech replaced the wrong pair), to a new motherboard, to power supplies, and finally the *correct* DIMM being replaced.
Slashdot Mirror
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4365189&cid=45212453
I tend to ignore people who can't be bothered to use google on their own, and instead ask for everything to be handed to them...
We're talking about half a century of gun control laws and increasing crime rates. There's no single link to ALL that information.
There's a few quick ones:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/02/21/disarming-the-myths-promoted-by-the-gun-control-lobby/2/
http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htm (See #10)
http://www.liveandlocalenc.com/proof-gun-control-increases-crime/
http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig7/lemieux1.html
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/22/do-strict-gun-laws-really-stop-gun-crime/
http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp#right-to-carry
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/weekinreview/29liptak.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2013/02/04/gun-crimes-increase-massachusetts-despite-tough-gun-laws/XjlDQLZlUDvsf3KS8PqyGK/story.html
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2010/06/25/stossel-argues-gun-control-increases-crime-i-was-once-clueless-senator-schumer
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/02/17/the-nation-toughest-gun-control-law-made-massachusetts-less-safe/3845k7xHzkwTrBWy4KpkEM/story.html
In several states, it's illegal to sell a gun without involving a licensed dealer to perform the background check and transfer. Not difficult at all.
And then every long-haul truck driver registers their truck in the state with the lowest per-mile taxes... An odometer reading system is too stupid to know if you're destroying in-state roads or some other state.
And how is the other state you're driving through going to collect on those per-mile taxes to maintain their roads? With fuel taxes, you're probably going to fill-up your tank away from home at some point, so the other state collects some of your money. But you can't collect per-mile fees from out-of-state drivers without toll-roads or some such.
They are incredibly insignificant next to high axle weight vehicles like semis, which aren't ever going to be able to switch to battery power.
No it doesn't... Half of road maintenance is already paid for from the general fund, rather than fuel taxes. Almost everybody has a car, and those few who don't are still getting a huge benefit from the road network around them, so why not take what you can get from an increased fuel tax, and cover the rest from income and property taxes?
Hybrids still need gasoline. And only about HALF of road work is paid for by fuel taxes... Crank up the gas taxes to compensate for the shortfall and be done with it. Those that burn the most fuel SHOULD be paying for more of the government programs. It's a fairly small incentive to buy a hybrid or an EV, and those vehicles have hugely positive knock-on effect so anything that encourages them is good.
Even if all cars were replaced with EVs tomorrow... Pickups, SUVs, buses, and tractor-trailers would still be burning quite a bit of gas / diesel, because they just can't carry enough batteries, and they will continue to pay the fuel taxes. What's more, high axle-weight vehicles like tractor-trailers are inordinately destructive to the roads, so even 20 years ago, they SHOULD have been paying much higher fuel taxes. Hybrid car drivers really are insignificant where road wear and tear is concerned, next to the semis.
Awesome! Most vehicles have two little wires that you can cut to disable the speedometer and odometer. Maybe wire it to a switch under the dashboard so you can reach down and shut it off while cruising on the freeway, to erase all those miles, and just turn it on when you need to check your speed or measure a trip.
And why is the state of Oregon going to be taxing their citizens on all the miles they may have incurred driving on out-of-state roads? Sounds like something that might run afoul of that whole Interstate Commerce clause.
Actually, we need more time to determine if it will have a positive effect...
"because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this finding isn't statistically significant."
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#Contention_over_effects_of_the_laws
I've given up on the Daily Show. It has become extremely heavy-handed and preachy on any topics the host or writer feel strongly about. They're serious and political when they want to be, and write it off as being a comedy show when they don't want to take responsibility or justify what they've said.
First you'll have to trek deep into the Amazonian rain forest, and discover a new species, so that you can name it a "Red-breasted Mediocre", in order for it to be a possible Ubuntu product name.
Actually, money in politics is usually about buying "the people". Put out a slick commercial that airs on every channel, and you can get popular opinion on your side, and drag the politicians along with it...
Only because of the courts... NY, D.C., and others, basically outlawed guns, until the courts overturned the rules.
I'm a registered Democrat, who has never owned or fired a gun, yet I'm disgusted at the faith-based gun control laws being advocated, despite all evidence EVER, showing they only have the opposite effects. And worse, exploiting dead children to push for gun control laws that undeniably wouldn't have saved any of those children. Universal background checks are a great idea, but all other gun control laws currently suggested are pure idiocy.
Moral of the story:
If you don't properly save for retirement, you'll be doing a lot of work after retirement age to try and keep the money coming in.
There are plenty of ways to deal with such people... The best is that you (IT) demand that computer related tasks are treated as any other job function. So IT trains managers how to do a task, the managers train supervisors, and the supervisors train employees. This critically gets IT out of the loop in employee training for departments with ridiculously high turn-over, or unhappy and useless minimum-wage slaves. It also drastically reduces the number of calls, as problems filter up the chain of command, instead of 20 people calling about a printer not working... But the supervisor/manager/director of IT must be willing to stick to the principle of shooting down any calls from regular employees or supervisors, with a blanket response of "Ask your manager". Managers don't like wasting their time any more than IT does, but they have numerous options to address that kind of a problem in their department with their underlings, while IT has none.
Another option, or a supplement for the above, is to have WRITTEN procedures, in a binder, in the supervisor's desk. So when they call screaming about error number 7905495 popping-up on their screen, and how the world is coming to an end, you just tell them you won't help them unless they look it up in the binder and follow the official procedure described there. This one really helps reduce the 3am calls (after you yell at them for not looking in the binder the first couple times).
Another option is to adjust your response time around how useless a particular person or group happens to be... Well-behaved departments get quick responses to any questions they have, while badly-behaved departments that don't learn (and might even expect IT is supposed to do the "computer" part of their job for them), get a callback the second Tuesday of next month. This usually results in the idiots missing some deadline or another, and getting in trouble. When they blame IT, you'd better have a few facts and figures in your back pocket, that show the inordinate number of hours IT staff has spent with group X explaining and re-explaining Y. But this is generally a good thing, because getting high-ranking attention focused on the problems IT faces is rare. And because they're the ones dealing with the money, and know that an IT employee is earning 5X more than the idiot taking up all of IT's time, they're likely to work towards fixing the problem, or at the very least, you'll get an obvious justification for IT projects being behind schedule, and can suggest hiring another IT employee right in-front of the guys who need to sign-off on that.
Related: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2595000&cid=38522902
You can definitely tell the difference between those who have a rather formal understanding of a technology (whether from a course or reading a good book on the subject cover-to-cover), versus those who learned "computers" through just experience and trial-and-error without a good theoretical basis. The former tend to be those who can track a problem, in sequence, from top to bottom, and quickly narrow down where the problem lies. The latter tend to be superstitious types, who will swap monitors to try and resolve a system crash...
I'm far from a blind advocate for a C.S. degree. In fact I'd say the majority of 4-year degrees objectively aren't worth the massive student-loan debt it takes to earn them, that will be hanging over your head for decades. Studies showing the benefits of a degree are just correlations that are caused by self-selection bias (more smart and/or rich people attend college). However, there are real benefits to be had from a formal CS education.
You're suggesting we won't be using C, bubble sort algorithms, TCP/IP, Cisco routers, Unix-compatible OSes, 4+ years from now? In fact the bulk of those are over 40 years old, now, aren't they?
Uhh, no. In two seconds you'll see the list of major projects your prospective employee has completed at former jobs. College degree is only really important if the person has no job experience.
MANY job listings these days say "4-year degree OR equivalent work experience" for just that reason.
I suppose that's true, as "most" jobs are minimum wage mindless tedium.
Except any decently large shop will have at least one highly skilled (and well-paid) coder that works on the big problems, and helps out the rest of the group when they run into issues.
Not true at all. I've had all these nightmares with PowerEdge servers.
Your firewall doesn't need an SB Audigy sound card...
Not trying to troll or flame here, BUT...
That's not the fault of "progress", it's just a Linux thing... Same thing happened with audio, file systems, and much more.
The BSDs:
* haven't changed their audio systems since their inception.
* Kept their file systems backwards-compatible for decades, and did not have a flood of XFS/JFS/ReiserFS/etc. options. There have been changes recently, but incredibly few by comparison.
* Used the powerful and simple IPF as their stateful firewall dating back before many /.ers were born... at least 1993 or so. Only changed to PF (with very similar syntax) after IPF's license was changed, and all the BSD still use it. There are some alternative projects, but again, even with several BSDs, there's still less churn than with Linux.
Compare the command syntax of an iptables rule to a PF rule, and get back to me. There's good reason OpenBSD is commonly used as a firewall, while Linux almost never is...
Non-masonry structures absolutely perform MUCH better with the twisting stresses caused by earthquakes. That goes triple for old, unreinforced masonry...
Wood-frame buildings can be significantly improved at trivial cost by just switching to HurriQuake nails.
Nope, that's just observation bias, NOT a result of going "high-end" or anything else you can think of. You just haven't dealt with them enough to see all the nonsense. We've got 4-hour mission-critical support, and they've had us applying all the BIOS & firmware updates, even if just weeks newer than what we had... making BIOS setting changes, and much more, on their SERVERS, where the system was crashing day after day.
Cost reductions due to technological improvements and similar, still occur despite monopolies. They were probably just there at the right time to ride the wave of falling prices. They still kept the prices higher than they would have been with healthy competition.
Nope, being able to set prices does quite a bit better, as you can directly undercut your upstart competitor and make sure they can't turn a profit. Which is exactly what Standard Oil did.
They aren't stopping anyone. The government did screw-up, as is commonly done, by allowing existing refineries to be grandfathered-in without meeting newer safety standards and pollution controls, while still allowing some expansion. If they'd imposed those regulations on existing refineries, you'd see oil companies jumping to build new ones, rather than keeping the old ones just barely limping along.
Besides, refineries are a wonderful tool for collusion and price-fixing between the few oil companies... Any shortfall or shutdown drives the price of gasoline through the roof, and they all benefit from having zero excess capacity...
The other extreme is true, too... Any random moron can slap [citation needed] and dozens of other tags into an article. It takes almost no effort, and there are no consequences for the idiot doing it without putting in any effort of being completely misinformed. Meanwhile, tracking down citations is obviously significant work in the best of cases. So some high quality articles have [citation needed] or [dubious] tags all over the place, left there for years. While some horribly slanted articles with only a few bad sources have no obvious indication of any problems.
Just one of many problems WP isn't dealing with.
Stone and brick performs terribly in earthquake country, still need ample routine maintenance (mortar deteriorates), and the framing is only a small part of the depreciation... Bringing old homes up to modern codes can be far more expensive than bulldozing and building new.
The longevity of that building is just a fluke, not evidence of superiority. There will always be outliers, and I'm sure you can find wooden homes from the same era still around as well.
Absolutely not true:
"The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Co. charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which leaves even the Standard little or no profit, and which more often leaves no profit to the competitor, whose costs are ordinarily somewhat higher."
Though I'd say you're being a bit too hard on them, your experience with Dell is the same nonsense I go through, managing thousands of servers. The time-wasting useless procedure checklist crap needs to stop!
Their technicians also range from below average to bad... I've seen things like a defective DRAC problem being treated by a motherboard being replaced. That was of course followed by us complaining, and the same dummy coming back the next day to fix the actual problem... Or a system with a single defective DIMM that resulted in half a dozen on-site visits, that went from just swapping DIMMs around, to installing new DIMMs (the tech replaced the wrong pair), to a new motherboard, to power supplies, and finally the *correct* DIMM being replaced.