The "liter" tax on liquor is obscene; not so much a sin tax as a "sure, we'll privatize booze sales as long as we get to keep collecting an amount equivalent to the profit we were making" tax so its a 20.5% tax in addition to the regular sales tax. Can't speak to cigarettes; I don't smoke. Don't know about a special tax on chips and salsa or a tax on fast food other than the "prepared foods tax" that is similar to other state's restaurant taxes but is 10%. Groceries (including candy and soda) are not taxed. But - the state sales tax is pretty stiff at 6.5%, and most local governments (county, and city) throw in their own sales tax, so you might see a sales tax of 8.5% to as much as 10% in some places. You can pay a whole lot for gas, or you can pay a lot, but it's not as bad as California! Buying gas at CostCo helps.
It is a trade-off... no state income tax, but a stiff sales tax, stiff real estate taxes, and lots of little fees. I moved here from another state, and I did so because I wanted to, so I guess from my point of view there are worse US states to live in.
Ground source heat pumps have been around in the United States for many years (https://igshpa.org/). I first looked at them in 1996 when I was planning to build a new house, and I looked at them again in 2007 when I needed to replace my failing air source heat pumps that could not be repaired in place because federal energy guidelines had killed the sale of the replacement parts I needed for my 7 year old system. I ended up going with the ground source heat pump to see how it would all work out.
It's a cool idea (no pun intended) and it works, but has its challenges. The contractors are somewhat specialized, as are the equipment vendors (I used Water Furnace equipment http://www.waterfurnace.com/). Similar to air source heat pumps, you have to accept a slower rate of change in your indoor temperature (i.e., you don't get the "ahhh" rapid heat like you do with a fossil-fuel force hot air furnace and you don't seem to get any measurable benefit from cutting back temperatures when you aren't home; I suspect that this is in part due to the challenge of heating/cooling the large thermal mass of your home with a smaller difference in the air temperature).
It is a huge advantage over air source heat pumps when temperatures fall below freezing; the ground temperature in my area was about 56 degrees F and its a lot easier to pull heat out of liquid at 56 degrees F than air at sub-freezing temperatures; same kind of benefit when cooling in the summer with outside temps in the 90s or 100s. Its a lot quieter than air source heat pumps because you don't have the noisy outside units running just outside your house.
Its worth looking at and I didn't regret doing it, but take all of the projected savings and especially any claims of "increased equity" in your home with a grain of salt. It was the soft benefits that sold it for me. Oh - to maximize efficiency when cooling and save yourself a few bucks, get an option for domestic hot water... in the summer the heat pump can exchange heat into your hot water reservoir first before dumping it into the ground. Free hot showers (yes, I like my hot showers, even in the summer).
I installed a geothermal (ground source heat pump) system (two actually - two zones) in the house that I just sold a month ago. The total cost was around $40,000 for my system, installed in 2008. My tie to the "geothermal energy" was ground water in an open loop configuration rather than a horizontal or vertical closed loop. I selected this alternative over a like-for-like replacement of my air source heat pump system (also two zones) at a cost of about $20,000. Both options included some interior duct work in addition to the basic mechanical equipment. My system was projected to save about $1,000 in yearly energy costs (electric), so there was a 20 year payback. As far as I can tell (having just sold my house) the geothermal system did not add any equity to my home (in other words, I did not seem to have buyers who were willing to pay me $$ more than they would for a similar house without geothermal, and the real estate agents in my area didn't find the geothermal HVAC to be a selling point worth more than a bullet point mention).
During planning, I discovered wide disparities between the claimed installation costs by those pushing "geothermal" and the contractors in my area who do this type of work (contractors cost >> claimed installation costs). Once the system was in, I discovered (surprise!) disparities between the claimed energy savings (by those pushing geothermal) and my actual energy savings (actual savings I'm slightly confused by installation comparison in the article. For my project, I looked at a shallow ground loop (slinky tubing) that would be installed under my lawn using a fairly large area - I didn't have enough lawn area and I didn't want to tear up the woods behind my house. I also looked at vertical bores - I needed 6 (one per ton of space conditioning) which could go under my lawn or my driveway - the "drill width" was not a deal breaker as its the same as is used for a water well. In the end the vertical bore option was not viable because the well contractor refused to attempt 6 vertical wells due to subsurface materials that the contractor claimed would make digging a nightmare.
The article seems to be comparing a vertical bore process with a horizontal "slinky" installation process, and of course vertical bores are less disruptive to install under your lawn. If they are really comparing two different vertical installations, then one or two bores going down 1,000 feet sounds marginally better than 6 bores going down 400 feet or so each, but I don't think I would have been interested in 2 instead of 6 holes unless it was roughly the same cost (in other words, having 6 holes at a lower cost would have been just fine by me as the holes are not that obtrusive). Ultimately the number of bores and depth of the bores depends on the heat transfer capabilities of the subsurface material and the BTUs of space conditioning you are trying to achieve. Too bad the article wasn't a lot more specific about the claimed advantages of the installation method.
I think you have identified a key part of the problem. When I hear about officer-involved shootings, and I hear that the officer was "in fear for his/her life" and that they are "trained to shoot when they are threatened" I wonder whether that is how they should be being trained. The general public is not aware of the risks that police officers face (not in the same way that the officers are), and so a member of the public is likely to respond to a situation differently than a police officer may expect them to; their perception of the situation is going to be radically different.
So, should their training emphasize the safety of the officer, or the safety of the general public interacting with the officer? If it were up to me, I would say the safety of the general public, recognizing that it increases risk to the police officer. But that risk is one that an individual becoming an officer assumes (takes on) as part of entering that role. I think that it should not be the case that a member of the general public who is not acting in a manner contrary to law ends up being killed because a police offer felt "threatened" - that seems to be fundamental failure of the reason why the police are part of our society - to protect and serve.
Since the officers are human, the set of things that may increase their level of fear is going to include "those who are outside of their tribe." With the results that we have been seeing.
Taking it a step further, it seems that police are also generally trained to dominate encounters, and that they react badly to people who don't bow and scrape to their authority. I'm not a member of a minority, but when I was young I had a few less than pleasant encounters with police officers who apparently believed that I was not respecting their authority enough. Now that I'm older I tend to be polite and respectful even when I think they are full of themselves and acting like asses (which is NOT every encounter that I've had, but it does happen). Younger people, and people with a chip on their shoulders due to past injustices and a knowledge that they have rights are going to run into problems when they encounter the authority-loving officers and they don't kow-tow to them. I'm not advocating kissing their asses; I think their training needs to include a recognition that not everyone reacts well to their dominating an encounter and that it might not always be the best technique to use. At that same time, people should recognize that they are just as capable of "pushing buttons" on the officers as the officers are on them, and that although they may win in the end, being dead right doesn't hold any particular joy.
The big game changer is the now ubiquitous presence of still and video cameras in the hands of practically every member of the public. This is highlighting the problems that exist with how officers sometimes interact with the public in general (and seemingly with minorities in particular). I'm glad that the courts are recognizing (and through case law publicizing and re-inforcing) the vital role that citizens recording police activities plays in maintaining a more civil society. Courts have generally given more credibility to an officer than to a defendant when no other evidence was available, but seem to be more than willing to accept the new source of evidence. When this helps shine the light on bad cops or bad policing, it provides evidence that our governments should use to update their training of our police.
Um.... its LIDAR (light radar) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar. Visible and near visible (ultra violet and near infra red) light that is being sprayed around. You know, like what surrounds you all day long, especially while you are outside? So, while its true that the detection uses photons that are on the electro-magnetic spectrum, its not the same risk as from microwave frequencies.
Add to that a tendency to be defensive about the things you fear may be happening to you as you age, and... it's not surprising that an elderly person reacts badly to being told that they aren't as good as others or as they used to be.
How is the law going to differentiate between a sex robot that looks like a "young but over the age of consent" individual and a sex robot that portrays an individual just on the other side of that line, if it comes down to that. With a live human, one can look at a birth certificate to make the determination, but with a robot, based on appearance, how will this be done? There certainly are humans individuals who are below the age of consent who appear to be above it, and vice versa. The intricacies of a policy like this could be a legal feast.
My impression from my (brief) read through was that the two variables "Female fertility as a factor of age" and "Male fertility as a factor of age" are confounding variables with respect to each other. In other words, you can't just measure the female fertility by age without considering the male fertility by age, and vice versa. The male fertility is less sensitive to age than female fertility, but the effect is still present (no necessary similarity as to cause, just effect), and they interact in a not unexpected way. Whether the observed behavior of older males pairing with younger females is an innate expression of the biology is an interesting question; it can certainly be explained by other factors such as wealth/security paired with vitality and youthful good looks.
and we continue to confuse "health care" with insurance against risks to our health, demanding that insurers cover the cost of regular health care, with many people expecting that their health insurance premiums should be lower than the cost of their health care (otherwise they wouldn't be getting anything out of it).
and we confuse the idea of figuring out why health care is expensive with the idea of helping people afford health insurance and health care. As far as I can tell, the number 1 reason why health care is so expensive is that the folks who could control health care costs (by voting with their dollars) haven't clue #1 about what any health care services actually cost. And until we fix that, we have no hope of figuring out how to reign in health care expenditures.
Don't you mean we need to start wider application of self-pollinating crops? That way we won't have to worry about the insecticides that are killing off the pollinators.
Interestingly enough, there was something a lot like a free market for ISPs at one point: when consumer Internet access was via dial-up. All you had to do to be an ISP was to get a dedicated Internet circuit (like a T1 with a heady 1.544 Mbps) and a number of POTS lines (say 10 to 40 or so) with modems on them, and you were an ISP! (With 56Kbps modems your service speed was "smoking!" At that point the "phone company" didn't even really know what Internet service was, and cable companies just provided TV channels.
Then Digital Subscriber Line came along, typically deployed as Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), with download speeds that might have been 768Kbps, no need to tie up your house's phone line with your Internet connection, and the connection itself was "always on!" The paying public abandoned dial-up ISPs, switching to DSL. DSL was more limited access on the provider side, because you had to be in the telephone company CO. There were some legal provisions for telephone companies to provide access to their copper lines for alternative DSL service ISPs, but it really crunched down the number of competitors as the "telephone companies" realized that there was a lot of money to be made as an ISP. Verizon's move to FIOS seems to have been in part inspired by the fact that although they had to share access to the copper cable plant, they could install the fiber cable plant and NOT have to shared it. At most of the locations that I'm aware of, as soon as a household switched to FIOS, the copper plant was disconnected from that house (loophole in the rules I think - they only had to share the copper if it was connected to the house, they couldn't be forced to provide a copper connection to a house for use by an alternative provider).
Cable companies got into it as they had their own cable plant and realized they could make $$$ just like the phone company of Internet service. Since cable Internet and FIOS offered much better bandwidth than DSL, the public switched again...
So - each time the public has voted for increased bandwidth, the public has also voted to constrain competition, albeit unknowingly. It this point, many households in the US need Internet almost as much as they need electricity and water. Its a utility and should be under the common carrier rules (in my opinion).
Wow. You missed the mark. I'm in my mid-50s, tail end of the baby boom. I cook all the time, and I buy as much as I can at CostCo. I don't drink coffee, never go to Starbucks or other coffee shops. I grimace when I eat (occasionally) at MacDonalds and have to throw out all of the containers/packing for my meal.
However, I'm tired of having to toss out spices because I've had them for years and they have lost their potency and I've only used a small fraction of the container. I'm tired of having units of [whatever] go bad in the refrigerator because I didn't need as much as was the smallest unit that I could buy. I'd like to buy just the portions of meat/cheese that I need for a meal without the hassle of waiting in line at the deli counter or meat counter. I'm dreading the multiplication of this effect when my two kids are in college and it's just me and my wife and we are cooking for just two.
In a fully realized version of my robot vision, certain staples like flour, sugar, salt, baking power, vegetable oil, olive oil wouldn't be part of the package. Other items that are needed in smaller quantities would come from a mass storage unit at the grocery store and be packaged in environmentally friendly materials for the meal preparation concept.
I think you miss the point of brainstorming. Come up with the ideas first, then refine them for actual implementation taking into account all needs, including being kind to the environment.
I don't think the best use of robots at a supermarket is in taking over individual jobs that humans do at supermarkets. The robots can make a major change to shopping. I'm starting to like the idea of services like Blue Apron, where one can get all of the ingredients to prepare a meal in one package (essentially). Imagine if when you went shopping at the supermarket, you submitted your order, not as a list of items to buy, but as a series of meals you want to prepare. Then, robots at the store "pick" and package the ingredients that you want for a meal together, and you just pick up your set of packages, one (or a small number) of packages per meal, all measured/portioned out for you. If you were able to order on-line, it could all be ready for you when you swing by the store. The nature of the store would change dramatically. If Amazon does something like this with Whole Foods, I might start shopping at Whole Foods...
A ten year old vehicle that has been maintained reasonably well is no where near the end of its service life. I currently have a 2000 model Dodge Caravan with 210k miles, and a 2000 Toyota 4Runner with almost 250k miles. Both are ok for regular use with a slightly higher expectation on my part that the Dodge's transmission is going to fail sooner or later. I take that into account when I use it. The 4Runner is still a daily driver; the Dodge has been relegated to non-time-critical uses such as occasional cargo duties and may be replaced by a trailer that will be owned behind the 4Runner.
Oil change intervals recommended by the manufacturer vary, with the manufacturer typically differentiating between standard duty and heavy duty environments (and heavy duty is defined as driving that breaks down oil more quickly, such as many short trips, etc.). Further differentiation may depend on type of oil. Businesses that make their money off of oil changes typically recommend shorter (sometimes much shorter) intervals.
Software changes, including those intended to correct security vulnerabilities, all carry an inherent risk of unintended consequences. Blindly applying any/all manufacturer-supplied software changes doesn't always go well. It should be noted that most mainstream/big name software vendors appear to have gotten their security vulnerability patch testing in order and it seems to be extremely rare now that a security patch causes an outage. When a manufacturer stops supply security patches the device in question doesn't immediately fail open.
All of these things have notifications related to servicing. Whether or not the notification requires immediate reaction (or even any action) depends on the particular circumstances of the item and its use. A Windows server attached directly to the Internet with no firewall is a very different risk item than a Windows server on a small private network.
When an item is end of life from a manufacturer, the manufacturer may no longer provide support. But that doesn't mean that the item is useless. It simply means that your risk profile for the use of the item has changed and you should adapt your thinking/planning accordingly.
How would you prove your infant child was yours if your child was stolen away from you? Today you could perhaps have DNA testing. Back when the footprint/handprints were initiated, that wasn't an option. I don't think the footprints/fingerprints work as a long-term ID, just a short-term ID.
Just "chip" everyone and be done with it (subdermal ID chip). Make a rule that everyone has to have their chip checked regularly. Heck, make the chip contain a digital ID that they use to encrypt/sign their communications, and make sure that the private encryption keys are all escrowed by the government.
An AR-15 is not an assault weapon. The term 'assault rifle' originally referred to a battle rifle that fires fully automatically but is lightweight. The AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle that looks like an particular assault rifle (the M16) but is not itself an assault rifle.
The use of the term 'assault weapon' applied to the AR-15 seems to have followed an arc from "assault-type rifle" (based on its appearance but admitting that it wasn't actually an assault rifle), to leaving off the "-type" but adding on "weapon" in order to avoid the argument that it isn't an assault *rifle*. This seems like a rather disingenuous ploy to confuse the public.
If you want to argue that people shouldn't own rifles that shoot centerfire rifle cartridges, or shouldn't own rifles that exceed a certain level of muzzle energy or just muzzle velocity, then we can have that argument, and we'll include all available firearms that have those capabilities. But to get all hot and bothered about the appearance of the firearm seems pointless to me. The Clinton Crime Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act included a provision to ban certain types of firearms that have come to be called "assault weapons". The ban also included a provision to track the use of these weapons for crimes. It is my understanding that the sunset provision for the ban was not blocked in part because no significant use of these weapons in crimes was found.
As for drones, and as far as "ordinary people" are concerned, I'm not sure the many people using drones for useful purposes would agree with your cavalier assessment that they don't need them. I have a friend with a drone business who provides a service to local farmers to assess the conditions of their fields using the drone. This saves the farmers a lot of time while providing them with a much more comprehensive view of their fields than they could achieve otherwise.
I'm not thrilled with some of the annoying things people do with drones any more than I'm thrilled about how some people use ATVs, personal watercraft, motorcycles, weed whackers, blowers, and other such devices, but they do have useful purposes, and many many people use them carefully and within legal limits. Let's enforce existing laws against the misuse of technology, whether its firearms or drones, but let's not go around making things illegal without evidence that they are a significant problem.
Words fail me. Rich people spend their money; there are gross examples of this all over the place. Some of them spend too much (see stories about Johnny Depp for an example). The money that rich people don't spend is unlikely to be "in their bank account," because bank accounts don't pay any interest. Rich people tend to invest their money, so that they can get richer. The money that they invest typically gets used by other people to do things that increase someone's value, and some of that increased value gets back to the rich people who invested money in the first place.
I think there are lots of problems with income disparity and wealth disparity. But your ultimate sentence doesn't match my observations.
Look up the definition of the work "engineer" in the dictionary. None of the dictionaries that I have just read include in the definition that concept that one must be licensed, or even have a degree, to be an engineer. That's little "e" generic engineer. However, in the United States, at least in the ones with which I am familiar, a person can achieve an official certification of their status as an "engineer" by satisfying certain conditions, including taking a test and paying a fee. At that point they can call themselves a "Licensed Engineer" or a "Professional Engineer" or whatever title is conveyed by satisfying those conditions. At that point that person is a big "E" engineer of whatever type they have proven that they can swing the weight of. And those jurisdictions can and usually do specify certain occupations or positions that require such licensing of the people in those occupations or positions. Those positions require the extra weight of official licensing because of the responsibilities of those positions.
To suggest that the only people in the United States who are "engineers" are the ones who have taken those extra steps is a gross mischaracterization of the licensing/PE process and willful ignorance of the considerable weight of evidence that, in fact, an extraordinarily large number of people in the United States are considered by just about everyone to be "engineers" despite not being licensed or certified as a "Professional Engineer". For starters, one could look at the job titles of a large number of companies in the United States which include the word "engineer" in conjunction with adjectives describing the type of engineering expected from the person holding that job title. You could also look at the popular use of the term engineer in many types of media and literature, where it is common to use the term without reference to the official status of a "licensed" or "professional" engineer. In fact, if the common usage of the word "engineer" included the concept of official licensing, we wouldn't need the specific capitalized titles of "Licensed Engineer" or "Professional Engineer."
To use an example from another, similar, domain, look at "Doctor." Any PhD can call themselves "Doctor" (and many insist upon it) without being a licensed medical doctor. They can even use the title "Dr." professionally. What they can't do is use the initials "MD" or "Doctor of Medicine" - the capitalized reference to official licensing or credentialing under a legal framework that grants special privileges and responsibilities to those using that official imprimatur.
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The "liter" tax on liquor is obscene; not so much a sin tax as a "sure, we'll privatize booze sales as long as we get to keep collecting an amount equivalent to the profit we were making" tax so its a 20.5% tax in addition to the regular sales tax. Can't speak to cigarettes; I don't smoke. Don't know about a special tax on chips and salsa or a tax on fast food other than the "prepared foods tax" that is similar to other state's restaurant taxes but is 10%. Groceries (including candy and soda) are not taxed. But - the state sales tax is pretty stiff at 6.5%, and most local governments (county, and city) throw in their own sales tax, so you might see a sales tax of 8.5% to as much as 10% in some places. You can pay a whole lot for gas, or you can pay a lot, but it's not as bad as California! Buying gas at CostCo helps.
It is a trade-off... no state income tax, but a stiff sales tax, stiff real estate taxes, and lots of little fees. I moved here from another state, and I did so because I wanted to, so I guess from my point of view there are worse US states to live in.
The state of Washington doesn't have a state income tax, but gets the money it needs for operating from a myriad of other fees, sales tax, etc.
Ground source heat pumps have been around in the United States for many years (https://igshpa.org/). I first looked at them in 1996 when I was planning to build a new house, and I looked at them again in 2007 when I needed to replace my failing air source heat pumps that could not be repaired in place because federal energy guidelines had killed the sale of the replacement parts I needed for my 7 year old system. I ended up going with the ground source heat pump to see how it would all work out.
It's a cool idea (no pun intended) and it works, but has its challenges. The contractors are somewhat specialized, as are the equipment vendors (I used Water Furnace equipment http://www.waterfurnace.com/). Similar to air source heat pumps, you have to accept a slower rate of change in your indoor temperature (i.e., you don't get the "ahhh" rapid heat like you do with a fossil-fuel force hot air furnace and you don't seem to get any measurable benefit from cutting back temperatures when you aren't home; I suspect that this is in part due to the challenge of heating/cooling the large thermal mass of your home with a smaller difference in the air temperature).
It is a huge advantage over air source heat pumps when temperatures fall below freezing; the ground temperature in my area was about 56 degrees F and its a lot easier to pull heat out of liquid at 56 degrees F than air at sub-freezing temperatures; same kind of benefit when cooling in the summer with outside temps in the 90s or 100s. Its a lot quieter than air source heat pumps because you don't have the noisy outside units running just outside your house.
Its worth looking at and I didn't regret doing it, but take all of the projected savings and especially any claims of "increased equity" in your home with a grain of salt. It was the soft benefits that sold it for me. Oh - to maximize efficiency when cooling and save yourself a few bucks, get an option for domestic hot water... in the summer the heat pump can exchange heat into your hot water reservoir first before dumping it into the ground. Free hot showers (yes, I like my hot showers, even in the summer).
I installed a geothermal (ground source heat pump) system (two actually - two zones) in the house that I just sold a month ago. The total cost was around $40,000 for my system, installed in 2008. My tie to the "geothermal energy" was ground water in an open loop configuration rather than a horizontal or vertical closed loop. I selected this alternative over a like-for-like replacement of my air source heat pump system (also two zones) at a cost of about $20,000. Both options included some interior duct work in addition to the basic mechanical equipment. My system was projected to save about $1,000 in yearly energy costs (electric), so there was a 20 year payback. As far as I can tell (having just sold my house) the geothermal system did not add any equity to my home (in other words, I did not seem to have buyers who were willing to pay me $$ more than they would for a similar house without geothermal, and the real estate agents in my area didn't find the geothermal HVAC to be a selling point worth more than a bullet point mention).
During planning, I discovered wide disparities between the claimed installation costs by those pushing "geothermal" and the contractors in my area who do this type of work (contractors cost >> claimed installation costs). Once the system was in, I discovered (surprise!) disparities between the claimed energy savings (by those pushing geothermal) and my actual energy savings (actual savings I'm slightly confused by installation comparison in the article. For my project, I looked at a shallow ground loop (slinky tubing) that would be installed under my lawn using a fairly large area - I didn't have enough lawn area and I didn't want to tear up the woods behind my house. I also looked at vertical bores - I needed 6 (one per ton of space conditioning) which could go under my lawn or my driveway - the "drill width" was not a deal breaker as its the same as is used for a water well. In the end the vertical bore option was not viable because the well contractor refused to attempt 6 vertical wells due to subsurface materials that the contractor claimed would make digging a nightmare.
The article seems to be comparing a vertical bore process with a horizontal "slinky" installation process, and of course vertical bores are less disruptive to install under your lawn. If they are really comparing two different vertical installations, then one or two bores going down 1,000 feet sounds marginally better than 6 bores going down 400 feet or so each, but I don't think I would have been interested in 2 instead of 6 holes unless it was roughly the same cost (in other words, having 6 holes at a lower cost would have been just fine by me as the holes are not that obtrusive). Ultimately the number of bores and depth of the bores depends on the heat transfer capabilities of the subsurface material and the BTUs of space conditioning you are trying to achieve. Too bad the article wasn't a lot more specific about the claimed advantages of the installation method.
I think you have identified a key part of the problem. When I hear about officer-involved shootings, and I hear that the officer was "in fear for his/her life" and that they are "trained to shoot when they are threatened" I wonder whether that is how they should be being trained. The general public is not aware of the risks that police officers face (not in the same way that the officers are), and so a member of the public is likely to respond to a situation differently than a police officer may expect them to; their perception of the situation is going to be radically different.
So, should their training emphasize the safety of the officer, or the safety of the general public interacting with the officer? If it were up to me, I would say the safety of the general public, recognizing that it increases risk to the police officer. But that risk is one that an individual becoming an officer assumes (takes on) as part of entering that role. I think that it should not be the case that a member of the general public who is not acting in a manner contrary to law ends up being killed because a police offer felt "threatened" - that seems to be fundamental failure of the reason why the police are part of our society - to protect and serve.
Since the officers are human, the set of things that may increase their level of fear is going to include "those who are outside of their tribe." With the results that we have been seeing.
Taking it a step further, it seems that police are also generally trained to dominate encounters, and that they react badly to people who don't bow and scrape to their authority. I'm not a member of a minority, but when I was young I had a few less than pleasant encounters with police officers who apparently believed that I was not respecting their authority enough. Now that I'm older I tend to be polite and respectful even when I think they are full of themselves and acting like asses (which is NOT every encounter that I've had, but it does happen). Younger people, and people with a chip on their shoulders due to past injustices and a knowledge that they have rights are going to run into problems when they encounter the authority-loving officers and they don't kow-tow to them. I'm not advocating kissing their asses; I think their training needs to include a recognition that not everyone reacts well to their dominating an encounter and that it might not always be the best technique to use. At that same time, people should recognize that they are just as capable of "pushing buttons" on the officers as the officers are on them, and that although they may win in the end, being dead right doesn't hold any particular joy.
The big game changer is the now ubiquitous presence of still and video cameras in the hands of practically every member of the public. This is highlighting the problems that exist with how officers sometimes interact with the public in general (and seemingly with minorities in particular). I'm glad that the courts are recognizing (and through case law publicizing and re-inforcing) the vital role that citizens recording police activities plays in maintaining a more civil society. Courts have generally given more credibility to an officer than to a defendant when no other evidence was available, but seem to be more than willing to accept the new source of evidence. When this helps shine the light on bad cops or bad policing, it provides evidence that our governments should use to update their training of our police.
Um.... its LIDAR (light radar) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar. Visible and near visible (ultra violet and near infra red) light that is being sprayed around. You know, like what surrounds you all day long, especially while you are outside? So, while its true that the detection uses photons that are on the electro-magnetic spectrum, its not the same risk as from microwave frequencies.
Most people would get insulted, not just the old ones. If I recall correctly, studies have shown that most of us believe that we are above average (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/everyone-thinks-they-are-above-average/, https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/motr/when-it-comes-to-driving-most-people-think-their-skills-are-above-average.html#.WWEcscbMzdQ, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority) and tend to be incapable of recognizing when our performance is declining (sorry, couldn't find the references I was thinking of for this second effect).
Add to that a tendency to be defensive about the things you fear may be happening to you as you age, and... it's not surprising that an elderly person reacts badly to being told that they aren't as good as others or as they used to be.
No doubt... science fiction has already been on the job exploring consequences like this.
How is the law going to differentiate between a sex robot that looks like a "young but over the age of consent" individual and a sex robot that portrays an individual just on the other side of that line, if it comes down to that. With a live human, one can look at a birth certificate to make the determination, but with a robot, based on appearance, how will this be done? There certainly are humans individuals who are below the age of consent who appear to be above it, and vice versa. The intricacies of a policy like this could be a legal feast.
That has been proven at least several times over, I believe.
My impression from my (brief) read through was that the two variables "Female fertility as a factor of age" and "Male fertility as a factor of age" are confounding variables with respect to each other. In other words, you can't just measure the female fertility by age without considering the male fertility by age, and vice versa. The male fertility is less sensitive to age than female fertility, but the effect is still present (no necessary similarity as to cause, just effect), and they interact in a not unexpected way. Whether the observed behavior of older males pairing with younger females is an innate expression of the biology is an interesting question; it can certainly be explained by other factors such as wealth/security paired with vitality and youthful good looks.
That was the other test engineer - he had to put his $0.02 in.
and we continue to confuse "health care" with insurance against risks to our health, demanding that insurers cover the cost of regular health care, with many people expecting that their health insurance premiums should be lower than the cost of their health care (otherwise they wouldn't be getting anything out of it).
and we confuse the idea of figuring out why health care is expensive with the idea of helping people afford health insurance and health care. As far as I can tell, the number 1 reason why health care is so expensive is that the folks who could control health care costs (by voting with their dollars) haven't clue #1 about what any health care services actually cost. And until we fix that, we have no hope of figuring out how to reign in health care expenditures.
Don't you mean we need to start wider application of self-pollinating crops? That way we won't have to worry about the insecticides that are killing off the pollinators.
Isn't the idea of a steady partner with whom to have sex on a regular basis a fantasy for most Slashdot users?
Interestingly enough, there was something a lot like a free market for ISPs at one point: when consumer Internet access was via dial-up. All you had to do to be an ISP was to get a dedicated Internet circuit (like a T1 with a heady 1.544 Mbps) and a number of POTS lines (say 10 to 40 or so) with modems on them, and you were an ISP! (With 56Kbps modems your service speed was "smoking!" At that point the "phone company" didn't even really know what Internet service was, and cable companies just provided TV channels.
Then Digital Subscriber Line came along, typically deployed as Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), with download speeds that might have been 768Kbps, no need to tie up your house's phone line with your Internet connection, and the connection itself was "always on!" The paying public abandoned dial-up ISPs, switching to DSL. DSL was more limited access on the provider side, because you had to be in the telephone company CO. There were some legal provisions for telephone companies to provide access to their copper lines for alternative DSL service ISPs, but it really crunched down the number of competitors as the "telephone companies" realized that there was a lot of money to be made as an ISP. Verizon's move to FIOS seems to have been in part inspired by the fact that although they had to share access to the copper cable plant, they could install the fiber cable plant and NOT have to shared it. At most of the locations that I'm aware of, as soon as a household switched to FIOS, the copper plant was disconnected from that house (loophole in the rules I think - they only had to share the copper if it was connected to the house, they couldn't be forced to provide a copper connection to a house for use by an alternative provider).
Cable companies got into it as they had their own cable plant and realized they could make $$$ just like the phone company of Internet service. Since cable Internet and FIOS offered much better bandwidth than DSL, the public switched again...
So - each time the public has voted for increased bandwidth, the public has also voted to constrain competition, albeit unknowingly. It this point, many households in the US need Internet almost as much as they need electricity and water. Its a utility and should be under the common carrier rules (in my opinion).
Wow. You missed the mark. I'm in my mid-50s, tail end of the baby boom. I cook all the time, and I buy as much as I can at CostCo. I don't drink coffee, never go to Starbucks or other coffee shops. I grimace when I eat (occasionally) at MacDonalds and have to throw out all of the containers/packing for my meal.
However, I'm tired of having to toss out spices because I've had them for years and they have lost their potency and I've only used a small fraction of the container. I'm tired of having units of [whatever] go bad in the refrigerator because I didn't need as much as was the smallest unit that I could buy. I'd like to buy just the portions of meat/cheese that I need for a meal without the hassle of waiting in line at the deli counter or meat counter. I'm dreading the multiplication of this effect when my two kids are in college and it's just me and my wife and we are cooking for just two.
In a fully realized version of my robot vision, certain staples like flour, sugar, salt, baking power, vegetable oil, olive oil wouldn't be part of the package. Other items that are needed in smaller quantities would come from a mass storage unit at the grocery store and be packaged in environmentally friendly materials for the meal preparation concept.
I think you miss the point of brainstorming. Come up with the ideas first, then refine them for actual implementation taking into account all needs, including being kind to the environment.
I don't think the best use of robots at a supermarket is in taking over individual jobs that humans do at supermarkets. The robots can make a major change to shopping. I'm starting to like the idea of services like Blue Apron, where one can get all of the ingredients to prepare a meal in one package (essentially). Imagine if when you went shopping at the supermarket, you submitted your order, not as a list of items to buy, but as a series of meals you want to prepare. Then, robots at the store "pick" and package the ingredients that you want for a meal together, and you just pick up your set of packages, one (or a small number) of packages per meal, all measured/portioned out for you. If you were able to order on-line, it could all be ready for you when you swing by the store. The nature of the store would change dramatically. If Amazon does something like this with Whole Foods, I might start shopping at Whole Foods...
Real data communication engineers calculate using bits per second. Storage folks use bytes per second. :-)
A ten year old vehicle that has been maintained reasonably well is no where near the end of its service life. I currently have a 2000 model Dodge Caravan with 210k miles, and a 2000 Toyota 4Runner with almost 250k miles. Both are ok for regular use with a slightly higher expectation on my part that the Dodge's transmission is going to fail sooner or later. I take that into account when I use it. The 4Runner is still a daily driver; the Dodge has been relegated to non-time-critical uses such as occasional cargo duties and may be replaced by a trailer that will be owned behind the 4Runner.
Oil change intervals recommended by the manufacturer vary, with the manufacturer typically differentiating between standard duty and heavy duty environments (and heavy duty is defined as driving that breaks down oil more quickly, such as many short trips, etc.). Further differentiation may depend on type of oil. Businesses that make their money off of oil changes typically recommend shorter (sometimes much shorter) intervals.
Software changes, including those intended to correct security vulnerabilities, all carry an inherent risk of unintended consequences. Blindly applying any/all manufacturer-supplied software changes doesn't always go well. It should be noted that most mainstream/big name software vendors appear to have gotten their security vulnerability patch testing in order and it seems to be extremely rare now that a security patch causes an outage. When a manufacturer stops supply security patches the device in question doesn't immediately fail open.
All of these things have notifications related to servicing. Whether or not the notification requires immediate reaction (or even any action) depends on the particular circumstances of the item and its use. A Windows server attached directly to the Internet with no firewall is a very different risk item than a Windows server on a small private network.
When an item is end of life from a manufacturer, the manufacturer may no longer provide support. But that doesn't mean that the item is useless. It simply means that your risk profile for the use of the item has changed and you should adapt your thinking/planning accordingly.
How would you prove your infant child was yours if your child was stolen away from you? Today you could perhaps have DNA testing. Back when the footprint/handprints were initiated, that wasn't an option. I don't think the footprints/fingerprints work as a long-term ID, just a short-term ID.
Just "chip" everyone and be done with it (subdermal ID chip). Make a rule that everyone has to have their chip checked regularly. Heck, make the chip contain a digital ID that they use to encrypt/sign their communications, and make sure that the private encryption keys are all escrowed by the government.
An AR-15 is not an assault weapon. The term 'assault rifle' originally referred to a battle rifle that fires fully automatically but is lightweight. The AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle that looks like an particular assault rifle (the M16) but is not itself an assault rifle.
The use of the term 'assault weapon' applied to the AR-15 seems to have followed an arc from "assault-type rifle" (based on its appearance but admitting that it wasn't actually an assault rifle), to leaving off the "-type" but adding on "weapon" in order to avoid the argument that it isn't an assault *rifle*. This seems like a rather disingenuous ploy to confuse the public.
If you want to argue that people shouldn't own rifles that shoot centerfire rifle cartridges, or shouldn't own rifles that exceed a certain level of muzzle energy or just muzzle velocity, then we can have that argument, and we'll include all available firearms that have those capabilities. But to get all hot and bothered about the appearance of the firearm seems pointless to me. The Clinton Crime Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act included a provision to ban certain types of firearms that have come to be called "assault weapons". The ban also included a provision to track the use of these weapons for crimes. It is my understanding that the sunset provision for the ban was not blocked in part because no significant use of these weapons in crimes was found.
As for drones, and as far as "ordinary people" are concerned, I'm not sure the many people using drones for useful purposes would agree with your cavalier assessment that they don't need them. I have a friend with a drone business who provides a service to local farmers to assess the conditions of their fields using the drone. This saves the farmers a lot of time while providing them with a much more comprehensive view of their fields than they could achieve otherwise.
I'm not thrilled with some of the annoying things people do with drones any more than I'm thrilled about how some people use ATVs, personal watercraft, motorcycles, weed whackers, blowers, and other such devices, but they do have useful purposes, and many many people use them carefully and within legal limits. Let's enforce existing laws against the misuse of technology, whether its firearms or drones, but let's not go around making things illegal without evidence that they are a significant problem.
Words fail me. Rich people spend their money; there are gross examples of this all over the place. Some of them spend too much (see stories about Johnny Depp for an example). The money that rich people don't spend is unlikely to be "in their bank account," because bank accounts don't pay any interest. Rich people tend to invest their money, so that they can get richer. The money that they invest typically gets used by other people to do things that increase someone's value, and some of that increased value gets back to the rich people who invested money in the first place.
I think there are lots of problems with income disparity and wealth disparity. But your ultimate sentence doesn't match my observations.
Look up the definition of the work "engineer" in the dictionary. None of the dictionaries that I have just read include in the definition that concept that one must be licensed, or even have a degree, to be an engineer. That's little "e" generic engineer. However, in the United States, at least in the ones with which I am familiar, a person can achieve an official certification of their status as an "engineer" by satisfying certain conditions, including taking a test and paying a fee. At that point they can call themselves a "Licensed Engineer" or a "Professional Engineer" or whatever title is conveyed by satisfying those conditions. At that point that person is a big "E" engineer of whatever type they have proven that they can swing the weight of. And those jurisdictions can and usually do specify certain occupations or positions that require such licensing of the people in those occupations or positions. Those positions require the extra weight of official licensing because of the responsibilities of those positions.
To suggest that the only people in the United States who are "engineers" are the ones who have taken those extra steps is a gross mischaracterization of the licensing/PE process and willful ignorance of the considerable weight of evidence that, in fact, an extraordinarily large number of people in the United States are considered by just about everyone to be "engineers" despite not being licensed or certified as a "Professional Engineer". For starters, one could look at the job titles of a large number of companies in the United States which include the word "engineer" in conjunction with adjectives describing the type of engineering expected from the person holding that job title. You could also look at the popular use of the term engineer in many types of media and literature, where it is common to use the term without reference to the official status of a "licensed" or "professional" engineer. In fact, if the common usage of the word "engineer" included the concept of official licensing, we wouldn't need the specific capitalized titles of "Licensed Engineer" or "Professional Engineer."
To use an example from another, similar, domain, look at "Doctor." Any PhD can call themselves "Doctor" (and many insist upon it) without being a licensed medical doctor. They can even use the title "Dr." professionally. What they can't do is use the initials "MD" or "Doctor of Medicine" - the capitalized reference to official licensing or credentialing under a legal framework that grants special privileges and responsibilities to those using that official imprimatur.