I was just in Washington D.C. and the security at EVERYTHING is airport crazy. Touring the house/senate galleries involves a backscatter X-ray machine, the Smithsonian museums have x-ray machines and metal detectors.
Yet there is no security AT ALL at the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials, and they're open 24/7. Really? The symbolic value of these targets is enormous.
I also wonder why shopping malls in the US haven't been targets, especially on the weekend after Thanksgiving. It would achieve a huge terror result as well as having a huge economic cost. Is our security that good against evildoers, or is there something else at work there?
I had forgotten the women racing to motherhood in their late 30s. I guess I kind of attribute this our society's "perpetual youth", where everyone lives as if they're 25 for 15 years. I think most of these women are mostly normal, but between careers and living a kind of never ending post-college lifestyle never seem to get drawn into marriage; possibly dating long-term but never marrying. I also think some marry, briefly and reflexively, but end up divorcing fairly quickly because they lack the maturity for a marriage.
Once they hit their late 30s, they have kind of a mid-life crisis and confront being alone, not having kids, and realize that they have to grow up in some sense. My sister in law was kind of like this, marrying a guy who had been married before (with a 9 year old daughter) and she was in her mid-30s. They had a baby within like 18 months of being married because it was on her agenda, but I also think there's an evolutionary biology element there, where the baby is an anchor/cement for her relationship and a demonstration of his commitment.
I agree that the purposeful single mom is kind of a bad idea. I think through the course of human history you seldom find female-only households that aren't the result of war, disease or other crises, and from what I've read, blended remarried families were common due to high death rates among both genders.
Although it may be less bad than you think, at least for the first five or so years where historically women were predominant caregivers anyway. In some cases where the women have high incomes and flexible schedules it might be less bad, but ultimately, and especially for boys, the lack of a close male role model is less than optimal at best.
I have a kind of evolutionary biology theory that says that as women age out of their child-bearing years their shifting hormones causes a general decline in sexual interest. The evolutionary biology aspect of it is that around 40, it becomes increasingly difficult for women to them to bear healthy children so losing sex interest makes them less likely to bear marginal pregnancies. It could possibly kill them or they may end up with a chromosomal defect baby which would be high maintenance at and age where they have declining energy to begin with.
Anyway, applying this to your dating scenario this would explain why 40-something never married women would date out of some kind of social necessity but be generally low-effort partners with high demands, because their reproductive drive is lowering as they age. They aren't on a reproductive track. And it also wouldn't surprise me, either, if as a class their reproductive drive was low to begin with which explains why they didn't follow their peers when they married and stayed single through their prime childbearing years. They also have a history of being single, so the compromises of a relationship are less compelling. Combined you can see why they don't engage well in dating.
Women who are divorced may also suffer from this generally, but I think people who get conditioned by 10-20 years of married life both recognize some practical value to a relationship and may be prone to recreate the stable long-term relationships they had before out of habit.
Single women with kid or kids are a train wreck of time management. I've done that and its impossible. You are always last in line for time allocation, which I totally get from a triage perspective, but this was always followed by a complete inability to dedicate time to the relationship, no matter how small. I generally only considered one of these relationships functional because I rated it solely on its sexual potential and never considered seriously engaging with her in any "serious" way. The irony, of course, was the time management ultimately reached ridiculous levels and I finally gave up.
I think women with kids would really work best if you had kids of your own and could make that part work, too, and that becomes lots of work and effort.
I'm 49 this year and I hear a lot of horror stories about dating from men my age I know who have been divorced. Most of them are above average in looks and general personality and all of them are above average in income, but the women they run into from dating sites are all mental as anything.
A certain percentage just appear to be narcissistic shrews who haven't figured out that what works on dumb guys when you're 21 and attractive doesn't work at all if you're 45 and have two kids -- that's why the guy you're trying to date got divorced himself.
A large number are just crazy, like something broke. They appear normal up front, but once you get past the veneer, there's a certain craziness and desperation that's not just off-putting, but kind of frightening. I'm mostly convinced that this is just an apt description of most people.
One guy tells me the secret is to avoid dating sites completely. He does these Meetup.com activities and says there's a lot of dating potential there. His theory is that all the desperate and weird women do dating sites, but the women with functional personalities do activities sites because they're a low-risk way of meeting people and possibly filling the void in your schedule with something worthwhile.
Of course this guy is dating a woman he met somewhere else who happens to be a spitting image of his 28 year old daughter, so maybe he's just crazy, too.
I'm so sick and tired of deceptive sales practices which are technically legal but involve all manner of legalism and obfuscation to sell a thing which differs conceptually from what the buyer actually gets.
This kind of thing should be required for any consumer contract advertising.
The advertisers should literally not care if its there if what they're selling in the big print actually matches what they deliver in the small print. The only way they should complain is if they are lying or intentionally deceiving consumers.
Maybe the issue isn't that reasonable procedure was followed, but that Microsoft has chat logs at all? Is it just connection info, or is it what was actually said?
I don't know how much logging they do or don't do. Everything I don't want to leave logs and records seems to, and everything I wish had detailed logging ends up having useless logging.
Counter-culture is not the same as form over function. It is simply a rejection of main stream culture.
It strikes me that in previous generations, counter-culture had much more emphasis on the counter part of it. It was more than just a rejection of the content of the dominant culture, but also a vigorous rejection of the structure of the dominant culture. It was as much about being *against* it as you were in creating a new culture. There was a strong undercurrent of nihilism.
Of course, marketing and advertising have long figured out how to extract the style and form of counter-cultures, sanitizing them of any of their hostility to mainstream thinking, and presenting it as something new and improved.
So what I think is now presented as counter-culture really isn't -- it's the same old structure and system, this time with plaid shirts, beards and microbrews.
You could stick to simple pathology (i.e. "a led to b led to c") and say that if only two known people were supposed to have the data
And only Jennifer Lawrence and her boyfriend were supposed to have her selfies, too.
And not a day goes buy where there isn't a story on Slashdot where there isn't some new security vulnerability on PCs, whether its Lenovo exploiting firmware to install their spyware, phone-home vulnerabilities, you name it. And none of this counts the hacking of services which might automatically back up data you didn't even *want* to disseminate into the ye olde cloud.
And then there's anybody else with physical access, the guy at Best Buy, your kids, your kid's friends, the babysitter, the cleaning woman, the plumber, anybody with five minutes and a thumb drive.
Basically, there are a thousand and one ways that someone could take images from your computer or phone.
I would kind of prefer that the burden of proof be on the state to prove dissemination rather than on the accused to prove they didn't "because private pictures".
I think it's pretty shitty for people to use homemade porn as a weapon, but I think it's shittier to create a law that can be exploited as a tool of revenge that forces someone to prove their innocence.
A big reason for this is you just know how this works. Jack and Jill are dating. To please Jack, Jill consents to nudies and a home made sex video. Jack decides he's had enough and breaks it off. Jilted Jill is enraged that despite submitting to Jack's sexual debasement, he has forsaken her. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. So distribute the pics and get Jack in trouble with the cops.
How will they prove dissemination? I would guess in 98.3% of all the cases, the person who does it is logged enough to prove they did it, because stupid people.
But because we're talking the murky depths of human revenge, at least some people will be clever about it and go to enough effort to create reasonable doubt about who disseminated the image.
I wonder if they will argue that possession of the image (home computer, etc) is prima facie evidence you were responsible for its dissemination.
I'd also be curious to know if "reverse revenge" based on this law could be controlled -- X and Y take sex pictures, Y breaks up with X, X is unhappy and surreptitiously disseminates the pictures. X accuses Y of revenge porn. Y's PC is searched and is found to have the images and is tried for the crime.
Even if Y is found not guilty, X has gotten a lot of revenge and possibly even the backing of the state to have the pictures taken down, early enough at least that they didn't get duplicated too widely and faces a minimal risk associated with the dissemination.
It makes me wonder if the law should create a liability for false accusations beyond the existing claims associated with perjury or filing a false police report.
The misery in the sex industry is not because of the sex, the misery is because of the illegality of sex for hire and the Hobbesian circumstances it produces. Legalizing and regulating would allow a significant portion of the market to be liberated from the misery-inducing circumstances associated with sex for money.
Sex for money isn't inherently unjust if the participants aren't coerced into it by anything more than the need for money (a need we all have, those of us not having sex for money merely trade our dignity for money in other ways, but it's still coercive).
No sane person wants to legalize trafficking of poor immigrants, physical coercion or violence. You can keep those illegal.
After that, the only misery would be the nature of the job and the reality is that some people find having sex for money to be a reasonable bargain. It requires no formal training, you don't need a grad school degree to be good at it.
Presumably people who would engage in a job like this would like sex more than average, and thus might actually enjoy sex with their customers. Chances are mostly it would be a job and sometimes gross to sleep with some clients because they're physically unappealing, but with occasional moments where it was pleasurable.
There may be misery associated with prostitution, but the actual sex is the least of it.
I think most of it isn't aspirational or conscious at all, I think it's mostly evolutionary biology behaviors that border on instinctual. I don't think women get together and strategize on the best way to obtain the benefits of male relationships with minimal sexual compliance, nor do I think men (effectively, anyway) strategize on how to obtain sex from women with the smallest amount of effort.
I think evolutionary biology, though, has ingrained sexual behaviors into cultures and maybe even as instinct into people to match desired outcomes with sexuality. For women this means stable mates who will contribute materially to raising offspring, and for men this means women who are sexually compliant and monogamous to produce offspring that are their genetic progeny.
I think the economic model of a cartel is an interesting way to look at the social organization of sexual activity. Women act in surprisingly uniform ways as a group towards various aspects of sexuality that suggest a cartel. Women tend to be very critical of other women who are promiscuous, for example, much like a cartel does when one of its members violates the pricing rules. Prostitution is just a form of promiscuity that is profitable for both parties. Older women frown on older men with younger women, as it threatens the artificial valuations the cartel wants to impose -- the older woman is an inferior product (appearance, ability to successfully bear healthy children, etc) whose pricing normal market mechanisms would discount, however the cartel always wants to impose its own pricing mechanisms, seeking uniform pricing levels regardless of the product quality.
It's also interesting how economic externalities, like job equality and legal equality, influence the cartel pricing arrangements. The cartel itself is somewhat under attack, as its own members now question their pricing model. They still have a product on offer, but they don't know how to value the exchange they receive for it. Some value it low -- women with good job prospects may engage in sex more freely, as they no longer value the material stability of a marriage partner. Some eschew the value completely, disengaging from male sexual relationships. This chaos in the market is somewhat evident from reading publications oriented towards women, and the hand-wringing over sexuality, men, even lesbianism as an alternative lifestyle.
On the latter topic, I'm kind of amazed at the number of stories I've heard lately of acquaintances who have been married and even had children who end up divorced because their wife "discovered" they were lesbians in their late 30s or 40s. This kind of "discovery" would have been unheard of a century ago, and I think more closely reflects the kind of disruption in gender and sexual identity as women leave their childbearing years and no longer have the maternal instinct for childbearing. While some of these women may actually have been social prisoners of a culturally imposed sexual identity, I think its difficult to believe that ALL of them were. I think a more compelling explanation is that these women more likely had no compelling economic interest in their husbands and when combined with a naturally declining libido as they entered the sunset of their childbearing years and are actually making a much more conscious lifestyle choice that simply abandons men as a desirable partner.
Until some point in the 20th century, prostitution was widely tolerated. Brothels operated more or less openly, and even if they were illegal, widespread corruption allowed them to operate anyway. I don't think there was much in terms of unintended consequences for the nature of human relationships.
Sex bots I don't think would change all that much, although it would be interesting to see how the forces of moral purity would challenge their commercial implementation. Would they try to ban sex bot brothels?
I'd wager that the women gaining political rights and economic abilities equal (or nearly equal for nitpickers) is largely what eliminated the accepted levels of prostitution that used to exist. Women with economic and political rights gained the upper hand in terms of sexual power and forced men to negotiate more and give women more sexual control.
Women largely operate as a sexual cartel and seek to eliminate competitors who don't adhere to the cartel's pricing requirements. Sex for pay weakens the bargaining position of women generally by requiring a higher level of compliance with women's interests. When men can obtain sex for money relatively easily, women lose some of their bargaining power.
An interesting idea, but hard to see how HP wouldn't have fucked itself regardless.
By most measures, Lewis Platt was doing a great job running the company but it seems like board got all worked up over short-term profits and glossy, Internet future thinking. If it hadn't been Carly Fiorina that screwed it up, the board would have hired some other big-talking glamour seeker who would have done the same kind of damage.
But let's say it doesn't happen anyway -- the board likes Platt's job, and he continues as CEO.
They kind of bet the farm pre-Carly on Itanium and that ended up a flop, and the market for their PA-RISC systems is kind of limited. Desktops, Laptops, PC servers has become such a low margin operation that it'd be kind of surprising if they could have competed on that alone. Dell has survived, but only because they've bought up every damn thing imaginable so they can sell pretty much anything a customer may want (even if half if it just says Dell on the outside).
I'm sure Kim just hated being last with memes. He's walking around with his iPad and showing some meme to his minions and he's like "This one is awesome!!111" and everyone's like "yeah, I saw it last week when your sister showed it to me."
But I do wonder where our obsession with "freshness" comes from. Is it because we're so divorced from the places where our food comes from?
Yes.
Actual fresh-from-the-garden produce is so much better than what's in the store.
I think some of this high-tech vertical "farming" is quite interesting and it does make you wonder if the benefits of not having to ship stuff half-way around the world is worth the local infrastructure investment.
It may not work for bulk crops that are large (corn, wheat, etc) but these seem to have an inherent advantage in that they usually have a lot of processing involved to be turned into food products, so maybe they should continue to be done on scale.
But a lot of other fruits and vegetables seem to be scaled right for high tech vertical agriculture,
Maybe this is a shocker, but Google and Android also spend hours on UI/UX testing, research, and so on.
I want to believe that the heavyweights (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc) really do invest a lot of time, money and manpower into user interface research. But why do the results often feel like they just hire artists looking to make a name for themselves with a unique visual approach?
"Human Factors" is an actual academic discipline and I find it hard to believe that aggregated wisdom in that field supported radical changes in user interface for established products. Your users have many man-hours of learning invested in how to accomplish tasks and throwing all that out for an art-centric design change doesn't make sense.
It may be that new or significantly upgraded products would benefit from new user interfaces, but how that gets done and how it's balanced against trying to retain the knowledge of your existing user base would suggest something more evolutionary and less rip-and-replace.
Even a brand new airplane with new avionics keeps a number of basic controls from previous airplanes. Cars make minor changes to shifter placement or add buttons to the steering wheel, but at the end of the day would they consider just ditching the steering wheel for some other control? Swapping the gas and brake pedals or doing away with them altogether?
It makes me wonder if the UI/UX experts at Google, et al actually even reference the existing research and knowledge in human factors, or if they have some kind of "we're in technology, so we know everything" mindset. Or they just figure that most of the their userbase is disposable, and they're more interested in acquiring the 14-24 set who have less established knowledge and seem to care more about overall "look".
Assume 50 Mbit/sec, symmetric bandwidth, dynamic IP address, no caps on upload/download?
What would it take to actually operate this network?
If you had 100,000 customers in a given metro area, what would you need for uplink capacity at the head end? My probably-has-an-error calculation at 5% average utilization is 250 Gbit/sec, 50 Gbit/sec at 1% (my 1 day average over 3 months is.55 Mbit).
What would 50 or 250 Gbit/sec of Internet uplink capacity cost if you had to go out and source it commercially?
I hate all these caps but I'm kind of curious what exactly it would cost to operate the kind of Internet connectivity everybody really wants.
You hit it on the head - the real reason for TSA is to increase airline profits. 90% of their "security" is theater.
I think the airlines and the airport concessions vendors have figured out how to profit from travelers who can't bring their own goodies on the plane, but I don't think that money means all that much to them.
And ironically, up until the late 1960s/early 1970s there was no airline security at all. You just carried whatever you wanted onto the plane. Some shuttle flights (NY-DC, for example) didn't even require a ticket to get on the plane, you just got on and paid the fare on the plane.
And even in the face of fairly frequent airline hijackings (1968-1973 -- average of one per week!), the carriers pretty vigorously resisted metal detectors and security checks because they thought it would hurt business and they would have to contribute to the cost of operating them. They literally would have just preferred to pay the ransom and not have security.
For a pretty good survey of the skyjacking phenomenon and a particularly noteworthy case, check out "The Skies Belong to Us". It was pretty amazing to realize how long there was no security at all for domestic flights and how few incidents there were until the social upheaval of the late 1960s.
But how did Anker get to be a reputable company? I'd never heard of them until I bought some highly-rated charger off Amazon. I've since bought a couple other Anker products which have been fine, but overall Amazon is a total bazaar of nearly identical products from dozens of brands you've never heard of.
I will often buy the Amazon Basics variation if it exists because I feel pretty confident that Amazon has put the effort into making sure it's a decent product and just can't tell about the dozen other variants.
It turns out the FBI is allowed to do a lot of things we would not want private citizens to do. Like running their own heavily armed hostage rescue team.
I think you could make a case for a private armed hostage rescue team, and I would guess that such an entity has existed for a long time, whether it was the Pinkertons or something like Blackwater.
Arguably it would be preferable to have the police handle a kidnapping rescue, but you can probably invent circumstances where involving the police didn't work somehow -- expediency, corruption of local law enforcement, some kind of overseas situation.
There's obviously a huge legal minefield here when you get into the use or application of deadly force, but we already allow all manner of armed private security and bounty hunters.
When I worked at a video store circa 1992, few catalog (non-new release) titles rented serially. The vast majority went out, came back and sat back on the shelf for days, weeks or longer before being rented again. The high volume videos were new release. So if a catalog title was late it was as close to a zero loss for the store as possible.
The only exceptions were a handful of children's titles and a few cult classics popular in our neighborhood.
We did have some kind of late fee multiplier on unpaid late fees that remained unpaid for 30 days or something, a fee we almost never actually charged and I suspect was only a threat or something to be used selling aged receivables or for tax purposes.
Movies that were literally never returned almost never got replaced unless they were somewhat popular, and even then it often took ages to replace them because the store stock expanded so much with new release it just didn't make sense from an inventory perspective. Often if they would get replaced due to demand it would be with a used tape -- at the time there were trade rags with the wholesalers who advertised used inventory, so unless it was a super rare title it wasn't hard to get a replacement for 25-33% of a new tape.
You have an aggressive growth plan, capitalized by debt that makes sense when your model is backed by subsidies.
Your debt starts to become due, but when you go to refinance it and there's some question as to whether the subsidies will continue (or its known for sure they will end), they crunch your numbers and find out that your entire business model is basically built on subsidies, and without them you are not at all profitable.
It turn out that in order to install solar panels and make any money doing it, not only do you need a huge subsidy for every install, you need the power company to pay retail rates for reverse metering for the next 20 years, too.
Once the subsidies go away and the power company only has to pay wholesale rates for reverse metering, well, solar power isn't really profitable at all unless the "profit" includes Excel-crashing giant models that suppose some kind of society-wide savings from improved environmental conditions and third order savings calculated on sheets 87, 88, and 89 of your model.
I read the news story but can't remember whether the video didn't get returned at all or if the guy blew off the late fee, which, due to video store contract language, got turned into some $100 late fee for nonpayment.
But probably what happened after that is that the video store sold all their old receivables for 5 cents on the dollar to a collection agency. The collection agency files a civil suit against the guy because they can't collect from him, they win a judgement in court and the bench warrant is issued for ignoring a summons and/or ignoring a judgement against him. The guy gets pulled over for a traffic ticket, the bench warrant shows and he goes to jail.
Of course this is shitty on many levels, and the courts have been basically complicit in allowing the judicial system to be used as a debtor's prison.
For one, the video store probably had an incorrect phone number or address because either they've hired incompetents who can't enter the data right, or they make no effort to ensure that the data was ever right to begin with, and they make no effort to ever make sure they know what their customer's correct info is.
The obviously bad data is sold to collections -- and having worked in a video store, I can tell you that at least 20% of the late fees are total bullshit to begin with, the guys that closed the store on a Tuesday flat out didn't bother checking in returned movies and the angry employees on Wednesday don't give a shit and check all the un-checked-in movies already in the store as late. But even when the late fees are legitimate, half the reason they are there is customer info is stale as hell and they have no idea they even have late fees.
So the collection agency is buying bogus data to begin with and they make ZERO effort to verify it or the legitimacy of the debt in question. They actually prefer it to be bad, because that way they can file as many civil suits as possible, civil suits that the respondents will never know about because the courts take their assertion at face value they've made a good faith effort to contact them and issue summons to them. They want to win the judgements by default because nobody shows up, and they can then get the courts to issue warrants and use the full police powers of the judiciary as a stick to collect their debt.
The part that I can't figure out is how the collections agency goes along with the valuation of the debt that they buy. You own a video store, and of course, you need some way to motivate people to return the movies (and rewind them, too, if you can remember that far back). So you charge a late fee, which motivates most people, but to further motivate them you have some insane rental agreement language that turns a $2 late fee into a $100 late fee if its not paid in 10 days or some other arbitrary period.
OK, maybe it's a legitimate contract, but really? The video store didn't incur anything like $100 in losses due to the unpaid late fee, at worst they were out the $2 or $5 or whatever the original rental fee was because somebody had the video an extra day and they couldn't generate another rental fee for renting out "Free Willy IV: Rocky vs. The Killer Whale" which never would sit unrented on the shelf anyway.
So how are these collection agencies willing to buy this ridiculously overvalued debt? It's like owner of the store has 100 overdue late fees that's now $10k in receivables? Are you fucking kidding me? You're going to let the business owner mark up bullshit debt by 2000%? It only makes sense if the courts are brain dead and wholly complicit in the entire process. It wouldn't surprise me if they were and that the judge gets a new flat screen and Herman Miller furniture every year because for every bogus civil case that passes through their court, the court gets to keep 25% of the filing fees or court costs the plaintiff pays up front, enabled by legislatures which want to cut taxes and run the courts as a for-profit enterprise. And of course, the fees are allowed to be padded ont
It would be kind of amusing to create a public printer that generates PDFs just to see what people might print. You'd have to have some basic protection to limit the number/size/amount of documents printed, and probably have it on some read-only system that couldn't get exploited.
But it might be entertaining to see what got printed.
The tragedy of this thing is that the dumb guy chose to bulk print offensive stupidity.
Much more enjoyable would have been a more calculated strategy to create some kind of apparent conspiracy by "accidentally" printing apparently real documents, and carefully distributing the "pieces" like some kind of puzzle, distributing them across the country (or even world) and/or altering the "message" to have it appear that your fake conspiracy had some geographic movement or flavor.
An obvious (and probably not believable one) would be messages tracking victims of a zombie outbreak.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just in Washington D.C. and the security at EVERYTHING is airport crazy. Touring the house/senate galleries involves a backscatter X-ray machine, the Smithsonian museums have x-ray machines and metal detectors.
Yet there is no security AT ALL at the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials, and they're open 24/7. Really? The symbolic value of these targets is enormous.
I also wonder why shopping malls in the US haven't been targets, especially on the weekend after Thanksgiving. It would achieve a huge terror result as well as having a huge economic cost. Is our security that good against evildoers, or is there something else at work there?
I had forgotten the women racing to motherhood in their late 30s. I guess I kind of attribute this our society's "perpetual youth", where everyone lives as if they're 25 for 15 years. I think most of these women are mostly normal, but between careers and living a kind of never ending post-college lifestyle never seem to get drawn into marriage; possibly dating long-term but never marrying. I also think some marry, briefly and reflexively, but end up divorcing fairly quickly because they lack the maturity for a marriage.
Once they hit their late 30s, they have kind of a mid-life crisis and confront being alone, not having kids, and realize that they have to grow up in some sense. My sister in law was kind of like this, marrying a guy who had been married before (with a 9 year old daughter) and she was in her mid-30s. They had a baby within like 18 months of being married because it was on her agenda, but I also think there's an evolutionary biology element there, where the baby is an anchor/cement for her relationship and a demonstration of his commitment.
I agree that the purposeful single mom is kind of a bad idea. I think through the course of human history you seldom find female-only households that aren't the result of war, disease or other crises, and from what I've read, blended remarried families were common due to high death rates among both genders.
Although it may be less bad than you think, at least for the first five or so years where historically women were predominant caregivers anyway. In some cases where the women have high incomes and flexible schedules it might be less bad, but ultimately, and especially for boys, the lack of a close male role model is less than optimal at best.
I have a kind of evolutionary biology theory that says that as women age out of their child-bearing years their shifting hormones causes a general decline in sexual interest. The evolutionary biology aspect of it is that around 40, it becomes increasingly difficult for women to them to bear healthy children so losing sex interest makes them less likely to bear marginal pregnancies. It could possibly kill them or they may end up with a chromosomal defect baby which would be high maintenance at and age where they have declining energy to begin with.
Anyway, applying this to your dating scenario this would explain why 40-something never married women would date out of some kind of social necessity but be generally low-effort partners with high demands, because their reproductive drive is lowering as they age. They aren't on a reproductive track. And it also wouldn't surprise me, either, if as a class their reproductive drive was low to begin with which explains why they didn't follow their peers when they married and stayed single through their prime childbearing years. They also have a history of being single, so the compromises of a relationship are less compelling. Combined you can see why they don't engage well in dating.
Women who are divorced may also suffer from this generally, but I think people who get conditioned by 10-20 years of married life both recognize some practical value to a relationship and may be prone to recreate the stable long-term relationships they had before out of habit.
Single women with kid or kids are a train wreck of time management. I've done that and its impossible. You are always last in line for time allocation, which I totally get from a triage perspective, but this was always followed by a complete inability to dedicate time to the relationship, no matter how small. I generally only considered one of these relationships functional because I rated it solely on its sexual potential and never considered seriously engaging with her in any "serious" way. The irony, of course, was the time management ultimately reached ridiculous levels and I finally gave up.
I think women with kids would really work best if you had kids of your own and could make that part work, too, and that becomes lots of work and effort.
I'm 49 this year and I hear a lot of horror stories about dating from men my age I know who have been divorced. Most of them are above average in looks and general personality and all of them are above average in income, but the women they run into from dating sites are all mental as anything.
A certain percentage just appear to be narcissistic shrews who haven't figured out that what works on dumb guys when you're 21 and attractive doesn't work at all if you're 45 and have two kids -- that's why the guy you're trying to date got divorced himself.
A large number are just crazy, like something broke. They appear normal up front, but once you get past the veneer, there's a certain craziness and desperation that's not just off-putting, but kind of frightening. I'm mostly convinced that this is just an apt description of most people.
One guy tells me the secret is to avoid dating sites completely. He does these Meetup.com activities and says there's a lot of dating potential there. His theory is that all the desperate and weird women do dating sites, but the women with functional personalities do activities sites because they're a low-risk way of meeting people and possibly filling the void in your schedule with something worthwhile.
Of course this guy is dating a woman he met somewhere else who happens to be a spitting image of his 28 year old daughter, so maybe he's just crazy, too.
I'm so sick and tired of deceptive sales practices which are technically legal but involve all manner of legalism and obfuscation to sell a thing which differs conceptually from what the buyer actually gets.
This kind of thing should be required for any consumer contract advertising.
The advertisers should literally not care if its there if what they're selling in the big print actually matches what they deliver in the small print. The only way they should complain is if they are lying or intentionally deceiving consumers.
He should have had a way to just pump /dev/random across the cellular network and into /dev/null on the receiving side.
His mistake was actually downloading real data instead of just trying to see how much crap he could push through the network.
Maybe the issue isn't that reasonable procedure was followed, but that Microsoft has chat logs at all? Is it just connection info, or is it what was actually said?
I don't know how much logging they do or don't do. Everything I don't want to leave logs and records seems to, and everything I wish had detailed logging ends up having useless logging.
Counter-culture is not the same as form over function. It is simply a rejection of main stream culture.
It strikes me that in previous generations, counter-culture had much more emphasis on the counter part of it. It was more than just a rejection of the content of the dominant culture, but also a vigorous rejection of the structure of the dominant culture. It was as much about being *against* it as you were in creating a new culture. There was a strong undercurrent of nihilism.
Of course, marketing and advertising have long figured out how to extract the style and form of counter-cultures, sanitizing them of any of their hostility to mainstream thinking, and presenting it as something new and improved.
So what I think is now presented as counter-culture really isn't -- it's the same old structure and system, this time with plaid shirts, beards and microbrews.
You could stick to simple pathology (i.e. "a led to b led to c") and say that if only two known people were supposed to have the data
And only Jennifer Lawrence and her boyfriend were supposed to have her selfies, too.
And not a day goes buy where there isn't a story on Slashdot where there isn't some new security vulnerability on PCs, whether its Lenovo exploiting firmware to install their spyware, phone-home vulnerabilities, you name it. And none of this counts the hacking of services which might automatically back up data you didn't even *want* to disseminate into the ye olde cloud.
And then there's anybody else with physical access, the guy at Best Buy, your kids, your kid's friends, the babysitter, the cleaning woman, the plumber, anybody with five minutes and a thumb drive.
Basically, there are a thousand and one ways that someone could take images from your computer or phone.
I would kind of prefer that the burden of proof be on the state to prove dissemination rather than on the accused to prove they didn't "because private pictures".
I think it's pretty shitty for people to use homemade porn as a weapon, but I think it's shittier to create a law that can be exploited as a tool of revenge that forces someone to prove their innocence.
A big reason for this is you just know how this works. Jack and Jill are dating. To please Jack, Jill consents to nudies and a home made sex video. Jack decides he's had enough and breaks it off. Jilted Jill is enraged that despite submitting to Jack's sexual debasement, he has forsaken her. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. So distribute the pics and get Jack in trouble with the cops.
(Sorry for the title, I couldn't help myself).
How will they prove dissemination? I would guess in 98.3% of all the cases, the person who does it is logged enough to prove they did it, because stupid people.
But because we're talking the murky depths of human revenge, at least some people will be clever about it and go to enough effort to create reasonable doubt about who disseminated the image.
I wonder if they will argue that possession of the image (home computer, etc) is prima facie evidence you were responsible for its dissemination.
I'd also be curious to know if "reverse revenge" based on this law could be controlled -- X and Y take sex pictures, Y breaks up with X, X is unhappy and surreptitiously disseminates the pictures. X accuses Y of revenge porn. Y's PC is searched and is found to have the images and is tried for the crime.
Even if Y is found not guilty, X has gotten a lot of revenge and possibly even the backing of the state to have the pictures taken down, early enough at least that they didn't get duplicated too widely and faces a minimal risk associated with the dissemination.
It makes me wonder if the law should create a liability for false accusations beyond the existing claims associated with perjury or filing a false police report.
The misery in the sex industry is not because of the sex, the misery is because of the illegality of sex for hire and the Hobbesian circumstances it produces. Legalizing and regulating would allow a significant portion of the market to be liberated from the misery-inducing circumstances associated with sex for money.
Sex for money isn't inherently unjust if the participants aren't coerced into it by anything more than the need for money (a need we all have, those of us not having sex for money merely trade our dignity for money in other ways, but it's still coercive).
No sane person wants to legalize trafficking of poor immigrants, physical coercion or violence. You can keep those illegal.
After that, the only misery would be the nature of the job and the reality is that some people find having sex for money to be a reasonable bargain. It requires no formal training, you don't need a grad school degree to be good at it.
Presumably people who would engage in a job like this would like sex more than average, and thus might actually enjoy sex with their customers. Chances are mostly it would be a job and sometimes gross to sleep with some clients because they're physically unappealing, but with occasional moments where it was pleasurable.
There may be misery associated with prostitution, but the actual sex is the least of it.
I think most of it isn't aspirational or conscious at all, I think it's mostly evolutionary biology behaviors that border on instinctual. I don't think women get together and strategize on the best way to obtain the benefits of male relationships with minimal sexual compliance, nor do I think men (effectively, anyway) strategize on how to obtain sex from women with the smallest amount of effort.
I think evolutionary biology, though, has ingrained sexual behaviors into cultures and maybe even as instinct into people to match desired outcomes with sexuality. For women this means stable mates who will contribute materially to raising offspring, and for men this means women who are sexually compliant and monogamous to produce offspring that are their genetic progeny.
I think the economic model of a cartel is an interesting way to look at the social organization of sexual activity. Women act in surprisingly uniform ways as a group towards various aspects of sexuality that suggest a cartel. Women tend to be very critical of other women who are promiscuous, for example, much like a cartel does when one of its members violates the pricing rules. Prostitution is just a form of promiscuity that is profitable for both parties. Older women frown on older men with younger women, as it threatens the artificial valuations the cartel wants to impose -- the older woman is an inferior product (appearance, ability to successfully bear healthy children, etc) whose pricing normal market mechanisms would discount, however the cartel always wants to impose its own pricing mechanisms, seeking uniform pricing levels regardless of the product quality.
It's also interesting how economic externalities, like job equality and legal equality, influence the cartel pricing arrangements. The cartel itself is somewhat under attack, as its own members now question their pricing model. They still have a product on offer, but they don't know how to value the exchange they receive for it. Some value it low -- women with good job prospects may engage in sex more freely, as they no longer value the material stability of a marriage partner. Some eschew the value completely, disengaging from male sexual relationships. This chaos in the market is somewhat evident from reading publications oriented towards women, and the hand-wringing over sexuality, men, even lesbianism as an alternative lifestyle.
On the latter topic, I'm kind of amazed at the number of stories I've heard lately of acquaintances who have been married and even had children who end up divorced because their wife "discovered" they were lesbians in their late 30s or 40s. This kind of "discovery" would have been unheard of a century ago, and I think more closely reflects the kind of disruption in gender and sexual identity as women leave their childbearing years and no longer have the maternal instinct for childbearing. While some of these women may actually have been social prisoners of a culturally imposed sexual identity, I think its difficult to believe that ALL of them were. I think a more compelling explanation is that these women more likely had no compelling economic interest in their husbands and when combined with a naturally declining libido as they entered the sunset of their childbearing years and are actually making a much more conscious lifestyle choice that simply abandons men as a desirable partner.
Until some point in the 20th century, prostitution was widely tolerated. Brothels operated more or less openly, and even if they were illegal, widespread corruption allowed them to operate anyway. I don't think there was much in terms of unintended consequences for the nature of human relationships.
Sex bots I don't think would change all that much, although it would be interesting to see how the forces of moral purity would challenge their commercial implementation. Would they try to ban sex bot brothels?
I'd wager that the women gaining political rights and economic abilities equal (or nearly equal for nitpickers) is largely what eliminated the accepted levels of prostitution that used to exist. Women with economic and political rights gained the upper hand in terms of sexual power and forced men to negotiate more and give women more sexual control.
Women largely operate as a sexual cartel and seek to eliminate competitors who don't adhere to the cartel's pricing requirements. Sex for pay weakens the bargaining position of women generally by requiring a higher level of compliance with women's interests. When men can obtain sex for money relatively easily, women lose some of their bargaining power.
An interesting idea, but hard to see how HP wouldn't have fucked itself regardless.
By most measures, Lewis Platt was doing a great job running the company but it seems like board got all worked up over short-term profits and glossy, Internet future thinking. If it hadn't been Carly Fiorina that screwed it up, the board would have hired some other big-talking glamour seeker who would have done the same kind of damage.
But let's say it doesn't happen anyway -- the board likes Platt's job, and he continues as CEO.
They kind of bet the farm pre-Carly on Itanium and that ended up a flop, and the market for their PA-RISC systems is kind of limited. Desktops, Laptops, PC servers has become such a low margin operation that it'd be kind of surprising if they could have competed on that alone. Dell has survived, but only because they've bought up every damn thing imaginable so they can sell pretty much anything a customer may want (even if half if it just says Dell on the outside).
I'm sure Kim just hated being last with memes. He's walking around with his iPad and showing some meme to his minions and he's like "This one is awesome!!111" and everyone's like "yeah, I saw it last week when your sister showed it to me."
But I do wonder where our obsession with "freshness" comes from. Is it because we're so divorced from the places where our food comes from?
Yes.
Actual fresh-from-the-garden produce is so much better than what's in the store.
I think some of this high-tech vertical "farming" is quite interesting and it does make you wonder if the benefits of not having to ship stuff half-way around the world is worth the local infrastructure investment.
It may not work for bulk crops that are large (corn, wheat, etc) but these seem to have an inherent advantage in that they usually have a lot of processing involved to be turned into food products, so maybe they should continue to be done on scale.
But a lot of other fruits and vegetables seem to be scaled right for high tech vertical agriculture,
Maybe this is a shocker, but Google and Android also spend hours on UI/UX testing, research, and so on.
I want to believe that the heavyweights (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc) really do invest a lot of time, money and manpower into user interface research. But why do the results often feel like they just hire artists looking to make a name for themselves with a unique visual approach?
"Human Factors" is an actual academic discipline and I find it hard to believe that aggregated wisdom in that field supported radical changes in user interface for established products. Your users have many man-hours of learning invested in how to accomplish tasks and throwing all that out for an art-centric design change doesn't make sense.
It may be that new or significantly upgraded products would benefit from new user interfaces, but how that gets done and how it's balanced against trying to retain the knowledge of your existing user base would suggest something more evolutionary and less rip-and-replace.
Even a brand new airplane with new avionics keeps a number of basic controls from previous airplanes. Cars make minor changes to shifter placement or add buttons to the steering wheel, but at the end of the day would they consider just ditching the steering wheel for some other control? Swapping the gas and brake pedals or doing away with them altogether?
It makes me wonder if the UI/UX experts at Google, et al actually even reference the existing research and knowledge in human factors, or if they have some kind of "we're in technology, so we know everything" mindset. Or they just figure that most of the their userbase is disposable, and they're more interested in acquiring the 14-24 set who have less established knowledge and seem to care more about overall "look".
Assume 50 Mbit/sec, symmetric bandwidth, dynamic IP address, no caps on upload/download?
What would it take to actually operate this network?
If you had 100,000 customers in a given metro area, what would you need for uplink capacity at the head end? My probably-has-an-error calculation at 5% average utilization is 250 Gbit/sec, 50 Gbit/sec at 1% (my 1 day average over 3 months is .55 Mbit).
What would 50 or 250 Gbit/sec of Internet uplink capacity cost if you had to go out and source it commercially?
I hate all these caps but I'm kind of curious what exactly it would cost to operate the kind of Internet connectivity everybody really wants.
You hit it on the head - the real reason for TSA is to increase airline profits. 90% of their "security" is theater.
I think the airlines and the airport concessions vendors have figured out how to profit from travelers who can't bring their own goodies on the plane, but I don't think that money means all that much to them.
And ironically, up until the late 1960s/early 1970s there was no airline security at all. You just carried whatever you wanted onto the plane. Some shuttle flights (NY-DC, for example) didn't even require a ticket to get on the plane, you just got on and paid the fare on the plane.
And even in the face of fairly frequent airline hijackings (1968-1973 -- average of one per week!), the carriers pretty vigorously resisted metal detectors and security checks because they thought it would hurt business and they would have to contribute to the cost of operating them. They literally would have just preferred to pay the ransom and not have security.
For a pretty good survey of the skyjacking phenomenon and a particularly noteworthy case, check out "The Skies Belong to Us". It was pretty amazing to realize how long there was no security at all for domestic flights and how few incidents there were until the social upheaval of the late 1960s.
But how did Anker get to be a reputable company? I'd never heard of them until I bought some highly-rated charger off Amazon. I've since bought a couple other Anker products which have been fine, but overall Amazon is a total bazaar of nearly identical products from dozens of brands you've never heard of.
I will often buy the Amazon Basics variation if it exists because I feel pretty confident that Amazon has put the effort into making sure it's a decent product and just can't tell about the dozen other variants.
It turns out the FBI is allowed to do a lot of things we would not want private citizens to do. Like running their own heavily armed hostage rescue team.
I think you could make a case for a private armed hostage rescue team, and I would guess that such an entity has existed for a long time, whether it was the Pinkertons or something like Blackwater.
Arguably it would be preferable to have the police handle a kidnapping rescue, but you can probably invent circumstances where involving the police didn't work somehow -- expediency, corruption of local law enforcement, some kind of overseas situation.
There's obviously a huge legal minefield here when you get into the use or application of deadly force, but we already allow all manner of armed private security and bounty hunters.
When I worked at a video store circa 1992, few catalog (non-new release) titles rented serially. The vast majority went out, came back and sat back on the shelf for days, weeks or longer before being rented again. The high volume videos were new release. So if a catalog title was late it was as close to a zero loss for the store as possible.
The only exceptions were a handful of children's titles and a few cult classics popular in our neighborhood.
We did have some kind of late fee multiplier on unpaid late fees that remained unpaid for 30 days or something, a fee we almost never actually charged and I suspect was only a threat or something to be used selling aged receivables or for tax purposes.
Movies that were literally never returned almost never got replaced unless they were somewhat popular, and even then it often took ages to replace them because the store stock expanded so much with new release it just didn't make sense from an inventory perspective. Often if they would get replaced due to demand it would be with a used tape -- at the time there were trade rags with the wholesalers who advertised used inventory, so unless it was a super rare title it wasn't hard to get a replacement for 25-33% of a new tape.
You have an aggressive growth plan, capitalized by debt that makes sense when your model is backed by subsidies.
Your debt starts to become due, but when you go to refinance it and there's some question as to whether the subsidies will continue (or its known for sure they will end), they crunch your numbers and find out that your entire business model is basically built on subsidies, and without them you are not at all profitable.
It turn out that in order to install solar panels and make any money doing it, not only do you need a huge subsidy for every install, you need the power company to pay retail rates for reverse metering for the next 20 years, too.
Once the subsidies go away and the power company only has to pay wholesale rates for reverse metering, well, solar power isn't really profitable at all unless the "profit" includes Excel-crashing giant models that suppose some kind of society-wide savings from improved environmental conditions and third order savings calculated on sheets 87, 88, and 89 of your model.
I read the news story but can't remember whether the video didn't get returned at all or if the guy blew off the late fee, which, due to video store contract language, got turned into some $100 late fee for nonpayment.
But probably what happened after that is that the video store sold all their old receivables for 5 cents on the dollar to a collection agency. The collection agency files a civil suit against the guy because they can't collect from him, they win a judgement in court and the bench warrant is issued for ignoring a summons and/or ignoring a judgement against him. The guy gets pulled over for a traffic ticket, the bench warrant shows and he goes to jail.
Of course this is shitty on many levels, and the courts have been basically complicit in allowing the judicial system to be used as a debtor's prison.
For one, the video store probably had an incorrect phone number or address because either they've hired incompetents who can't enter the data right, or they make no effort to ensure that the data was ever right to begin with, and they make no effort to ever make sure they know what their customer's correct info is.
The obviously bad data is sold to collections -- and having worked in a video store, I can tell you that at least 20% of the late fees are total bullshit to begin with, the guys that closed the store on a Tuesday flat out didn't bother checking in returned movies and the angry employees on Wednesday don't give a shit and check all the un-checked-in movies already in the store as late. But even when the late fees are legitimate, half the reason they are there is customer info is stale as hell and they have no idea they even have late fees.
So the collection agency is buying bogus data to begin with and they make ZERO effort to verify it or the legitimacy of the debt in question. They actually prefer it to be bad, because that way they can file as many civil suits as possible, civil suits that the respondents will never know about because the courts take their assertion at face value they've made a good faith effort to contact them and issue summons to them. They want to win the judgements by default because nobody shows up, and they can then get the courts to issue warrants and use the full police powers of the judiciary as a stick to collect their debt.
The part that I can't figure out is how the collections agency goes along with the valuation of the debt that they buy. You own a video store, and of course, you need some way to motivate people to return the movies (and rewind them, too, if you can remember that far back). So you charge a late fee, which motivates most people, but to further motivate them you have some insane rental agreement language that turns a $2 late fee into a $100 late fee if its not paid in 10 days or some other arbitrary period.
OK, maybe it's a legitimate contract, but really? The video store didn't incur anything like $100 in losses due to the unpaid late fee, at worst they were out the $2 or $5 or whatever the original rental fee was because somebody had the video an extra day and they couldn't generate another rental fee for renting out "Free Willy IV: Rocky vs. The Killer Whale" which never would sit unrented on the shelf anyway.
So how are these collection agencies willing to buy this ridiculously overvalued debt? It's like owner of the store has 100 overdue late fees that's now $10k in receivables? Are you fucking kidding me? You're going to let the business owner mark up bullshit debt by 2000%? It only makes sense if the courts are brain dead and wholly complicit in the entire process. It wouldn't surprise me if they were and that the judge gets a new flat screen and Herman Miller furniture every year because for every bogus civil case that passes through their court, the court gets to keep 25% of the filing fees or court costs the plaintiff pays up front, enabled by legislatures which want to cut taxes and run the courts as a for-profit enterprise. And of course, the fees are allowed to be padded ont
It would be kind of amusing to create a public printer that generates PDFs just to see what people might print. You'd have to have some basic protection to limit the number/size/amount of documents printed, and probably have it on some read-only system that couldn't get exploited.
But it might be entertaining to see what got printed.
The tragedy of this thing is that the dumb guy chose to bulk print offensive stupidity.
Much more enjoyable would have been a more calculated strategy to create some kind of apparent conspiracy by "accidentally" printing apparently real documents, and carefully distributing the "pieces" like some kind of puzzle, distributing them across the country (or even world) and/or altering the "message" to have it appear that your fake conspiracy had some geographic movement or flavor.
An obvious (and probably not believable one) would be messages tracking victims of a zombie outbreak.