The city has had at least two controversial shootings in recent years and activists are wholly opposed to anything involving "more police". One shooting involved an African American male who fought white officers and tried to take their gun and was shot and killed. The OTHER shooting happened about 1.5 miles from where I lived and involved an African American (first Somali immigrant police officer) officer who shot an unarmed white woman who had actually initiated the police call.
So it's a total political clusterfuck with the cops in this town. In last year's mayoral election, a major candidate actually suggested disarming the cops. Another major candidate rose to prominence in the precinct occupation/protest which went on for a month or two (in addition to disrupting things like the Park Board meetings, screaming racism and preventing the meeting from taking place). We use ranked choice voting and both candidates polled top 4, so there's that kind of crazy here.
The latter shooting (white woman shot by Somali cop) has everyone spinning in circles. The African American activists and white liberals don't know whether to be outraged or not because while they're trained to be outraged at police shootings, the racial role reversal here has them flummoxed. The pro-police "conservatives" who usually give the cops the benefit of the doubt are annoyed, but are equally flummoxed because a black cop shot a white woman.
The 100% democratic city government just wants it all to go away. The DA had to turn to the Grand Jury (after saying he would no longer use it after the previous shooting) to forcibly extract testimony as all the officers even tangentially involved in the Officer's career and training went blue wall of silence, making it take 8 months to get an indictment. The so-called legal experts are calling the odds of conviction 3-2 against due to the incredible lack of evidence (body cameras -- turned off, no witnesses, etc).
So yeah, run for city council on a "we need more police patrols" platform? Uh, no.
I'm not a fan of police state tactics by any means, but shit, what else can we turn to?
I've lived in large single family home residential neighborhood in a city (looks suburban, but is in the city) for 19 years and over the past 5+ years, the amount of nuisance theft has skyrocketed. Just on my *block* it's not unusual to hear about a car being rifled, strange "door to door" sales people with no materials/identification/logos. We had a rash of car entries using keyless entry repeaters and a couple of sneak burglaries (snatching purses from kitchen tables). Over a week last November, the entire larger neighborhood was hit by package thieves, including my house. 3 different people had footage of the car involved.
I had a long conversation with my council member about what can be done and was told that we should just report it and then do insurance or whatever. I asked why we couldn't get more police patrols and was told our area was "too low crime" (the numbers say we're the lowest crime area in the city) and there wasn't sufficient resources.
So what the fuck? Just put up with it? That's the answer? Or just change my thinking, it *must* be my racial bias?
Or this is somehow really ad-hoc redistributive economic justice, and I'm just too racist to notice?
I read an interesting comment the other day where it was theorized that once the cloud gets past some tipping point, on-premise hardware will lose its economies of scale due to less adoption and few organizations will be able to go back on premise because the equipment will be too expensive. OEMs will be mostly producing parts for custom cloud provider designs and they won't be useful for on-prem purposes.
I don't know that I buy it completely, but found it thought provoking. You would think that virtualization would have also had this effect -- even small companies I work for used to have 3-4 physical servers and now only have 1-2 for their workloads, yet server prices haven't gone though the roof, although it may just be that aggregate growth is so good that it covers up for it or even reduces demand-side inflation.
It does kind of make me wonder what economies of scale would have done for physical server prices if virtualization hadn't been widely adopted and organizations that buy 4 servers for their 100 VMs were still buying a nearly equivalent number of physical servers. We'd probably be doing what we used to do, cramming a bunch of unrelated services onto the same OS box wherever there wasn't a service/port/utilization conflict rather than splitting out services into single-service VMs.
Every once in a while I still run into a random client with a shitload of physical servers and it's kind of staggering. The last one was a company that had the same CFO and IT director for 20 years and an AS/400 shop with a really old-school IBM commitment.
Most only need one space after their period before we're back in business. Some though have a little extra surge at the end, so two spaces is a safer bet. Unfortunately you don't know until you "know", if you know what I mean.
The problem is they're prone to crippling apps that could be useful in the mobile space by chaining them to their own cloud services.
I find OneNote to be useful on the PC and it even manages to work with the documents synced with Dropbox, but it's chained to OneDrive, which I don't use. It would even be kind of useful if I had to manually import the data files.
Isn't it only "VoIP data" up until it enters the actual phone routing system?
I can't help but think that phone companies could verify inbound calling paths were legitimate sources for the presented ANI data.
Number portability means there IS a database of phone numbers and the carriers to which they are associated, there should be a way to check ANI data against the database to decide if the source for that calling party is legitimate.
I'm sure we'll hear about all the "legitimate" reasons to pass fake ANI data (like some offshore support call center operating under contract for Dell, etc). I'd guess most of these situations are passing generic toll free numbers and maybe they would just have to pony up for toll free numbers on their own outbound trunks and deal with the headaches of routing calls to those toll free numbers back to the destination they really want.
Most PBXs it wouldn't be a problem, because their outbound ANI is almost always a number/DID they actually own.
That, or fuck $Company and their business partners. $Company can just extend their phone system via VoIP to their call center provider so that outbound calls get made on $Company owned trunks and numbers.
I keep feeling like there is a solution to this, but it imposes small costs on a small number of high-profile businesses who lobby against them, unintentionally carrying the water for shitty scam companies.
I like this idea, and I'd guess you might even get away with making it universal, where every call you make that gets answered transfers $0.10 to the recipient, with the idea that a lot of people call essentially another number they own, making the net transfer between people zero.
I would suspect you could even drive down the cost to $0.05, since if you're penalizing robocallers, $50k vs. $100k per day for a million outbound calls is still a penalty.
Businesses and maybe even individuals who didn't want to "charge" a call termination fee could opt out.
Business privatizes the profits of sacking redundant labor but socializes the costs of doing so.
I think there's good arguments for allowing businesses a lot of labor flexibility as it contributes to economic health. But they still should bear the burden of paying the costs associated with that flexibility.
This sounds like welfare that people with substance abuse problems or other mental health problems wouldn't be able to get
Are you kidding? Showing up high or getting high is exactly what people with pointless jobs do.
The Japanese may have the personal dignity to get dressed in their salaryman suits and sit in an empty room all day like they *might* actually be called on to do some work, but Americans would quickly turn it into a stoner's den.
I have yet to meet someone who actually has a shotgun "loaded with rock salt."
Rock salt isn't available in any commercial loads I've ever seen and I can't think of what you'd actually shoot it at. It's so light that it would have little terminal effect outside maybe 20'. At point blank ranges it would probably produce a nasty wound or even be fatal but would you want to face down someone with real ammunition bearing only rock salt? Or have to explain to the cops how maiming someone amounts to self defense "in fear of your life." You'd also have to clean the barrel right away after shooting anything as the salt would be corrosive.
Conventional bird loads like you'd use on pheasants would be perfect for drones -- reasonable range, and aimed up the pellets would be harmless. A target range I've been to has a duck tower and you shoot at angles like 10-20 degrees off vertical and the pellets come down near the clubhouse and it's like someone threw fine sand in the air when it comes down.
Floors heated to be warm to the touch are often done when the point is to heat the room that way.
In other cases where the floor is basically a heat sink that makes the room colder (like a basement floor) you can warm it without overheating the room.
I use screenshots to document some software installs that request a bunch of information that is important to have, sometimes years away, but is easily lost.
I'd love something that would record the display as a series of stills, like 15 frames per minute or something where I could just pick the individual frames to keep after.
It's the stopping, snipping, pasting thing that makes it tedious.
The remaining three would just get larger in proportion to their size, mostly because they could afford to buy Sprint's assets in proportion to their own income and assets.
Verizon and ATT would mostly wind up shutting down Sprint cell sites and repurposing their band assignments to existing towers.
T-Mobile would probably add some new net coverage, but there would still be some duplication that would get shut down.
The tech industry has a ton of churn -- there's some technological advancement, but there's an awful lot of new products turned out simply to keep customers buying new licenses and paying for upgrades.
This relentless and mostly phony newness means a lot of people have little experience with current products. People fake because they have no choice. The good ones understand the general technologies and problems they're meant to solve and can generally get up to speed quickly, while the bad ones are good at faking it but don't really know what they're doing. Telling the difference from the outside is impossible.
Sales people make it worse, promoting people as "experts" in specific products or implementations because the people have experience with a related product and "they're all the same". This burns out the people with good adaption skills.
Around here at least, the excess administrative cost seems closely tied to the extent that the "achievement gap", the so called difference in educational outcomes between African American students and white students. This has lead to two things.
One, the increasing expansion of the educational bureaucracy to provide not only education but social welfare as well, providing things like meals, social workers and an increasing the number of special education teachers to deal with the learning deficiencies of the mostly black underclass. All of these services lie mostly outside of the traditional management hierarchy of schools and thus have their own parallel management bureaucracy within the district. It has also increased the number of district employees who "manage" the education gap issue but do not provide any direct involvement in general education.
The other byproduct of the achievement gap is political. Partly because African Americans are seen as the major stakeholders due to their poor educational outcomes, the African American community has come to see the school district administration as "their" institution. Patronage and political considerations have greatly increased the number of African American district administrative employees.
A few years ago after another forced resignation of the latest "hero" Superintendent, a temporary Superintendent with a long and well-regarded career in state government administration (there are actually some) was hired. He combed through the budget and discussed significant cuts in administrative overhead which would increase school funding. There were proposals to promote him to permanent Superintendent status but his plans for administrative cuts outraged the African American community because "their" people bore the brunt of the cuts. It was seen as a direct challenge to their political base and the school board quickly suppressed any talk of promoting the temporary Supervisor -- they and the Democrats (since all the board are Democrats), got the message that there would be problems obtaining African American political support.
The TL;DR edition: schools spend too much money on social welfare. It's not that social welfare isn't necessary, but that the school funding mechanism in the district is too shallow to provide an education and social welfare services for a significant plurality of the entire state's poor kids. Promoting the idea that the educational system is at fault for African American students has created a political base for African Americans who have used it to promote patronage and creating a bureaucratic base to support it, bloating the district's administrative staff with African American employees. The excess administrative staff is essentially immune from downsizing due to political considerations.
There's no real fix for it, either. Increasing social welfare support for poor kids would help, but it has to come from and be paid for by the state -- poverty concentration is too great for the local political entities to provide sufficient funding -- and the social welfare has to be delivered and managed by the state, not by local school districts. The district administration needs to be thinned accordingly, but what also has to happen is an acknowledgement that whatever they've been doing for the last 20 of 30 years hasn't solved the achievement gap and that it is principally a problem of family support and the social problems of the African American community, not a failure of pedagogy. None of this is likely, especially the admission that it's the African American community failing its own children, not the school district.
A lot of parents drilled this into heads, including mine.
I think there was a strong sense that they were denied entry into some aspect of life because they weren't college educated. We lived a fairly average middle class type life, but even growing up there seemed to be a subtle snubbing of my parents by other parents on our block who were college educated. My dad owned his own business and drove Cadillacs, so it wasn't like we were economically blue collar, either, and at least one of the families that seemed snobby were worse off financially.
The whole trades job thing would probably attract more people if the working conditions weren't so shitty. A $10/office flunky gets treated so much better than a $25 tradesperson.
My guess is what you describe only really works with an Altered Carbon type of device to store brain contents and transfer it to a new brain.
I'd guess that the surgical complexity to actually move a physical brain between skulls makes it necessary to treat the brain's contents separately from its physical entity.
Honestly, if ten hours of work at $10/hr makes a table, you can't continue supplying tables for less than $100 each--regardless of competition. Find a way to make a table in five hours of work and now it's a $50 table
I thought they just told people who made $10/hr they now make $5/hr, instant $50 table.
When will the cost effective vehicles start showing up?
I agree with all the benefits, but struggle to understand where the products are. Most mail trucks are damn near glorified golf carts and don't drive far in most urbanized zipcodes. It's not hard to see a design almost literally based off a sightly upsized golf cart (with some kind of micro van type body).
UPS, FedEx local delivery seem like great candidates, too. These need to be more truck scale, but there's more room for batteries to deal with heavier cargo loads and the longer ranges they drive in a day.
Both USPS and UPS are big enough and both have a history of buying custom vehicles specially built for them. You would think that both organizations would already be fielding large scale prototype tests and that either existing or upstart suppliers could see big money replacing entire fleets.
Yet strangely I don't see any of them doing this. USPS is especially puzzling -- they buy GM minivans now, and it's not hard to see the (now discontinued) City Express van combined with a Volt powertrain. Plug in at the post office and nearly all the mileage would be electric with the generator for longer or more rural routes.
Which is the conceptual problem with the idea that attractive, female salespeople are somehow effective -- some proportion of the target audience views them as specifically manipulative, undermining their individual and brand's credibility.
On the other hand, it must work in enough situations that they keep getting hired.
I'm kind of surprised that they don't focus on more average women. I think there is a certain unique persuasive quality that women possess that transcends appearance and crude sex appeal. It would seem that these more subtle use of this by women less obviously designed to manipulate would make it more effective, and the obtainable averageness may actually achieve more than the unobtainable perfection of the usual type.
Or is this basically a way for dominant corporations to flyswat people claiming infringement?
It's easy to like a system that makes "bad patents" get invalidated without the Eastern District of Texas seeing its income tick up due to court cases challenging patents.
But part of me worries that this will be just a system for big corporations to steal patents from legitimate patent holders.
I'm pretty sure you could come up with data that shows that attractive people produce greater levels of customer satisfaction, higher sales, and so on, so why isn't being good looking a BOFQ for a lot of jobs?
It's funny, but in IT the majority of women sales people I encounter are way better looking than the male sales people. I had to sit through a sales meeting the other day and the 4 women there were all super attractive -- I don't just mean well dressed, or slim, etc, but were 5/5 on all the sub measures -- great figure, great hair, great outfits, it was like they could have gone out and gotten modeling jobs, but instead they sold IT stuff for major companies you have heard from and used.
I can't decide what drives this. It could just be the people who do the hiring had the pick of the litter and chose the best looking among otherwise equal candidates. It could be some kind of self-selection bias, where people who go into sales have high levels of self-esteem and this biases the pool towards attractive women who would tend to be more confident and outgoing among all women. It could be that they were merely average looking but above average in personal presentation, and being women, better at personal grooming on average than most men (especially men in IT, even sales), thus making them only appear to better looking.
Maybe I'm just stupid, but I can't help but think it's not just a coincidence, and that they were actually selected based on their appearance and they get sent in as eye candy or "closers" to motivate certain clients based on their appearance. I would think this would be a long-term problem/discrimination complaint risk or just ineffective (many IT buyers are working with budgets that don't move because the salesperson has a great ass, or insulted because they're into the technology and feel they're being manipulated).
The standard capitalist answer is when Scrooge McDuck trades $250 million for some luxury good, he has given $250 million to the people who produced or sold the luxury good, and Scrooge McDuck now is sitting on a useless, unproductive asset. That is how money gets recycled from the rich into the economy.
The global art market alone is something like $40-odd billion, I 'd wager double that when you get into other similar markets for collectible goods (cars, rare wines, etc). Van Gogh isn't getting a dime of that money, it's essentially the rich swapping money for things that already exist and whose production and labor has already been paid for.
No value is being lost, it's merely being frozen in an economic asset that doesn't produce products, jobs or any kind of economic growth.
I will agree with you that I'm deeply skeptical that any kind of government policy will have a positive impact. Even if you could come up with an economically sound, data-driven plan to decrease some market failure the actual implementation by the government is likely to result in a lot of suboptimal outcomes.
Slashdot Mirror
A losing effort.
The city has had at least two controversial shootings in recent years and activists are wholly opposed to anything involving "more police". One shooting involved an African American male who fought white officers and tried to take their gun and was shot and killed. The OTHER shooting happened about 1.5 miles from where I lived and involved an African American (first Somali immigrant police officer) officer who shot an unarmed white woman who had actually initiated the police call.
So it's a total political clusterfuck with the cops in this town. In last year's mayoral election, a major candidate actually suggested disarming the cops. Another major candidate rose to prominence in the precinct occupation/protest which went on for a month or two (in addition to disrupting things like the Park Board meetings, screaming racism and preventing the meeting from taking place). We use ranked choice voting and both candidates polled top 4, so there's that kind of crazy here.
The latter shooting (white woman shot by Somali cop) has everyone spinning in circles. The African American activists and white liberals don't know whether to be outraged or not because while they're trained to be outraged at police shootings, the racial role reversal here has them flummoxed. The pro-police "conservatives" who usually give the cops the benefit of the doubt are annoyed, but are equally flummoxed because a black cop shot a white woman.
The 100% democratic city government just wants it all to go away. The DA had to turn to the Grand Jury (after saying he would no longer use it after the previous shooting) to forcibly extract testimony as all the officers even tangentially involved in the Officer's career and training went blue wall of silence, making it take 8 months to get an indictment. The so-called legal experts are calling the odds of conviction 3-2 against due to the incredible lack of evidence (body cameras -- turned off, no witnesses, etc).
So yeah, run for city council on a "we need more police patrols" platform? Uh, no.
I'm not a fan of police state tactics by any means, but shit, what else can we turn to?
I've lived in large single family home residential neighborhood in a city (looks suburban, but is in the city) for 19 years and over the past 5+ years, the amount of nuisance theft has skyrocketed. Just on my *block* it's not unusual to hear about a car being rifled, strange "door to door" sales people with no materials/identification/logos. We had a rash of car entries using keyless entry repeaters and a couple of sneak burglaries (snatching purses from kitchen tables). Over a week last November, the entire larger neighborhood was hit by package thieves, including my house. 3 different people had footage of the car involved.
I had a long conversation with my council member about what can be done and was told that we should just report it and then do insurance or whatever. I asked why we couldn't get more police patrols and was told our area was "too low crime" (the numbers say we're the lowest crime area in the city) and there wasn't sufficient resources.
So what the fuck? Just put up with it? That's the answer? Or just change my thinking, it *must* be my racial bias?
Or this is somehow really ad-hoc redistributive economic justice, and I'm just too racist to notice?
I read an interesting comment the other day where it was theorized that once the cloud gets past some tipping point, on-premise hardware will lose its economies of scale due to less adoption and few organizations will be able to go back on premise because the equipment will be too expensive. OEMs will be mostly producing parts for custom cloud provider designs and they won't be useful for on-prem purposes.
I don't know that I buy it completely, but found it thought provoking. You would think that virtualization would have also had this effect -- even small companies I work for used to have 3-4 physical servers and now only have 1-2 for their workloads, yet server prices haven't gone though the roof, although it may just be that aggregate growth is so good that it covers up for it or even reduces demand-side inflation.
It does kind of make me wonder what economies of scale would have done for physical server prices if virtualization hadn't been widely adopted and organizations that buy 4 servers for their 100 VMs were still buying a nearly equivalent number of physical servers. We'd probably be doing what we used to do, cramming a bunch of unrelated services onto the same OS box wherever there wasn't a service/port/utilization conflict rather than splitting out services into single-service VMs.
Every once in a while I still run into a random client with a shitload of physical servers and it's kind of staggering. The last one was a company that had the same CFO and IT director for 20 years and an AS/400 shop with a really old-school IBM commitment.
Most only need one space after their period before we're back in business. Some though have a little extra surge at the end, so two spaces is a safer bet. Unfortunately you don't know until you "know", if you know what I mean.
The problem is they're prone to crippling apps that could be useful in the mobile space by chaining them to their own cloud services.
I find OneNote to be useful on the PC and it even manages to work with the documents synced with Dropbox, but it's chained to OneDrive, which I don't use. It would even be kind of useful if I had to manually import the data files.
Isn't it only "VoIP data" up until it enters the actual phone routing system?
I can't help but think that phone companies could verify inbound calling paths were legitimate sources for the presented ANI data.
Number portability means there IS a database of phone numbers and the carriers to which they are associated, there should be a way to check ANI data against the database to decide if the source for that calling party is legitimate.
I'm sure we'll hear about all the "legitimate" reasons to pass fake ANI data (like some offshore support call center operating under contract for Dell, etc). I'd guess most of these situations are passing generic toll free numbers and maybe they would just have to pony up for toll free numbers on their own outbound trunks and deal with the headaches of routing calls to those toll free numbers back to the destination they really want.
Most PBXs it wouldn't be a problem, because their outbound ANI is almost always a number/DID they actually own.
That, or fuck $Company and their business partners. $Company can just extend their phone system via VoIP to their call center provider so that outbound calls get made on $Company owned trunks and numbers.
I keep feeling like there is a solution to this, but it imposes small costs on a small number of high-profile businesses who lobby against them, unintentionally carrying the water for shitty scam companies.
I like this idea, and I'd guess you might even get away with making it universal, where every call you make that gets answered transfers $0.10 to the recipient, with the idea that a lot of people call essentially another number they own, making the net transfer between people zero.
I would suspect you could even drive down the cost to $0.05, since if you're penalizing robocallers, $50k vs. $100k per day for a million outbound calls is still a penalty.
Businesses and maybe even individuals who didn't want to "charge" a call termination fee could opt out.
Business privatizes the profits of sacking redundant labor but socializes the costs of doing so.
I think there's good arguments for allowing businesses a lot of labor flexibility as it contributes to economic health. But they still should bear the burden of paying the costs associated with that flexibility.
This sounds like welfare that people with substance abuse problems or other mental health problems wouldn't be able to get
Are you kidding? Showing up high or getting high is exactly what people with pointless jobs do.
The Japanese may have the personal dignity to get dressed in their salaryman suits and sit in an empty room all day like they *might* actually be called on to do some work, but Americans would quickly turn it into a stoner's den.
I have yet to meet someone who actually has a shotgun "loaded with rock salt."
Rock salt isn't available in any commercial loads I've ever seen and I can't think of what you'd actually shoot it at. It's so light that it would have little terminal effect outside maybe 20'. At point blank ranges it would probably produce a nasty wound or even be fatal but would you want to face down someone with real ammunition bearing only rock salt? Or have to explain to the cops how maiming someone amounts to self defense "in fear of your life." You'd also have to clean the barrel right away after shooting anything as the salt would be corrosive.
Conventional bird loads like you'd use on pheasants would be perfect for drones -- reasonable range, and aimed up the pellets would be harmless. A target range I've been to has a duck tower and you shoot at angles like 10-20 degrees off vertical and the pellets come down near the clubhouse and it's like someone threw fine sand in the air when it comes down.
Floors heated to be warm to the touch are often done when the point is to heat the room that way.
In other cases where the floor is basically a heat sink that makes the room colder (like a basement floor) you can warm it without overheating the room.
I use screenshots to document some software installs that request a bunch of information that is important to have, sometimes years away, but is easily lost.
I'd love something that would record the display as a series of stills, like 15 frames per minute or something where I could just pick the individual frames to keep after.
It's the stopping, snipping, pasting thing that makes it tedious.
The remaining three would just get larger in proportion to their size, mostly because they could afford to buy Sprint's assets in proportion to their own income and assets.
Verizon and ATT would mostly wind up shutting down Sprint cell sites and repurposing their band assignments to existing towers.
T-Mobile would probably add some new net coverage, but there would still be some duplication that would get shut down.
The tech industry has a ton of churn -- there's some technological advancement, but there's an awful lot of new products turned out simply to keep customers buying new licenses and paying for upgrades.
This relentless and mostly phony newness means a lot of people have little experience with current products. People fake because they have no choice. The good ones understand the general technologies and problems they're meant to solve and can generally get up to speed quickly, while the bad ones are good at faking it but don't really know what they're doing. Telling the difference from the outside is impossible.
Sales people make it worse, promoting people as "experts" in specific products or implementations because the people have experience with a related product and "they're all the same". This burns out the people with good adaption skills.
Around here at least, the excess administrative cost seems closely tied to the extent that the "achievement gap", the so called difference in educational outcomes between African American students and white students. This has lead to two things.
One, the increasing expansion of the educational bureaucracy to provide not only education but social welfare as well, providing things like meals, social workers and an increasing the number of special education teachers to deal with the learning deficiencies of the mostly black underclass. All of these services lie mostly outside of the traditional management hierarchy of schools and thus have their own parallel management bureaucracy within the district. It has also increased the number of district employees who "manage" the education gap issue but do not provide any direct involvement in general education.
The other byproduct of the achievement gap is political. Partly because African Americans are seen as the major stakeholders due to their poor educational outcomes, the African American community has come to see the school district administration as "their" institution. Patronage and political considerations have greatly increased the number of African American district administrative employees.
A few years ago after another forced resignation of the latest "hero" Superintendent, a temporary Superintendent with a long and well-regarded career in state government administration (there are actually some) was hired. He combed through the budget and discussed significant cuts in administrative overhead which would increase school funding. There were proposals to promote him to permanent Superintendent status but his plans for administrative cuts outraged the African American community because "their" people bore the brunt of the cuts. It was seen as a direct challenge to their political base and the school board quickly suppressed any talk of promoting the temporary Supervisor -- they and the Democrats (since all the board are Democrats), got the message that there would be problems obtaining African American political support.
The TL;DR edition: schools spend too much money on social welfare. It's not that social welfare isn't necessary, but that the school funding mechanism in the district is too shallow to provide an education and social welfare services for a significant plurality of the entire state's poor kids. Promoting the idea that the educational system is at fault for African American students has created a political base for African Americans who have used it to promote patronage and creating a bureaucratic base to support it, bloating the district's administrative staff with African American employees. The excess administrative staff is essentially immune from downsizing due to political considerations.
There's no real fix for it, either. Increasing social welfare support for poor kids would help, but it has to come from and be paid for by the state -- poverty concentration is too great for the local political entities to provide sufficient funding -- and the social welfare has to be delivered and managed by the state, not by local school districts. The district administration needs to be thinned accordingly, but what also has to happen is an acknowledgement that whatever they've been doing for the last 20 of 30 years hasn't solved the achievement gap and that it is principally a problem of family support and the social problems of the African American community, not a failure of pedagogy. None of this is likely, especially the admission that it's the African American community failing its own children, not the school district.
That is strange. You don't have access to Google?
No, but I have access to a car and use it a lot and never see electric vehicles, just the standard diesel ones.
A lot of parents drilled this into heads, including mine.
I think there was a strong sense that they were denied entry into some aspect of life because they weren't college educated. We lived a fairly average middle class type life, but even growing up there seemed to be a subtle snubbing of my parents by other parents on our block who were college educated. My dad owned his own business and drove Cadillacs, so it wasn't like we were economically blue collar, either, and at least one of the families that seemed snobby were worse off financially.
The whole trades job thing would probably attract more people if the working conditions weren't so shitty. A $10/office flunky gets treated so much better than a $25 tradesperson.
My guess is what you describe only really works with an Altered Carbon type of device to store brain contents and transfer it to a new brain.
I'd guess that the surgical complexity to actually move a physical brain between skulls makes it necessary to treat the brain's contents separately from its physical entity.
Yeah, but then you have to also provide an extra $5/hr of welfare,
Your argument fell apart at the beginning. You don't *have to* provide $5/hr of welfare, which is why our system is so super awesome.
[I'm being facetious with all of this...]
Honestly, if ten hours of work at $10/hr makes a table, you can't continue supplying tables for less than $100 each--regardless of competition. Find a way to make a table in five hours of work and now it's a $50 table
I thought they just told people who made $10/hr they now make $5/hr, instant $50 table.
When will the cost effective vehicles start showing up?
I agree with all the benefits, but struggle to understand where the products are. Most mail trucks are damn near glorified golf carts and don't drive far in most urbanized zipcodes. It's not hard to see a design almost literally based off a sightly upsized golf cart (with some kind of micro van type body).
UPS, FedEx local delivery seem like great candidates, too. These need to be more truck scale, but there's more room for batteries to deal with heavier cargo loads and the longer ranges they drive in a day.
Both USPS and UPS are big enough and both have a history of buying custom vehicles specially built for them. You would think that both organizations would already be fielding large scale prototype tests and that either existing or upstart suppliers could see big money replacing entire fleets.
Yet strangely I don't see any of them doing this. USPS is especially puzzling -- they buy GM minivans now, and it's not hard to see the (now discontinued) City Express van combined with a Volt powertrain. Plug in at the post office and nearly all the mileage would be electric with the generator for longer or more rural routes.
Which is the conceptual problem with the idea that attractive, female salespeople are somehow effective -- some proportion of the target audience views them as specifically manipulative, undermining their individual and brand's credibility.
On the other hand, it must work in enough situations that they keep getting hired.
I'm kind of surprised that they don't focus on more average women. I think there is a certain unique persuasive quality that women possess that transcends appearance and crude sex appeal. It would seem that these more subtle use of this by women less obviously designed to manipulate would make it more effective, and the obtainable averageness may actually achieve more than the unobtainable perfection of the usual type.
Or is this basically a way for dominant corporations to flyswat people claiming infringement?
It's easy to like a system that makes "bad patents" get invalidated without the Eastern District of Texas seeing its income tick up due to court cases challenging patents.
But part of me worries that this will be just a system for big corporations to steal patents from legitimate patent holders.
I'm pretty sure you could come up with data that shows that attractive people produce greater levels of customer satisfaction, higher sales, and so on, so why isn't being good looking a BOFQ for a lot of jobs?
It's funny, but in IT the majority of women sales people I encounter are way better looking than the male sales people. I had to sit through a sales meeting the other day and the 4 women there were all super attractive -- I don't just mean well dressed, or slim, etc, but were 5/5 on all the sub measures -- great figure, great hair, great outfits, it was like they could have gone out and gotten modeling jobs, but instead they sold IT stuff for major companies you have heard from and used.
I can't decide what drives this. It could just be the people who do the hiring had the pick of the litter and chose the best looking among otherwise equal candidates. It could be some kind of self-selection bias, where people who go into sales have high levels of self-esteem and this biases the pool towards attractive women who would tend to be more confident and outgoing among all women. It could be that they were merely average looking but above average in personal presentation, and being women, better at personal grooming on average than most men (especially men in IT, even sales), thus making them only appear to better looking.
Maybe I'm just stupid, but I can't help but think it's not just a coincidence, and that they were actually selected based on their appearance and they get sent in as eye candy or "closers" to motivate certain clients based on their appearance. I would think this would be a long-term problem/discrimination complaint risk or just ineffective (many IT buyers are working with budgets that don't move because the salesperson has a great ass, or insulted because they're into the technology and feel they're being manipulated).
The standard capitalist answer is when Scrooge McDuck trades $250 million for some luxury good, he has given $250 million to the people who produced or sold the luxury good, and Scrooge McDuck now is sitting on a useless, unproductive asset. That is how money gets recycled from the rich into the economy.
The global art market alone is something like $40-odd billion, I 'd wager double that when you get into other similar markets for collectible goods (cars, rare wines, etc). Van Gogh isn't getting a dime of that money, it's essentially the rich swapping money for things that already exist and whose production and labor has already been paid for.
No value is being lost, it's merely being frozen in an economic asset that doesn't produce products, jobs or any kind of economic growth.
I will agree with you that I'm deeply skeptical that any kind of government policy will have a positive impact. Even if you could come up with an economically sound, data-driven plan to decrease some market failure the actual implementation by the government is likely to result in a lot of suboptimal outcomes.