The plural of anecdote is not data. While your brother may actually be honest and not biasing himself in favor of himself, it's not clear that truck drivers are always in the right or even mostly in the right.
I've seen a lot of bad truck driving behavior -- abrupt lane changes, following too close, failure to yield, speeding, etc. When in Arizona last winter it was fairly appalling how badly trucks drove on I-10 between Tuscon and Benson. In fact there was a semi that crashed and burned on the westbound side while we drove past. They would weave, drive just fast enough to pass the slower rigs but stay in the left lane below the speed limit, change lanes abruptly with no signal. It was scary.
I'd almost argue truck drivers have gotten worse, not better which if true could be caused by lower wages, less unionization, greater demand to meet tight schedules -- basically all the usual market forces that make management more money but lower the quality of the workforce.
The real problem is most likely just the conflict between 80,000 pound trucks and 3,000 pound passenger cars. If you mix those together and shake well, you'll end up with horrific accidents just based on physics. Add in bad passenger car driving and perhaps over-aggressive trucks and it's not hard to see how it could get worse.
At it's heart, the Euro is an attempt to institutionalize neoliberal economic ideas; as such, it lacks any way to deal with trade imbalances (since those should be automatically dealt with by the free market, according to the theory). And they are being dealt with, however this in practice means destroying the countries which can't compete and starving their population.
I thought the most basic function of the European Economic Community was to be a free trade zone. When combined with a shared currency, I'm not sure that the idea of a trade imbalance has the same meaning as it does between countries with trade barriers (taxes, tarrifs, etc) and differing currencies.
It's a little like saying that there's a trade imbalance between Elm Street and Main Street because all the shops and businesses are on Main Street and Elm Street has to import everything from Main Street because all they do is mow lawns and babysit on Elm.
I think the biggest problem was the overexpansion of the Euro zone to countries like Greece which had a history of dubious economic performance, Government economic performance (budgeting, tax collection, etc) and basic economic capability.
What's the most expensive part of a Sodastream, the carbonation?
The flavors (per their estimate of 12 liters per flavor pack) are around 50 cents per liter, which is about the "on sale" price of most 2L bottles of soda. Canned soda is about 80 cents a liter (more or less depending on brand and price).
A friend bought a kit to fool around with and toyed with the idea of an adapter to use standard bottles of CO2.
He ended up really hacking it by abandoning the Sodastream carbonator itself and instead put schraeder valves in the caps of the Sodastream bottles and bought a 20 gallon CO2 tank off Craigslist. I think he's even gotten into converting 2L bottles to use with this.
The Golden Age of research on any cutting edge technology is that point at which deep pockets take it seriously enough to spend serious money and give researches comfortable timelines while at the same time have limited expectations of tangible and useful results.
I would think that a lot of the government agent type job applicants are very familiar with polygraphs already and likely know how to minimize their effectiveness already.
Maybe somebody applying to be a file clerk at the DEA wouldn't, but my guess is also most of those kinds of jobs aren't subject to this level of scrutiny.
I think you're right if you're talking about who would start using opiates if they became legal tomorrow -- most people who don't abuse them now wouldn't rush out to abuse them tomorrow just because they became legal.
That being said, I think there would have to be limits on what big pharma could do in terms of advertising and marketing. Considering the kinds of ad pushes you get for Naproxen or other drugs, I could see Big Pharma being less than honest about the risks and subtly hooking people.
If it was free of marketing and had clear instructions (how much to take, how much you could take before you ran the risk of it being physically habit forming based on actual known data like biological half life, etc) it would probably steer clear of any kind of naive addictions of people who may be physically prone to addiction but simply lack the interest or personality to seek it out.
I question how bad the "addiction" problem would actually be.
I think some subset of the population may be prone to abusive use of opiates, but I would bet that most would settle into a maintenance habit that might technically be called addiction but wouldn't otherwise be a major obstacle to living a more or less normal life.
And that's of people who actually would find the effect pleasant. I've known many people who *complain* about opiates they get after surgery -- "it makes me too sleepy", "it makes me kind of sick to my stomach" -- "I don't like the way it makes me feel". I think there's a fair amount of people who just would never develop a habit at all because they find it dysphoric in some way or other.
I had major hand surgery about a year and a half ago and was on oxycodone for about six months. On paper, I was supposed to be taking about 50 mg per day but at that level I was just foggy and dragging and I found it to be unsustainable. It was easier to take it as needed (chewing a 5 mg tablet brought fairly quick relief). And while it brought a pleasant euphoria, when the meds ran out I just walked away from it and never had a craving or a desire for it.
Bonobos just figured out that civilization is a lot of extra work to go through for fucking and eating. Especially when you can just fuck and eat without it.
How good/bad is DeVry? I remember getting a full court sales pitch from them in 1984 when I was a senior in high school.
I want to guess "as bad as ITT" but then again, they've been around for at least 30 years.
I also wonder if these kinds of "schools" weren't actually semi-legitimate when there were a lot more tape-monkey type jobs in "IT" where a full-blown CompSci degree was overkill for a lot of low-end maintenance tasks like spooling reports, loading tapes and disk packs, etc. People with an innate ability could probably have moved up into more sophisticated jobs, thus validating the education.
"A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" is really something to see in person because it's so big (2m high, 3m wide) and Seurat's pointillist style makes you wonder how he actually was able to paint it. It's almost worth the trip to the Art Institute of Chicago on its own.
The power output of RTGs declines over time, but according to Wikipedia Americium-241 has a half-life of 432 years and is an experimental replacement/alternative to Pu-238 RTGs.
Since shielding and weight requirements are a non-factor for terrestrial RTGs, it wouldn't surprise me if there was some secret bunker someplace with a huge (1-2kW) RTG in place as a kind of emergency power source capable of powering a control system or something to bring up other power systems.
At this point in history, I don't have much sympathy for musicians who complain about their lack of wealth.
Musicians who have risen to any kind of popularity in the last 10 years ought to be well aware of the greedy "recording industry" and its money grubbing ways. I'm pretty sure it's been common knowledge for the last 30 years.
I don't know why popular artists don't try to structure their income around self-production and distribution and making money off touring and reduce their exposure to the record labels.
Big complainers like Taylor Swift are a product of this industry -- would she have "made it" at all if not for the industry?
...they had to turn down from 11 because trainees were actually getting hurt when it crashed? For some reason I remember broken teeth being part of the experience.
I'm not sure why a simulator would ever want to bash people that hard. You'd think it'd be almost more jarring to have the simulation just stop completely -- lights go on, screen dark.
Sex Ed should have a "technique" component that does something to at least inform kids what kind of behaviors are expected and liked by potential sex partners and what preferences they have that their partners are unlikely to share.
I'd wager more than a few date rape scenarios result from frustration borne of people who don't know what the other person wants or how to please them.
(Standard disclaimer applies, date rape is bad, no means no, etc etc etc).
Mostly I think you're given a choice of some kind of severence package if you train your replacement or nothing if you don't.
I think the logical choice is to train your replacement. Badly.
I've never worked anyplace that was able to document systems or processes so completely that you could just pick up a binder and do the job. Usually when they come close, it takes so long and so much labor that it's out of date five minutes after it's complete. At it's very best it's a compromise of up-to-date but materially incomplete information that gets the big picture and many details right but something is always missing.
So there's always this chunk of information that's part politics, part personalities, part hackery, part strangeness that's crucial but not possible to put on paper.
This is the part you leave out, alter or otherwise just get wrong for your replacment. Eventually it will break something in a way that they won't know how to fix, but by then you'll be gone and your severence spent.
It seems like part of the problem is CPU -- every advancement in mobile processors seems to be matched by advancements in desktop processors, and the gap never really closes.
I also wonder if this is something Google's Project Ara is sort of trying to fix or work around. Maybe a modular phone would make it easier to swap in a desktop class processor when needed for desktop type functions.
I think some of it is the demand that everything work, all the time, without any room for maintenance while at the same time not being willing to pay for the resources to deliver systems that can provide that.
No, and I will always actively seek to avoid it if possible. I don't know if I would ALWAYS refuse one, but given two similar properties I'd choose the one without the HOA.
I also think it's kind of a regional thing. I don't know of any HOAs off the top of my head that aren't townhouse developments.
Why does that always seem to translate into "no regard for the aesthetics I find most valuable"?
We've had a ton of "debate" in Minneapolis over the last few years over teardowns in Southwest Minneapolis and there's always complaints about the "aesthetics", as if people were putting up houses that looked poorly built, used unpleasant color schemes or were otherwise easily identifiable eyesores. Most of them looked totally inoffensive.
These Seattle townhouses look like they're just your basic contemporary styled building. They don't match the generic, small-house look of what was there, but why do they have to? Is there a requirement that everything has to look as it always has, forever, especially when what's existing never met any standard to begin with?
The "too big" thing cropped up here and mostly it struck me as either outright jealousy (most of the houses replaced were functionally too small for a family of four, unless they replicated the living standards of a family of four circa 1950.
The rest of the size criticism just struck me as jealousy cloaked in an anti-materialist ideology that had some notion of what the "right" amount of living space was. Also ironic because more than a few of the original homes were owned by single people or childless couples who probably had more square feet per person than a family of 4 or 5 would have in one of the newer houses,.
The new houses were probably way more energy efficient (new HVAC, superior insulation standards, new windows), too.
I do think that you need SOME zoning codes -- a 10 story, poured concrete house build within 2" of all property lines would be a mistake, but mostly people should feel good about new houses. Someone is willing to invest in an existing urban neighborhood, not move to some suburb.
Clean is something of a term of art in the car business that refers to the overall condition of the car -- no rust, missing trim, body damage, intact interior without any major stains or damage to interior components. It's not an emissions standard.
If I could have afforded to fix it, I would have. If I could have afforded to drive a newer car, I could have. Hell, if my work situation would have been different I might have intentionally gotten rid of it altogether and not even had a car (although having a car was super convenient for shopping at the cheaper grocery store 2 miles away and other similar errands).
The reality is that MOST of America is built around the idea that people have cars. The bus system absolutely SUCKED back then. On weekends I could come pretty close to beating the bus ON FOOT the 30-some blocks to one of my job locations. Even on weekdays schedules it was still a 20+ minute ride.
It's all warm and fuzzy to think only of the environment, but I really don't think that an emissions program that basically strips low income people of economically vital transportation makes any sense at all.
Why not take it a step further and just shut down all the coal power plants? People who can afford solar setups can have electricity and those that can't will be shit out of luck, which serves them right for being polluters.
What they should have done was mandate the emission testing process on used vehicles before they could be sold. This would have left everyone who already owned a car free from testing unless they went to sell it.
My guess is that more newer cars change hands, so the burden on used car sellers would have been less.
I did get a waiver for one year, but by next year I had to fix it or stop driving it. I borrowed money from a relative to get it fixed to pass emissions, but whatever they did was a poor fix because the car chronically overheated after that and I ultimately junked it about six months later.
Our state has given up on emissions testing. At the end of the day it just seems like a subsidy to repair shops. The "problem" with emissions is less about repair than just the age of the fleet. As new car emissions get stricter and computer controls get better, the problem larger goes away as the fleet ages out the older cars with weaker emissions controls.
"Clean" is a term of art in the world of cars that describes a vehicle that is free of body and interior defects. It's not related to emissions, although my car did not have any noticeable emissions nor did it burn any oil.
As for reliable, it started and ran consistently and was free of mechanical defects in the engine and powertrain that would have affected its ability to be safely driven.
When I was just out of college and broke I had a car that was clean and was reliable.
When our state began emissions inspections my car failed and I was required to fix it. The repair estimate was $400 (in 1992) and I didn't have $400 to fix my car, so I had to stop driving it.
I was lucky that of the two part-time jobs I had to make ends meet, one agreed to change the store I worked at to a location within reasonable walking distance AND the hours I worked to accommodate the bus trip I now I had to make every day to my other job (I rode the bus on days I only worked that job anyway).
For a lot of people, though, they just don't make enough money to afford these kinds of repairs and they NEED a car to get to work or school or childcare or whatever their responsibilities are.
Mandating this kind of fine-tuning sounds like a great idea, but it ultimately becomes another punitive burden on low-income people. If I wasn't lucky enough to have the alternatives I had, I would have been out of a job or forced to drive illegally.
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The plural of anecdote is not data. While your brother may actually be honest and not biasing himself in favor of himself, it's not clear that truck drivers are always in the right or even mostly in the right.
I've seen a lot of bad truck driving behavior -- abrupt lane changes, following too close, failure to yield, speeding, etc. When in Arizona last winter it was fairly appalling how badly trucks drove on I-10 between Tuscon and Benson. In fact there was a semi that crashed and burned on the westbound side while we drove past. They would weave, drive just fast enough to pass the slower rigs but stay in the left lane below the speed limit, change lanes abruptly with no signal. It was scary.
I'd almost argue truck drivers have gotten worse, not better which if true could be caused by lower wages, less unionization, greater demand to meet tight schedules -- basically all the usual market forces that make management more money but lower the quality of the workforce.
The real problem is most likely just the conflict between 80,000 pound trucks and 3,000 pound passenger cars. If you mix those together and shake well, you'll end up with horrific accidents just based on physics. Add in bad passenger car driving and perhaps over-aggressive trucks and it's not hard to see how it could get worse.
At it's heart, the Euro is an attempt to institutionalize neoliberal economic ideas; as such, it lacks any way to deal with trade imbalances (since those should be automatically dealt with by the free market, according to the theory). And they are being dealt with, however this in practice means destroying the countries which can't compete and starving their population.
I thought the most basic function of the European Economic Community was to be a free trade zone. When combined with a shared currency, I'm not sure that the idea of a trade imbalance has the same meaning as it does between countries with trade barriers (taxes, tarrifs, etc) and differing currencies.
It's a little like saying that there's a trade imbalance between Elm Street and Main Street because all the shops and businesses are on Main Street and Elm Street has to import everything from Main Street because all they do is mow lawns and babysit on Elm.
I think the biggest problem was the overexpansion of the Euro zone to countries like Greece which had a history of dubious economic performance, Government economic performance (budgeting, tax collection, etc) and basic economic capability.
What's the most expensive part of a Sodastream, the carbonation?
The flavors (per their estimate of 12 liters per flavor pack) are around 50 cents per liter, which is about the "on sale" price of most 2L bottles of soda. Canned soda is about 80 cents a liter (more or less depending on brand and price).
A friend bought a kit to fool around with and toyed with the idea of an adapter to use standard bottles of CO2.
He ended up really hacking it by abandoning the Sodastream carbonator itself and instead put schraeder valves in the caps of the Sodastream bottles and bought a 20 gallon CO2 tank off Craigslist. I think he's even gotten into converting 2L bottles to use with this.
The Golden Age of research on any cutting edge technology is that point at which deep pockets take it seriously enough to spend serious money and give researches comfortable timelines while at the same time have limited expectations of tangible and useful results.
I would think that a lot of the government agent type job applicants are very familiar with polygraphs already and likely know how to minimize their effectiveness already.
Maybe somebody applying to be a file clerk at the DEA wouldn't, but my guess is also most of those kinds of jobs aren't subject to this level of scrutiny.
It would be kind of interesting to build a VMware cluster out of these.
I think you're right if you're talking about who would start using opiates if they became legal tomorrow -- most people who don't abuse them now wouldn't rush out to abuse them tomorrow just because they became legal.
That being said, I think there would have to be limits on what big pharma could do in terms of advertising and marketing. Considering the kinds of ad pushes you get for Naproxen or other drugs, I could see Big Pharma being less than honest about the risks and subtly hooking people.
If it was free of marketing and had clear instructions (how much to take, how much you could take before you ran the risk of it being physically habit forming based on actual known data like biological half life, etc) it would probably steer clear of any kind of naive addictions of people who may be physically prone to addiction but simply lack the interest or personality to seek it out.
I question how bad the "addiction" problem would actually be.
I think some subset of the population may be prone to abusive use of opiates, but I would bet that most would settle into a maintenance habit that might technically be called addiction but wouldn't otherwise be a major obstacle to living a more or less normal life.
And that's of people who actually would find the effect pleasant. I've known many people who *complain* about opiates they get after surgery -- "it makes me too sleepy", "it makes me kind of sick to my stomach" -- "I don't like the way it makes me feel". I think there's a fair amount of people who just would never develop a habit at all because they find it dysphoric in some way or other.
I had major hand surgery about a year and a half ago and was on oxycodone for about six months. On paper, I was supposed to be taking about 50 mg per day but at that level I was just foggy and dragging and I found it to be unsustainable. It was easier to take it as needed (chewing a 5 mg tablet brought fairly quick relief). And while it brought a pleasant euphoria, when the meds ran out I just walked away from it and never had a craving or a desire for it.
Bonobos just figured out that civilization is a lot of extra work to go through for fucking and eating. Especially when you can just fuck and eat without it.
How good/bad is DeVry? I remember getting a full court sales pitch from them in 1984 when I was a senior in high school.
I want to guess "as bad as ITT" but then again, they've been around for at least 30 years.
I also wonder if these kinds of "schools" weren't actually semi-legitimate when there were a lot more tape-monkey type jobs in "IT" where a full-blown CompSci degree was overkill for a lot of low-end maintenance tasks like spooling reports, loading tapes and disk packs, etc. People with an innate ability could probably have moved up into more sophisticated jobs, thus validating the education.
Georges Seurat was a pixel artist.
"A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" is really something to see in person because it's so big (2m high, 3m wide) and Seurat's pointillist style makes you wonder how he actually was able to paint it. It's almost worth the trip to the Art Institute of Chicago on its own.
The power output of RTGs declines over time, but according to Wikipedia Americium-241 has a half-life of 432 years and is an experimental replacement/alternative to Pu-238 RTGs.
Since shielding and weight requirements are a non-factor for terrestrial RTGs, it wouldn't surprise me if there was some secret bunker someplace with a huge (1-2kW) RTG in place as a kind of emergency power source capable of powering a control system or something to bring up other power systems.
At this point in history, I don't have much sympathy for musicians who complain about their lack of wealth.
Musicians who have risen to any kind of popularity in the last 10 years ought to be well aware of the greedy "recording industry" and its money grubbing ways. I'm pretty sure it's been common knowledge for the last 30 years.
I don't know why popular artists don't try to structure their income around self-production and distribution and making money off touring and reduce their exposure to the record labels.
Big complainers like Taylor Swift are a product of this industry -- would she have "made it" at all if not for the industry?
...they had to turn down from 11 because trainees were actually getting hurt when it crashed? For some reason I remember broken teeth being part of the experience.
I'm not sure why a simulator would ever want to bash people that hard. You'd think it'd be almost more jarring to have the simulation just stop completely -- lights go on, screen dark.
Sex Ed should have a "technique" component that does something to at least inform kids what kind of behaviors are expected and liked by potential sex partners and what preferences they have that their partners are unlikely to share.
I'd wager more than a few date rape scenarios result from frustration borne of people who don't know what the other person wants or how to please them.
(Standard disclaimer applies, date rape is bad, no means no, etc etc etc).
Mostly I think you're given a choice of some kind of severence package if you train your replacement or nothing if you don't.
I think the logical choice is to train your replacement. Badly.
I've never worked anyplace that was able to document systems or processes so completely that you could just pick up a binder and do the job. Usually when they come close, it takes so long and so much labor that it's out of date five minutes after it's complete. At it's very best it's a compromise of up-to-date but materially incomplete information that gets the big picture and many details right but something is always missing.
So there's always this chunk of information that's part politics, part personalities, part hackery, part strangeness that's crucial but not possible to put on paper.
This is the part you leave out, alter or otherwise just get wrong for your replacment. Eventually it will break something in a way that they won't know how to fix, but by then you'll be gone and your severence spent.
Will we ever get there?
It seems like part of the problem is CPU -- every advancement in mobile processors seems to be matched by advancements in desktop processors, and the gap never really closes.
I also wonder if this is something Google's Project Ara is sort of trying to fix or work around. Maybe a modular phone would make it easier to swap in a desktop class processor when needed for desktop type functions.
...they might have been designing Windows around Notepad.
I would imagine that every conceivable thing has been bounced around when it comes to Windows.
I think some of it is the demand that everything work, all the time, without any room for maintenance while at the same time not being willing to pay for the resources to deliver systems that can provide that.
No, and I will always actively seek to avoid it if possible. I don't know if I would ALWAYS refuse one, but given two similar properties I'd choose the one without the HOA.
I also think it's kind of a regional thing. I don't know of any HOAs off the top of my head that aren't townhouse developments.
Why does that always seem to translate into "no regard for the aesthetics I find most valuable"?
We've had a ton of "debate" in Minneapolis over the last few years over teardowns in Southwest Minneapolis and there's always complaints about the "aesthetics", as if people were putting up houses that looked poorly built, used unpleasant color schemes or were otherwise easily identifiable eyesores. Most of them looked totally inoffensive.
These Seattle townhouses look like they're just your basic contemporary styled building. They don't match the generic, small-house look of what was there, but why do they have to? Is there a requirement that everything has to look as it always has, forever, especially when what's existing never met any standard to begin with?
The "too big" thing cropped up here and mostly it struck me as either outright jealousy (most of the houses replaced were functionally too small for a family of four, unless they replicated the living standards of a family of four circa 1950.
The rest of the size criticism just struck me as jealousy cloaked in an anti-materialist ideology that had some notion of what the "right" amount of living space was. Also ironic because more than a few of the original homes were owned by single people or childless couples who probably had more square feet per person than a family of 4 or 5 would have in one of the newer houses,.
The new houses were probably way more energy efficient (new HVAC, superior insulation standards, new windows), too.
I do think that you need SOME zoning codes -- a 10 story, poured concrete house build within 2" of all property lines would be a mistake, but mostly people should feel good about new houses. Someone is willing to invest in an existing urban neighborhood, not move to some suburb.
Clean is something of a term of art in the car business that refers to the overall condition of the car -- no rust, missing trim, body damage, intact interior without any major stains or damage to interior components. It's not an emissions standard.
If I could have afforded to fix it, I would have. If I could have afforded to drive a newer car, I could have. Hell, if my work situation would have been different I might have intentionally gotten rid of it altogether and not even had a car (although having a car was super convenient for shopping at the cheaper grocery store 2 miles away and other similar errands).
The reality is that MOST of America is built around the idea that people have cars. The bus system absolutely SUCKED back then. On weekends I could come pretty close to beating the bus ON FOOT the 30-some blocks to one of my job locations. Even on weekdays schedules it was still a 20+ minute ride.
It's all warm and fuzzy to think only of the environment, but I really don't think that an emissions program that basically strips low income people of economically vital transportation makes any sense at all.
Why not take it a step further and just shut down all the coal power plants? People who can afford solar setups can have electricity and those that can't will be shit out of luck, which serves them right for being polluters.
What they should have done was mandate the emission testing process on used vehicles before they could be sold. This would have left everyone who already owned a car free from testing unless they went to sell it.
My guess is that more newer cars change hands, so the burden on used car sellers would have been less.
I did get a waiver for one year, but by next year I had to fix it or stop driving it. I borrowed money from a relative to get it fixed to pass emissions, but whatever they did was a poor fix because the car chronically overheated after that and I ultimately junked it about six months later.
Our state has given up on emissions testing. At the end of the day it just seems like a subsidy to repair shops. The "problem" with emissions is less about repair than just the age of the fleet. As new car emissions get stricter and computer controls get better, the problem larger goes away as the fleet ages out the older cars with weaker emissions controls.
"Clean" is a term of art in the world of cars that describes a vehicle that is free of body and interior defects. It's not related to emissions, although my car did not have any noticeable emissions nor did it burn any oil.
As for reliable, it started and ran consistently and was free of mechanical defects in the engine and powertrain that would have affected its ability to be safely driven.
When I was just out of college and broke I had a car that was clean and was reliable.
When our state began emissions inspections my car failed and I was required to fix it. The repair estimate was $400 (in 1992) and I didn't have $400 to fix my car, so I had to stop driving it.
I was lucky that of the two part-time jobs I had to make ends meet, one agreed to change the store I worked at to a location within reasonable walking distance AND the hours I worked to accommodate the bus trip I now I had to make every day to my other job (I rode the bus on days I only worked that job anyway).
For a lot of people, though, they just don't make enough money to afford these kinds of repairs and they NEED a car to get to work or school or childcare or whatever their responsibilities are.
Mandating this kind of fine-tuning sounds like a great idea, but it ultimately becomes another punitive burden on low-income people. If I wasn't lucky enough to have the alternatives I had, I would have been out of a job or forced to drive illegally.