I think you could make an argument for speed enforcement cameras provided that the logic of where to place them was safety data driven -- ie, you have solid numbers that show that a specific stretch of road has a high number of speed-related accidents.
I don't think that's how it works, though, I think like squad-car based speed traps they tend to get placed in locations where a higher number of people may get cited because people naturally tend to drive over the speed limit due to the nature of the roadway (good pavement, wide lanes, good sightlines, perhaps even a downhill grade).
Even where the data may show they are of safety value, they only cover a tiny stretch of road. I would tend to think that speed-induced accident zones are likely much larger than the small space a camera system could cover. I'd guess that unless they were portable and moved frequently to saturate the true target area, you might just end up with traffic that gets "camera smart" and merely slows in the camera's footprint (unsafely, even) and then resumes speeding.
I also think the public's appetite for speed cameras would improve if there was more leniency to them -- your first and maybe even second citation from a specific camera is a warning and all subsequent citations from the same camera are fines. Provide an educational motivation first before becoming purely punitive.
I'm curious what law enforcement's opinion of them is -- I can see where the brass involved with budgets and income and safety PR may be in favor of them, but I would think many cops would be opposed, since stopping speeders isn't just about traffic citations, it's an opportunity to question citizens under color of law.
This is why everyone is nervous about North Korea: if they wanted to fire a nuke at South Korea or Japan, the threat of nuclear annihilation of their cities in response wouldn't be very likely to dissuade them.
I get this logic when it comes to religiously-inspired non-state actors -- the lack of a state apparatus and physical territory means they don't have a physical presence to defend, and the religious motivation implies outcomes that transcend the physical world.
But despite the cult of personality, North Korea isn't religiously motivated and is essentially defined by the state and its territory. Kim may have the best bunker in the world, but annihilation of his cities and standing army leaves him with what? His circle of backstabbers locked in concrete hole in the mountains? His state and leadership are over; he may have struck the enemy but he can't defeat the enemy and his state WILL be defeated, ending it permanently.
North Korea seems defined by the notions of a rational actor and bound by the notion of self-preservation, whereas Islamic groups seem to better fit the idea of a non-rational actor for whom self-preservation isn't a criteria.
The one thing missing from the iPad in terms of desktop replacement is the ability to use a Bluetooth mouse. Heavy text editing and RDP sessions feel totally clumsy without a mouse -- reaching for the screen and trying to remenber which odd touch combination is required to activate the non-touch-friendly GUI widget makes me crazy as does Apple's touch text editing.
The backstory is that I had gone to roust him out of bed because he's chronically late but found him in the bathroom, unconscious and not breathing. Somehow he had passed out, fell, and landed on a trash bin and the bin liner had blocked his airway.
He spent four days in the ICU, the first day in a propofol-induced coma with an EEG connected. It was a horrifying experience and my wife posted the image two days later basically as a way of letting people know what had happened and why we had gone silent to everyone for a few days.
She was annoyed by the image of him presented as "what a great year" but I don't think much more than annoyed.
I think the entire feature is lame and I've marked all of them (my own suggested one and every other I've been presented) as "I don't want to see this". Trying to block my own suggested one in the Facebook IOS app consistently crashed the app.
My takeaway on this is that Facebook's image analytics suck. As good as they seem to be at identifying faces for tagging you might think they would be able to train their system to identify smiling faces so that when they suggested images they would tend to show ones more likely to be positive and reject others.
Assuming you're not running major data service out of your house, what's the point of diminishing return for connectivity?
I'm making the assumptions that the link speed you're sold is actually the speed you get and that there are no resource constraints, artificial or real, that would stop you from utilizing the maximum bandwidth.
Do most web sites have per-connection caps on how fast any one connection can download files or data? Could you mount a file store on AWS or any other cloud storage provider and use it like a local NAS disk?
While a zoo may seem like a comfy environment some animals just don't do well in captivity.
I believe this is generally true, but at the same time I think there's also an undercurrent of anthropomorphization here about animal psychology that can get dangerous. Too often it seems like we talk about what animals "want" and "don't want" when in a lot of cases things that would bother humans just don't matter to animals because they lack the kinds of emotional processes unique to humans.
I think there's probably a reasonable argument to be made that a move to a foreign location, even one nominally more "native" than a zoo, is a definite hardship on an animal who has become habituated to a specific environment.
Now, if the "zoo" in question is a 10x10 concrete room with bars, then maybe the quality of life in a larger and more natural (in the sense of less confinement and concrete) environment is worth a temporary disruption.
But what about zoos that give primates large, outdoor spaces with natural accommodations like ponds, trees, shelter and primate experts who ensure their physical health and mental stimulation? A "natural" environment may be at best an equal trade and in some instances worse if it comes with a change in the fellow-species population (change in social status, loss of familiar animals or mates, etc).
I'm not always sure that "natural" spaces really are as natural as their made out to be unless it means putting the animal back in its native environment -- sure, their animals but they can become as habituated to a captive lifestyle as any animal. My dog may love to run free outside, but he seems pretty well adapted to sleeping on the couch and probably wouldn't like being made to live outdoors 24x7 after living his life indoors.
My dad had zero engineering or technical ability, which I can attest to through the two lawn mowers "inspected" for problems that ended up being thrown away after too many parts were removed for inspection to reassemble, and all the shit that never got fixed around the house.
But that man could level a parked motorhome like he was Apollodorus of Damascus so we could run the refrigerator. I was always impressed with the newer motorhomes we saw on our trips that had hydraulic jacking systems built-in and could self-level, but dad always felt all you needed were a stack of 2x scraps and a fine accelerator touch. I'd swear he would occasionally use stacks of 2x4s and I'm not quite sure how he managed to get a 26' Winnebago on a stack of 2x4s.
I think they definitely get mileage out of it, but China has some of their own inbuilt paranoia about NK. The last thing the Chinese want is a war on their border. The refugee crisis would be completely destabilizing on its own let alone the risk of war with the United States.
I can only guess that this a veiled threat to help limit their capabilities or risk being collateral damage in any responses that may target assets in China linked to North Korea.
It's also a way of engaging the segments of the Chinese leadership sick of getting caught up in North Korea's antics. The NY Times had a piece this morning highlighting an anti-NK article written by a senior Chinese army officer.
You could make the same claims about texting and driving. Texting and driving has undoubtedly gone up yet accidents continue to fall. It's not clear that texting and driving is the scourge it's made out to be. I'm not arguing it's safe, but maybe it's less unsafe than it's made out to be.
They always seem to put speed traps where it's easy to catch speeders versus where speed control would improve safety, such as places with high levels of speed related accidents.
The latter are often difficult to place speed traps or don't offer good cover for squad cars and the former are often places where it's easy to go faster or where the speed limits are artificially low.
No, they cancelled the line. I had a change in my financial aid and ended up living at home for another year. When I found that out I actually did get the extra line again but I couldn't get the old phone number, I had to get another phone number.
Before I left for college in '85, we had a second phone line (which basically became my line). When I went away, my parents got it disconnected. When I came home the first summer I didn't know it was disconnected. I connected my phone back to the jack and sure enough, had a dialtone.
I made calls for several weeks until my friends kept complaining that my number didn't work, said it was disconnected. I called Ma Bell and found out it was disconnected!
The line from our house to the pole-mounted junction box was still there but the pair for "my" line got repurposed for an additional line in the neighborhood and nobody ever thought to remove the extra jumper.
I kind of doubt it. States enjoy sovereign immunity thanks to the 11th Amendment and generally can't be sued by other states.
Without this, you would have all manner of lawsuits about neighboring states tax laws, liquor and cigarette control regimes, abortion, etc. Bigger states could dominate smaller states via sheer resources.
Chappell, NE is a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it town of 929 on I-80 between North Platte, NE and Cheyenne, Wyoming. A 400% increase in felony drug arrests sounds like a lot, but how many felony drug arrests could there ever have been in a town of 929? Did we go from 1 to 4?
I also wonder how many shitkicker rural sheriffs in neighboring states went on full batshit alert once Colorado legalized it and began pulling over every car they could with out of state license plates coming from Colorado, knowing that they would hit paydirt on at least some of them? You can pretty easily create your own crisis if you start looking for it.
To be fair to the sheriffs, I don't doubt there is some increased amount of pot leaving Colorado -- it's a tourist destination even without pot and it wouldn't surprise me at all if people who go there for other reasons (like skiing or other outdoor activities) decide to bring some home.
It also wouldn't surprise me if some people went there specifically to bring some home, although from what I've been told the retail pricing isn't all that competitive on a dollar basis with black market pot and the economics of driving cross-country to pick up a couple of ounces of weed don't seem to lend themselves to a lot of people deciding to make that trip.
I don't think you can factor in any kind of organized criminal enterprises into these complaints -- that was a "problem" *before* it was legalized. Bitching about it now because you're frothed up about pot legalization and seeing it everywhere you look just seems paranoid.
I thnk their core business WAS the web directory but that seemed to become irrelevent and less useful once Google came around. Their age and size has allowed them a certain amount of inertia with users who simply don't know or care for anything better.
I think there's some value in a high-quality curated web directory. Given what Wikipedia accomplishes with volunteers and no advertising, I would think that Yahoo could have come up with some way to basically pay people to browse the web and curate a directory given the money they have to spend.
Google search is better in some regards and use cases but in some ways, if it isn't on the first page of results it probably won't be useful, especially if you don't know what to search for or are looking for a class of information or type of web site.
But they seemed to have given up on that in favor of "web services" which they probably can't ever compete with. Their technology isn't competitive, they don't have any media clout and nothing unique to offer.
I agree with this in principle, but I worry that there's a certain naivete to it -- making surveillance harder will not cause the security apparatus to give up mass surveillance.
In a world with only limited use of encryption, surveillance was generally a matter of just listening, and targets that used encryption were either immune because of the extra effort and/or low profile but if they were high enough profile, they were attacked through other more resource intensive vectors.
In a world of mass encryption, the security apparatus will instead attack the infrastructure of encryption -- root CAs, encryption technologies and software, neutralizing the value of encryption and eliminating the utility value of it while retaining all the costs to the implementer (CAs, extra CPU cycles, complexity, etc). I think it also destroys trust in some existential way, which may be one of the worst aspects of this.
I think the entire encryption system needs to become decentralized in some way that forces attacks on encryption to be more difficult. Locally generated keys without the need for centralized trust seems to be part of the solution, but the existing CA system provides the trust component making it more difficult to rely on random keys.
Versus the equipment to actually perform the desalination?
California has some pretty big wind farms and one of the issues with wind power is its availability when the grid can't accept the power. I wonder how much capacity goes unused and whether it would make sense to direct that power to a desalination facility that could provide a working load for the power in a scalable way that could be quickly and granularly spun up and down inversely to grid demand for that power.
The power the wind farms can generate but isn't absorbable into the grid is kind of free energy in a way and it would seem to make sense to do useful work with it like desal.
Time spent on a bus is time not spent concentrating on traffic. Relax, read a book, maybe do some work.
Gack.
I remember long bus rides. In the summer, it was kind of 50-50 you'd get a bus with air conditioning. No AC? Now you sweat like a pig, which is really awesome on the way into work. This was marginally less oppressive on the way home, but only marginally less oppressive because when you got home you could strip off your sweaty clothes.
In the winter not enough heat wasn't the problem, too much heat was. Since I had to walk six blocks to the stop and wait at least 10 minutes, I had to dress for whatever outside was like in Minnesota in January, which usually meant dressing for 10-20F. Then you get on the bus and it's like entering a crematorium -- the heat blowing batshit, making it like 80 degrees. And it's crowded and you can only take off so much of your winter stuff, because there's no room to put any of it.
I did do a fair amount of reading, but working? The buses I rode were all like coach airline seats (although not as extreme as coach has recently become). There was no room to practically use a laptop and of course no tray table or anything to put it on.
I eventually gave up the bus and plowed an extra $200/month into a paid parking spot and it was actually LESS stressful. The climate control worked. The seating more comfortable. And despite periodic traffic headaches, it was less stressful to commute for 25 minutes in my car than to wait 10-15 minutes outside for the bus, sit on the bus for 45-50 minutes, and then walk another six blocks to get home. The daily one-way trip time from door-door was almost double on the bus.
It will be a cold day in hell before I commute on a bus again. I might be swayed if I had less than a five minute walk, the stop was climate controlled, and the ride actually on par with driving time AND the seating approximated a first class airline seat in terms of room and a tray table, etc.
I think they do this already -- a recent newspaper article about our local police department detailed a half-dozen officers terminated for various reasons.
But I think it begs the larger question of what remaining officer morale is like if the kinds of "fire 'em all" mindset towards swift and harsh discipline takes place.
I'm not trying to defend bad police behavior, I'm trying to put into the context of a bunch of highly unionized employees who aren't trivially monitorable like $10/hr clerical employees working in some 3,000 square foot desk farm.
There are ways (and I'm sure most experienced officers know them) of simply doing less that no level of oversight can measure let alone measure to the level that satisfies union work rule disciplinary procedures. Sure, fire them all, but who the hell are you going to be hiring to do the job?
It's a common theme, but it begs the question -- do we just live in a state of anarchy now, where the "order" the police provide is merely illusory and most people are law abiding because of social convention, etc? Or does policing actually provide some kind of utility function to maintaining order?
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I think you could make an argument for speed enforcement cameras provided that the logic of where to place them was safety data driven -- ie, you have solid numbers that show that a specific stretch of road has a high number of speed-related accidents.
I don't think that's how it works, though, I think like squad-car based speed traps they tend to get placed in locations where a higher number of people may get cited because people naturally tend to drive over the speed limit due to the nature of the roadway (good pavement, wide lanes, good sightlines, perhaps even a downhill grade).
Even where the data may show they are of safety value, they only cover a tiny stretch of road. I would tend to think that speed-induced accident zones are likely much larger than the small space a camera system could cover. I'd guess that unless they were portable and moved frequently to saturate the true target area, you might just end up with traffic that gets "camera smart" and merely slows in the camera's footprint (unsafely, even) and then resumes speeding.
I also think the public's appetite for speed cameras would improve if there was more leniency to them -- your first and maybe even second citation from a specific camera is a warning and all subsequent citations from the same camera are fines. Provide an educational motivation first before becoming purely punitive.
I'm curious what law enforcement's opinion of them is -- I can see where the brass involved with budgets and income and safety PR may be in favor of them, but I would think many cops would be opposed, since stopping speeders isn't just about traffic citations, it's an opportunity to question citizens under color of law.
This is why everyone is nervous about North Korea: if they wanted to fire a nuke at South Korea or Japan, the threat of nuclear annihilation of their cities in response wouldn't be very likely to dissuade them.
I get this logic when it comes to religiously-inspired non-state actors -- the lack of a state apparatus and physical territory means they don't have a physical presence to defend, and the religious motivation implies outcomes that transcend the physical world.
But despite the cult of personality, North Korea isn't religiously motivated and is essentially defined by the state and its territory. Kim may have the best bunker in the world, but annihilation of his cities and standing army leaves him with what? His circle of backstabbers locked in concrete hole in the mountains? His state and leadership are over; he may have struck the enemy but he can't defeat the enemy and his state WILL be defeated, ending it permanently.
North Korea seems defined by the notions of a rational actor and bound by the notion of self-preservation, whereas Islamic groups seem to better fit the idea of a non-rational actor for whom self-preservation isn't a criteria.
The one thing missing from the iPad in terms of desktop replacement is the ability to use a Bluetooth mouse. Heavy text editing and RDP sessions feel totally clumsy without a mouse -- reaching for the screen and trying to remenber which odd touch combination is required to activate the non-touch-friendly GUI widget makes me crazy as does Apple's touch text editing.
Why wouldn't it work for a single carrier to do this, especially if they ended some of the fees and add-on charges the airlines used?
...hooked up to an EEG machine.
The backstory is that I had gone to roust him out of bed because he's chronically late but found him in the bathroom, unconscious and not breathing. Somehow he had passed out, fell, and landed on a trash bin and the bin liner had blocked his airway.
He spent four days in the ICU, the first day in a propofol-induced coma with an EEG connected. It was a horrifying experience and my wife posted the image two days later basically as a way of letting people know what had happened and why we had gone silent to everyone for a few days.
She was annoyed by the image of him presented as "what a great year" but I don't think much more than annoyed.
I think the entire feature is lame and I've marked all of them (my own suggested one and every other I've been presented) as "I don't want to see this". Trying to block my own suggested one in the Facebook IOS app consistently crashed the app.
My takeaway on this is that Facebook's image analytics suck. As good as they seem to be at identifying faces for tagging you might think they would be able to train their system to identify smiling faces so that when they suggested images they would tend to show ones more likely to be positive and reject others.
Assuming you're not running major data service out of your house, what's the point of diminishing return for connectivity?
I'm making the assumptions that the link speed you're sold is actually the speed you get and that there are no resource constraints, artificial or real, that would stop you from utilizing the maximum bandwidth.
Do most web sites have per-connection caps on how fast any one connection can download files or data? Could you mount a file store on AWS or any other cloud storage provider and use it like a local NAS disk?
While a zoo may seem like a comfy environment some animals just don't do well in captivity.
I believe this is generally true, but at the same time I think there's also an undercurrent of anthropomorphization here about animal psychology that can get dangerous. Too often it seems like we talk about what animals "want" and "don't want" when in a lot of cases things that would bother humans just don't matter to animals because they lack the kinds of emotional processes unique to humans.
I think there's probably a reasonable argument to be made that a move to a foreign location, even one nominally more "native" than a zoo, is a definite hardship on an animal who has become habituated to a specific environment.
Now, if the "zoo" in question is a 10x10 concrete room with bars, then maybe the quality of life in a larger and more natural (in the sense of less confinement and concrete) environment is worth a temporary disruption.
But what about zoos that give primates large, outdoor spaces with natural accommodations like ponds, trees, shelter and primate experts who ensure their physical health and mental stimulation? A "natural" environment may be at best an equal trade and in some instances worse if it comes with a change in the fellow-species population (change in social status, loss of familiar animals or mates, etc).
I'm not always sure that "natural" spaces really are as natural as their made out to be unless it means putting the animal back in its native environment -- sure, their animals but they can become as habituated to a captive lifestyle as any animal. My dog may love to run free outside, but he seems pretty well adapted to sleeping on the couch and probably wouldn't like being made to live outdoors 24x7 after living his life indoors.
My dad had zero engineering or technical ability, which I can attest to through the two lawn mowers "inspected" for problems that ended up being thrown away after too many parts were removed for inspection to reassemble, and all the shit that never got fixed around the house.
But that man could level a parked motorhome like he was Apollodorus of Damascus so we could run the refrigerator. I was always impressed with the newer motorhomes we saw on our trips that had hydraulic jacking systems built-in and could self-level, but dad always felt all you needed were a stack of 2x scraps and a fine accelerator touch. I'd swear he would occasionally use stacks of 2x4s and I'm not quite sure how he managed to get a 26' Winnebago on a stack of 2x4s.
I think they definitely get mileage out of it, but China has some of their own inbuilt paranoia about NK. The last thing the Chinese want is a war on their border. The refugee crisis would be completely destabilizing on its own let alone the risk of war with the United States.
I can only guess that this a veiled threat to help limit their capabilities or risk being collateral damage in any responses that may target assets in China linked to North Korea.
It's also a way of engaging the segments of the Chinese leadership sick of getting caught up in North Korea's antics. The NY Times had a piece this morning highlighting an anti-NK article written by a senior Chinese army officer.
You could make the same claims about texting and driving. Texting and driving has undoubtedly gone up yet accidents continue to fall. It's not clear that texting and driving is the scourge it's made out to be. I'm not arguing it's safe, but maybe it's less unsafe than it's made out to be.
They always seem to put speed traps where it's easy to catch speeders versus where speed control would improve safety, such as places with high levels of speed related accidents.
The latter are often difficult to place speed traps or don't offer good cover for squad cars and the former are often places where it's easy to go faster or where the speed limits are artificially low.
No, they cancelled the line. I had a change in my financial aid and ended up living at home for another year. When I found that out I actually did get the extra line again but I couldn't get the old phone number, I had to get another phone number.
Even the phone company used to do it wrong.
Before I left for college in '85, we had a second phone line (which basically became my line). When I went away, my parents got it disconnected. When I came home the first summer I didn't know it was disconnected. I connected my phone back to the jack and sure enough, had a dialtone.
I made calls for several weeks until my friends kept complaining that my number didn't work, said it was disconnected. I called Ma Bell and found out it was disconnected!
The line from our house to the pole-mounted junction box was still there but the pair for "my" line got repurposed for an additional line in the neighborhood and nobody ever thought to remove the extra jumper.
I kind of doubt it. States enjoy sovereign immunity thanks to the 11th Amendment and generally can't be sued by other states.
Without this, you would have all manner of lawsuits about neighboring states tax laws, liquor and cigarette control regimes, abortion, etc. Bigger states could dominate smaller states via sheer resources.
Chappell, NE is a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it town of 929 on I-80 between North Platte, NE and Cheyenne, Wyoming. A 400% increase in felony drug arrests sounds like a lot, but how many felony drug arrests could there ever have been in a town of 929? Did we go from 1 to 4?
I also wonder how many shitkicker rural sheriffs in neighboring states went on full batshit alert once Colorado legalized it and began pulling over every car they could with out of state license plates coming from Colorado, knowing that they would hit paydirt on at least some of them? You can pretty easily create your own crisis if you start looking for it.
To be fair to the sheriffs, I don't doubt there is some increased amount of pot leaving Colorado -- it's a tourist destination even without pot and it wouldn't surprise me at all if people who go there for other reasons (like skiing or other outdoor activities) decide to bring some home.
It also wouldn't surprise me if some people went there specifically to bring some home, although from what I've been told the retail pricing isn't all that competitive on a dollar basis with black market pot and the economics of driving cross-country to pick up a couple of ounces of weed don't seem to lend themselves to a lot of people deciding to make that trip.
I don't think you can factor in any kind of organized criminal enterprises into these complaints -- that was a "problem" *before* it was legalized. Bitching about it now because you're frothed up about pot legalization and seeing it everywhere you look just seems paranoid.
I thnk their core business WAS the web directory but that seemed to become irrelevent and less useful once Google came around. Their age and size has allowed them a certain amount of inertia with users who simply don't know or care for anything better.
I think there's some value in a high-quality curated web directory. Given what Wikipedia accomplishes with volunteers and no advertising, I would think that Yahoo could have come up with some way to basically pay people to browse the web and curate a directory given the money they have to spend.
Google search is better in some regards and use cases but in some ways, if it isn't on the first page of results it probably won't be useful, especially if you don't know what to search for or are looking for a class of information or type of web site.
But they seemed to have given up on that in favor of "web services" which they probably can't ever compete with. Their technology isn't competitive, they don't have any media clout and nothing unique to offer.
I agree with this in principle, but I worry that there's a certain naivete to it -- making surveillance harder will not cause the security apparatus to give up mass surveillance.
In a world with only limited use of encryption, surveillance was generally a matter of just listening, and targets that used encryption were either immune because of the extra effort and/or low profile but if they were high enough profile, they were attacked through other more resource intensive vectors.
In a world of mass encryption, the security apparatus will instead attack the infrastructure of encryption -- root CAs, encryption technologies and software, neutralizing the value of encryption and eliminating the utility value of it while retaining all the costs to the implementer (CAs, extra CPU cycles, complexity, etc). I think it also destroys trust in some existential way, which may be one of the worst aspects of this.
I think the entire encryption system needs to become decentralized in some way that forces attacks on encryption to be more difficult. Locally generated keys without the need for centralized trust seems to be part of the solution, but the existing CA system provides the trust component making it more difficult to rely on random keys.
Versus the equipment to actually perform the desalination?
California has some pretty big wind farms and one of the issues with wind power is its availability when the grid can't accept the power. I wonder how much capacity goes unused and whether it would make sense to direct that power to a desalination facility that could provide a working load for the power in a scalable way that could be quickly and granularly spun up and down inversely to grid demand for that power.
The power the wind farms can generate but isn't absorbable into the grid is kind of free energy in a way and it would seem to make sense to do useful work with it like desal.
Time spent on a bus is time not spent concentrating on traffic. Relax, read a book, maybe do some work.
Gack.
I remember long bus rides. In the summer, it was kind of 50-50 you'd get a bus with air conditioning. No AC? Now you sweat like a pig, which is really awesome on the way into work. This was marginally less oppressive on the way home, but only marginally less oppressive because when you got home you could strip off your sweaty clothes.
In the winter not enough heat wasn't the problem, too much heat was. Since I had to walk six blocks to the stop and wait at least 10 minutes, I had to dress for whatever outside was like in Minnesota in January, which usually meant dressing for 10-20F. Then you get on the bus and it's like entering a crematorium -- the heat blowing batshit, making it like 80 degrees. And it's crowded and you can only take off so much of your winter stuff, because there's no room to put any of it.
I did do a fair amount of reading, but working? The buses I rode were all like coach airline seats (although not as extreme as coach has recently become). There was no room to practically use a laptop and of course no tray table or anything to put it on.
I eventually gave up the bus and plowed an extra $200/month into a paid parking spot and it was actually LESS stressful. The climate control worked. The seating more comfortable. And despite periodic traffic headaches, it was less stressful to commute for 25 minutes in my car than to wait 10-15 minutes outside for the bus, sit on the bus for 45-50 minutes, and then walk another six blocks to get home. The daily one-way trip time from door-door was almost double on the bus.
It will be a cold day in hell before I commute on a bus again. I might be swayed if I had less than a five minute walk, the stop was climate controlled, and the ride actually on par with driving time AND the seating approximated a first class airline seat in terms of room and a tray table, etc.
With 8 TB drive sizes I would think you would want double parity and some kind of hotspare. The rebuild times on that could be glacial.
Or would that just be considered a gag gift?
I think they do this already -- a recent newspaper article about our local police department detailed a half-dozen officers terminated for various reasons.
But I think it begs the larger question of what remaining officer morale is like if the kinds of "fire 'em all" mindset towards swift and harsh discipline takes place.
I'm not trying to defend bad police behavior, I'm trying to put into the context of a bunch of highly unionized employees who aren't trivially monitorable like $10/hr clerical employees working in some 3,000 square foot desk farm.
There are ways (and I'm sure most experienced officers know them) of simply doing less that no level of oversight can measure let alone measure to the level that satisfies union work rule disciplinary procedures. Sure, fire them all, but who the hell are you going to be hiring to do the job?
It's a common theme, but it begs the question -- do we just live in a state of anarchy now, where the "order" the police provide is merely illusory and most people are law abiding because of social convention, etc? Or does policing actually provide some kind of utility function to maintaining order?