The thing that always bugs me -- when an English language film is set in a non-English language country, why do the actors have to speak local-language accented English when presumably the characters are all "local" to whatever foreign locale the film is in (ie, Germans speaking to Germans). This seems to happen all the time and it first struck me after watching "The Reader" and for some reason I tend to think its most common with Germans but it also seems to happen with Russians, too.
I guess it makes sense if you have an English speaker speaking in English with a non-English speaker, especially if they're trying to sell the non-English speaker as being of the specific ethnicity they play.
But overall, have them all speak in a common English accent/dialect (ie, whatever most of the cast speaks), presumably the film is just as good if everyone just speaks 'normal' English. If you really, really need that local feel then have them actually recite their dialog in the actual foreign language and subtitle it (which I know won't fly for an entire feature-length Hollywood film due to mass-audience distaste for subtitles).
Once this dawned on me it became really hard for me to suspend disbelief. And it's especially annoying, in an existential way, when they aren't consistent about it. You never see ancient Romans speaking in Latin-accented English, for example -- they usually have a BRITISH accent.
I like the idea of conduit for wiring because it allows you to add or replace cabling you otherwise wouldn't be able to, but I think you have to be smart about the structure of the conduit so that you have accessable, big junction boxes to enable long pulls or pulls between areas that aren't in a straight line.
One thing I'd like as an existing homeowner is video cameras and monitoring. I don't think I'll ever have them where I want them, though, because the wiring to corners of eaves and other locations is so onerous. In a new house I'd definitely want to plan for this because these are a lot harder to retrofit than wall locations.
My point isn't that these kids need help, my point is that the school system is not the right place to do it because it subverts the educational process (are schools an educational delivery system or a social welfare delivery system?), schools are not funded adequately for education, let alone addressing massive social welfare problems with people outside the school system (school funding is limited to the property tax base of their district), and the scale and complexity of the social welfare problems are beyond the mandate of the school (which is really a combination of subverting the educational mandate and inadequate resources).
The educational mission of the school system gets subverted when funding is spent on social welfare (staffing, administration, benefits) and when educators careen from one new and improved curricula to another as the politicians elected to school positions make promises they can't keep about improving test scores. There is a myopic focus on only poor minorities. A school board member in my city, Minneapolis, was quoted in the paper opposing a badly needed facility expansion for a successful high school because "the most important kids aren't there." http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/232723051.html
School funding is extremely dependent on regressive property taxes and schools in urban areas have trouble funding their putative primary mission, education. Social welfare needs greatly exceed the ability of these districts to raise funds for education and social welfare. If you try to do both you will do neither well. Our elementary school was identified as having a dozen children who scored in the "gifted" category yet there are ZERO gifted programs or resources for these kids, yet lots of resources for kids in need of social welfare services. I guess, like the school board member quoted above, these kids are "good enough" and we should sacrifice their further development.
The depth and severity of the social welfare problems are just too great for them to be solved through the school system. None of the problems you note, broken families, housing, criminal injustice or lack of parental involvement are issues of the school system. The school system is not the organization that should be dealing with housing, criminal justice or family dynamics, these are all broader social problems that need to be addressed and funded through broader state and federal organizations, not a local school district.
It's not that we shouldn't try to help poor black kids get an education, but that the school system can't be the focus of all the problem solving, otherwise we risk giving EVERYONE a slipshod, useless education and making these social problems worse.
The public school system is growing increasingly dysfunctional because it is chasing the doomed goal of "closing the achievement gap" for non-white students, a gap that exists not because of inadequate teaching but because most of those students are a byproduct of a corrosive social and cultural environment.
This had led schools into the business of providing social welfare services, something they are not equipped to handle, especially in terms of budgets and personnel. There is no amount of money that the schools can spend to fix the problems of broken families, poverty and a corrosive social environment dominated by crime.
School administrators are right, Johnny can't read if he's hungry, etc, but the school system doesn't and won't ever have the money to address these problems and it seriously detracts from the educational mission to divert scarce funding into performing social welfare services.
It's an open question as to whether ANY social welfare spending (at least as structured in the US) can "solve" any of these problems. So many of the problems plaguing these students are CULTURAL issues, not issues of simply being poor. Teenage parents, missing or jailed parents, etc -- we don't seem to know how to solve these problems even in the broader social welfare system, let along trying to do it within the educational system.
Walk through the lobby of the office tower at City Center where Target has offices and its H1-B city. They are, like most corporations, looking to cut IT costs as much as possible and hire legions of H1-Bs.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the volume of H1-Bs doesn't lead to a management arrogance towards IT staff that extends to native-born IT workers which I'm sure would do plenty create the kind of grievance which would help motivate an insider to participate in this kind of fraud.
My teeth kind of reached train wreck status about six or seven years ago. I had switched jobs and the dentist I had been using was located downtown and a huge hassle to get to now that I no longer worked downtown, so I quit going to the dentist for a couple of years. I only brushed once a day, didn't floss or use any kind of dental rinse. One day I had a filling crumble and I knew I had to face the music.
So I found a dentist who did sedation dentistry and went in and laid it out for him -- my teeth were fucked, I want them fixed and I don't want any speeches about flossing, as I doubt I will ever floss. The dentist was great -- thanks to sedation, I was able to get two crowns and 4 fillings in one visit.
And he suggested these "trays" that looked like a set of mouth guards that you filled with a peroxide-based gel. You put it in your mouth and leave it in for about 10 minutes, the idea being that the peroxide gel in the trays would neutralize the plaque in between your teeth and give you most of the benefit of flossing.
After about six months my gums got back to normal. I also stepped up a little and began brushing twice a day and I use a CPC-based mouth wash (Crest Pro Health or generic CPC-based mouth wash) at each brushing. No cavities or gum problems in 3 years.
After about 18 months I ran out of the gel (which was prescription only and filled via mail order form some compounding pharmacy in North Dakota) and quit using the trays, but my teeth have stayed just as good without them.
My sense is that flossing itself isn't necessary and that a decent ultrasonic tooth brush (I use disposable Oral-B Pulsars) and regular use of a CPC rinse is good enough.
Why does this read to me like "Apple and Samsung agree to stage mediation as a way to openly collude on ways to effectively split the market and work to eliminate competitors."
It seems like they can both take their long-term business strategies to the table and figure out a way to split the market for smartphones between themselves. Apple agrees to let Samsung use some trivial design elements, which gives Samsung some advantage over other Android makers who aren't part of this bargain, and Samsung largely agrees to not try to hone in on Apple's narrow design-focused markets.
The real losers are the competitors of both companies who now face two giant competitors no longer focused on fighting each other and instead focus on their smaller competitors who might threaten their hegemony. LG and HTC remain also-rans whose Android products won't have Samsung's access to Apple's design elements and Apple can freely snipe at Windows Phone or any other up-and-comer who might try to break into Apple's niche.
They already have many levers against guns. Unless you hold a valid carry permit it is already a felony to carry a weapon. Felons are prohibited against possession of a weapon even at home. Usually commuting any crime while possessing a weapon, even when it is not used in furthering the crime is a penalty unto itself and sentences are usually more severe for those crimes committed while possessing a weapon. And of course there are many felonies associated with various illegal uses of a weapon -- brandishing, terroristic threats, assault, homicide.
The idea that there are meaningful additional crimes or additional penalties is absurd as most of the additional gun controls don't address criminal behavior, they criminalize gun ownership by law abiding citizens. They are meant to block civilian gun ownership not criminal activity with a gun which is already extensively criminalized and penalized.
My basic understanding is that too often people just aren't charged for illegal gun possession or not charged by the proper venue, such as Federal court. Ignoring existing laws doesn't help nor does making criminals out of law abiding gun owners.
My neighbor is a cop and a pretty conservative guy.
I've been on ride-a-longs with him and one thing that surprised me was the amount of "paperwork" (which is really just database entry, not actual paper) associated with pretty much any call. We went to a house that was under renovation that had been broken into. Lockbox smashed and door opened. As it happens, the house was nearly done and they had just finished doing the hardwood floors -- the place was EMPTY, no tools, nothing at all to steal. The only thing that had happened was the breaking and entering. We were at the house and talked to the owner for maybe 10 minutes. We were at the precinct entering data for nearly an HOUR!
I asked him what he does when he finds pot on someone. He said mostly nothing if its a small amount -- dump it on the ground and grind it up with this boot -- "You saw how much paperwork there is. If wrote every guy up with pot, I'd catch hell from my supervisor because I wouldn't be taking enough other calls."
But, I suspect that despite that street cops don't want to or can't arrest everyone, cops generally LIKE that pot is illegal because it gives them a LEVER. A tool to use against people to justify stopping them and searching them. Look at Stop and Frisk in NYC -- so many arrests there are from stopping someone, making them dump their pockets and then arresting them for public display of marijuana.
The DEA and the like organizationally don't like legalization because it undercuts their bureaucracy, but they really don't like the loss of authority.
I sometimes wonder if the middle class wasn't a function of general inefficiencies in markets and firms that were a function of scale relative to the ability to control and manage information. Information technology generally allows a smaller group of people understand and analyze greater amounts of information leading to greater efficiencies.
Part of it was just the sheer manpower required to try to manage the volume of information about supply and labor. Without computers it took legions of people simply to keep track of supplies, inventory and labor and this created a white collar class of worker who was an "information worker" in an office. These jobs required a once-scarce commodity of general education (reading, writing, basic mathematics) and emphasized social and knowledge skills more so than brute strength or even mechanical ability. This creates a new class of worker with scarcer skills who gets paid better.
As you get more efficient information processing, it takes fewer people to manage this information because it can be more centralized and its analysis requires less manual computation and the overall volume of processing is larger because the information is accessed more rapidly (from storage media) versus physical objects (ledger books or filing cabinets).
You also make a lot better decisions about supply, labor, productivity and so forth, which also cuts a lot of jobs.
I would imagine if it was viable at all it would only be viable for a select group of cars. Niche vehicles like the VW vans are in higher demand than the used market alone can satisfy.
Where I think this would "work" would be with vehicles sold in large numbers and with a reputation for reliability, like the Camry or Accord.
Why isn't there a car refurbishment industry, or at least a cottage industry?
There are always those models of cars which through design refinement seem to reach a "bullet-proof" stage where the major mechanicals are extremely durable and are produced in massive scale, like the Camry.
Assuming they don't rust out (which seems to be less a function of corrosion than mistreatment and unrepaired body damage), you would think that someone would be in the business of refurbishing them to a near-new kind of state.
There's a ton of third-party new parts and the cars were produced in such numbers that there's a lot of spare parts from other vehicles, too. Seats could be rebuilt and reupholstered. About the hardest part to "fix" would be dashes and interior door panels, but these could come from spares.
US labor is probably too expensive, but it's not hard to see the rebuilding of components (engines, transmissions, seats) happening overseas and assembly happening here, or just do it all overseas and ship them back by the shipload.
Why did I have to scroll down 1/3 of the way through the comments to find someone finally asking how/why the FBI gets to change its mission statement?
At a minimum I would expect that to be a significant policy change signed off by the White House and executed by the Justice department. My hope is that it would be something that would require an act of Congress.
Although part of me thinks that its "mission statement" is not a statement of official government policy but merely one of those empty organizational statements meant to engage the middle management in a fantasy that they are running the organization.
My dog gets walked about two miles on weekdays and 3-5 on weekend days. I never have to clip his nails because he grinds them down. His pads are like rough leather and he never lifts his paws when we walk in the winter.
But dogs don't get frostbite because of their paw toughness, it's because their circulatory system works to circulate warm blood differently than humans. We pull circulation from our extremities to maintain or cores and brain. Dogs circulate more blood in their extremities which prevents frostbite.
All these threats make me wonder if instead of exploring Mars if maybe we wouldn't be better figuring out how to build long-term survival habitats underground or on the sea floor (or both).
I think if we had these kinds of temperatures in Minneapolis for any length of time freezing water mains would be possible.
I measured my cold tap water temperature this morning with the water running and it got down to 43.7 degrees F. AFAIK, the ground temperature below the common frost line is supposed to be something like 50 degrees.
I figure if the water is getting colder than that the frost depth is greater than the people who dug the pipes planned for. Of course, this is an unusual cold snap and it won't stay this cold, so its unlikely that the mains near where I live will freeze but it wouldn't surprise me if they have problems in places where they weren't buried deep enough or surface excavations have effectively raised the depth of the pipes or where they weren't buried deep enough to begin with.
The simple solution seems to be mirroring the device onto the car's dash-mounted display and accepting remote touch from the dash display, and, ideally, some kind of button protocol to standardize button interactions.
Presumably you'd want to develop some kind of car-specific mirroring protocol so it would be device agnostic, but that would require device makers to include and support it, although as long as it was a superset of their own mirroring protocols it probably wouldn't be that hard for them to support it.
Hannibal brought elephants into continental Europe.
True, elephants to this day have a history of being used as draft animals, but he also brought them farther and under more difficult circumstances (war with Rome).
Pompeii is in the southern part of the Italian peninsula and it doesn't seem unreasonable that giraffes could have been brought as livestock from Africa. Roman Carthage was an important city in the Roman empire and likely would have attracted all manner of exotic trade from Africa.
My first instinct about the use of social media for job applicants has nothing to do with job performance, but feels more like a social background check -- is this person a "partier" or some kind of political "radical"?
My next thought is that maybe they use it as background for salary negotiations -- does this person have a big family/kids which would be expensive for insurance? Are they overextended financially and can be coerced into accepting a lower salary?
In some ways, though, isn't typical behavior in the job seekers favor? It's hard to have the incentives more in your favor than a job screener looking for a paycheck to put you in a job.
You laugh, but I think a lot of resistance to mass transit expansion/funding is from people in affluent neighborhoods who don't want "poor people" able to get to their neighborhoods easily.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that always bugs me -- when an English language film is set in a non-English language country, why do the actors have to speak local-language accented English when presumably the characters are all "local" to whatever foreign locale the film is in (ie, Germans speaking to Germans). This seems to happen all the time and it first struck me after watching "The Reader" and for some reason I tend to think its most common with Germans but it also seems to happen with Russians, too.
I guess it makes sense if you have an English speaker speaking in English with a non-English speaker, especially if they're trying to sell the non-English speaker as being of the specific ethnicity they play.
But overall, have them all speak in a common English accent/dialect (ie, whatever most of the cast speaks), presumably the film is just as good if everyone just speaks 'normal' English. If you really, really need that local feel then have them actually recite their dialog in the actual foreign language and subtitle it (which I know won't fly for an entire feature-length Hollywood film due to mass-audience distaste for subtitles).
Once this dawned on me it became really hard for me to suspend disbelief. And it's especially annoying, in an existential way, when they aren't consistent about it. You never see ancient Romans speaking in Latin-accented English, for example -- they usually have a BRITISH accent.
I like the idea of conduit for wiring because it allows you to add or replace cabling you otherwise wouldn't be able to, but I think you have to be smart about the structure of the conduit so that you have accessable, big junction boxes to enable long pulls or pulls between areas that aren't in a straight line.
One thing I'd like as an existing homeowner is video cameras and monitoring. I don't think I'll ever have them where I want them, though, because the wiring to corners of eaves and other locations is so onerous. In a new house I'd definitely want to plan for this because these are a lot harder to retrofit than wall locations.
The same is true for alarm wiring.
My point isn't that these kids need help, my point is that the school system is not the right place to do it because it subverts the educational process (are schools an educational delivery system or a social welfare delivery system?), schools are not funded adequately for education, let alone addressing massive social welfare problems with people outside the school system (school funding is limited to the property tax base of their district), and the scale and complexity of the social welfare problems are beyond the mandate of the school (which is really a combination of subverting the educational mandate and inadequate resources).
The educational mission of the school system gets subverted when funding is spent on social welfare (staffing, administration, benefits) and when educators careen from one new and improved curricula to another as the politicians elected to school positions make promises they can't keep about improving test scores. There is a myopic focus on only poor minorities. A school board member in my city, Minneapolis, was quoted in the paper opposing a badly needed facility expansion for a successful high school because "the most important kids aren't there." http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/232723051.html
School funding is extremely dependent on regressive property taxes and schools in urban areas have trouble funding their putative primary mission, education. Social welfare needs greatly exceed the ability of these districts to raise funds for education and social welfare. If you try to do both you will do neither well. Our elementary school was identified as having a dozen children who scored in the "gifted" category yet there are ZERO gifted programs or resources for these kids, yet lots of resources for kids in need of social welfare services. I guess, like the school board member quoted above, these kids are "good enough" and we should sacrifice their further development.
The depth and severity of the social welfare problems are just too great for them to be solved through the school system. None of the problems you note, broken families, housing, criminal injustice or lack of parental involvement are issues of the school system. The school system is not the organization that should be dealing with housing, criminal justice or family dynamics, these are all broader social problems that need to be addressed and funded through broader state and federal organizations, not a local school district.
It's not that we shouldn't try to help poor black kids get an education, but that the school system can't be the focus of all the problem solving, otherwise we risk giving EVERYONE a slipshod, useless education and making these social problems worse.
The public school system is growing increasingly dysfunctional because it is chasing the doomed goal of "closing the achievement gap" for non-white students, a gap that exists not because of inadequate teaching but because most of those students are a byproduct of a corrosive social and cultural environment.
This had led schools into the business of providing social welfare services, something they are not equipped to handle, especially in terms of budgets and personnel. There is no amount of money that the schools can spend to fix the problems of broken families, poverty and a corrosive social environment dominated by crime.
School administrators are right, Johnny can't read if he's hungry, etc, but the school system doesn't and won't ever have the money to address these problems and it seriously detracts from the educational mission to divert scarce funding into performing social welfare services.
It's an open question as to whether ANY social welfare spending (at least as structured in the US) can "solve" any of these problems. So many of the problems plaguing these students are CULTURAL issues, not issues of simply being poor. Teenage parents, missing or jailed parents, etc -- we don't seem to know how to solve these problems even in the broader social welfare system, let along trying to do it within the educational system.
Walk through the lobby of the office tower at City Center where Target has offices and its H1-B city. They are, like most corporations, looking to cut IT costs as much as possible and hire legions of H1-Bs.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the volume of H1-Bs doesn't lead to a management arrogance towards IT staff that extends to native-born IT workers which I'm sure would do plenty create the kind of grievance which would help motivate an insider to participate in this kind of fraud.
My teeth kind of reached train wreck status about six or seven years ago. I had switched jobs and the dentist I had been using was located downtown and a huge hassle to get to now that I no longer worked downtown, so I quit going to the dentist for a couple of years. I only brushed once a day, didn't floss or use any kind of dental rinse. One day I had a filling crumble and I knew I had to face the music.
So I found a dentist who did sedation dentistry and went in and laid it out for him -- my teeth were fucked, I want them fixed and I don't want any speeches about flossing, as I doubt I will ever floss. The dentist was great -- thanks to sedation, I was able to get two crowns and 4 fillings in one visit.
And he suggested these "trays" that looked like a set of mouth guards that you filled with a peroxide-based gel. You put it in your mouth and leave it in for about 10 minutes, the idea being that the peroxide gel in the trays would neutralize the plaque in between your teeth and give you most of the benefit of flossing.
After about six months my gums got back to normal. I also stepped up a little and began brushing twice a day and I use a CPC-based mouth wash (Crest Pro Health or generic CPC-based mouth wash) at each brushing. No cavities or gum problems in 3 years.
After about 18 months I ran out of the gel (which was prescription only and filled via mail order form some compounding pharmacy in North Dakota) and quit using the trays, but my teeth have stayed just as good without them.
My sense is that flossing itself isn't necessary and that a decent ultrasonic tooth brush (I use disposable Oral-B Pulsars) and regular use of a CPC rinse is good enough.
Why does this read to me like "Apple and Samsung agree to stage mediation as a way to openly collude on ways to effectively split the market and work to eliminate competitors."
It seems like they can both take their long-term business strategies to the table and figure out a way to split the market for smartphones between themselves. Apple agrees to let Samsung use some trivial design elements, which gives Samsung some advantage over other Android makers who aren't part of this bargain, and Samsung largely agrees to not try to hone in on Apple's narrow design-focused markets.
The real losers are the competitors of both companies who now face two giant competitors no longer focused on fighting each other and instead focus on their smaller competitors who might threaten their hegemony. LG and HTC remain also-rans whose Android products won't have Samsung's access to Apple's design elements and Apple can freely snipe at Windows Phone or any other up-and-comer who might try to break into Apple's niche.
They already have many levers against guns. Unless you hold a valid carry permit it is already a felony to carry a weapon. Felons are prohibited against possession of a weapon even at home. Usually commuting any crime while possessing a weapon, even when it is not used in furthering the crime is a penalty unto itself and sentences are usually more severe for those crimes committed while possessing a weapon. And of course there are many felonies associated with various illegal uses of a weapon -- brandishing, terroristic threats, assault, homicide.
The idea that there are meaningful additional crimes or additional penalties is absurd as most of the additional gun controls don't address criminal behavior, they criminalize gun ownership by law abiding citizens. They are meant to block civilian gun ownership not criminal activity with a gun which is already extensively criminalized and penalized.
My basic understanding is that too often people just aren't charged for illegal gun possession or not charged by the proper venue, such as Federal court. Ignoring existing laws doesn't help nor does making criminals out of law abiding gun owners.
My neighbor is a cop and a pretty conservative guy.
I've been on ride-a-longs with him and one thing that surprised me was the amount of "paperwork" (which is really just database entry, not actual paper) associated with pretty much any call. We went to a house that was under renovation that had been broken into. Lockbox smashed and door opened. As it happens, the house was nearly done and they had just finished doing the hardwood floors -- the place was EMPTY, no tools, nothing at all to steal. The only thing that had happened was the breaking and entering. We were at the house and talked to the owner for maybe 10 minutes. We were at the precinct entering data for nearly an HOUR!
I asked him what he does when he finds pot on someone. He said mostly nothing if its a small amount -- dump it on the ground and grind it up with this boot -- "You saw how much paperwork there is. If wrote every guy up with pot, I'd catch hell from my supervisor because I wouldn't be taking enough other calls."
But, I suspect that despite that street cops don't want to or can't arrest everyone, cops generally LIKE that pot is illegal because it gives them a LEVER. A tool to use against people to justify stopping them and searching them. Look at Stop and Frisk in NYC -- so many arrests there are from stopping someone, making them dump their pockets and then arresting them for public display of marijuana.
The DEA and the like organizationally don't like legalization because it undercuts their bureaucracy, but they really don't like the loss of authority.
I sometimes wonder if the middle class wasn't a function of general inefficiencies in markets and firms that were a function of scale relative to the ability to control and manage information. Information technology generally allows a smaller group of people understand and analyze greater amounts of information leading to greater efficiencies.
Part of it was just the sheer manpower required to try to manage the volume of information about supply and labor. Without computers it took legions of people simply to keep track of supplies, inventory and labor and this created a white collar class of worker who was an "information worker" in an office. These jobs required a once-scarce commodity of general education (reading, writing, basic mathematics) and emphasized social and knowledge skills more so than brute strength or even mechanical ability. This creates a new class of worker with scarcer skills who gets paid better.
As you get more efficient information processing, it takes fewer people to manage this information because it can be more centralized and its analysis requires less manual computation and the overall volume of processing is larger because the information is accessed more rapidly (from storage media) versus physical objects (ledger books or filing cabinets).
You also make a lot better decisions about supply, labor, productivity and so forth, which also cuts a lot of jobs.
I would imagine if it was viable at all it would only be viable for a select group of cars. Niche vehicles like the VW vans are in higher demand than the used market alone can satisfy.
Where I think this would "work" would be with vehicles sold in large numbers and with a reputation for reliability, like the Camry or Accord.
Rollerball and Network were two of the most prescient films of the 1970s.
Why isn't there a car refurbishment industry, or at least a cottage industry?
There are always those models of cars which through design refinement seem to reach a "bullet-proof" stage where the major mechanicals are extremely durable and are produced in massive scale, like the Camry.
Assuming they don't rust out (which seems to be less a function of corrosion than mistreatment and unrepaired body damage), you would think that someone would be in the business of refurbishing them to a near-new kind of state.
There's a ton of third-party new parts and the cars were produced in such numbers that there's a lot of spare parts from other vehicles, too. Seats could be rebuilt and reupholstered. About the hardest part to "fix" would be dashes and interior door panels, but these could come from spares.
US labor is probably too expensive, but it's not hard to see the rebuilding of components (engines, transmissions, seats) happening overseas and assembly happening here, or just do it all overseas and ship them back by the shipload.
Why did I have to scroll down 1/3 of the way through the comments to find someone finally asking how/why the FBI gets to change its mission statement?
At a minimum I would expect that to be a significant policy change signed off by the White House and executed by the Justice department. My hope is that it would be something that would require an act of Congress.
Although part of me thinks that its "mission statement" is not a statement of official government policy but merely one of those empty organizational statements meant to engage the middle management in a fantasy that they are running the organization.
My dog gets walked about two miles on weekdays and 3-5 on weekend days. I never have to clip his nails because he grinds them down. His pads are like rough leather and he never lifts his paws when we walk in the winter.
But dogs don't get frostbite because of their paw toughness, it's because their circulatory system works to circulate warm blood differently than humans. We pull circulation from our extremities to maintain or cores and brain. Dogs circulate more blood in their extremities which prevents frostbite.
All these threats make me wonder if instead of exploring Mars if maybe we wouldn't be better figuring out how to build long-term survival habitats underground or on the sea floor (or both).
Dogs don't get frostbite in their paws.
http://iditarod.com/zuma/do-sled-dogs-wear-booties-to-prevent-frostbite-by-sanka-w-dog/
http://dogingtonpost.com/why-dont-barefoot-dogs-get-frostbite/#.UssLG_RDu3I
Booties for dogs are mainly about protecting their paws from sharp edges of ice and snow as well as protecting them from deicing chemicals.
I'm pretty sure I've never seen a coyote or timber wolf wearing booties and they are outside all year.
I think if we had these kinds of temperatures in Minneapolis for any length of time freezing water mains would be possible.
I measured my cold tap water temperature this morning with the water running and it got down to 43.7 degrees F. AFAIK, the ground temperature below the common frost line is supposed to be something like 50 degrees.
I figure if the water is getting colder than that the frost depth is greater than the people who dug the pipes planned for. Of course, this is an unusual cold snap and it won't stay this cold, so its unlikely that the mains near where I live will freeze but it wouldn't surprise me if they have problems in places where they weren't buried deep enough or surface excavations have effectively raised the depth of the pipes or where they weren't buried deep enough to begin with.
The simple solution seems to be mirroring the device onto the car's dash-mounted display and accepting remote touch from the dash display, and, ideally, some kind of button protocol to standardize button interactions.
Presumably you'd want to develop some kind of car-specific mirroring protocol so it would be device agnostic, but that would require device makers to include and support it, although as long as it was a superset of their own mirroring protocols it probably wouldn't be that hard for them to support it.
It was -22 F this morning in Minneapolis. I stepped outside to get the paper and it was breathtaking.
I walked the dog for about 5 minutes last night at -16F and it seems like the inside of your nostrils starts to freeze.
The NOAA lists -27F as the lowest recorded temperature in Chicago.
They also have a list of days with a temperature below -16F and 1980 wasn't listed.
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lot/?n=chi_temperature_records
Hannibal brought elephants into continental Europe.
True, elephants to this day have a history of being used as draft animals, but he also brought them farther and under more difficult circumstances (war with Rome).
Pompeii is in the southern part of the Italian peninsula and it doesn't seem unreasonable that giraffes could have been brought as livestock from Africa. Roman Carthage was an important city in the Roman empire and likely would have attracted all manner of exotic trade from Africa.
My first instinct about the use of social media for job applicants has nothing to do with job performance, but feels more like a social background check -- is this person a "partier" or some kind of political "radical"?
My next thought is that maybe they use it as background for salary negotiations -- does this person have a big family/kids which would be expensive for insurance? Are they overextended financially and can be coerced into accepting a lower salary?
In some ways, though, isn't typical behavior in the job seekers favor? It's hard to have the incentives more in your favor than a job screener looking for a paycheck to put you in a job.
You laugh, but I think a lot of resistance to mass transit expansion/funding is from people in affluent neighborhoods who don't want "poor people" able to get to their neighborhoods easily.