Which means that it involves more than just one set of parents and their children, it involves the social sphere of many parents and many children.
If my child doesn't learn to eat well or brush their teeth, really, it's all about me as a parent because there's no other dynamic there.
But with social components, it involves what other kids are doing, too, and while you can set limits on your own kids it influences their interactions with other kids and what the other kids are doing influences your kids in ways outside of your control.
You may demand strict controls on social media, but if the majority of other kids have less strict limits, your kids may reap whatever benefits come from that but they may be outweighed by the negatives of being outsiders or less engaged the same way the other kids are.
The idea that parents have just failed is kind of ludicrous. Most parents I know struggle with technology access in all forms, it's not like they ignore it or don't try to do things they think will be positive. And it's not like our experience as children or our parents' experience is specifically informative -- social media didn't exist at all, and technology didn't have that wide of a reach (through high school I was one of the few kids that even had a computer).
There is a political and cultural phenomenon in the US known as the "limousine liberal" -- otherwise well off people supporting agendas, often environmental ones, which have a a high financial cost which is trivial to them but expensive for other people.
Examples of this include pushing hybrid cars, organic and free range foods, and apparently light bulbs, too. There are other more political examples, like higher taxes to support social welfare programs or higher gas taxes.
None of this is to suggest that these individual items aren't without sound, rational arguments, but there is a good argument to be made that people with resources want to force things with greater costs and in many cases less desirable qualities on people with fewer resources.
Part of the subtext is that the affluent also have greater political influence because of their affluence, making the debate somehow less fair. There's also an element of ideology, as elements of the rational arguments in favor of these proposals aren't always grounded in a completely sound scientific basis or have contradictions (like the heavy metals in CFLs).
As for lighting, I've been a big user of CFLs and have found them frustrating and with weird reliability. Strangely, I get great life out of them in outdoor fixtures where CFLs aren't supposed to work well, at least in the Minnesota climate. Indoors they have been less reliable, to the point where I pick "reduced wattage" halogen-type bulbs (current favorite: Philips Halogena) in recessed can fixtures. I live in an older house with a lot of older built-in fixtures and my principal motivation has been less about environmentalism than getting more lumens out of fixtures only rated for 60w bulbs by using 75 and 100w equivalent CFLs.
I bought an LED at Costco on a lark and have been pretty impressed with it, although I don't see many bulbs with lumen ratings matching 75w and or 100w bulbs. That, cost and my history with CFLs has led me to be pretty unwilling to dive into LEDs.
He seems like he's the kind of archetypal low-rent scam artist with a gambling habit who thinks that because he can walk away from corporate civil judgements he can get away with anything.
Maybe I've seen too many movies, but Las Vegas seems like the place guys like this go only to find out that there's a difference between civil suits and guys in sharkskin suits, and the latter is more than willing to use extrajudicial means to recover their debts.
Like most politicians, Erdogan has figured out that people vote with their wallets, and the emptiest wallets you can fill will be your best supporters. From what I've read, the more religious Turks, especially in the interior, are the poorest and a major part of his power base has been through massive construction projects funneled to construction companies owned by these more religious Turks.
As for his party, Erdogan rose to power when the military still was considered to have veto power over civilian governments and parties who didn't meet secular standards. He would not have achieved any political goals if his party was called "Religion and Islamification".
I'm inclined to think that Erdogan the man isn't an Islamist in the mold of Arab Islamists; but rather a politician who has embraced a more conservative Islam as a means to political power, much as some American Republicans have embraced evangelical Christianity. On a cultural level they aren't bothered by it but it is more about political means than some kind of theological belief.
Apparently the idea is that its such a fine powder that it will contaminate all the bills it comes into contact with, the cash counting machines, ATMs, etc.
The implication of these stories is always that the bills considered "most" contaminated were handled by drug dealers or used to snort coke, but the reality is that very few are but the powder is so fine it can spread easily to thousands of other bills that were never in proximity to cocaine.
There's about a half-dozen ways to define this kind of crime as a legitimate national security concern, especially given the long history of criminal activity being used to finance insurgency (eg, drugs) or using economic means, such as counterfeiting, to disrupt economies.
It's not hard to make an argument that widespread credit fraud is more costly and economically damaging than counterfeiting in a modern economy even if the proceeds are only used by criminals for cocaine and hookers instead of funding armed insurgency. And that's not counting the collateral damage from other forms of cyber crime used to enable credit fraud activity.
It's really surprising there isn't more NSA focus on this stuff. If there was I think a lot of people who give the NSA a pass on some of their more intrusive surveillance (even though it's not warranted) -- it's kind of the same thing that happens when the local police beat the shit out of someone with a history of violent criminal activity; they might otherwise dislike heavy handed policing themselves, but so long as its used on the bad guy they're willing to overlook their own injustice.
For some reason, I think GE had a similar management philosophy tied to the process improvement system Six Sigma. I think the idea was that you fired the bottom 10%(?) of your work force every year, regardless of their absolute performance.
I can't see how this or any other similar system is sustainable, though. There are a lot of transaction costs with hiring new employees; at some point the overall cost of termination and hiring will exceed the differential value of a better employee.
You probably can't do this without statistics and it's not hard to see management and employees quickly learning to work towards statistics rather than results, as well as eliminating creative risk taking. Look at business as an example -- Wall Street is the ultimate version of this and corporations have devoted a lot of time and energy into managing to Wall Street numbers instead of other, longer-term goals that don't deliver the "numbers" in the expected timeline.
I would also think a culture like this would become quite ruthless and unpleasant, with "getting rid of people" becoming a goal and kill a lot of organizational enthusiasm if you spent a lot of time worrying about being gotten rid of.
On the other hand, they are probably trying to deal with real problems -- people who are just good enough to not get fired, and people who "rest on their laurels" after some accomplishment and stop contributing in a meaningful way, although management is often complicit in this by promoting people into mediocrity.
I would argue that you look at all of the civilizations that we know much about throughout history.
I think if you look you see obvious patterns of gender and social interaction that repeat throughout eras and wildly different regions and cultures. And the patterns are similar. Women seldom in positions of political and military authority or engaged in engineering, construction or other "hard" tasks, primarily engaged in domestic roles of childcare, food preperation and manual agricultural tasks. You might imagine the men hunting and the women gathering.
It's true that women are often poorly treated in many ways, and just becaue we may have these innate gender-driven differences doesn't mean that the way we express them is always right or moral. Just that it represents that there seems to be some really common forms of social gender organizations that repeat over and over and can't be explained as some giant conspiracy.
...works better than is described by the story blurb.
Acceleration when resuming or when a vehicle going slower than the setpoint moves or exits my lane is pretty smooth as is deceleration when overtaking a slower vehicle.
I only have two complaints. I wish there was an audible indicator when driving slower than the setpoint. On long interstate drives I occasionally find myself behind someone driving slower than my setpoint but because the deceleration is so subtle it's easy to not notice.
The other is icing on the radar panel in bad weather causing the cruise to not work at all. It'd be great to have it heated so that it resists icing and possibly a way to run it in manual mode like normal cruise control and bypass the adaptive aspect.
I've only been to SF once, back in 1995 before a lot of the.com insanity. I remember seeing a 1 BR apartment for rent for $2000 per month, pretty close to the cable car museum. I was astonished at the time, considering I was renting the top half of a duplex in Minneapolis with a garage for $700 a month at the time. I knew NYC was expensive, but this wasn't NYC...
Now that I think about it, I'm still kind of asontished considering that's just slightly less than I pay for more mortgage on a 3BR/2BA 2K sq ft. house now.
Well, no shit sherlock. Nobody expects a bare lens on the face of the cutterhead.
But I would expect a camera or cameras behind a protected recess that could be opened to allow observation of whatever it is they're running up against.
That's maybe true for coding, which can largely be done inexpensively for the most part, but there's a lot of IT work where even if you WANTED to do it at home it's cost-prohibitive to do so.
While it'd be nice to have a three tier fiber channel & 10G SAN in my house, I can't afford one. Freebie products like OpenFiler and the like don't cut it because while some of the concepts are on display, there's a shitload that's not in it nor is what you kind of need to know, like the actual management interface, hardware and connectivity. Nor is there anyway to generate real-world workloads which might give you an idea if whatever you've done actually works right.
The same is true of lots of infrastructure components. You can halfass around with some used Cisco equipment, but you can really only get so far when features aren't even in your software or sometimes even hardware.
It seems pretty strange that there's no provision for looking in front of the machine. You'd almost expect that there would be some kind of camera or way to poke a camera out an opening to see what's in front of them.
I would assume than running into weird shit digging a tunnel would be typical, although maybe it's designed with so much boring power that they only really expect to look at the overburden on the conveyor behind the boring machine.
The problem is that the market for stolen phones is global.
While the blacklist may keep stolen phones from working in Australia, what about a phone stolen in Australia and taken to Indonesia or somewhere else? THAT network operator has to be able to blacklist IMEI numbers from elsewhere.
I can see some kind of agreement among first world countries to manage and accept a multinational blacklist to limit shipping stolen phones between countries (in Europe, America, AUNZ, Japan). But it's harder to see that kind of list being used or being effective (given bribery) in third world countries.
And then there's the reverse problem -- adding global blacklist entries in high risk countries. It's not hard to see getting a text message telling you to accept a charge or make a payment to keep your phone from being blacklisted. Even though your home carrier may be able easily remove you from the blacklist, you may have to go into the store in person to verify you physically own the phone. You could argue that only the carrier with an account associated with a specific IMEI can blacklist it, but now you've just made it impossible to third-party unlock a phone from a carrier.
I think there's probably a device-specific way to brick phones in a way that is recoverable but too difficult to bypass by resale-oriented hackers so that should a phone get bricked accidentally the phone manufacturer could unbrick it with proper documentation (and should be required to do so free of charge).
Is the PR that bad for a voluntary, non-governmental and non-coercive system that offers the service for free and provides an incentive like cash or college payment? AFAIK Planned Parenthood-type organizations will often provide free birth control to low-income people and no one screams eugenics.
I think the biggest problems with most birth control systems has been they are not incentive systems but coercive systems or forced on undesirable elements in society.
I kind of wonder what the reaction would be to a system that says "Unplanned pregnancy will ruin your life, make you poor and burden your children with poverty. We can prevent that! Free, implantable birth control with a cash payment of $5,000 to boot!"
Assuredly Christian-types would scream about this and many leftists would claim it was an anti-minority conspiracy but I have a feeling it would be HUGELY successful and even Bill Gates would have trouble coming up with enough money to keep the system funded.
I always burn any rags that I get soaked with oil or gasoline immediately. I keep a large metal can for this purpose. Take it out in the driveway well away from any structure and let them burn.
I would at times agree with your perspective, but I find that people without medical care with simple illnesses that are not covered often develop catastrophic illnesses that result in hospitalizations that they never pay for. In effect, costing more than had they gotten treated to begin with.
Often their bad housing contributes or even causes their diseases to begin with, starting the above cycle of uncovered illness that results in expensive hospitalization.
I'm pretty sure that eliminating poor people is a statistical impossibility, since, by definition some chunk of the population will always be poor in even the most charitable society, as poverty is often a relative measure.
The best charity would be one that reduced the number of people who were poor by promoting birth control. If I won the hundred-plus million dollar lottery I would seriously consider founding a charity that promoted incentivized long-term birth control and sterilization. Cash for vasectomies, tubal ligations and implantable birth control. Breaking the generation cycle of poverty is trivial if you eliminate the next generation.
There was a great op-ed piece in the paper the other day about how self-serving these tax-deductible "charitable" donations end up being.
A lot of them end up being donations to private schools that principally benefit their own children (easing "legacy" admissions to private colleges) or the other children of other plutocrats.
There's even criticism of donations to arts groups. While on the surface, I like the idea of keeping the performing arts groups going, it doesn't really benefit anyone who isn't buying $100 tickets to the Opera or Ballet. Museum donations are less vulnerable to this kind of criticism because the admission is low (ie, there's a low barrier to enjoying the value of the institution). But overall you can say these kinds of donations really are about enhancing the plutocracy's cultural cachet and social standing. They don't really improve social welfare for poor people.
And I don't remember the plutocracy building any free sports stadiums. There's a near universal habit of extorting local governments into paying for professional sports stadiums outright or covering all the costs that "seat licenses" and "naming rights" don't cover.
When the plutocracy starts building housing, providing direct subsidies for medical care, free food and direct cash donations to urban school districts it'll be a lot easier to see them as being driven by actual altruism.
Whatever the political origins of the term, "third world" is most routinely used as an economic descriptor of mass poverty and limited industrialization and economic sophistication, not a label of political alignment.
Suharto aligned Indonesia closely with the West during the cold war but almost no one would consider Indonesia a "first world" country, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the beginning of the Suharto reign.
And you also need enough of the right kind of backups.
Basic drag-and-drop copy backups for desktop users where they keep the backup device connected and online for convenience or scheduling would be of limited value due to the fact that they do could be crypto-lockered. Your backup needs to be of a type that can't be compromised by cryptolocker, either in a format it doesn't attack or on a system/media that is isolated from a desktop infection.
Further, you need enough retention in your backup so that you can restore the data to a state prior to the infection. A client I work with that got hit but didn't report it until days later. A short retention cycle backup where only a few copies are kept might prevent the backup from even containing useful information. Fortunately for my client, we had 21 days of online retention and were easily able to restore files to a pre-modified state.
I also like to advise that data access be restricted so that the totality of information stored isn't vulnerable to one person's computer going haywire. It always amazes me how many places find the "dumping ground" method of organization useful, where all data is accessible by all users. Unfortunately once you get there, it's hard to change because there's little coherency to the information, making it difficult to segment and often represents organizational challenges in trying to establish limits.
Please explain how a desire to suppress wages and import cheap workers leads you to the conclusion that competency is the principal value of Target hiring and IT systems.
Target appears to be a massive H1B user, at least based on the people I see streaming in and out of their office buildings. So I'm not sure that paying for proper IT admins is part of their business plan.
I work as an IT consultant and frequently have to travel over 100 miles in a day.
The subcompact-type car is just a non-starter for that much driving. The seats alone don't cut it. I need something with a little more creature comfort at a minimum. My Volvo has all wheel drive, which is a real plus in Minnesota winters, too.
Now, if I was driving some standard commute of 20 miles or less, I would consider a Volt or even a Smart for their size and fuel economy.
We had a dog in the house until I was about 8 or 9, but I had such severe dust and pollen allergies that I once spent a week in an oxygen tent and then went through weekly allergy therapy shots for several years. I had a window air conditioner in my bedroom on recirculate during the warm weather months to keep the air semi-filtered (this was in the early 1970s before the advent of HEPA filtration devices).
We couldn't even have a real Christmas tree or wreath in the house. We had one early on and I was super sick until my parents realized that it made me sick and we had to ditch the tree AND the wreath right before Christmas.
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Which means that it involves more than just one set of parents and their children, it involves the social sphere of many parents and many children.
If my child doesn't learn to eat well or brush their teeth, really, it's all about me as a parent because there's no other dynamic there.
But with social components, it involves what other kids are doing, too, and while you can set limits on your own kids it influences their interactions with other kids and what the other kids are doing influences your kids in ways outside of your control.
You may demand strict controls on social media, but if the majority of other kids have less strict limits, your kids may reap whatever benefits come from that but they may be outweighed by the negatives of being outsiders or less engaged the same way the other kids are.
The idea that parents have just failed is kind of ludicrous. Most parents I know struggle with technology access in all forms, it's not like they ignore it or don't try to do things they think will be positive. And it's not like our experience as children or our parents' experience is specifically informative -- social media didn't exist at all, and technology didn't have that wide of a reach (through high school I was one of the few kids that even had a computer).
There is a political and cultural phenomenon in the US known as the "limousine liberal" -- otherwise well off people supporting agendas, often environmental ones, which have a a high financial cost which is trivial to them but expensive for other people.
Examples of this include pushing hybrid cars, organic and free range foods, and apparently light bulbs, too. There are other more political examples, like higher taxes to support social welfare programs or higher gas taxes.
None of this is to suggest that these individual items aren't without sound, rational arguments, but there is a good argument to be made that people with resources want to force things with greater costs and in many cases less desirable qualities on people with fewer resources.
Part of the subtext is that the affluent also have greater political influence because of their affluence, making the debate somehow less fair. There's also an element of ideology, as elements of the rational arguments in favor of these proposals aren't always grounded in a completely sound scientific basis or have contradictions (like the heavy metals in CFLs).
As for lighting, I've been a big user of CFLs and have found them frustrating and with weird reliability. Strangely, I get great life out of them in outdoor fixtures where CFLs aren't supposed to work well, at least in the Minnesota climate. Indoors they have been less reliable, to the point where I pick "reduced wattage" halogen-type bulbs (current favorite: Philips Halogena) in recessed can fixtures. I live in an older house with a lot of older built-in fixtures and my principal motivation has been less about environmentalism than getting more lumens out of fixtures only rated for 60w bulbs by using 75 and 100w equivalent CFLs.
I bought an LED at Costco on a lark and have been pretty impressed with it, although I don't see many bulbs with lumen ratings matching 75w and or 100w bulbs. That, cost and my history with CFLs has led me to be pretty unwilling to dive into LEDs.
...in a shallow grave in the Mojave desert?
He seems like he's the kind of archetypal low-rent scam artist with a gambling habit who thinks that because he can walk away from corporate civil judgements he can get away with anything.
Maybe I've seen too many movies, but Las Vegas seems like the place guys like this go only to find out that there's a difference between civil suits and guys in sharkskin suits, and the latter is more than willing to use extrajudicial means to recover their debts.
Like most politicians, Erdogan has figured out that people vote with their wallets, and the emptiest wallets you can fill will be your best supporters. From what I've read, the more religious Turks, especially in the interior, are the poorest and a major part of his power base has been through massive construction projects funneled to construction companies owned by these more religious Turks.
As for his party, Erdogan rose to power when the military still was considered to have veto power over civilian governments and parties who didn't meet secular standards. He would not have achieved any political goals if his party was called "Religion and Islamification".
I'm inclined to think that Erdogan the man isn't an Islamist in the mold of Arab Islamists; but rather a politician who has embraced a more conservative Islam as a means to political power, much as some American Republicans have embraced evangelical Christianity. On a cultural level they aren't bothered by it but it is more about political means than some kind of theological belief.
Snopes has an article on cocaine on currency.
Apparently the idea is that its such a fine powder that it will contaminate all the bills it comes into contact with, the cash counting machines, ATMs, etc.
The implication of these stories is always that the bills considered "most" contaminated were handled by drug dealers or used to snort coke, but the reality is that very few are but the powder is so fine it can spread easily to thousands of other bills that were never in proximity to cocaine.
There's about a half-dozen ways to define this kind of crime as a legitimate national security concern, especially given the long history of criminal activity being used to finance insurgency (eg, drugs) or using economic means, such as counterfeiting, to disrupt economies.
It's not hard to make an argument that widespread credit fraud is more costly and economically damaging than counterfeiting in a modern economy even if the proceeds are only used by criminals for cocaine and hookers instead of funding armed insurgency. And that's not counting the collateral damage from other forms of cyber crime used to enable credit fraud activity.
It's really surprising there isn't more NSA focus on this stuff. If there was I think a lot of people who give the NSA a pass on some of their more intrusive surveillance (even though it's not warranted) -- it's kind of the same thing that happens when the local police beat the shit out of someone with a history of violent criminal activity; they might otherwise dislike heavy handed policing themselves, but so long as its used on the bad guy they're willing to overlook their own injustice.
For some reason, I think GE had a similar management philosophy tied to the process improvement system Six Sigma. I think the idea was that you fired the bottom 10%(?) of your work force every year, regardless of their absolute performance.
I can't see how this or any other similar system is sustainable, though. There are a lot of transaction costs with hiring new employees; at some point the overall cost of termination and hiring will exceed the differential value of a better employee.
You probably can't do this without statistics and it's not hard to see management and employees quickly learning to work towards statistics rather than results, as well as eliminating creative risk taking. Look at business as an example -- Wall Street is the ultimate version of this and corporations have devoted a lot of time and energy into managing to Wall Street numbers instead of other, longer-term goals that don't deliver the "numbers" in the expected timeline.
I would also think a culture like this would become quite ruthless and unpleasant, with "getting rid of people" becoming a goal and kill a lot of organizational enthusiasm if you spent a lot of time worrying about being gotten rid of.
On the other hand, they are probably trying to deal with real problems -- people who are just good enough to not get fired, and people who "rest on their laurels" after some accomplishment and stop contributing in a meaningful way, although management is often complicit in this by promoting people into mediocrity.
I would argue that you look at all of the civilizations that we know much about throughout history.
I think if you look you see obvious patterns of gender and social interaction that repeat throughout eras and wildly different regions and cultures. And the patterns are similar. Women seldom in positions of political and military authority or engaged in engineering, construction or other "hard" tasks, primarily engaged in domestic roles of childcare, food preperation and manual agricultural tasks. You might imagine the men hunting and the women gathering.
It's true that women are often poorly treated in many ways, and just becaue we may have these innate gender-driven differences doesn't mean that the way we express them is always right or moral. Just that it represents that there seems to be some really common forms of social gender organizations that repeat over and over and can't be explained as some giant conspiracy.
...works better than is described by the story blurb.
Acceleration when resuming or when a vehicle going slower than the setpoint moves or exits my lane is pretty smooth as is deceleration when overtaking a slower vehicle.
I only have two complaints. I wish there was an audible indicator when driving slower than the setpoint. On long interstate drives I occasionally find myself behind someone driving slower than my setpoint but because the deceleration is so subtle it's easy to not notice.
The other is icing on the radar panel in bad weather causing the cruise to not work at all. It'd be great to have it heated so that it resists icing and possibly a way to run it in manual mode like normal cruise control and bypass the adaptive aspect.
I've only been to SF once, back in 1995 before a lot of the .com insanity. I remember seeing a 1 BR apartment for rent for $2000 per month, pretty close to the cable car museum. I was astonished at the time, considering I was renting the top half of a duplex in Minneapolis with a garage for $700 a month at the time. I knew NYC was expensive, but this wasn't NYC...
Now that I think about it, I'm still kind of asontished considering that's just slightly less than I pay for more mortgage on a 3BR/2BA 2K sq ft. house now.
Well, no shit sherlock. Nobody expects a bare lens on the face of the cutterhead.
But I would expect a camera or cameras behind a protected recess that could be opened to allow observation of whatever it is they're running up against.
That's maybe true for coding, which can largely be done inexpensively for the most part, but there's a lot of IT work where even if you WANTED to do it at home it's cost-prohibitive to do so.
While it'd be nice to have a three tier fiber channel & 10G SAN in my house, I can't afford one. Freebie products like OpenFiler and the like don't cut it because while some of the concepts are on display, there's a shitload that's not in it nor is what you kind of need to know, like the actual management interface, hardware and connectivity. Nor is there anyway to generate real-world workloads which might give you an idea if whatever you've done actually works right.
The same is true of lots of infrastructure components. You can halfass around with some used Cisco equipment, but you can really only get so far when features aren't even in your software or sometimes even hardware.
It seems pretty strange that there's no provision for looking in front of the machine. You'd almost expect that there would be some kind of camera or way to poke a camera out an opening to see what's in front of them.
I would assume than running into weird shit digging a tunnel would be typical, although maybe it's designed with so much boring power that they only really expect to look at the overburden on the conveyor behind the boring machine.
The problem is that the market for stolen phones is global.
While the blacklist may keep stolen phones from working in Australia, what about a phone stolen in Australia and taken to Indonesia or somewhere else? THAT network operator has to be able to blacklist IMEI numbers from elsewhere.
I can see some kind of agreement among first world countries to manage and accept a multinational blacklist to limit shipping stolen phones between countries (in Europe, America, AUNZ, Japan). But it's harder to see that kind of list being used or being effective (given bribery) in third world countries.
And then there's the reverse problem -- adding global blacklist entries in high risk countries. It's not hard to see getting a text message telling you to accept a charge or make a payment to keep your phone from being blacklisted. Even though your home carrier may be able easily remove you from the blacklist, you may have to go into the store in person to verify you physically own the phone. You could argue that only the carrier with an account associated with a specific IMEI can blacklist it, but now you've just made it impossible to third-party unlock a phone from a carrier.
I think there's probably a device-specific way to brick phones in a way that is recoverable but too difficult to bypass by resale-oriented hackers so that should a phone get bricked accidentally the phone manufacturer could unbrick it with proper documentation (and should be required to do so free of charge).
Is the PR that bad for a voluntary, non-governmental and non-coercive system that offers the service for free and provides an incentive like cash or college payment? AFAIK Planned Parenthood-type organizations will often provide free birth control to low-income people and no one screams eugenics.
I think the biggest problems with most birth control systems has been they are not incentive systems but coercive systems or forced on undesirable elements in society.
I kind of wonder what the reaction would be to a system that says "Unplanned pregnancy will ruin your life, make you poor and burden your children with poverty. We can prevent that! Free, implantable birth control with a cash payment of $5,000 to boot!"
Assuredly Christian-types would scream about this and many leftists would claim it was an anti-minority conspiracy but I have a feeling it would be HUGELY successful and even Bill Gates would have trouble coming up with enough money to keep the system funded.
I always burn any rags that I get soaked with oil or gasoline immediately. I keep a large metal can for this purpose. Take it out in the driveway well away from any structure and let them burn.
I would at times agree with your perspective, but I find that people without medical care with simple illnesses that are not covered often develop catastrophic illnesses that result in hospitalizations that they never pay for. In effect, costing more than had they gotten treated to begin with.
Often their bad housing contributes or even causes their diseases to begin with, starting the above cycle of uncovered illness that results in expensive hospitalization.
I'm pretty sure that eliminating poor people is a statistical impossibility, since, by definition some chunk of the population will always be poor in even the most charitable society, as poverty is often a relative measure.
The best charity would be one that reduced the number of people who were poor by promoting birth control. If I won the hundred-plus million dollar lottery I would seriously consider founding a charity that promoted incentivized long-term birth control and sterilization. Cash for vasectomies, tubal ligations and implantable birth control. Breaking the generation cycle of poverty is trivial if you eliminate the next generation.
There was a great op-ed piece in the paper the other day about how self-serving these tax-deductible "charitable" donations end up being.
A lot of them end up being donations to private schools that principally benefit their own children (easing "legacy" admissions to private colleges) or the other children of other plutocrats.
There's even criticism of donations to arts groups. While on the surface, I like the idea of keeping the performing arts groups going, it doesn't really benefit anyone who isn't buying $100 tickets to the Opera or Ballet. Museum donations are less vulnerable to this kind of criticism because the admission is low (ie, there's a low barrier to enjoying the value of the institution). But overall you can say these kinds of donations really are about enhancing the plutocracy's cultural cachet and social standing. They don't really improve social welfare for poor people.
And I don't remember the plutocracy building any free sports stadiums. There's a near universal habit of extorting local governments into paying for professional sports stadiums outright or covering all the costs that "seat licenses" and "naming rights" don't cover.
When the plutocracy starts building housing, providing direct subsidies for medical care, free food and direct cash donations to urban school districts it'll be a lot easier to see them as being driven by actual altruism.
Whatever the political origins of the term, "third world" is most routinely used as an economic descriptor of mass poverty and limited industrialization and economic sophistication, not a label of political alignment.
Suharto aligned Indonesia closely with the West during the cold war but almost no one would consider Indonesia a "first world" country, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the beginning of the Suharto reign.
And you also need enough of the right kind of backups.
Basic drag-and-drop copy backups for desktop users where they keep the backup device connected and online for convenience or scheduling would be of limited value due to the fact that they do could be crypto-lockered. Your backup needs to be of a type that can't be compromised by cryptolocker, either in a format it doesn't attack or on a system/media that is isolated from a desktop infection.
Further, you need enough retention in your backup so that you can restore the data to a state prior to the infection. A client I work with that got hit but didn't report it until days later. A short retention cycle backup where only a few copies are kept might prevent the backup from even containing useful information. Fortunately for my client, we had 21 days of online retention and were easily able to restore files to a pre-modified state.
I also like to advise that data access be restricted so that the totality of information stored isn't vulnerable to one person's computer going haywire. It always amazes me how many places find the "dumping ground" method of organization useful, where all data is accessible by all users. Unfortunately once you get there, it's hard to change because there's little coherency to the information, making it difficult to segment and often represents organizational challenges in trying to establish limits.
Please explain how a desire to suppress wages and import cheap workers leads you to the conclusion that competency is the principal value of Target hiring and IT systems.
Target appears to be a massive H1B user, at least based on the people I see streaming in and out of their office buildings. So I'm not sure that paying for proper IT admins is part of their business plan.
I work as an IT consultant and frequently have to travel over 100 miles in a day.
The subcompact-type car is just a non-starter for that much driving. The seats alone don't cut it. I need something with a little more creature comfort at a minimum. My Volvo has all wheel drive, which is a real plus in Minnesota winters, too.
Now, if I was driving some standard commute of 20 miles or less, I would consider a Volt or even a Smart for their size and fuel economy.
We had a dog in the house until I was about 8 or 9, but I had such severe dust and pollen allergies that I once spent a week in an oxygen tent and then went through weekly allergy therapy shots for several years. I had a window air conditioner in my bedroom on recirculate during the warm weather months to keep the air semi-filtered (this was in the early 1970s before the advent of HEPA filtration devices).
We couldn't even have a real Christmas tree or wreath in the house. We had one early on and I was super sick until my parents realized that it made me sick and we had to ditch the tree AND the wreath right before Christmas.
Or is it really a tautology and well-nourished means eats enough food with vitamins?