Why does this sound like one of those 'deals' that simply becomes a rate hike for everyone and the discount for disclosing information just puts you back at the normal price?
Or they introduce a new fee or surcharge for not providing this info?
Or becomes one more bogus way to manufacture fake lending risk (like driving records) -- how would you like your Facebook profile factored into your credit score?
"Government mandated drug testing for everyone" would be patently unconstitutional, which is why you don't see it on that level, just as you don't see house-to-house searches. Private industry does it because they can get away with it.
My primary argument is that drug testing is focused on the crusade against illegal drugs; no one I know who has gotten tested says they were tested for alcohol and none of the test attempts to test for motor or cognitive impairment.
In other words, they're not looking to see if you ARE impaired, they are looking to see if you HAVE BEEN impaired with drugs whose impairment duration is a lot shorter than its detectability.
Preventing accidents, etc from impairment is what the advocates for testing claim its for, yet they don't test for that.
When it was originally released, the CGI in the first Tron seemed striking and futuristic; computer animation in the early 1980s was either low-res sprites or high res vector graphics.
Now we're totally used to high-resolution, fully rendered, full-color computer graphics. Tron now seems dated, like a 1950s film on rocket travel to the moon.
I've had the opportunity to know quite a few commercial pilots, and at least two-thirds of them were heavy drinkers. The kind of guys who thought nothing of putting down 8-10 cocktails before an 8 AM flight the next day.
Even if they are not "drunk" in a way detectable by a breathalyzer, they still are suffering from some kind of impairment as they are operating on reduced, poor quality sleep and whatever physical and cognitive impairment comes from even a mild hangover.
The same is true of nurses and doctors, although not with illegal drugs, but with pharmaceuticals. I've known more than one nurse that regularly worked 18-24 hour shifts so they could bank the time off; while the young ones in the twenties can get away with this, it's not hard to see why a lot of others turn to amphetamines, tranquilizers and pain killers to deal with the stress and sleep deprivation.
While I agree that physical and cognitive impairment should be watched carefully in a number of critical tasks, our current approach doesn't even come close to measuring it -- like the parent poster suggests, its very crude and given the history of prohibition in the USA, appears to be strongly driven by a moral crusade versus a practical approach.
And none of these tests even begin to look at a whole panoply of over-the-counter and prescription medications that can produce significant impairment.
Not only that, I find it doesn't work that well due to the clumsy fit. The 3D effect seems to be sensitive to the distance between the lens and your eye, and its difficult to get a comfortable fit with glasses on, and when it's comfortable, the effect seems "off".
How many people who own "luxury sedans" do more than drive to their office, their country club and a handful of restaurants and shops that cater to their luxury lifestyles?
I'd wager it's a small number -- any trip outside of their city they will likely fly to.
Maybe it's different in California, or at least Southern California (ie, driving between LA/OC/SD), but I'll bet in most cases people who spend on a $100k luxury car don't decide to take huge road trips.
My guess is that ANY new system would be superior to the existing system.
You can argue all day about the regressive nature of a flat tax or other alternative systems -- and be right -- but I think that eliminating the loopholes, distortions, biases and in some cases, single-business advantages that the current system has would be so economically beneficial that the somewhat nit-picky complaints about alternative systems wouldn't really be noticed.
In the end, I don't think the basic principals of our existing tax system are the issue as much as the corrosive nature of our tax code is on our economy.
Some of my all-time favorite music is poor quality live recordings.
There's a 3 disc Velvet Underground live album (Quine Tapes, volume 1) that is just mind-blowing, despite being some of the worst audio quality I've ever heard on a commercial disc release (IIRC, it was recorded on a stereo reel-reel and transfered to cassette at some point in the 1970s when the original open reel tapes started falling apart).
I have a couple of other bootlegs that might be worse, but not many. It seems like since the late 1980s that either audience recordings got a lot better or the bootlegs that bubble to the surface are soundboard sourced.
But even then, the mixes aren't always great for normal stereo reproduction or there's generational loss.
What you want is called the universal draft. At age 18, you get in physical shape and you learn discipline and respect.
I would say it doesn't have to be military oriented, but I'm not sure how the discipline gets taught without it. Maybe something that's structured like the military but does WPA-type work on public lands would work.
I think this is kind of how it worked in the late 40s up through the end of the draft in the early 70s.
A side benefit of this is it will go a long way towards eliminating class and racial differences, as it basically forces the rich white guy and the poor latino to be in the same place, solving a task together.
So then the board owns the loss of fiduciary duty -- if they are turning down management's initiatives as not in the best interest of shareholders, how do you justify selling out to the same management who will presumably implement those initiatives as being in the best interest of the shareholders?
If they are legally liable for failing to maximize profits, how do they get away with management buyouts?
Management isn't buying the company to make less profit -- they're buying it to make more profit. But if they know of a way to make more, money, where's their legal liability for not pursuing this fiduciary duty?
Isn't a violation of that fiduciary duty to fail to implement a plan that they know will result in increased profits?
I couldn't agree more. I actually sent a nasty email to some VP at VMware chiding them for making downloads so difficult to do, despite the fact that I was a VCP.
So I get to be a VCP and work selling/installing your product and when a client needs a critical upgrade/patch but nobody knows the support login, you're going to block me from downloading it? It was just stupid.
BTW, love the Cisco insight. I didn't notice that when I saw the commercial and it's totally hilarious.
I don't know if you're a marginal case or not, but I had a VMware employee that they felt that they had to raise prices because server core and memory densities were getting to the point where they were going to start losing revenue.
They said they had seen a tendency among very large customers to actually cut CPU licensing. Earlier adopters had started smaller on older hardware that didn't have the massive amount of CPU and RAM that's common today and the old per-CPU licensing model meant that growth in these environments meant more licenses.
But with memory and CPU densities growing, these customers now need fewer licenses, even though they still have VM growth, because they have been buying 24 core, 128GB boxes to replace 16/64 or smaller boxes. Each new box can replace 2 or sometimes 3 older ones.
IMHO, they're just making up for the general reduction in price they had once they started offering EssentialsPlus ESXi. This was much cheaper than ESX 3.5 with vCenter and vMotion licensing.
I also wonder if maybe they shouldn't have switched from per-socket to per-core licensing, but charging less per core than they had per socket. This would have allowed stable revenue with increased core counts.
I'd eagerly agree its often frustrating, but AFAIK, a support ticket is only $350 for something like Exchange and they will work the ticket 24/7 until its fixed.
I've even had refunds when they couldn't fix it or for fixes that couldn't be implemented for reasons outside their control.
I had one client use Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 for Exchange 2007. Not the R2 version, but the R1 version (which isn't called R1, but...). A disk went full, the system blue screened and something in IIS was fucked and required a re-install per an MS support call. The client couldn't produce the media and neither could I -- Exchange 2007 was released after 2003 R2 and nobody I've ever seen used the R1 x64 version for anything -- it wasn't even media I could download from what I could see on VLSC.
Needless to say, we did an emergency upgrade on a new VM to 2010 and migrated mailboxes because the downtime waiting for media would have been too great. MS ended up refunding the charge because they didn't fix the issue, despite the fact that the paying customer was the real problem.
Now, I thought that the 5 hours I spent on the phone was excessive for the troubleshooting work that was done (a lot of steps repeated to failure needlessly, and a lot of time spent on hold "researching..."), so it wasn't overall a great experience, but it ended up being free and even if it wasn't, it would have been worth the $350.
That works with removable ammunition magazines, but it does not work with ammunition clips.
Ammunition clips or "stripper clips" clip together cartridges in a uniform orientation so that magazines, either removable box-type or fixed magazines (eg, M1 Garand, or the Soviet SKS) can be loaded quickly.
Taping two stripper clips together won't work, since you won't be able to insert them into a magazine.
They now also make a host of gizmos for pairing magazines that's more effective than the duct tape method made popular by various revolutionary groups.
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Why does this sound like one of those 'deals' that simply becomes a rate hike for everyone and the discount for disclosing information just puts you back at the normal price?
Or they introduce a new fee or surcharge for not providing this info?
Or becomes one more bogus way to manufacture fake lending risk (like driving records) -- how would you like your Facebook profile factored into your credit score?
And big ones, too? They certainly release a lot more energy than any one drilling operation does with an injection.
"Government mandated drug testing for everyone" would be patently unconstitutional, which is why you don't see it on that level, just as you don't see house-to-house searches. Private industry does it because they can get away with it.
My primary argument is that drug testing is focused on the crusade against illegal drugs; no one I know who has gotten tested says they were tested for alcohol and none of the test attempts to test for motor or cognitive impairment.
In other words, they're not looking to see if you ARE impaired, they are looking to see if you HAVE BEEN impaired with drugs whose impairment duration is a lot shorter than its detectability.
Preventing accidents, etc from impairment is what the advocates for testing claim its for, yet they don't test for that.
Obama: "Vlad, man, what the fuck is up wit' yo' spaceship, man?"
Putin: "Technical error. Zee FSB will be executing ze traitors."
Obama: "Sheeit, all that tough shit and you can't get it up. Man, you Russians is punk ass bitches."
Obama: [yelling to someone in the background] "Reggie, where the fuck is that fo-tay I asked you for like 20 minutes ago? And get me a blunt."
When it was originally released, the CGI in the first Tron seemed striking and futuristic; computer animation in the early 1980s was either low-res sprites or high res vector graphics.
Now we're totally used to high-resolution, fully rendered, full-color computer graphics. Tron now seems dated, like a 1950s film on rocket travel to the moon.
I've had the opportunity to know quite a few commercial pilots, and at least two-thirds of them were heavy drinkers. The kind of guys who thought nothing of putting down 8-10 cocktails before an 8 AM flight the next day.
Even if they are not "drunk" in a way detectable by a breathalyzer, they still are suffering from some kind of impairment as they are operating on reduced, poor quality sleep and whatever physical and cognitive impairment comes from even a mild hangover.
The same is true of nurses and doctors, although not with illegal drugs, but with pharmaceuticals. I've known more than one nurse that regularly worked 18-24 hour shifts so they could bank the time off; while the young ones in the twenties can get away with this, it's not hard to see why a lot of others turn to amphetamines, tranquilizers and pain killers to deal with the stress and sleep deprivation.
While I agree that physical and cognitive impairment should be watched carefully in a number of critical tasks, our current approach doesn't even come close to measuring it -- like the parent poster suggests, its very crude and given the history of prohibition in the USA, appears to be strongly driven by a moral crusade versus a practical approach.
And none of these tests even begin to look at a whole panoply of over-the-counter and prescription medications that can produce significant impairment.
In South Dakota, testing positive for a drug is considered possession.
How fucked up is that?
Not only that, I find it doesn't work that well due to the clumsy fit. The 3D effect seems to be sensitive to the distance between the lens and your eye, and its difficult to get a comfortable fit with glasses on, and when it's comfortable, the effect seems "off".
Tron made me ill in 2D.
Does it come with a sticker that says "OFFICIAL US GOVERNMENT PROPERTY"?
Assuming its just some random object, I don't see how they can hold you responsible for it.
What was the last porn movie you saw where they made love?
The last one I saw involved a girl taking two gents at one time and both of them gave her a facial.
While I'm sure it's a lovely experience, I don't think that's exactly what people think of.
"...when was ever going to be in Haiti again?"
While I'm sure Guam has its own risks, I think at the time the risk of AIDS in Haiti was the "bad idea" behind that particular stunt..
How many people who own "luxury sedans" do more than drive to their office, their country club and a handful of restaurants and shops that cater to their luxury lifestyles?
I'd wager it's a small number -- any trip outside of their city they will likely fly to.
Maybe it's different in California, or at least Southern California (ie, driving between LA/OC/SD), but I'll bet in most cases people who spend on a $100k luxury car don't decide to take huge road trips.
My guess is that ANY new system would be superior to the existing system.
You can argue all day about the regressive nature of a flat tax or other alternative systems -- and be right -- but I think that eliminating the loopholes, distortions, biases and in some cases, single-business advantages that the current system has would be so economically beneficial that the somewhat nit-picky complaints about alternative systems wouldn't really be noticed.
In the end, I don't think the basic principals of our existing tax system are the issue as much as the corrosive nature of our tax code is on our economy.
Nerds, or pointy-headed bureaucrats with MAs in Advanced Paperwork and Kicking It Upstairs?
Some of my all-time favorite music is poor quality live recordings.
There's a 3 disc Velvet Underground live album (Quine Tapes, volume 1) that is just mind-blowing, despite being some of the worst audio quality I've ever heard on a commercial disc release (IIRC, it was recorded on a stereo reel-reel and transfered to cassette at some point in the 1970s when the original open reel tapes started falling apart).
I have a couple of other bootlegs that might be worse, but not many. It seems like since the late 1980s that either audience recordings got a lot better or the bootlegs that bubble to the surface are soundboard sourced.
But even then, the mixes aren't always great for normal stereo reproduction or there's generational loss.
What you want is called the universal draft. At age 18, you get in physical shape and you learn discipline and respect.
I would say it doesn't have to be military oriented, but I'm not sure how the discipline gets taught without it. Maybe something that's structured like the military but does WPA-type work on public lands would work.
I think this is kind of how it worked in the late 40s up through the end of the draft in the early 70s.
A side benefit of this is it will go a long way towards eliminating class and racial differences, as it basically forces the rich white guy and the poor latino to be in the same place, solving a task together.
So then the board owns the loss of fiduciary duty -- if they are turning down management's initiatives as not in the best interest of shareholders, how do you justify selling out to the same management who will presumably implement those initiatives as being in the best interest of the shareholders?
If they are legally liable for failing to maximize profits, how do they get away with management buyouts?
Management isn't buying the company to make less profit -- they're buying it to make more profit. But if they know of a way to make more, money, where's their legal liability for not pursuing this fiduciary duty?
Isn't a violation of that fiduciary duty to fail to implement a plan that they know will result in increased profits?
I couldn't agree more. I actually sent a nasty email to some VP at VMware chiding them for making downloads so difficult to do, despite the fact that I was a VCP.
So I get to be a VCP and work selling/installing your product and when a client needs a critical upgrade/patch but nobody knows the support login, you're going to block me from downloading it? It was just stupid.
BTW, love the Cisco insight. I didn't notice that when I saw the commercial and it's totally hilarious.
I don't know if you're a marginal case or not, but I had a VMware employee that they felt that they had to raise prices because server core and memory densities were getting to the point where they were going to start losing revenue.
They said they had seen a tendency among very large customers to actually cut CPU licensing. Earlier adopters had started smaller on older hardware that didn't have the massive amount of CPU and RAM that's common today and the old per-CPU licensing model meant that growth in these environments meant more licenses.
But with memory and CPU densities growing, these customers now need fewer licenses, even though they still have VM growth, because they have been buying 24 core, 128GB boxes to replace 16/64 or smaller boxes. Each new box can replace 2 or sometimes 3 older ones.
IMHO, they're just making up for the general reduction in price they had once they started offering EssentialsPlus ESXi. This was much cheaper than ESX 3.5 with vCenter and vMotion licensing.
I also wonder if maybe they shouldn't have switched from per-socket to per-core licensing, but charging less per core than they had per socket. This would have allowed stable revenue with increased core counts.
Calling MS is expensive?
I'd eagerly agree its often frustrating, but AFAIK, a support ticket is only $350 for something like Exchange and they will work the ticket 24/7 until its fixed.
I've even had refunds when they couldn't fix it or for fixes that couldn't be implemented for reasons outside their control.
I had one client use Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 for Exchange 2007. Not the R2 version, but the R1 version (which isn't called R1, but...). A disk went full, the system blue screened and something in IIS was fucked and required a re-install per an MS support call. The client couldn't produce the media and neither could I -- Exchange 2007 was released after 2003 R2 and nobody I've ever seen used the R1 x64 version for anything -- it wasn't even media I could download from what I could see on VLSC.
Needless to say, we did an emergency upgrade on a new VM to 2010 and migrated mailboxes because the downtime waiting for media would have been too great. MS ended up refunding the charge because they didn't fix the issue, despite the fact that the paying customer was the real problem.
Now, I thought that the 5 hours I spent on the phone was excessive for the troubleshooting work that was done (a lot of steps repeated to failure needlessly, and a lot of time spent on hold "researching..."), so it wasn't overall a great experience, but it ended up being free and even if it wasn't, it would have been worth the $350.
It might have been nice to mention that in the article summary.
A lot of people point at their computer and call it a hard drive. You're OK with that, too?
That works with removable ammunition magazines, but it does not work with ammunition clips.
Ammunition clips or "stripper clips" clip together cartridges in a uniform orientation so that magazines, either removable box-type or fixed magazines (eg, M1 Garand, or the Soviet SKS) can be loaded quickly.
Taping two stripper clips together won't work, since you won't be able to insert them into a magazine.
They now also make a host of gizmos for pairing magazines that's more effective than the duct tape method made popular by various revolutionary groups.