Did "counselors" ever do anything? In the early 1980s they did nothing at my high school, which at the time was possibly the best in the city.
I still remember meeting my counselor at one of the few mandatory meetings and walking away wondering what the guy got paid for. All he did was tell me I was taking the right classes for college and that I should apply.
Have any economists studied the planned obsolescence economy and production cycles based on intentional forced turnover?
It strikes me as the (probably wrong) layman that a lot of companies seem to have business models that are predicated on planned obsolescence generating demand for replacement products.
Obviously there's a whole category of computer-related products where improvements make the product obsolete no matter how much the design suggests upgradability -- even though your Socket 7 motherboard has a removable CPU, other improvements mean you can't stuff a Core i7 in that motherboard.
But in a lot of ways it seems that products are just made non-serviceable intentionally so that they have to be replaced, guaranteeing a kind of annuity-like continuous stream of business as consumers are forced to replace products which can't be fixed at all.
We may pay lower prices for the product because lack of service access makes them cheaper to make, but it's sure hard to sort out where this is a real consumer benefit and not just some way to make people keep buying the same product. And of course manufacturers are caught in the race to the bottom by consumers who shave pennies in the short run and won't accept tiny price premiums for something can be repaired, basically preventing a manufacturer from even making a repairable product at all.
I'm sure I will be denounced, but this does seem like an area where imposing some kind of regulation would have good environmental consequences (reducing the waste stream) and consumer benefit even if it results in marginal price premiums.
Another problem we don't quite understand is: why do some people become pedophile?
I'd be curious if there's any relationship between a society's "openness" to sexuality and its rates of child sexual abuse.
My gut instinct is that the more oppressive a society is towards sexuality between adults, the more likely that they are to have high rates of child sexual abuse. Children are easily manipulated, especially by adult authority figures, leading to an exploitable outlet for sexual urges not melt elsewhere.
Societies more open to sexuality would seem more likely to have less child sexual abuse as there would be more available outlets for sexual urges. The availability of legal prostitution would be an interesting variable as well, as it would seem to provide a further potential outlet for people with social dysfunctions that would limit their ability to obtain sex through normal social contact.
There's probably a bunch more distinctions to be made, such as between actual pedophilia focused on pre-pubescent children, and sex with post-pubescent teenagers. Many of the latter seem abusive more on circumstance (ie, forced prostitution of teens, coercive relationships) and a lot of value judgement involved when sexual relationships appear to be consensual. I can think of a local case of a high school teacher (in their 20s) and a high school student where the student loudly proclaimed her willingness and initiation of the relationship and wouldn't cooperate with his prosecution.
Then there's the role of gender -- how many male teens have had sex with older women and it never gets reported until someone "discovers" the relationship? And then there's the homosexuality angle and how it plays into the judgement of the situation. And I seldom seem to read of lesbian adult/teen sexual abuse, although basic statistics would seem to suggest it happens but just isn't reported or discovered.
Amongst the many unanswered questions are for example: Why (or by which mechanism) does sexual abuse of a child harm the child?
My guess is that sex produces intense emotional stimulation which, the younger the person, the less they have the emotional maturity to process the feelings. I think it throws adults for loops in most cases, for children its probably really a source of intense confusion and conflict.
I think capitalism relies on a large amount of moralizing to coerce workers into unfavorable job markets. Young men wasting time on gaming is just the latest iteration. In years past it was alcohol consumption, opium, and marijuana that were diverting labor into indolence rather than providing capital with a labor force.
If the segment of workers who find themselves satisfied with less or little labor force participation stay out of the labor market, business owners will wind up with a smaller labor pool better able to negotiate for wages and benefits.
Creating a morally coercive environment that creates social pressure on disinterested workers to engage in workforce participation enlarges the pool of workers and creates downward pressure on labor costs.
It'd be extra effort, but could they secure it further by allowing a combination of biometrics in a specific order to unlock it, possibly further combined with a passcode?
They could potentially do this with just touch ID, where you need to use specific fingers in a specific order.
Of course this would all defeat the rapid convenience of touch/face ID as the only unlock method, which means Apple is unlikely to implement it, but maybe they could have a "fast unlock" timer where once you had used the more complex method it would allow a fast method for some period.
I'm sure there's some requirement to not just *see* the source, but to build it independently with the same toolchain and make sure you get the same executables.
The problem with Kaspersky is that like all AV it's self-updating with definitions and program updates, it's not a static executable.
Isn't this just trading one elite class for another?
As the other respondent pointed out, the Black Death created labor shortages which raised wages and shifted wealth into a broader base, which in turn created a merchant and skilled labor class which gained a claim on political power.
We're nearing the terminus of that cycle, though, where the merchant class is nearly as consolidated and economically dominant as the feudal lords. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Corporations are sitting on trillions in cash, neither spending nor investing it (other than parking it in short-term treasuries or other cash-equivalent short term investments).
Even if you posit that most of it is invested, when the investments are in firms controlled by an ever-shrinking number of people, you're not "creating wealth for others" in any broad sense, you're either increasing your own wealth, since you control the firm being invested in, or its back-scratching exercise with the other oligarchs.
And if we're actually talking about a future of high levels of automation, investing in a firm like that isn't actually creating wage jobs, either.
It strikes me that it's less about the job loss and more about the wealth concentration.
In theory, the high level of automation should result in the long-predicted elimination of want and/or the predicted leisure-time lifestyle that even Keynes predicted 75-odd years ago.
The corollary to automation, though, seems to be an increasing amount of wealth concentration in the hands of people who seem to validate that there's no such thing as "enough". Their wealth hoarding stands as an impediment to elimination of want and the leisure-time lifestyle -- they'd rather pay for mercenaries to keep people down than to feed and house them.
And of course they have nothing but contempt for the middle class, a group they think is overpaid and under worked and whose own education and consumption habits undermine the sense of exclusivity and prestige meant to be the exclusive domain of the truly rich.
Whether we drift back into a feudal/manorial economic and political structure or turn the corner on a world of abundance kind of depends on whether the political system is capable of responding to change for just the economic elite or whether it is capable of responding to change for the masses.
Out of curiosity, what about sexism is unique to the tech industry? I'd be inclined to think it was a broader cultural phenomenon and not something unique to technology, I would also assume it has some regional variation along with culture.
Dogs do thrive on a carnivorous diet, and if you want to see lean muscle then a raw meat diet is definitely going to get your dog there easier and with less side-effects (i.e. allergies) than Ol' Roy, but I tend to worry way more about how many calories they eat than whether they're eating an optimal diet.
I suspect that dogs have a pretty good metabolic signaling system that prevents them from gaining weight even on an all meat diet. Unless they have been stressed or mistreated somehow and have developed a starvation mindset, I think that even if given an unlimited supply of all meat they would gorge initially but then level out as their metabolic system told them they had enough to eat.
Maybe some of that, but the difference between that and Cisco being "guilty for being American" because of NSA hijacking shipments and hacking their hardware is what?
The reality is that a Russian company is far more vulnerable to kinds of influence that would be outright illegal and American companies have the luxury of being able to open resist explicit efforts to compromise their systems and organizations in an actual judicial system.
Sure, there's all kinds of secret FISA courts and national security leverage the US government can use, but Tim Cook isn't going to the gulag for telling the FBI and NSA to bugger off. A Russian company is far more vulnerable to what really are mafia tactics.
Right, their access in nature to fruits is extremely limited by seasonality, the inherent limitations of wild fruit-producing plants (most forests are not populated with apple trees), and competition from animals for whom fruit is a primary food and which have innate abilities to access it (climbing or flying).
A dog can only eat fruit in season and which it can reach and hasn't been already taken by fruit-eating competitors.
In nature, a dog's access to high carbohydrate foods is extremely limited.
I would suspect that domestic dogs may have even evolved improved carbohydrate metabolism from their long association with people and the odds that humans were most likely to discard lower-value carbohydrates than high-value animal proteins.
Dogs may be able to digest carbohydrates but if you stop and think about it, where would dogs get carbohydrates in the wild? Trace amounts from eating grass, but otherwise they would be eating meat or scavenging carrion. They can only tolerate some carbohydrates because of their long association with humans.
Most dog food is chock full of carbohydrates and it fattens dogs just like fattens people and cattle in the feedlot.
The ADA is like a forced subsidy. The market won't address it, because there's not enough handicapped people for it to be profitable to cater to them (and they probably tend to be low income, too). The incentive is to not get sued, not to help handicapped people.
Since a forced subsidy is like a tax, why not just have a direct tax and use the tax money to provide positive incentives to provide rides to the handicapped? At least this way, helping handicapped people is profitable and provides a direct incentive to do so. The "negative incentive" of being sued just becomes something people try to avoid or cheat on.
The ADA outsources the cost of accommodation to private entities *and* the cost of enforcement to handicapped people who have to file lawsuits to get meaningful enforcement. It ends up being a subsidy to trial lawyers.
You don't need a warrant when lying to the FBI is a felony by itself.
They don't even need to convict you of whatever crime they were interested in nor do you even need to be guilty of anything, if you lie to them you have committed a felony and will go to jail for that.
So either spill your guts completely and risk being charged with being an accessory to a conspiracy or something equally vague (hoping you're not worth the effort) or just don't even talk to them.
Shareholders chasing him out isn't about him being a bad leader, but them just protecting their interests and the company's PR standing.
An "uninterested" third party CEO criticizing him and saying there was a standard of leadership he failed to achieve opens the door to other CEOs being held to higher standards or facing criticism, too. So Mayer's defense of him seems not unexpected.
On the other hand, I think she does have some kind of point about this. To my naive mind, scaling a company like Uber up as fast as it has sounds like surfing a landslide that only gets bigger and faster. You have to delegate a ton of shit and can't pay close attention to a lot of it, especially if a lot of your energy is devoted towards business expansion, not existing operations.
As for the harassment culture, I always wonder at what point you can hold one person responsible for a culture populated by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Maybe he was all bro culture at the beginning and new hires just picked it up and perpetuated it.
The irony in all of this is that we pay CEOs like they were all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and deserve to reap 99% of the rewards of the entire organization because they were 99% responsible for all of it getting done. This seems dubious on the surface, more so when executives like Mayer make the (possibly reasonable) excuses that he really isn't all-seeing, all-knowing. I mean which is it, CEOs are superhuman or they're not? If not, why pay them like they are?
The CIA or any organization like it wants unicorns. They want the tiny subset of the Venn diagram where people are bold thinkers AND organizationally compliant rule followers.
Like high-end spec-ops, not only do they want really tough super-athletes, they want high intelligence, independent thinkers AND chain of command rule followers.
It's a small subset of people that match all those qualities.
I still think the original "half moon" receiver was outstanding design from an ergonomics perspective, providing a simple solution for being able to hear the caller and speak directly into the microphone.
I'm not sure why you think this was a bad solution for old car telephones. The user already knows how to use it and it uses an existing component already being mass-produced.
I'd wager a good chunk of cell phone driving problems isn't the distraction from talking on the phone, but the clusterfuck of a tiny flip phone that can't be held securely. If cell phones had Bell 500 handsets, I'd wager they'd be less distracting while driving than a flip phone.
The race for ever smaller flip phones was less about it's functionality as a phone than a kind of fashion competition to see who could have the smallest phone.
The complaints about flat PDA phones were legitimate, for whatever flip phones got wrong by going tiny, they at least emulated the functional aspect of the Bell 500 handset's shape and speaker and microphone placement.
Most people just don't understand how good the Bell 500 handset was as a piece of industrial design, especially people that have only ever talked on smartphones. The speaker goes over your ear, insulating you from background noise and your voice goes directly into the microphone so the caller can hear your clearly.
We will see a day soon when we can enjoy an even-greater standard-of-living with as little as 32 or even 28 working-hours per week declared as full-time employment in an amended Fair Labor Standards Act, a trade-off of an even greater capacity to purchase goods and services for instead the simple time to enjoy our ever-amassing wealth.
Why does it seem instead of this happening (as predicted by Keynes a century ago), what we really get are fewer people, holding more wealth and clamoring for even more wealth?
Given a choice of limiting luxury consumption and giving money to others, it seems like people generally always choose to further their own luxury consumption, at least first even if they choose some kind of charity after.
I can think of two real world examples involving even highly altruistic people.
My wife was on the board of a charity that ran a daycare & preschool for a disadvantaged minority. The women who started it was a PhD in early childhood education, but her and her husband were both very wealthy (huge house, pool, elite country club memberships, luxury vacations, etc). My wife was always wanting me to scare up used PCs and volunteer for the school (which I did and counseled against, since I think used PCs are a curse to most non-profits). I always asked, if the founder was so convinced of her organizations goals, why didn't she give up half her own wealth for the charity? Her whole family could have downsized by half and lived better than middle class. Even she believed in furthering her own luxury first.
The guy across the street is a pastor at an inner city church. Really into poverty causes and helping the disadvantaged (like annoyingly so in person sometimes), and I think generally they don't have much income. Yet he has a motorcycle hobby. Should he be spending money on a recreational motor vehicle, or putting that money into the cause which is basically a bottomless pit of need? I think he's less "guilty" than the charity founder because they generally don't have much money to begin with, and he's super handy so I don't think he spends much on the bike that's not gas or repair parts (it's not a Harley or some glory bike, either).
Although even the charity founder has basically given away a ton of her time to found and get the charity started (which included a ton of in-person hands on work using her professional background), I always found it odd that someone so immersed in the lives of super poor people would have no problem keeping up a pretty high-end socialite-type lifestyle. The charity work was important, but not enough apparently to produce any real lifestyle sacrifices.
People are tired of being told what to think, the outlets have been telling people what to think in the strongest possible terms, and as a result the strength of the words has declined.
I think there is a gap between what people are being told in the media and what they experience on the ground in their every day lives and this gap has reached ridiculous proportions.
Trump's genius, if you want to call it that, seems to be providing a message that aligns with people's actual experiences. They think Trump is more honest.
Now, none of this is to say that people's experiences are necessarily accurate or that Trump doesn't spin lies, either (the wall, his so-called healthcare plan, etc), but I still think he's more willing to "say it like it is" than push an agenda than Clinton was.
Rude when customers don't understand them. Attitude issues when corrected. Inflated sense of importance. Tend to have tone issues with customers. Very willing to break rules. Hygiene is an issue.
I kind of hate them, but occasionally they are useful and I often find links or other valuable info about the repair in the comments.
A lot of the time they are low view videos, so there's not 8 billion shitposts to filter through, either. The latest game of thrones preview or some other popular content? Forget it. It's like someone gave accounts to the lowest IQ creature that can type.
Slashdot Mirror
Did "counselors" ever do anything? In the early 1980s they did nothing at my high school, which at the time was possibly the best in the city.
I still remember meeting my counselor at one of the few mandatory meetings and walking away wondering what the guy got paid for. All he did was tell me I was taking the right classes for college and that I should apply.
And it would actually be a legitimate entrepreneurial path in Colorado and several other states, perhaps even Illinois some day.
Have any economists studied the planned obsolescence economy and production cycles based on intentional forced turnover?
It strikes me as the (probably wrong) layman that a lot of companies seem to have business models that are predicated on planned obsolescence generating demand for replacement products.
Obviously there's a whole category of computer-related products where improvements make the product obsolete no matter how much the design suggests upgradability -- even though your Socket 7 motherboard has a removable CPU, other improvements mean you can't stuff a Core i7 in that motherboard.
But in a lot of ways it seems that products are just made non-serviceable intentionally so that they have to be replaced, guaranteeing a kind of annuity-like continuous stream of business as consumers are forced to replace products which can't be fixed at all.
We may pay lower prices for the product because lack of service access makes them cheaper to make, but it's sure hard to sort out where this is a real consumer benefit and not just some way to make people keep buying the same product. And of course manufacturers are caught in the race to the bottom by consumers who shave pennies in the short run and won't accept tiny price premiums for something can be repaired, basically preventing a manufacturer from even making a repairable product at all.
I'm sure I will be denounced, but this does seem like an area where imposing some kind of regulation would have good environmental consequences (reducing the waste stream) and consumer benefit even if it results in marginal price premiums.
Another problem we don't quite understand is: why do some people become pedophile?
I'd be curious if there's any relationship between a society's "openness" to sexuality and its rates of child sexual abuse.
My gut instinct is that the more oppressive a society is towards sexuality between adults, the more likely that they are to have high rates of child sexual abuse. Children are easily manipulated, especially by adult authority figures, leading to an exploitable outlet for sexual urges not melt elsewhere.
Societies more open to sexuality would seem more likely to have less child sexual abuse as there would be more available outlets for sexual urges. The availability of legal prostitution would be an interesting variable as well, as it would seem to provide a further potential outlet for people with social dysfunctions that would limit their ability to obtain sex through normal social contact.
There's probably a bunch more distinctions to be made, such as between actual pedophilia focused on pre-pubescent children, and sex with post-pubescent teenagers. Many of the latter seem abusive more on circumstance (ie, forced prostitution of teens, coercive relationships) and a lot of value judgement involved when sexual relationships appear to be consensual. I can think of a local case of a high school teacher (in their 20s) and a high school student where the student loudly proclaimed her willingness and initiation of the relationship and wouldn't cooperate with his prosecution.
Then there's the role of gender -- how many male teens have had sex with older women and it never gets reported until someone "discovers" the relationship? And then there's the homosexuality angle and how it plays into the judgement of the situation. And I seldom seem to read of lesbian adult/teen sexual abuse, although basic statistics would seem to suggest it happens but just isn't reported or discovered.
Amongst the many unanswered questions are for example: Why (or by which mechanism) does sexual abuse of a child harm the child?
My guess is that sex produces intense emotional stimulation which, the younger the person, the less they have the emotional maturity to process the feelings. I think it throws adults for loops in most cases, for children its probably really a source of intense confusion and conflict.
I think capitalism relies on a large amount of moralizing to coerce workers into unfavorable job markets. Young men wasting time on gaming is just the latest iteration. In years past it was alcohol consumption, opium, and marijuana that were diverting labor into indolence rather than providing capital with a labor force.
If the segment of workers who find themselves satisfied with less or little labor force participation stay out of the labor market, business owners will wind up with a smaller labor pool better able to negotiate for wages and benefits.
Creating a morally coercive environment that creates social pressure on disinterested workers to engage in workforce participation enlarges the pool of workers and creates downward pressure on labor costs.
It'd be extra effort, but could they secure it further by allowing a combination of biometrics in a specific order to unlock it, possibly further combined with a passcode?
They could potentially do this with just touch ID, where you need to use specific fingers in a specific order.
Of course this would all defeat the rapid convenience of touch/face ID as the only unlock method, which means Apple is unlikely to implement it, but maybe they could have a "fast unlock" timer where once you had used the more complex method it would allow a fast method for some period.
I'm sure there's some requirement to not just *see* the source, but to build it independently with the same toolchain and make sure you get the same executables.
The problem with Kaspersky is that like all AV it's self-updating with definitions and program updates, it's not a static executable.
Isn't this just trading one elite class for another?
As the other respondent pointed out, the Black Death created labor shortages which raised wages and shifted wealth into a broader base, which in turn created a merchant and skilled labor class which gained a claim on political power.
We're nearing the terminus of that cycle, though, where the merchant class is nearly as consolidated and economically dominant as the feudal lords. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Corporations are sitting on trillions in cash, neither spending nor investing it (other than parking it in short-term treasuries or other cash-equivalent short term investments).
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
Even if you posit that most of it is invested, when the investments are in firms controlled by an ever-shrinking number of people, you're not "creating wealth for others" in any broad sense, you're either increasing your own wealth, since you control the firm being invested in, or its back-scratching exercise with the other oligarchs.
And if we're actually talking about a future of high levels of automation, investing in a firm like that isn't actually creating wage jobs, either.
It strikes me that it's less about the job loss and more about the wealth concentration.
In theory, the high level of automation should result in the long-predicted elimination of want and/or the predicted leisure-time lifestyle that even Keynes predicted 75-odd years ago.
The corollary to automation, though, seems to be an increasing amount of wealth concentration in the hands of people who seem to validate that there's no such thing as "enough". Their wealth hoarding stands as an impediment to elimination of want and the leisure-time lifestyle -- they'd rather pay for mercenaries to keep people down than to feed and house them.
And of course they have nothing but contempt for the middle class, a group they think is overpaid and under worked and whose own education and consumption habits undermine the sense of exclusivity and prestige meant to be the exclusive domain of the truly rich.
Whether we drift back into a feudal/manorial economic and political structure or turn the corner on a world of abundance kind of depends on whether the political system is capable of responding to change for just the economic elite or whether it is capable of responding to change for the masses.
Out of curiosity, what about sexism is unique to the tech industry? I'd be inclined to think it was a broader cultural phenomenon and not something unique to technology, I would also assume it has some regional variation along with culture.
Dogs do thrive on a carnivorous diet, and if you want to see lean muscle then a raw meat diet is definitely going to get your dog there easier and with less side-effects (i.e. allergies) than Ol' Roy, but I tend to worry way more about how many calories they eat than whether they're eating an optimal diet.
I suspect that dogs have a pretty good metabolic signaling system that prevents them from gaining weight even on an all meat diet. Unless they have been stressed or mistreated somehow and have developed a starvation mindset, I think that even if given an unlimited supply of all meat they would gorge initially but then level out as their metabolic system told them they had enough to eat.
Maybe some of that, but the difference between that and Cisco being "guilty for being American" because of NSA hijacking shipments and hacking their hardware is what?
The reality is that a Russian company is far more vulnerable to kinds of influence that would be outright illegal and American companies have the luxury of being able to open resist explicit efforts to compromise their systems and organizations in an actual judicial system.
Sure, there's all kinds of secret FISA courts and national security leverage the US government can use, but Tim Cook isn't going to the gulag for telling the FBI and NSA to bugger off. A Russian company is far more vulnerable to what really are mafia tactics.
Right, their access in nature to fruits is extremely limited by seasonality, the inherent limitations of wild fruit-producing plants (most forests are not populated with apple trees), and competition from animals for whom fruit is a primary food and which have innate abilities to access it (climbing or flying).
A dog can only eat fruit in season and which it can reach and hasn't been already taken by fruit-eating competitors.
In nature, a dog's access to high carbohydrate foods is extremely limited.
I would suspect that domestic dogs may have even evolved improved carbohydrate metabolism from their long association with people and the odds that humans were most likely to discard lower-value carbohydrates than high-value animal proteins.
Dogs may be able to digest carbohydrates but if you stop and think about it, where would dogs get carbohydrates in the wild? Trace amounts from eating grass, but otherwise they would be eating meat or scavenging carrion. They can only tolerate some carbohydrates because of their long association with humans.
Most dog food is chock full of carbohydrates and it fattens dogs just like fattens people and cattle in the feedlot.
The ADA is like a forced subsidy. The market won't address it, because there's not enough handicapped people for it to be profitable to cater to them (and they probably tend to be low income, too). The incentive is to not get sued, not to help handicapped people.
Since a forced subsidy is like a tax, why not just have a direct tax and use the tax money to provide positive incentives to provide rides to the handicapped? At least this way, helping handicapped people is profitable and provides a direct incentive to do so. The "negative incentive" of being sued just becomes something people try to avoid or cheat on.
The ADA outsources the cost of accommodation to private entities *and* the cost of enforcement to handicapped people who have to file lawsuits to get meaningful enforcement. It ends up being a subsidy to trial lawyers.
You don't need a warrant when lying to the FBI is a felony by itself.
They don't even need to convict you of whatever crime they were interested in nor do you even need to be guilty of anything, if you lie to them you have committed a felony and will go to jail for that.
So either spill your guts completely and risk being charged with being an accessory to a conspiracy or something equally vague (hoping you're not worth the effort) or just don't even talk to them.
Definitely this.
Shareholders chasing him out isn't about him being a bad leader, but them just protecting their interests and the company's PR standing.
An "uninterested" third party CEO criticizing him and saying there was a standard of leadership he failed to achieve opens the door to other CEOs being held to higher standards or facing criticism, too. So Mayer's defense of him seems not unexpected.
On the other hand, I think she does have some kind of point about this. To my naive mind, scaling a company like Uber up as fast as it has sounds like surfing a landslide that only gets bigger and faster. You have to delegate a ton of shit and can't pay close attention to a lot of it, especially if a lot of your energy is devoted towards business expansion, not existing operations.
As for the harassment culture, I always wonder at what point you can hold one person responsible for a culture populated by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Maybe he was all bro culture at the beginning and new hires just picked it up and perpetuated it.
The irony in all of this is that we pay CEOs like they were all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and deserve to reap 99% of the rewards of the entire organization because they were 99% responsible for all of it getting done. This seems dubious on the surface, more so when executives like Mayer make the (possibly reasonable) excuses that he really isn't all-seeing, all-knowing. I mean which is it, CEOs are superhuman or they're not? If not, why pay them like they are?
The CIA or any organization like it wants unicorns. They want the tiny subset of the Venn diagram where people are bold thinkers AND organizationally compliant rule followers.
Like high-end spec-ops, not only do they want really tough super-athletes, they want high intelligence, independent thinkers AND chain of command rule followers.
It's a small subset of people that match all those qualities.
Wasn't that what Tripwire was all about?
I still think the original "half moon" receiver was outstanding design from an ergonomics perspective, providing a simple solution for being able to hear the caller and speak directly into the microphone.
I'm not sure why you think this was a bad solution for old car telephones. The user already knows how to use it and it uses an existing component already being mass-produced.
I'd wager a good chunk of cell phone driving problems isn't the distraction from talking on the phone, but the clusterfuck of a tiny flip phone that can't be held securely. If cell phones had Bell 500 handsets, I'd wager they'd be less distracting while driving than a flip phone.
The race for ever smaller flip phones was less about it's functionality as a phone than a kind of fashion competition to see who could have the smallest phone.
The complaints about flat PDA phones were legitimate, for whatever flip phones got wrong by going tiny, they at least emulated the functional aspect of the Bell 500 handset's shape and speaker and microphone placement.
Most people just don't understand how good the Bell 500 handset was as a piece of industrial design, especially people that have only ever talked on smartphones. The speaker goes over your ear, insulating you from background noise and your voice goes directly into the microphone so the caller can hear your clearly.
We will see a day soon when we can enjoy an even-greater standard-of-living with as little as 32 or even 28 working-hours per week declared as full-time employment in an amended Fair Labor Standards Act, a trade-off of an even greater capacity to purchase goods and services for instead the simple time to enjoy our ever-amassing wealth.
Why does it seem instead of this happening (as predicted by Keynes a century ago), what we really get are fewer people, holding more wealth and clamoring for even more wealth?
Given a choice of limiting luxury consumption and giving money to others, it seems like people generally always choose to further their own luxury consumption, at least first even if they choose some kind of charity after.
I can think of two real world examples involving even highly altruistic people.
My wife was on the board of a charity that ran a daycare & preschool for a disadvantaged minority. The women who started it was a PhD in early childhood education, but her and her husband were both very wealthy (huge house, pool, elite country club memberships, luxury vacations, etc). My wife was always wanting me to scare up used PCs and volunteer for the school (which I did and counseled against, since I think used PCs are a curse to most non-profits). I always asked, if the founder was so convinced of her organizations goals, why didn't she give up half her own wealth for the charity? Her whole family could have downsized by half and lived better than middle class. Even she believed in furthering her own luxury first.
The guy across the street is a pastor at an inner city church. Really into poverty causes and helping the disadvantaged (like annoyingly so in person sometimes), and I think generally they don't have much income. Yet he has a motorcycle hobby. Should he be spending money on a recreational motor vehicle, or putting that money into the cause which is basically a bottomless pit of need? I think he's less "guilty" than the charity founder because they generally don't have much money to begin with, and he's super handy so I don't think he spends much on the bike that's not gas or repair parts (it's not a Harley or some glory bike, either).
Although even the charity founder has basically given away a ton of her time to found and get the charity started (which included a ton of in-person hands on work using her professional background), I always found it odd that someone so immersed in the lives of super poor people would have no problem keeping up a pretty high-end socialite-type lifestyle. The charity work was important, but not enough apparently to produce any real lifestyle sacrifices.
People are tired of being told what to think, the outlets have been telling people what to think in the strongest possible terms, and as a result the strength of the words has declined.
I think there is a gap between what people are being told in the media and what they experience on the ground in their every day lives and this gap has reached ridiculous proportions.
Trump's genius, if you want to call it that, seems to be providing a message that aligns with people's actual experiences. They think Trump is more honest.
Now, none of this is to say that people's experiences are necessarily accurate or that Trump doesn't spin lies, either (the wall, his so-called healthcare plan, etc), but I still think he's more willing to "say it like it is" than push an agenda than Clinton was.
Rude when customers don't understand them. Attitude issues when corrected. Inflated sense of importance. Tend to have tone issues with customers. Very willing to break rules. Hygiene is an issue.
Arrogant and filthy.
Repair videos.
I kind of hate them, but occasionally they are useful and I often find links or other valuable info about the repair in the comments.
A lot of the time they are low view videos, so there's not 8 billion shitposts to filter through, either. The latest game of thrones preview or some other popular content? Forget it. It's like someone gave accounts to the lowest IQ creature that can type.