The problem is the masses will never be "well appraised" of the dangers, and the people who want to decide what "dangers" they should be appraised of will always show bias (too much or not enough danger).
I'm inclined to believe that if people had access to weaker drug formulations, they would generally sort themselves out. Given how objectively dangerous, addictive and widespread alcohol is, it's almost surprising that fewer than 8% of Americans are alcoholics.
I think a world where nobody has problems with substance use is a world that doesn't and won't ever exist. Some people will be harmed, the best you can do is figure out how to reduce harm.
I think the critical thing is the way potency and time-to-trouble interact.
An addictive drug that's low potency still has long-term addiction risks, but it takes a much longer time for it to develop into a serious problem. In this time window, people may quit, lose interest or have some other thing happen that causes them to not use the substance anymore.
It may be low enough potency that even though they are habitual users, they don't really develop any structural deficiencies in their life. Functional addicts, but isn't the functional part what's important?
In the book I read, the description of most opium and morphine addicts of the late 19th/early 20th century seemed to be functional addicts. Some had started taking medicinal opiates for legitimate reasons and became addicted, but most didn't seem to spiral out of control. Opium users tended to be fringe members of society with a whole host of other life risks (exposure to violence, maybe heavy drinking, lack of any medical care, etc) so that opium smoking wasn't really their downfall, it was running with a rough crowd.
I read a fascinating history of opium use in the United States and one of the most surprising thing was that opium smoking remained the primary means of recreational opiate use into the 1920s, which is strange because heroin and morphine were trivially available and outright legal up until 1914.
What I find interesting about this is that it seems like there was kind of a deference to the least possibly risky means of opiate use -- opium smoking. Heroin didn't become the predominant illicit form until the 1920s when raw opium bans and tariffs made it difficult to come by, and the more potent and easily trafficked heroin took its place.
In many ways, the current (over say 10 years) "crisis" in opiate use seems to be fairly similar.
First you had relatively easy to obtain opiate tablets -- oxycodone and hydrocodone, most of which were probably low dosage variants (5-10 mg). Then you had the scare stories, and states began keeping lists to limit doctor shopping, the Feds reviewed prescribing to crack down on pill mills, etc.
Almost like it was predictable, when the pill supply slowed down demand shifted to heroin, and the suppliers responded with more heroin, lowering its price to cheaper than now hard to obtain pills. I'd wager a whole class of recreational pill users who normally wouldn't have moved to heroin based on price and availability.
Then between the Feds cracking down on heroin and market demand, you get a shift to synthetics like Fentanyl. IIRC, Fentanyl is a pure synthetic, not a byproduct of opium, so its made in any old lab and doesn't have the geographic types of supply chain from poppy fields to sellers. The same potency of heroin that would require a truck can now be carried in an envelope in a suit pocket, making it much easier to traffic.
In both the move from smoking opium to heroin and pills to Fentanyl, you have a population that was mostly satisfied with what they had, and what they had was weaker and less dangerous than what replaced it. While still addictive, I'd wager that building a serious addiction is more difficult with a weaker variant that would require frequent dosing. It's also less likely to kill people, especially novices. I don't think anybody who experiments with opium smoking is at risk of overdosing, nor is someone who takes a couple of 5 mg oxy tablets.
Each time the legal pressure is tightened, the supply side seems to have a newer, harder to eradicate, more dangerous and stronger alternative. We'd have been better off leaving it fairly easy to buy a few 5 mg oxy tablets. It still can create a mess, but much less mess than a blast of Fentanyl in the local opiate market.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not fully opposed to unionization of IT workers, more skeptical that the traditional, American blue-collar union template would be attractive or effective at organizing IT labor.
It would be nice if some Scandinavian/German cooperative labor union model could be adopted, but the problem is you'd have to start a new union that operated under different principles than traditional American unions and probably exclude them from participating as well so they wouldn't co-opt the organization into being yet another branch of traditional organized labor.
SAG/AFTRA are interesting case studies because I think they have some similarity to IT in that they deal with a specialized type of labor that doesn't fit into the usual industrial-era types and they have a lot of exposure to project-type work. In some ways the analogy breaks down, though, because it's an arts field and has lots of aspects which aren't shared outside of the arts.
There's just too much anecdotal evidence of government and union inefficiency and corruption. Even if both organizations are cleaner and better run on an at large basis, the perception of unions' and their historical problems of corruption, etc, is enough to make the adoption of trade unionism by IT workers unlikely, especially with the mindset that it's an actual professional meritocracy that doesn't need any kind of collective bargaining.
I agree with you that unions have been a historical good for workers with regard to wages and working conditions, but there are have also been a lot of problems, such as corruption, small scale to Jimmy Hoffa/Organized Crime scale.
I'd also argue that in some ways, unions have also created a legacy of adversarial relationships between workers and management that has led to a tit-for-tat legalistic rigidity in labor relationships, with both workers and management pushing their claims right to the edge of what they think the contracts will allow.
I also think there are cultural challenges. Unions have traditionally represented blue collar industries and IT has traditionally been a white collar enterprise (although there is a bit of pink-collarism, IMHO, in many organizations), and I don't think there's a great working model of white collar unionization in the US. IT in particular is complicated because of its close working relationship with more senior management and in most cases it's relatively small size within an organization.
It's too bad the conventional union system has nearly all the rot and inefficiency of government. It gives it such a bad name that it's easy to see why so many IT workers see it as a turn for the worse.
I think what you say about IT workers deluding themselves into thinking that it's a meritocracy is true, and much of this is just a byproduct of the general growth of IT. As long as it was new and on a path of large-scale growth, it's easy to see how the large demand for bodies and skills translates into "I'm here because I'm good" when the real answer was "they're so desperate".
As IT matures as a sector, the cost pressures become more obvious and the myth of the meritocracy seems to quickly erode.
Curb appeal gets buyers in, but I think the only renovations that actually increase your house's value are kitchens and bathrooms, and in some markets, a basement that has been finished from bare utility to normal living space.
Otherwise, I think the best bang for your buck with regard to exteriors is just basic maintenance -- keeping up the paint and whatever you have for greenery.
I think most real estate agents say that too much personalization or technology works against you. It may be great when new, but its prone to being obsolete when you sell and new buyers may have different tastes or lifestyle choices.
A home theater as you describe it will be considered "neat", but to buyers its a purpose built room with hard to change functionality. Maybe if its less than 3 years old and comes with all the gear to make it run.
Really, I think round walled art galleries have been considered acceptable since Frank Lloyd Wright built Peggy Guggenheim a museum. I don't recall an issue with the paintings and it's one of those buildings you can say is both a visual and functional masterpiece.
My wife and I once debated spending some money on some furniture versus some exterior work on the front of our house. My argument was for the furniture -- sure, the exterior work would make the house much more attractive. But I only see that side when I go in and out the front of the house. I have to sit on the furniture in the house every day.
So why spend the money and make myself miserable with my old furniture just so the neighbors have a fancy facade to look at?
I wonder how often that idea comes up. I've seen amazing buildings on the outside and been totally nonplussed with the interiors. I've been in some buildings that were fugly as hell on the outside, but awesome on the inside.
Nobody is talking about the drubbing SNP took. It looked to me like they were down 40-50% of their seats.
In the states I don't have access to data that shows whether the seats the Tories reclaimed in Scotland were traditional Tory constituencies and they just reverted to traditional voting patterns or whether these were contested seats that could have swung either way.
Someone I know worked for a home improvement product company and was running a marketing project that involved a market research component.
My friend had an ad taken out recruiting customers of Lowe's, Home Depot and Menard's who had bought a similar product in the last year. Pretty standard stuff in marketing.
My friend got a call from a woman who identified herself as "Chief Counsel" for Menard's and demanded to know what the market research project was about, who was behind it. My friend said it was confidential and that they were not at liberty to discuss it. The Menard's counsel said that she was willing to go to court over it and got really mad.
My friend went to their company's lawyers and they said "Just tell her, there's nothing that will hurt the company in her finding out, and Menard's will make a legal issue out of it, even if it only costs them money, we will end up wasting money defending ourselves."
I've heard since then from other people that Menard's is run by some crazy right-wing family that sees conspiracies everywhere.
I swear, every time I come even within an arm's reach of a family run company I see some kind of paranoid, power-mad behavior. They are the worst customers I deal with, always a ton of bad behavior. They almost always seem to have 1-2 non-family members they let halfway into the inner circle and keep on a string to do their dirty work. And tons of secrecy, always worried employees will "find out" about something, usually related to "business expenses" which end up being money shipped out to family members. I caught hell at one when preparing some planning for a project, asking about a group of users/computers that I couldn't pin down in the office -- as it turns out, they were owner family members on the payroll for no-show jobs and the computers/accounts were in place to demonstrate they were indeed employees, and not just a tax deductible way to siphon cash out of the company, which is what they really were.
To the extent that my exposure to electric vehicles is riding in a friend's Model S, I think electric car are great. My concern is where all the extra electricity will come from with mass adoption.
The best figure I've seen is a study by Xcel energy that says with 75% penetration, demand grows by 14%. I don't know if this is a big number or a small number relative to available capacity or if it takes into account peak effects like everybody wanting to charge in a 10 hour window, especially the loading on residential grids which is highest in the peak charging window.
I think when I've seen this it's been "no problem" because of lower overall nighttime loads or some hand-waving with "more rooftop residential solar" and the like, although I don't know how solar helps with nighttime charging without some extra batteries for storage.
When it isn't hostile, it's often wheedling - as you say, negotiation, but the fact is, I was unambiguous, and they're just hoping I can be persuaded.
Why is there so much bargaining when you give an unambiguous "no" response?
I would also argue that men engage in bargaining because it works sometimes (the value of intermittent reinforcement), and it works sometimes because some percentage of the time no DOES become yes.
You can argue that the majority of those nos-that-becomes-yeses happen because men are violent and the women are in fear of their lives, but I don't think that painting all men with that brush is accurate. Some percentage, yes, but not all.
The others have to be covered by the idea that "no" wasn't really firm, and that the no was a kind of negotiating tactic to get more of whatever they wanted out of the guy. My instinct is that most of the time they want some kind of emotional reassurance, but there is probably a fair amount of women who like the ego gratification of seeing how much the guy "really" wants her.
If you repair older appliances and machinery you can see this principle clearly - there's usually a number of easily-replaceable "sacrificial" components that are designed to absorb the majority of normal wear and/or out-of-spec stresses.
Somebody explain this to Mercury Marine. Their raw water pumps usually end up destroying the pump housing, a costly part to replace.
Worse yet, the rubber impeller usually destroys itself after about two seasons (or less) and it's pretty much impossible to replace the impeller without removing the entire pump assembly because Mercury engineers were too lazy to do anything other than make it yet another belt-drive accessory in a nearly inaccessible location.
I've always wondered if all this was just deliberate to drive service revenue or if there was some good reason they couldn't have made the pump shaft driven with an easy to access impeller housing.
If Wikipedia truly was awful in some general way, the idea that somebody got $xxx,xxx severance while the organization kept pleading for money in a very obnoxious way I might be annoyed.
But generally speaking, the content is amazing in its depth and breadth on so many topics for the general reader (and possibly even for people who are in-field experts) and the "fund raising" seems so infrequent that it seems hard to complain.
The very fact that it exists at all with that much good content is pretty astonishing.
If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, I would have to lower the 5 star rating of the entirety of the Internet (content + functionality) by like an entire star due to its loss. At this point, it's literally one of the single highest value sites on the network. No ads, very little obvious bias even on controversial subjects and astonishing breadth and depth of information. For free.
It's so good that I laughed at myself for being annoyed about something missing. I had been watching a fairly awful movie (The Brad Pitt Jesse James movie) and was distracting myself by reading the Wikipedia entries of the real-life people presented in the movie. A bunch of minor historical characters in the movie all have entries, but the woman who owned a farm/rooming house where the gang hid out in later years doesn't have a page. And then I thought to myself, this is a problem? This woman is kind of a foot note to a foot note of history and there's probably near zero primary sources about her, but Wikipedia is so good that you just expect you can drill down into so much minutia and actually read something.
So now malware can simply use an existing install of Chrome and totally mimic an end user in a way that makes it appear they were actually performing some actions.
Now we'll end up with banks or stores refusing to cover theft losses because they will say it passed all of their tests to insure a real user was using the system, so the customer must be lying about their claim of theft.
And of course it will make it much more annoying to use web sites which will have to work all the harder to ensure a kind of Turing test every time you visit a site to make sure you're not some scripted browser.
Your whole premise is flawed anyway. It's not "bargaining" at all, there is no winner or loser in the deal. It's mutual consent to both get what you want. There is no degree of getting what you want, it's all or nothing for both of you. If you have to negotiate how far you get to go, you are doing it wrong.
It is absolutely bargaining -- a mutual consent agreement between two or more parties as to what each party will do for the other.
You are delusional if you think men and women have completely identical interests in a relationship. They may agree in general terms on their interests, but they will assign different preferences for those interests in addition to having at least some interests which the other does not share.
However, enough men are assholes that pretty much every woman has encountered at least a few for who "no means yes". It's this small percentage that spoil it for everyone.
I think that's a two way street. Most women who say no mean no, but enough women say "no" but mean something else (cue the ambiguous signaling) that it only compounds the ambiguous signaling problem and devalues the "no" response.
I have always walked away when told no. And by walked away, I mean literally -- gotten up and left.
"What, you're just leaving?"
"You just said you don't want physical intimacy. That's what I want, and I don't want to stay with you if we won't be physically intimate."
Sometimes they are hostile, I believe angry because they attempted a manipulation which failed and their anger is an attempt to cover this up. I'm never sure about the sadness or crying response, whether it is genuine or manipulative. But what's most interesting is the re-negotiation response. When confronted with a total loss of any bargain, it's amazing how many women are willing to change their terms.
In other words, you should wait for that person to signal that they are open to advances, e.g. by attending a social event.
There's two problems here. Signalling is ambiguous and women generally have an incentive for ambiguous signalling because it provides information asymmetry and an enhanced bargaining position.
As a society, we have far fewer formal social events whose structure is intentionally structured to foster personal relationships -- the few we have left are either mass events, where interpersonal socializing is difficult, or they are structured around alcohol consumption, which has a lot of negative side effects.
Further, most work places are highly gender integrated. We're exposed to members of the opposite sex in a very social environment. Even if better judgement suggests its a bad idea, it's totally unrealistic to expect that intimate relationships won't result from this situation. How many people do you know that met their spouses at work? Even the military, with its strict discipline and rigid rules, has difficulty managing intimate relationships among its members.
I'm not advocating that there should be no rules, either, there should be, but a big goal should be increasing information transparency and reducing ambiguous bargaining. It's difficult to enforce rules of conduct without clear and direct communication rules.
We used to -- not even all that long ago -- have widely accepted social practices for intimate relationships, covering their entire life cycle from introductions, to dating to marriage.
Over a period of time, we began rejecting and changing these practices because it was believed that they were unfair, mostly to women. They had little personal control of their partner assignments, little official control over their role and treatment within relationships, and little to no ability to end these relationships. These are not unfair claims, although I do believe that this system persisted so long because it was more beneficial -- mutually, and externally -- than it was unfair, but its unfairness really can't be underestimated.
Unfortunately, our reforms of this system were less reform and more like abandonment of these rules, and we didn't really replace them with alternative rules to govern intimate relationships. So we're operating largely by a set of ad-hoc impressions -- kind of an unregulated marketplace, where all possible bargains are possible, based merely on the parties inclinations and state of mind.
The parent poster's point is legitimate, but somewhat crassly expressed.
We live in a social sphere with literally centuries of cultural tradition of men initiating intimate relationships with women. This pattern is ingrained and reinforced throughout our culture, and changing it is an evolutionary process that can take decades and more than a generation to evolve. Further, I think there's an evolutionary biology component to it that makes it resistant to change.
It also suffers from what I would call a bargaining imbalance. Usually in a negotiation, the first person to make an offer bargains from a position of weakness -- they expose their bargaining position and expose themselves to rejection. Thus it seems likely that women generally do not want to give up their default bargaining position, further ingraining the default position of men as initiators.
There's also a signaling problem, which is probably the most complex aspect of this. Should signaling be up front and literal, or should it be subtle and ambiguous? Given that women would want to retain their bargaining advantage, they have have an incentive to keep relationship signaling subtle and ambiguous because it provides them with an advantageous information asymmetry. This further weakens potential partner's bargaining ability because they are both unsure of what terms are acceptable *and* unsure if the partner is even receptive to an offer.
The last complication is the icing on the cake, the growth in general promiscuity. As a culture we've become quickly accepting of low-attachment sexual relationships.
So, why is it women get unwanted sexual advances? Men know that there is some possibility that a woman will be willing to engage in low-attachment sexual relationships. Women are ambiguous in their signaling as to their receptiveness to intimate contact. Men have internalized their role as initiators, and also know that since they are bargaining from a position of weakness, they face a high probability of failure. But since they know there is some chance of success generally, they know they have to make a lot of offers in order to achieve successful bargains. Intermittent reinforcement is a very powerful reward mechanism.
In my opinion, women just need to be more vocal in stating their unambiguous disinterest in intimacy. Don't be subtle, it only confuses the person into believing that you are engaging in bargaining somehow.
Silicon Valley may be noodling around the margins, but it's probably less because of the "onerous regulation" than the empty product they peddle not being able to live up to the regulations and cope with the existing complexity.
They're not showing up to a business sector that has been moribund and antiquated for decades, they're showing up to a business sector that has been highly computerized for decades, so in some sense they're competing against their Silicon Valley neighbors, too.
And too much of Silicon Valley "innovation" is just empty bullshit, an appy app, perpetually in beta, and lots of hype. Regulation means following rules, audits to make sure you're doing that and actually delivering something of substance.
I see too many posts on the community web site where an entire block reports nearly every car on the street was opened and rifled for valuables, thefts from multiple garages on the same alley, etc.
More frequent patrols seem very likely to result in at least discouragement of property theft if not outright arrests of people caught in the act. In a residential neighborhood of single family houses, how hard can it be to spot people going down the street and trying car doors? The same is nearly true for daytime burglaries.
While I agree that generally speaking crime is more complicated than more police, if you create a vacuum with essentially NO patrols it becomes apparent where the easy pickings are and that getting caught has very low odds.
My sense is that the police don't even *try* to stop these crimes, they simply ignore "low crime" neighborhoods (where low crime is defined by no crimes of violence). I would think "trying" would be tying at least one patrol car per every couple square miles and making it route through ONLY that neighborhood. They could cover that area several times per shift, making it much more likely that criminal behavior would be spotted. The cops assigned to this area could get to know the resident, the troublemakers and get up on potential trends quickly through relationships with the neighbors.
I think they've just kind of given up on these kinds of crimes, probably around the point that cops were exclusively in cars. As budgets shrank and ghetto crime skyrocketed, they dumped all their resources into the supposed efficiencies of central dispatch and a response-only method.
My entire precinct (many square miles) has MAYBE 4-5 squad cars active on a single night, often tied up with tedious reporting and bureaucracy.
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The problem is the masses will never be "well appraised" of the dangers, and the people who want to decide what "dangers" they should be appraised of will always show bias (too much or not enough danger).
I'm inclined to believe that if people had access to weaker drug formulations, they would generally sort themselves out. Given how objectively dangerous, addictive and widespread alcohol is, it's almost surprising that fewer than 8% of Americans are alcoholics.
I think a world where nobody has problems with substance use is a world that doesn't and won't ever exist. Some people will be harmed, the best you can do is figure out how to reduce harm.
I think the critical thing is the way potency and time-to-trouble interact.
An addictive drug that's low potency still has long-term addiction risks, but it takes a much longer time for it to develop into a serious problem. In this time window, people may quit, lose interest or have some other thing happen that causes them to not use the substance anymore.
It may be low enough potency that even though they are habitual users, they don't really develop any structural deficiencies in their life. Functional addicts, but isn't the functional part what's important?
In the book I read, the description of most opium and morphine addicts of the late 19th/early 20th century seemed to be functional addicts. Some had started taking medicinal opiates for legitimate reasons and became addicted, but most didn't seem to spiral out of control. Opium users tended to be fringe members of society with a whole host of other life risks (exposure to violence, maybe heavy drinking, lack of any medical care, etc) so that opium smoking wasn't really their downfall, it was running with a rough crowd.
I read a fascinating history of opium use in the United States and one of the most surprising thing was that opium smoking remained the primary means of recreational opiate use into the 1920s, which is strange because heroin and morphine were trivially available and outright legal up until 1914.
What I find interesting about this is that it seems like there was kind of a deference to the least possibly risky means of opiate use -- opium smoking. Heroin didn't become the predominant illicit form until the 1920s when raw opium bans and tariffs made it difficult to come by, and the more potent and easily trafficked heroin took its place.
In many ways, the current (over say 10 years) "crisis" in opiate use seems to be fairly similar.
First you had relatively easy to obtain opiate tablets -- oxycodone and hydrocodone, most of which were probably low dosage variants (5-10 mg). Then you had the scare stories, and states began keeping lists to limit doctor shopping, the Feds reviewed prescribing to crack down on pill mills, etc.
Almost like it was predictable, when the pill supply slowed down demand shifted to heroin, and the suppliers responded with more heroin, lowering its price to cheaper than now hard to obtain pills. I'd wager a whole class of recreational pill users who normally wouldn't have moved to heroin based on price and availability.
Then between the Feds cracking down on heroin and market demand, you get a shift to synthetics like Fentanyl. IIRC, Fentanyl is a pure synthetic, not a byproduct of opium, so its made in any old lab and doesn't have the geographic types of supply chain from poppy fields to sellers. The same potency of heroin that would require a truck can now be carried in an envelope in a suit pocket, making it much easier to traffic.
In both the move from smoking opium to heroin and pills to Fentanyl, you have a population that was mostly satisfied with what they had, and what they had was weaker and less dangerous than what replaced it. While still addictive, I'd wager that building a serious addiction is more difficult with a weaker variant that would require frequent dosing. It's also less likely to kill people, especially novices. I don't think anybody who experiments with opium smoking is at risk of overdosing, nor is someone who takes a couple of 5 mg oxy tablets.
Each time the legal pressure is tightened, the supply side seems to have a newer, harder to eradicate, more dangerous and stronger alternative. We'd have been better off leaving it fairly easy to buy a few 5 mg oxy tablets. It still can create a mess, but much less mess than a blast of Fentanyl in the local opiate market.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not fully opposed to unionization of IT workers, more skeptical that the traditional, American blue-collar union template would be attractive or effective at organizing IT labor.
It would be nice if some Scandinavian/German cooperative labor union model could be adopted, but the problem is you'd have to start a new union that operated under different principles than traditional American unions and probably exclude them from participating as well so they wouldn't co-opt the organization into being yet another branch of traditional organized labor.
SAG/AFTRA are interesting case studies because I think they have some similarity to IT in that they deal with a specialized type of labor that doesn't fit into the usual industrial-era types and they have a lot of exposure to project-type work. In some ways the analogy breaks down, though, because it's an arts field and has lots of aspects which aren't shared outside of the arts.
There's just too much anecdotal evidence of government and union inefficiency and corruption. Even if both organizations are cleaner and better run on an at large basis, the perception of unions' and their historical problems of corruption, etc, is enough to make the adoption of trade unionism by IT workers unlikely, especially with the mindset that it's an actual professional meritocracy that doesn't need any kind of collective bargaining.
I agree with you that unions have been a historical good for workers with regard to wages and working conditions, but there are have also been a lot of problems, such as corruption, small scale to Jimmy Hoffa/Organized Crime scale.
I'd also argue that in some ways, unions have also created a legacy of adversarial relationships between workers and management that has led to a tit-for-tat legalistic rigidity in labor relationships, with both workers and management pushing their claims right to the edge of what they think the contracts will allow.
I also think there are cultural challenges. Unions have traditionally represented blue collar industries and IT has traditionally been a white collar enterprise (although there is a bit of pink-collarism, IMHO, in many organizations), and I don't think there's a great working model of white collar unionization in the US. IT in particular is complicated because of its close working relationship with more senior management and in most cases it's relatively small size within an organization.
It's too bad the conventional union system has nearly all the rot and inefficiency of government. It gives it such a bad name that it's easy to see why so many IT workers see it as a turn for the worse.
I think what you say about IT workers deluding themselves into thinking that it's a meritocracy is true, and much of this is just a byproduct of the general growth of IT. As long as it was new and on a path of large-scale growth, it's easy to see how the large demand for bodies and skills translates into "I'm here because I'm good" when the real answer was "they're so desperate".
As IT matures as a sector, the cost pressures become more obvious and the myth of the meritocracy seems to quickly erode.
Curb appeal gets buyers in, but I think the only renovations that actually increase your house's value are kitchens and bathrooms, and in some markets, a basement that has been finished from bare utility to normal living space.
Otherwise, I think the best bang for your buck with regard to exteriors is just basic maintenance -- keeping up the paint and whatever you have for greenery.
I think most real estate agents say that too much personalization or technology works against you. It may be great when new, but its prone to being obsolete when you sell and new buyers may have different tastes or lifestyle choices.
A home theater as you describe it will be considered "neat", but to buyers its a purpose built room with hard to change functionality. Maybe if its less than 3 years old and comes with all the gear to make it run.
Really, I think round walled art galleries have been considered acceptable since Frank Lloyd Wright built Peggy Guggenheim a museum. I don't recall an issue with the paintings and it's one of those buildings you can say is both a visual and functional masterpiece.
My wife and I once debated spending some money on some furniture versus some exterior work on the front of our house. My argument was for the furniture -- sure, the exterior work would make the house much more attractive. But I only see that side when I go in and out the front of the house. I have to sit on the furniture in the house every day.
So why spend the money and make myself miserable with my old furniture just so the neighbors have a fancy facade to look at?
I wonder how often that idea comes up. I've seen amazing buildings on the outside and been totally nonplussed with the interiors. I've been in some buildings that were fugly as hell on the outside, but awesome on the inside.
Nobody is talking about the drubbing SNP took. It looked to me like they were down 40-50% of their seats.
In the states I don't have access to data that shows whether the seats the Tories reclaimed in Scotland were traditional Tory constituencies and they just reverted to traditional voting patterns or whether these were contested seats that could have swung either way.
Someone I know worked for a home improvement product company and was running a marketing project that involved a market research component.
My friend had an ad taken out recruiting customers of Lowe's, Home Depot and Menard's who had bought a similar product in the last year. Pretty standard stuff in marketing.
My friend got a call from a woman who identified herself as "Chief Counsel" for Menard's and demanded to know what the market research project was about, who was behind it. My friend said it was confidential and that they were not at liberty to discuss it. The Menard's counsel said that she was willing to go to court over it and got really mad.
My friend went to their company's lawyers and they said "Just tell her, there's nothing that will hurt the company in her finding out, and Menard's will make a legal issue out of it, even if it only costs them money, we will end up wasting money defending ourselves."
I've heard since then from other people that Menard's is run by some crazy right-wing family that sees conspiracies everywhere.
I swear, every time I come even within an arm's reach of a family run company I see some kind of paranoid, power-mad behavior. They are the worst customers I deal with, always a ton of bad behavior. They almost always seem to have 1-2 non-family members they let halfway into the inner circle and keep on a string to do their dirty work. And tons of secrecy, always worried employees will "find out" about something, usually related to "business expenses" which end up being money shipped out to family members. I caught hell at one when preparing some planning for a project, asking about a group of users/computers that I couldn't pin down in the office -- as it turns out, they were owner family members on the payroll for no-show jobs and the computers/accounts were in place to demonstrate they were indeed employees, and not just a tax deductible way to siphon cash out of the company, which is what they really were.
To the extent that my exposure to electric vehicles is riding in a friend's Model S, I think electric car are great. My concern is where all the extra electricity will come from with mass adoption.
The best figure I've seen is a study by Xcel energy that says with 75% penetration, demand grows by 14%. I don't know if this is a big number or a small number relative to available capacity or if it takes into account peak effects like everybody wanting to charge in a 10 hour window, especially the loading on residential grids which is highest in the peak charging window.
I think when I've seen this it's been "no problem" because of lower overall nighttime loads or some hand-waving with "more rooftop residential solar" and the like, although I don't know how solar helps with nighttime charging without some extra batteries for storage.
I'm still waiting for the compelling part of the application to be realized.
When it isn't hostile, it's often wheedling - as you say, negotiation, but the fact is, I was unambiguous, and they're just hoping I can be persuaded.
Why is there so much bargaining when you give an unambiguous "no" response?
I would also argue that men engage in bargaining because it works sometimes (the value of intermittent reinforcement), and it works sometimes because some percentage of the time no DOES become yes.
You can argue that the majority of those nos-that-becomes-yeses happen because men are violent and the women are in fear of their lives, but I don't think that painting all men with that brush is accurate. Some percentage, yes, but not all.
The others have to be covered by the idea that "no" wasn't really firm, and that the no was a kind of negotiating tactic to get more of whatever they wanted out of the guy. My instinct is that most of the time they want some kind of emotional reassurance, but there is probably a fair amount of women who like the ego gratification of seeing how much the guy "really" wants her.
If you repair older appliances and machinery you can see this principle clearly - there's usually a number of easily-replaceable "sacrificial" components that are designed to absorb the majority of normal wear and/or out-of-spec stresses.
Somebody explain this to Mercury Marine. Their raw water pumps usually end up destroying the pump housing, a costly part to replace.
Worse yet, the rubber impeller usually destroys itself after about two seasons (or less) and it's pretty much impossible to replace the impeller without removing the entire pump assembly because Mercury engineers were too lazy to do anything other than make it yet another belt-drive accessory in a nearly inaccessible location.
I've always wondered if all this was just deliberate to drive service revenue or if there was some good reason they couldn't have made the pump shaft driven with an easy to access impeller housing.
I find it hard to complain about this issue.
If Wikipedia truly was awful in some general way, the idea that somebody got $xxx,xxx severance while the organization kept pleading for money in a very obnoxious way I might be annoyed.
But generally speaking, the content is amazing in its depth and breadth on so many topics for the general reader (and possibly even for people who are in-field experts) and the "fund raising" seems so infrequent that it seems hard to complain.
The very fact that it exists at all with that much good content is pretty astonishing.
If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, I would have to lower the 5 star rating of the entirety of the Internet (content + functionality) by like an entire star due to its loss. At this point, it's literally one of the single highest value sites on the network. No ads, very little obvious bias even on controversial subjects and astonishing breadth and depth of information. For free.
It's so good that I laughed at myself for being annoyed about something missing. I had been watching a fairly awful movie (The Brad Pitt Jesse James movie) and was distracting myself by reading the Wikipedia entries of the real-life people presented in the movie. A bunch of minor historical characters in the movie all have entries, but the woman who owned a farm/rooming house where the gang hid out in later years doesn't have a page. And then I thought to myself, this is a problem? This woman is kind of a foot note to a foot note of history and there's probably near zero primary sources about her, but Wikipedia is so good that you just expect you can drill down into so much minutia and actually read something.
So now malware can simply use an existing install of Chrome and totally mimic an end user in a way that makes it appear they were actually performing some actions.
Now we'll end up with banks or stores refusing to cover theft losses because they will say it passed all of their tests to insure a real user was using the system, so the customer must be lying about their claim of theft.
And of course it will make it much more annoying to use web sites which will have to work all the harder to ensure a kind of Turing test every time you visit a site to make sure you're not some scripted browser.
Your whole premise is flawed anyway. It's not "bargaining" at all, there is no winner or loser in the deal. It's mutual consent to both get what you want. There is no degree of getting what you want, it's all or nothing for both of you. If you have to negotiate how far you get to go, you are doing it wrong.
It is absolutely bargaining -- a mutual consent agreement between two or more parties as to what each party will do for the other.
You are delusional if you think men and women have completely identical interests in a relationship. They may agree in general terms on their interests, but they will assign different preferences for those interests in addition to having at least some interests which the other does not share.
However, enough men are assholes that pretty much every woman has encountered at least a few for who "no means yes". It's this small percentage that spoil it for everyone.
I think that's a two way street. Most women who say no mean no, but enough women say "no" but mean something else (cue the ambiguous signaling) that it only compounds the ambiguous signaling problem and devalues the "no" response.
I have always walked away when told no. And by walked away, I mean literally -- gotten up and left.
"What, you're just leaving?"
"You just said you don't want physical intimacy. That's what I want, and I don't want to stay with you if we won't be physically intimate."
Sometimes they are hostile, I believe angry because they attempted a manipulation which failed and their anger is an attempt to cover this up. I'm never sure about the sadness or crying response, whether it is genuine or manipulative. But what's most interesting is the re-negotiation response. When confronted with a total loss of any bargain, it's amazing how many women are willing to change their terms.
In other words, you should wait for that person to signal that they are open to advances, e.g. by attending a social event.
There's two problems here. Signalling is ambiguous and women generally have an incentive for ambiguous signalling because it provides information asymmetry and an enhanced bargaining position.
As a society, we have far fewer formal social events whose structure is intentionally structured to foster personal relationships -- the few we have left are either mass events, where interpersonal socializing is difficult, or they are structured around alcohol consumption, which has a lot of negative side effects.
Further, most work places are highly gender integrated. We're exposed to members of the opposite sex in a very social environment. Even if better judgement suggests its a bad idea, it's totally unrealistic to expect that intimate relationships won't result from this situation. How many people do you know that met their spouses at work? Even the military, with its strict discipline and rigid rules, has difficulty managing intimate relationships among its members.
I'm not advocating that there should be no rules, either, there should be, but a big goal should be increasing information transparency and reducing ambiguous bargaining. It's difficult to enforce rules of conduct without clear and direct communication rules.
We used to -- not even all that long ago -- have widely accepted social practices for intimate relationships, covering their entire life cycle from introductions, to dating to marriage.
Over a period of time, we began rejecting and changing these practices because it was believed that they were unfair, mostly to women. They had little personal control of their partner assignments, little official control over their role and treatment within relationships, and little to no ability to end these relationships. These are not unfair claims, although I do believe that this system persisted so long because it was more beneficial -- mutually, and externally -- than it was unfair, but its unfairness really can't be underestimated.
Unfortunately, our reforms of this system were less reform and more like abandonment of these rules, and we didn't really replace them with alternative rules to govern intimate relationships. So we're operating largely by a set of ad-hoc impressions -- kind of an unregulated marketplace, where all possible bargains are possible, based merely on the parties inclinations and state of mind.
The parent poster's point is legitimate, but somewhat crassly expressed.
We live in a social sphere with literally centuries of cultural tradition of men initiating intimate relationships with women. This pattern is ingrained and reinforced throughout our culture, and changing it is an evolutionary process that can take decades and more than a generation to evolve. Further, I think there's an evolutionary biology component to it that makes it resistant to change.
It also suffers from what I would call a bargaining imbalance. Usually in a negotiation, the first person to make an offer bargains from a position of weakness -- they expose their bargaining position and expose themselves to rejection. Thus it seems likely that women generally do not want to give up their default bargaining position, further ingraining the default position of men as initiators.
There's also a signaling problem, which is probably the most complex aspect of this. Should signaling be up front and literal, or should it be subtle and ambiguous? Given that women would want to retain their bargaining advantage, they have have an incentive to keep relationship signaling subtle and ambiguous because it provides them with an advantageous information asymmetry. This further weakens potential partner's bargaining ability because they are both unsure of what terms are acceptable *and* unsure if the partner is even receptive to an offer.
The last complication is the icing on the cake, the growth in general promiscuity. As a culture we've become quickly accepting of low-attachment sexual relationships.
So, why is it women get unwanted sexual advances? Men know that there is some possibility that a woman will be willing to engage in low-attachment sexual relationships. Women are ambiguous in their signaling as to their receptiveness to intimate contact. Men have internalized their role as initiators, and also know that since they are bargaining from a position of weakness, they face a high probability of failure. But since they know there is some chance of success generally, they know they have to make a lot of offers in order to achieve successful bargains. Intermittent reinforcement is a very powerful reward mechanism.
In my opinion, women just need to be more vocal in stating their unambiguous disinterest in intimacy. Don't be subtle, it only confuses the person into believing that you are engaging in bargaining somehow.
They want to be a services company and they are using their apps to steer users towards their services.
Ever since iTunes match became a thing, the music app has been sliding and the current pushyness to Apple Music has made it almost unusable.
...doesn't cut it in the realm of health care.
Silicon Valley may be noodling around the margins, but it's probably less because of the "onerous regulation" than the empty product they peddle not being able to live up to the regulations and cope with the existing complexity.
They're not showing up to a business sector that has been moribund and antiquated for decades, they're showing up to a business sector that has been highly computerized for decades, so in some sense they're competing against their Silicon Valley neighbors, too.
And too much of Silicon Valley "innovation" is just empty bullshit, an appy app, perpetually in beta, and lots of hype. Regulation means following rules, audits to make sure you're doing that and actually delivering something of substance.
I see too many posts on the community web site where an entire block reports nearly every car on the street was opened and rifled for valuables, thefts from multiple garages on the same alley, etc.
More frequent patrols seem very likely to result in at least discouragement of property theft if not outright arrests of people caught in the act. In a residential neighborhood of single family houses, how hard can it be to spot people going down the street and trying car doors? The same is nearly true for daytime burglaries.
While I agree that generally speaking crime is more complicated than more police, if you create a vacuum with essentially NO patrols it becomes apparent where the easy pickings are and that getting caught has very low odds.
My sense is that the police don't even *try* to stop these crimes, they simply ignore "low crime" neighborhoods (where low crime is defined by no crimes of violence). I would think "trying" would be tying at least one patrol car per every couple square miles and making it route through ONLY that neighborhood. They could cover that area several times per shift, making it much more likely that criminal behavior would be spotted. The cops assigned to this area could get to know the resident, the troublemakers and get up on potential trends quickly through relationships with the neighbors.
I think they've just kind of given up on these kinds of crimes, probably around the point that cops were exclusively in cars. As budgets shrank and ghetto crime skyrocketed, they dumped all their resources into the supposed efficiencies of central dispatch and a response-only method.
My entire precinct (many square miles) has MAYBE 4-5 squad cars active on a single night, often tied up with tedious reporting and bureaucracy.