Not so much. I spent a bunch of time in Japan, China, and Europe, and the public transit goes useful places and is reasonably fast and clean. It's a matter of priorities, not properties inherent in mass transit.
Yeah, it does happen. It's unpleasant and noisome and it does occur more than it should.
But then the City has become stratified - it's terribly expensive to live there. Public conveniences like bathrooms are surprisingly few and far between. For better or for worse, it's got a large homeless population. And whether or not people like to admit it, that large homeless population is made of humans who need to eat, breathe, and empty themselves just like the rest of us. But there's really nowhere they can do it. There aren't public restrooms, in part bc of the hysteria after Sept 11th when the public restrooms in BART and MUNI were shut down, and partially because other bathrooms are shut to them bc some of the homeless use bathrooms to shoot up or whatnot, making them less safe for the rest of the population. So they poop in the street, and it sucks.
Lest people think this is unique to SF, it's not. It seems to happen in every reasonably warm city in this country, from Savannah GA to a number of Gulf Coast cities to Austin and Dallas and more. And, more and more, it seems to be showing up in the suburbs, as people who have been comfortable up to now lose jobs and become homeless (for whatever reason).
The Valley isn't unique, but because of the scrutiny it receives as an oasis of wealth, it's often a harbinger of what will happen elsewhere in places that don't have the economic power to maintain a small segment of the population while the rest suffers.
And so I kind of have to think that it's not 'The Valley' that's over, it's the economic model that marginalizes people with limited skills while handsomely rewarding people with relatively narrow, specialized skillsets. As much as I love how much freedom and power tech provides, it also accelerates inequality (at least, in its current form) and ensures that non-STEM students are going to scrape by for a living....and not every kid is a STEM learner. IMHO, we as a nation need to start thinking about how we create opportunities and economic security for people who are not going to be university material - that will stem the tide, maybe, if we start realizing that we all need the people who do the thankless jobs. It's gonna be a long, long time until robots can take over, and I'd assume avoid pushing people to the brink of homelessness and beyond just because their job pays so little they can't live within an economically viable distance of their job.
Yup. I've had a couple of MacBook Airs since 2011, and they've been fine small machines. They're not super-powerful, but they're perfectly good editors, and the ergonomics are comfortable. And I don't compile locally much anyhow.....that's what Linux machines are for.
Divas are useful in a perishingly small set of use-cases. The cognitive dissonance is stunning, though - misanthropes who crave laudatory attention, people who complain about being too heavily laden who won't document and won't teach, and (all too often) self-proclaimed senior staff who turn out not to know basics.
I've worked with divas and I've worked with givers/sharers. I'll take the givers and sharers - if you want to document something or teach me and the team, so much the better.
>> As an example, human phone operators seem to have made some what of a comeback because automated voice messaging is unpopular and annoying....for the time being. There are several companies which are doing interactive voice, and it's pretty wonderful how much they've improved the state of the art. It doesn't mean that everything is going to work through IVR going forward but for information gathering and some other basic tasks requiring a small medicum of intelligence - by which I mean workable heuristics - it'll be a good thing.
>> People in the public sector spend the majority of their time coming up with useless ways to justify their existence.
Tell that to cops, firefighters, EMTs, librarians, teachers, accountants, road-repair people, and a host of other people who do useful work on a daily basis that benefits the rest of us.
Yeah, politicians are a PITA. But there are real working humans in the public sector and I'm pretty glad for what they provide.
Kind of sad that you dismiss the desire of women - comprising fifty-plus percent of the human race - to be treated as human beings with equal rights.
That's what feminism is. It's not about diminution of rights for males. It's about trying to ensure that there's a level playing field.
This is not a radical idea....countries which have taken steps to try to address gender imbalances often do better, as witness much of northern Europe. Ditto for treating people of different (in this case, mostly black/brown) morphology as humans. We're in a global economy where the success of a society is tied to the ability of that society to bring the best out of all of its citizens. This is why education, basic respect, tolerance, basic economic equity, et cetera matter....because that's where a society can eke out the incremental increase in performance that will enable it to prosper.
Societies which are highly stratified and winner-take-all can succeed in the short term but tend to devolve away from democracy and towards an encomienda system in which there are a few very rich people and the rest are poor. And don't construe this as my hating capitalism; I don't. I do, however, recognize that unregulated capitalism is a Hobbsian nightmare which ultimately does as much damage to society as any soi-disant communist oligarchy.....some regulation is needed to keep both economic power (business) and political power (government) in check.
But that's a moderate view, so at least the flames will come from both sides:-) .
Sadly, there are a lot of knuckleheads who actively deny the social contract. It's destroying the US, too - we're not taking care of people whose jobs have been outsourced. We've passively acquiesced to letting corporate entities to ship jobs elsewhere and perform labor arbitrage, resulting in privatized profit and socialized costs....the increased profits are taken by corporate entities, and the costs are borne by US citizens paying taxes to help our fellow citizens.
Drones, drones, drones. Mining can be done by drones. I have no idea exactly what will be worth mining, but presumably there is some commodity that will make it worthwhile, at least after the tax breaks:-)
Dinosaurs weren't wiped out entirely - we still have birds, which are their descendants. And hopefully humans will be better at showing foresight and preparing in the face of imminent disaster (assuming, of course, that it's known about).
You need to make the distinction between bacterial and viral infections.
Appendicitis is (usually) bacterial, and as such can (to some extent) be treated with antibiotics (which really should be called antibacterials).
The common cold is viral - hence the name 'rhinovirus' for a cold - as is flu, and there are very few if any effective antiviral agents of any type. If there were, we'd have mastered the common cold already, let alone other things.
This is one of those McGuffin scenarios which has been around since time immemorial - how to get enough water to Mars to thicken the atmosphere. In Larry Niven's universe, asteroid miners find ice in the asteroid belt and bring it to Mars and Earth; in Bruce Sterling's universes, drones do much the same. I'm voting for drones to do that - use some ice as reaction mass and basically tumble the rest of the stuff into Mars below the poles and above the equator. Enough of that and *something* will happen.....although it's going to take a LOT of asteroid ice to make it even remotely habitable. The science fiction trope is that terraforming is quick, but it isn't - moving the quantities of ice mass needed from the asteroid belt to Mars is a not inconsiderable problem.
I think that a lot of what happened - which is to say, the fake accounts and such - stem less from malfeasance on FB's part than on sheer institutional inability to deal with scaling. They have scaled up hard and fast in the last several years, and despite having excellent technical staff (I worked for a business supplying some), the business (which is to say, Zuckerberg and the rest of the upper management team) has not really understood the scope of what they were trying to do. Keeping the site online and functional has sucked up a surprising number of cycles, and that left a lot fewer cycles for governance or review behavior.
Hopefully, as they get their config management under control, they'll have cycles to deal with various bad actors. But it's going to take a cultural shift both inside FB (mgt team and memes to the devops staff) and users. I'm curious to see if any of the attempts will work or if it'll become MySpace n, where n is a large number.
Sadly, this is true only to the extent that the source of fire from the AK can be rapidly identified. When it's hard to identify (or bursts are fired and then the shooter stops), it's far more difficult for even the most powerful of weapons to ID a valid target. This is (essentially) the same problem as the situation presented to police during the recent Vegas shootings - it was night, it wasn't clear where the fire was coming from for a while.
From a merchant perspective, long transaction times resulting from a reduction in hashing power and such is a bit scary; it means that your customers' transactions might time out before completing.
Huh. $10k in? That's surprisingly low. I would have expected the cost in to be closer to what hedge funds want for buy-in, which is typically $500k minimum (and more than that for some of them).
Slashdot Mirror
And the market's down 700 points since the orange horror in the White House picked a trade war his banker- and business-buddies don't want.
....and the market dropped 700 points. If Trump's headed for another bankruptcy, he wants to take us all with him.
Not so much. I spent a bunch of time in Japan, China, and Europe, and the public transit goes useful places and is reasonably fast and clean.
It's a matter of priorities, not properties inherent in mass transit.
Yeah, it does happen. It's unpleasant and noisome and it does occur more than it should.
But then the City has become stratified - it's terribly expensive to live there.
Public conveniences like bathrooms are surprisingly few and far between.
For better or for worse, it's got a large homeless population.
And whether or not people like to admit it, that large homeless population is made of humans who need to eat, breathe, and empty themselves just like the rest of us.
But there's really nowhere they can do it.
There aren't public restrooms, in part bc of the hysteria after Sept 11th when the public restrooms in BART and MUNI were shut down, and partially because other bathrooms are shut to them bc some of the homeless use bathrooms to shoot up or whatnot, making them less safe for the rest of the population.
So they poop in the street, and it sucks.
Lest people think this is unique to SF, it's not. It seems to happen in every reasonably warm city in this country, from Savannah GA to a number of Gulf Coast cities to Austin and Dallas and more. And, more and more, it seems to be showing up in the suburbs, as people who have been comfortable up to now lose jobs and become homeless (for whatever reason).
The Valley isn't unique, but because of the scrutiny it receives as an oasis of wealth, it's often a harbinger of what will happen elsewhere in places that don't have the economic power to maintain a small segment of the population while the rest suffers.
And so I kind of have to think that it's not 'The Valley' that's over, it's the economic model that marginalizes people with limited skills while handsomely rewarding people with relatively narrow, specialized skillsets. As much as I love how much freedom and power tech provides, it also accelerates inequality (at least, in its current form) and ensures that non-STEM students are going to scrape by for a living....and not every kid is a STEM learner.
IMHO, we as a nation need to start thinking about how we create opportunities and economic security for people who are not going to be university material - that will stem the tide, maybe, if we start realizing that we all need the people who do the thankless jobs. It's gonna be a long, long time until robots can take over, and I'd assume avoid pushing people to the brink of homelessness and beyond just because their job pays so little they can't live within an economically viable distance of their job.
Not will be, is.
People are already shooting at the tech buses...
Even insufferable engineers don't deserve that.
Yup. I've had a couple of MacBook Airs since 2011, and they've been fine small machines. They're not super-powerful, but they're perfectly good editors, and the ergonomics are comfortable. And I don't compile locally much anyhow.....that's what Linux machines are for.
Divas are useful in a perishingly small set of use-cases. The cognitive dissonance is stunning, though - misanthropes who crave laudatory attention, people who complain about being too heavily laden who won't document and won't teach, and (all too often) self-proclaimed senior staff who turn out not to know basics.
I've worked with divas and I've worked with givers/sharers. I'll take the givers and sharers - if you want to document something or teach me and the team, so much the better.
>> As an example, human phone operators seem to have made some what of a comeback because automated voice messaging is unpopular and annoying. ...for the time being. There are several companies which are doing interactive voice, and it's pretty wonderful how much they've improved the state of the art. It doesn't mean that everything is going to work through IVR going forward but for information gathering and some other basic tasks requiring a small medicum of intelligence - by which I mean workable heuristics - it'll be a good thing.
>> People in the public sector spend the majority of their time coming up with useless ways to justify their existence.
Tell that to cops, firefighters, EMTs, librarians, teachers, accountants, road-repair people, and a host of other people who do useful work on a daily basis that benefits the rest of us.
Yeah, politicians are a PITA. But there are real working humans in the public sector and I'm pretty glad for what they provide.
^^ What Midnight Thunder said.
Kind of sad that you dismiss the desire of women - comprising fifty-plus percent of the human race - to be treated as human beings with equal rights.
That's what feminism is. It's not about diminution of rights for males. It's about trying to ensure that there's a level playing field.
This is not a radical idea....countries which have taken steps to try to address gender imbalances often do better, as witness much of northern Europe. Ditto for treating people of different (in this case, mostly black/brown) morphology as humans. We're in a global economy where the success of a society is tied to the ability of that society to bring the best out of all of its citizens. This is why education, basic respect, tolerance, basic economic equity, et cetera matter....because that's where a society can eke out the incremental increase in performance that will enable it to prosper.
Societies which are highly stratified and winner-take-all can succeed in the short term but tend to devolve away from democracy and towards an encomienda system in which there are a few very rich people and the rest are poor. And don't construe this as my hating capitalism; I don't. I do, however, recognize that unregulated capitalism is a Hobbsian nightmare which ultimately does as much damage to society as any soi-disant communist oligarchy.....some regulation is needed to keep both economic power (business) and political power (government) in check.
But that's a moderate view, so at least the flames will come from both sides :-) .
Sadly, there are a lot of knuckleheads who actively deny the social contract. It's destroying the US, too - we're not taking care of people whose jobs have been outsourced. We've passively acquiesced to letting corporate entities to ship jobs elsewhere and perform labor arbitrage, resulting in privatized profit and socialized costs....the increased profits are taken by corporate entities, and the costs are borne by US citizens paying taxes to help our fellow citizens.
Drones, drones, drones. Mining can be done by drones. I have no idea exactly what will be worth mining, but presumably there is some commodity that will make it worthwhile, at least after the tax breaks :-)
Dinosaurs weren't wiped out entirely - we still have birds, which are their descendants.
And hopefully humans will be better at showing foresight and preparing in the face of imminent disaster (assuming, of course, that it's known about).
If only a novelist had written a book where people lived underground in sealed caves for five thousand years as a thought experiment.....
Oh, wait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You need to make the distinction between bacterial and viral infections.
Appendicitis is (usually) bacterial, and as such can (to some extent) be treated with antibiotics (which really should be called antibacterials).
The common cold is viral - hence the name 'rhinovirus' for a cold - as is flu, and there are very few if any effective antiviral agents of any type. If there were, we'd have mastered the common cold already, let alone other things.
This is one of those McGuffin scenarios which has been around since time immemorial - how to get enough water to Mars to thicken the atmosphere. In Larry Niven's universe, asteroid miners find ice in the asteroid belt and bring it to Mars and Earth; in Bruce Sterling's universes, drones do much the same. I'm voting for drones to do that - use some ice as reaction mass and basically tumble the rest of the stuff into Mars below the poles and above the equator. Enough of that and *something* will happen.....although it's going to take a LOT of asteroid ice to make it even remotely habitable. The science fiction trope is that terraforming is quick, but it isn't - moving the quantities of ice mass needed from the asteroid belt to Mars is a not inconsiderable problem.
I think that a lot of what happened - which is to say, the fake accounts and such - stem less from malfeasance on FB's part than on sheer institutional inability to deal with scaling. They have scaled up hard and fast in the last several years, and despite having excellent technical staff (I worked for a business supplying some), the business (which is to say, Zuckerberg and the rest of the upper management team) has not really understood the scope of what they were trying to do. Keeping the site online and functional has sucked up a surprising number of cycles, and that left a lot fewer cycles for governance or review behavior.
Hopefully, as they get their config management under control, they'll have cycles to deal with various bad actors. But it's going to take a cultural shift both inside FB (mgt team and memes to the devops staff) and users. I'm curious to see if any of the attempts will work or if it'll become MySpace n, where n is a large number.
One-person-one-vote, no dilution by the EC. Makes sense to me.
s/projections/protections/
Otherwise well said.
Sadly, this is true only to the extent that the source of fire from the AK can be rapidly identified. When it's hard to identify (or bursts are fired and then the shooter stops), it's far more difficult for even the most powerful of weapons to ID a valid target. This is (essentially) the same problem as the situation presented to police during the recent Vegas shootings - it was night, it wasn't clear where the fire was coming from for a while.
I think it's still considered a munition under ITAR. At least the trainings that I've attended re ITAR seem to think so.
But...but....my IPv6 addresses! They're 128 bits! We will run out of internetses numbers! ;)
From a merchant perspective, long transaction times resulting from a reduction in hashing power and such is a bit scary; it means that your customers' transactions might time out before completing.
Huh. $10k in? That's surprisingly low. I would have expected the cost in to be closer to what hedge funds want for buy-in, which is typically $500k minimum (and more than that for some of them).