No, processes that are broken and unsustainable are failures. If there's no money in it, nobody wants to take your recyclables, which lead to the closure of every consumer-facing recycling center in my city of over 100k residents. So what do you do with the tons of bottles, cans, and paper that nobody wants to pay you for? You dump it in the landfill, burn it, or truck it to increasingly distant drop off points, which drives profitability even lower. This shit doesn't get recycled on good intentions and unicorn farts alone. There are major costs involved with processing and transporting it, and this state is running out of money to fund such activities.
Except that its a failure. Recycling centers are shutting down because there is no profit in it anymore, and the deposits aren't bringing in enough money to keep it all running long term.
State of California charges you a deposit for every bottle and can, and it really adds up. You don't get that money back when you throw it in the WM bins, so I have to take bags of aluminum and plastic to a facility 12 miles away (since all the local ones went out of business, and no I don't live in the sticks) just to get some of my money back. If it weren't for the fact I'd be throwing money away, the only thing I'd ever consider recycling is the aluminum, since it is actually less energy intensive to recycle it than to produce new. If the state ever gets rid of these ridiculous deposit prices, you can pretty much kiss recycling goodbye.
My water bill is just as bad. Half of it is fees that you pay even if you turn off the valve at the street and never use it. We tore out our lawns and went low water landscape, cutting our usage in half. Our bill went down by around 25%. Then they jacked up the prices the next year because people were using less water, so it's steadily creeping back up to where it originally was.
Well, was Dodge open about what they were doing and why? Or did it take a lot of digging after people wondered why their cars felt a decrease in performance before Dodge owned up to the fact that they gimped everyone's engine below the advertised specs without announcement? To me, it's less the act of doing what was done and more the total lack of information and transparency regarding it. Keeping something like this hidden just reeks of ill intent. If they came out and said "We're worried about blowing up your engines so here's what we're doing...", that's completely acceptable. Apple was not that forthcoming.
It's less about the technical facts and more about the intent. Did they truly slow these phones down for the sole intent of managing aging batteries, or did they do it knowing full well that it may discourage users of these phones enough that they would then see purchasing a new phone as the best course of action? If you cripple working phones in order to drive sales, is that not something you would want the government to investigate? Imagine if you had an older car and the manufacturer, without your knowledge or consent, dropped the performance of the engine down to a level that caused it to be sluggish and aggravating to drive. Would you not have a problem with this, no matter what reason they coughed up when pressured for an explanation?
I just signed up for their Spectrum service, was promised to receive 100 Mbps, but have consistently gotten less than 40 Mbps since day one.
Did they promise 100Mbps, or "up to 100Mbps"? That's always been their game. "We'll give you 'up to' the advertised speed, but that includes anything down to and including zero". On a side note, have them come out and check your wire. I'm about to call them again to have them replace the line from the pole for the third time. They just can't hang those things to save their lives, and two of them have broken at the anchor point on my eaves. This third one they ran directly through a bushy tree, and the wind is tearing it up.
Starting salaries for college grads may be higher, but what is the average starting salary for someone fresh out of school, with no prior work history? "College grad" is a large, vague group of people that includes new graduates all the way up to (and beyond?) retirement age. How many of these fresh grads are severely underemployed for the first few years after they get their degree, and don't actually start making a decent amount until later? I bet you can walk into any Starbucks, throw a stick, and hit someone with a degree. I actually work with a person right now who is finishing up a masters, but can't get a job in their field and worked at Starbucks prior to joining up with us doing gopher work.
My situation was not a tragedy, nor extreme. I started work right out of high school, and spent the next 8 years realizing I didn't what to do what I was doing anymore. It gave me the motivation to do well in school, and gave me a goal. I also didn't know what I wanted to do as a career until I knew what I didn't want to do. It was tiring, with long nights, but I had fun and it felt like an accomplishment to pull it off with a 4.0gpa. I believe everyone should work while they go to school. Colleges can't teach you how to function within a business organization. They don't teach you people skills, office politics, what not to say to the boss even when he's wrong, how to make your measly paycheck last until the next one and beyond, etc. Living in the bubble that is college, and then being thrown to the wolves as soon as you're done, has got to be a terrifying experience. It benefited me greatly to experience all the crap that goes along with employment in a job that I was all to happy to be leaving.
College education is hugely important for living well in this day and age. Asking adults to start working to pay for their college is a great lesson in life: nothing is actually free. You set them up with a 4 year 'free' ride, then expect them to be instantly successful living in this big scary world afterwards is just setting them up for failure, especially since they're leaving the gates with a massive debt load. If you want to make an argument, it should be 'college should be cheaper', which I won't disagree with. "College should be 'free', except not really and by the way good luck kid" is not a great system for positive outcome.
They don't have a job yet (that's why they go to college)
I had a full time job for 6 years before I went back to school, and continued to work full time while going to school at night. Employment and education are not mutually exclusive. Between my employer's education benefits and tax breaks, school cost me little more than time and effort. I think those who live completely off of loans for 4 years, and then expect to find immediate employment above what they could have been doing all along, are foolish.
I think it's fair to say that California has a well maintained road network for its size,
The interstates are generally well maintained. The freeways in and around the LA/OC area are a fucking travesty. Potholes everywhere. Some roads are crumbling and coming apart in chunks. They only fix the worst of the worst, and it takes them several years to get to it. I work in the north SFV area, and I've only seen them repave 4 streets in the ~5 miles around my office in the last decade, and only just recently. Meanwhile, the freeways are constantly "under construction" but you rarely see them working on them, even late at night. They like to start 15 projects, tear everything to shit, then spend the next 6 years slowly putting one of them back together. For such a car-centric metro area, our roads are in a totally unacceptable level of disrepair. This isn't New Hampshire, this is Car City USA. Fix the fucking roads. And don't even get me started on the sidewalks.
Either companies are honeypotting Bittorrent emissions themselves, which would be entrapment
Honeypots are not entrapment. They have not forced or coerced you into doing something you weren't setting out to do anyway. I believe the concept of entrapment can only be applied to law enforcement entities, as well.
The electoral college prevents politicians for completely ignoring 90% of the country and focusing only on the few really big cities.
Unfortunately, in states like California (where I reside), the electoral college system completely nullifies the votes of those outside the big cities. If you look at the voting results by county, the major metro areas (SF, LA, SD) vote severely Democrat. The further north you head, and away from the coast, the vote tends to learn more Republican. California is a huge state, but most of the population is concentrated on the coastal areas of the lower half. If you vote Republican in California, your vote simply does not count with the current system. Going to a popular vote would at least give those who live outside the big cities SOME voice. As it is, you might as well throw your presidential vote in the round file.
It's not so much the number of people we've sent up there, but the huge number of scientific and technological advances we've made because of our efforts to get there. Human spaceflight is obviously not comparable in every day utility to hyperloop, but if we had the "It's too hard/expensive, why bother" mindset, look at all the things we'd be missing. Even if hyperloop flops spectacularly, we're bound to learn something along the way that benefits humanity somehow.
Most schools offer shit degrees, and shit people take shit degrees. Then they end up with a shit load of debt and a shitty life. It's the cycle of shit.The problem is that we loan them our money, so they can be stupid shits and continue the cycle of shit. This shit needs to stop.
What we need is shithawks to cull these shitrats, before the shithurricane buries us all in a shitslide. You hear that, Bobandy? A SHITSLIDE.
I use hydrogen peroxide to kill algae in my aquariums. It's absolute murder on some of the toughest algae that's almost impossible to get rid of otherwise. For them to say that dumping in a load of HP actually caused the algae doesn't pass the sniff test for me. Also, algae needs nutrients to survive and grow. If that pool turned green overnight, a lack of chlorine wasn't the only problem going on.
What is more important is verifying that no-one is running the red light when you enter the intersection.
This. I almost got killed last year when some idiot blew through a red that had been red long enough for two other stopped cars to clear the intersection after mine turned green, plus about 2 seconds. People just can't be bothered to obey traffic lights anymore, and the last thing we need is more people darting out the instant they see green. There's already that special breed of driver who inches half way out into the intersection when they think it's about to turn.. where's the fire son?
I've only pre-purchased one game in recent memory, and that's only because I was able to play it in open beta before release. The game was about as rock solid as you could get for a new release, barring a few balance issues. More publishers need to offer public betas or demos, if only to assure potential players that they won't regret their purchase.
In the area where I work, there are quite a few homeless people. I've seen one guy out here for 9 years now. He isn't homeless because of some financial disaster. He is homeless because he clearly has a disease of the brain. He spends quite a lot of his time locked in combat with somebody in the sky. I don't think giving him $1,000 or $1,000,000 would keep him off the streets for long, if at all. What he really needs to get him indoors is treatment for his disease, but as is the case with many people with his type of affliction, he'll probably be back out here sooner or later.
"Homelessness" isn't always somebody without a home who wants one. It's a problem you can't just throw money at to make it go away. You can't just give all of these people jobs and consider the problem solved. It needs to be treated as a symptom of a disease, and one that usually cannot be permanently cured. Even if you could cure it, they are still human beings who deserve to have their wishes respected, and if they refuse treatment you cannot just force it upon them. Some people make the choice to live out there, because it's easier to cope with their disease this way. The next time you see a homeless person, please don't look down on them like some dirty bum pushing a stolen cart full of blankets and trash; they're probably suffering far more than you'll ever know, and it's most likely not at all their fault that they're in that state.
Slashdot Mirror
No, processes that are broken and unsustainable are failures. If there's no money in it, nobody wants to take your recyclables, which lead to the closure of every consumer-facing recycling center in my city of over 100k residents. So what do you do with the tons of bottles, cans, and paper that nobody wants to pay you for? You dump it in the landfill, burn it, or truck it to increasingly distant drop off points, which drives profitability even lower. This shit doesn't get recycled on good intentions and unicorn farts alone. There are major costs involved with processing and transporting it, and this state is running out of money to fund such activities.
Except that its a failure. Recycling centers are shutting down because there is no profit in it anymore, and the deposits aren't bringing in enough money to keep it all running long term.
State of California charges you a deposit for every bottle and can, and it really adds up. You don't get that money back when you throw it in the WM bins, so I have to take bags of aluminum and plastic to a facility 12 miles away (since all the local ones went out of business, and no I don't live in the sticks) just to get some of my money back. If it weren't for the fact I'd be throwing money away, the only thing I'd ever consider recycling is the aluminum, since it is actually less energy intensive to recycle it than to produce new. If the state ever gets rid of these ridiculous deposit prices, you can pretty much kiss recycling goodbye.
My water bill is just as bad. Half of it is fees that you pay even if you turn off the valve at the street and never use it. We tore out our lawns and went low water landscape, cutting our usage in half. Our bill went down by around 25%. Then they jacked up the prices the next year because people were using less water, so it's steadily creeping back up to where it originally was.
Well, was Dodge open about what they were doing and why? Or did it take a lot of digging after people wondered why their cars felt a decrease in performance before Dodge owned up to the fact that they gimped everyone's engine below the advertised specs without announcement? To me, it's less the act of doing what was done and more the total lack of information and transparency regarding it. Keeping something like this hidden just reeks of ill intent. If they came out and said "We're worried about blowing up your engines so here's what we're doing...", that's completely acceptable. Apple was not that forthcoming.
It's less about the technical facts and more about the intent. Did they truly slow these phones down for the sole intent of managing aging batteries, or did they do it knowing full well that it may discourage users of these phones enough that they would then see purchasing a new phone as the best course of action? If you cripple working phones in order to drive sales, is that not something you would want the government to investigate? Imagine if you had an older car and the manufacturer, without your knowledge or consent, dropped the performance of the engine down to a level that caused it to be sluggish and aggravating to drive. Would you not have a problem with this, no matter what reason they coughed up when pressured for an explanation?
motorcycles (which can likely never be self-driving)
BMW, Honda, and Yamaha have already built them. The future is here, and it looks boring as hell.
I just signed up for their Spectrum service, was promised to receive 100 Mbps, but have consistently gotten less than 40 Mbps since day one.
Did they promise 100Mbps, or "up to 100Mbps"? That's always been their game. "We'll give you 'up to' the advertised speed, but that includes anything down to and including zero". On a side note, have them come out and check your wire. I'm about to call them again to have them replace the line from the pole for the third time. They just can't hang those things to save their lives, and two of them have broken at the anchor point on my eaves. This third one they ran directly through a bushy tree, and the wind is tearing it up.
Starting salaries for college grads may be higher, but what is the average starting salary for someone fresh out of school, with no prior work history? "College grad" is a large, vague group of people that includes new graduates all the way up to (and beyond?) retirement age. How many of these fresh grads are severely underemployed for the first few years after they get their degree, and don't actually start making a decent amount until later? I bet you can walk into any Starbucks, throw a stick, and hit someone with a degree. I actually work with a person right now who is finishing up a masters, but can't get a job in their field and worked at Starbucks prior to joining up with us doing gopher work.
My situation was not a tragedy, nor extreme. I started work right out of high school, and spent the next 8 years realizing I didn't what to do what I was doing anymore. It gave me the motivation to do well in school, and gave me a goal. I also didn't know what I wanted to do as a career until I knew what I didn't want to do. It was tiring, with long nights, but I had fun and it felt like an accomplishment to pull it off with a 4.0gpa. I believe everyone should work while they go to school. Colleges can't teach you how to function within a business organization. They don't teach you people skills, office politics, what not to say to the boss even when he's wrong, how to make your measly paycheck last until the next one and beyond, etc. Living in the bubble that is college, and then being thrown to the wolves as soon as you're done, has got to be a terrifying experience. It benefited me greatly to experience all the crap that goes along with employment in a job that I was all to happy to be leaving.
College education is hugely important for living well in this day and age. Asking adults to start working to pay for their college is a great lesson in life: nothing is actually free. You set them up with a 4 year 'free' ride, then expect them to be instantly successful living in this big scary world afterwards is just setting them up for failure, especially since they're leaving the gates with a massive debt load. If you want to make an argument, it should be 'college should be cheaper', which I won't disagree with. "College should be 'free', except not really and by the way good luck kid" is not a great system for positive outcome.
They don't have a job yet (that's why they go to college)
I had a full time job for 6 years before I went back to school, and continued to work full time while going to school at night. Employment and education are not mutually exclusive. Between my employer's education benefits and tax breaks, school cost me little more than time and effort. I think those who live completely off of loans for 4 years, and then expect to find immediate employment above what they could have been doing all along, are foolish.
I think it's fair to say that California has a well maintained road network for its size,
The interstates are generally well maintained. The freeways in and around the LA/OC area are a fucking travesty. Potholes everywhere. Some roads are crumbling and coming apart in chunks. They only fix the worst of the worst, and it takes them several years to get to it. I work in the north SFV area, and I've only seen them repave 4 streets in the ~5 miles around my office in the last decade, and only just recently. Meanwhile, the freeways are constantly "under construction" but you rarely see them working on them, even late at night. They like to start 15 projects, tear everything to shit, then spend the next 6 years slowly putting one of them back together. For such a car-centric metro area, our roads are in a totally unacceptable level of disrepair. This isn't New Hampshire, this is Car City USA. Fix the fucking roads. And don't even get me started on the sidewalks.
Welcome to California. Sucks to your assmar, and sucks to your constituion!
California: Oh boy, here I go banning shit again!
. It worked great, but the $200 'tincture' was basically just alcohol with some herbs and shit in it.
It was more likely just a $200 bottle of alcohol. Past a certain point, no molecules of the original substance should be present in the dilution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Either companies are honeypotting Bittorrent emissions themselves, which would be entrapment
Honeypots are not entrapment. They have not forced or coerced you into doing something you weren't setting out to do anyway. I believe the concept of entrapment can only be applied to law enforcement entities, as well.
The electoral college prevents politicians for completely ignoring 90% of the country and focusing only on the few really big cities.
Unfortunately, in states like California (where I reside), the electoral college system completely nullifies the votes of those outside the big cities. If you look at the voting results by county, the major metro areas (SF, LA, SD) vote severely Democrat. The further north you head, and away from the coast, the vote tends to learn more Republican. California is a huge state, but most of the population is concentrated on the coastal areas of the lower half. If you vote Republican in California, your vote simply does not count with the current system. Going to a popular vote would at least give those who live outside the big cities SOME voice. As it is, you might as well throw your presidential vote in the round file.
It's not so much the number of people we've sent up there, but the huge number of scientific and technological advances we've made because of our efforts to get there. Human spaceflight is obviously not comparable in every day utility to hyperloop, but if we had the "It's too hard/expensive, why bother" mindset, look at all the things we'd be missing. Even if hyperloop flops spectacularly, we're bound to learn something along the way that benefits humanity somehow.
The whole thing is unpractical, unproven, dependant on technology that does not exist
Sounds an awful lot like the manned spaced flight program. Should we have just stuck to flapping our arms and staring longingly at the moon as well?
That sounds like something Hitler would have said.
What, the free coasters? Those things saved the finish on many a desk, back in my day. They were also crazy fun to throw in the microwave.
Most schools offer shit degrees, and shit people take shit degrees. Then they end up with a shit load of debt and a shitty life. It's the cycle of shit.The problem is that we loan them our money, so they can be stupid shits and continue the cycle of shit. This shit needs to stop.
What we need is shithawks to cull these shitrats, before the shithurricane buries us all in a shitslide. You hear that, Bobandy? A SHITSLIDE.
I use hydrogen peroxide to kill algae in my aquariums. It's absolute murder on some of the toughest algae that's almost impossible to get rid of otherwise. For them to say that dumping in a load of HP actually caused the algae doesn't pass the sniff test for me. Also, algae needs nutrients to survive and grow. If that pool turned green overnight, a lack of chlorine wasn't the only problem going on.
What is more important is verifying that no-one is running the red light when you enter the intersection.
This. I almost got killed last year when some idiot blew through a red that had been red long enough for two other stopped cars to clear the intersection after mine turned green, plus about 2 seconds. People just can't be bothered to obey traffic lights anymore, and the last thing we need is more people darting out the instant they see green. There's already that special breed of driver who inches half way out into the intersection when they think it's about to turn.. where's the fire son?
I've only pre-purchased one game in recent memory, and that's only because I was able to play it in open beta before release. The game was about as rock solid as you could get for a new release, barring a few balance issues. More publishers need to offer public betas or demos, if only to assure potential players that they won't regret their purchase.
In the area where I work, there are quite a few homeless people. I've seen one guy out here for 9 years now. He isn't homeless because of some financial disaster. He is homeless because he clearly has a disease of the brain. He spends quite a lot of his time locked in combat with somebody in the sky. I don't think giving him $1,000 or $1,000,000 would keep him off the streets for long, if at all. What he really needs to get him indoors is treatment for his disease, but as is the case with many people with his type of affliction, he'll probably be back out here sooner or later.
"Homelessness" isn't always somebody without a home who wants one. It's a problem you can't just throw money at to make it go away. You can't just give all of these people jobs and consider the problem solved. It needs to be treated as a symptom of a disease, and one that usually cannot be permanently cured. Even if you could cure it, they are still human beings who deserve to have their wishes respected, and if they refuse treatment you cannot just force it upon them. Some people make the choice to live out there, because it's easier to cope with their disease this way. The next time you see a homeless person, please don't look down on them like some dirty bum pushing a stolen cart full of blankets and trash; they're probably suffering far more than you'll ever know, and it's most likely not at all their fault that they're in that state.