"It's only 2-4 inches! I drive in that all the time!" - No you don't. You drive on roads that are prepared CONSTANTLY with salt and gravel, using 4 wheel drive, snow tires or chains. Snow in Atlanta almost immediately melts when it hits the pavement and then turns to ice from the air temperature. ICE people. It's not snow it's ICE.
Yes, we do. Those same air temperatures and conditions occur where I live (Colorado). We call the worst of it - when exhaust and road dirt is mixed in - Black Ice and it is especially dangerous because it can look just like asphalt.
Nobody around here uses chains except semis-crossing mountain passes, or in the most extreme blizzards (like the century storm we had in 2003). We use front-wheel drive and all season tires, and complain about the idiots who immigrate here from California and think 4-wheel drive makes them immune to the laws of physics.
"Southerners can't drive on snow!" - Actually, we don't have experience driving on snow and that would hold true if it were only southerners driving here.
So by your logic, at least two thirds of the people on the roads don't know how to drive in snow. Clearly you don't get the recurrent practice in it that we do around here, but since it does snow there at least a little each year, you should still be prepared for it. The aforementioned front-wheel drive and all weather tires are a good place to start, plus maybe a survival kit, a decent jacket, and sensible shoes. Weather warnings exist for a reason.
So in short, while I empathize with the people who had harrowing experiences, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who were apparently so drastically unprepared. And I scorn the elected officials who failed your city (cue "Arrow") in the interest of saving money.
On the other hand, if they pay the artist a tenth of a cent per minute played, using your formulas I calculate a subscription cost of $14.61 per month. The service then has a million in revenue for every 68,000 subscribers. Whether that's enough to pay the overhead is left as an exercise for the MBAs.
At that pay rate, if the artist can get 50,000 people to listen to 60 minutes of their music each month (i.e. a long album's worth) they can pull in over $30,000 just from the one streaming site.
Seems to me that there is money to be made for both the artist and the middleman.
You make some interesting points. I live in Colorado, and sadly we are near the bottom in per student spending, at just over $9,000 per year.
I ran the numbers using your breakdowns as a starting point and some quick Googling for local values. Our average teacher is paid $41k, so I used that as a baseline for the security and janitorial staff. Office space around here seems to go for about $21 per square foot. I added in a line item for bus transportation (although our district has recently made that into a direct fee to the students who ride the bus).
I get just under $3000 per student to cover the hard-to-define values for classroom materials, special education, and administrative overhead. That doesn't seem way out of line.
On the other hand, I've seen how hard our teachers and principals struggle with the budgets they have (not to mention the strangling layers of regulation) and I'm confident they are not the problem. And yet our voters decided once again not to increase funding for schools.
I don't understand what people prioritize ahead of education.
Because one of them is a Theory, supported by reams of evidence, but still falsifiable, and the other is a religious dogma without any substantial evidence, no predictive capabilities, and no way to test it. There really is no comparison. The only controversy is cooked up by one side as a plea for attention.
I live there, you insensitive clod! And so does everyone I see on a daily basis. Not everyone lives in the continuous urban sprawl of BosNyWash.
How many people does it take to exceed your threshold of "nobody"?
What would this proof you are waiting for look like? Perhaps a strong consensus among the experts in the field, since they are the ones who have actually studied the data? That data includes things like glacier core samples and tree rings which go back considerably further than 300 years.
Writing is not a particularly lucrative profession. Unless you are someone like Capote, King, or Rowling, you can aspire to (maybe) make an upper middle class income after YEARS of working at effectively McDonalds wages. If you are lucky. Obviously some take it too far (I'm looking at you, Mr. Ellison) but it seems to me that these authors are just trying to claim equitable payment after a century of disenfranchisement.
Read "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge, at least the first chapter. Dude envisions some positively Lovecraftian stuff in exactly the vein you describe. The rest of the book is just awesome too, but backs away from your dark vision.
Enjoy!
Why would I clutter up my brain with stuff like that when I can look it up in any reference book in two minutes?
Because if the carry some of the more useful numbers around in your head, and can do math without a calculator, you can at least estimate things on the fly, and incorporate actual data into conversation. (Which numbers are actually useful depends on your field: maybe it's feet per mile, maybe it's drag coefficients, maybe it's IP addresses.)
Why spend two minutes looking it up and another minute typing itnto a machine when you are already interfaced with a perfectly good data processor?
Besides that, books still drive an incredible portion of culture. If you don't believe me, think about the sheer number of movies that are based off of books while you drive down to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders book superstore.
America doesn't read anymore (present company excepted, of course). Sometimes I'm baffled how bookstores stay in business. (Gifts mostly, I'd wager.)
Movies based on books mostly just use the title, and the author's name if they are famous enough.
Passing tangental thought: Shouldn't RIAA be spelled SYRINX?
1) As others have pointed out, there are a few commercials I actually want to see - movie trailers for instance. If I skip over them completely, I miss visuals that might indicate an interesting flick.
2) Overshoot. If the last commercial is a 10-second blurb, you find yourself 20 seconds into the show. If there was mini-clifhanger before the commercial, you've ruined the effect. I would rather watch a few seconds of commercial brought in by the Reaction Time Compensator than jump too far into the show.
New discoveries are made, as are new, cheaper methods to extract oil that was previously thought to be uneconomical.
And you expect this trend to continue forever? Unless you think there is a cornucopia down there somewhere continuously pouring out hydrocarbons, you must realize the supply of fossil fuels is finite. Maybe you believe the hypernova will arrive before the supply runs out. I believe it makes a lot of sense to look for alternatives.
The most sober meditation I've seen on this was a Scientific American article archived at dieoff.com called The End of Cheap Oil. It doesn't attempt to forecast the day the wells run dry, just the year when gas prices finally rise to the point where the society that depends on them begins to break down.
It's an exercise in frog boiling. I think Iceland's leadership is wise to begin looking for ways out of the pot now.
Yesterday I received the following travel "recommendations" from National Business
Travelers Association the via company blast-o-gram.
"Per a conversation this morning with the FAA and confirmed with the DOT, the
following is their STRONG recommendations as how to address documentation and processing concerns for travelers. You should advise your travelers
that ALL travelers should go immediately to the ticket counter, upon arrival at the airport, to verify that they have proper documentation to pass
through the security check points. If they do not have proper documentation, it will be provided to them at the ticket counter. ALL travelers should have two forms of photo ID. They recommend a license and a passport, although corporate photo IDs would be acceptable should a passport not be available."
This is a dangerous first step. We must be sure that this "temporary recommendation" is indeed temporary and remains a recommendation.
Eternal vigilance, everyone.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
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I think I saw that movie. I like the part where the lumberjacks led their overseers into a minefield.
"It's only 2-4 inches! I drive in that all the time!" - No you don't. You drive on roads that are prepared CONSTANTLY with salt and gravel, using 4 wheel drive, snow tires or chains. Snow in Atlanta almost immediately melts when it hits the pavement and then turns to ice from the air temperature. ICE people. It's not snow it's ICE.
Yes, we do. Those same air temperatures and conditions occur where I live (Colorado). We call the worst of it - when exhaust and road dirt is mixed in - Black Ice and it is especially dangerous because it can look just like asphalt.
Nobody around here uses chains except semis-crossing mountain passes, or in the most extreme blizzards (like the century storm we had in 2003). We use front-wheel drive and all season tires, and complain about the idiots who immigrate here from California and think 4-wheel drive makes them immune to the laws of physics.
"Southerners can't drive on snow!" - Actually, we don't have experience driving on snow and that would hold true if it were only southerners driving here.
So by your logic, at least two thirds of the people on the roads don't know how to drive in snow. Clearly you don't get the recurrent practice in it that we do around here, but since it does snow there at least a little each year, you should still be prepared for it. The aforementioned front-wheel drive and all weather tires are a good place to start, plus maybe a survival kit, a decent jacket, and sensible shoes. Weather warnings exist for a reason.
So in short, while I empathize with the people who had harrowing experiences, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who were apparently so drastically unprepared. And I scorn the elected officials who failed your city (cue "Arrow") in the interest of saving money.
On the other hand, if they pay the artist a tenth of a cent per minute played, using your formulas I calculate a subscription cost of $14.61 per month. The service then has a million in revenue for every 68,000 subscribers. Whether that's enough to pay the overhead is left as an exercise for the MBAs.
At that pay rate, if the artist can get 50,000 people to listen to 60 minutes of their music each month (i.e. a long album's worth) they can pull in over $30,000 just from the one streaming site.
Seems to me that there is money to be made for both the artist and the middleman.
You make some interesting points. I live in Colorado, and sadly we are near the bottom in per student spending, at just over $9,000 per year.
I ran the numbers using your breakdowns as a starting point and some quick Googling for local values. Our average teacher is paid $41k, so I used that as a baseline for the security and janitorial staff. Office space around here seems to go for about $21 per square foot. I added in a line item for bus transportation (although our district has recently made that into a direct fee to the students who ride the bus).
I get just under $3000 per student to cover the hard-to-define values for classroom materials, special education, and administrative overhead. That doesn't seem way out of line.
On the other hand, I've seen how hard our teachers and principals struggle with the budgets they have (not to mention the strangling layers of regulation) and I'm confident they are not the problem. And yet our voters decided once again not to increase funding for schools.
I don't understand what people prioritize ahead of education.
Because one of them is a Theory, supported by reams of evidence, but still falsifiable, and the other is a religious dogma without any substantial evidence, no predictive capabilities, and no way to test it. There really is no comparison. The only controversy is cooked up by one side as a plea for attention.
I live there, you insensitive clod! And so does everyone I see on a daily basis. Not everyone lives in the continuous urban sprawl of BosNyWash. How many people does it take to exceed your threshold of "nobody"?
What would this proof you are waiting for look like? Perhaps a strong consensus among the experts in the field, since they are the ones who have actually studied the data? That data includes things like glacier core samples and tree rings which go back considerably further than 300 years.
Writing is not a particularly lucrative profession. Unless you are someone like Capote, King, or Rowling, you can aspire to (maybe) make an upper middle class income after YEARS of working at effectively McDonalds wages. If you are lucky. Obviously some take it too far (I'm looking at you, Mr. Ellison) but it seems to me that these authors are just trying to claim equitable payment after a century of disenfranchisement.
Read "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge, at least the first chapter. Dude envisions some positively Lovecraftian stuff in exactly the vein you describe. The rest of the book is just awesome too, but backs away from your dark vision. Enjoy!
Why do people equate "Failure to gain" with "Loss"?
Because if the carry some of the more useful numbers around in your head, and can do math without a calculator, you can at least estimate things on the fly, and incorporate actual data into conversation. (Which numbers are actually useful depends on your field: maybe it's feet per mile, maybe it's drag coefficients, maybe it's IP addresses.)
Why spend two minutes looking it up and another minute typing itnto a machine when you are already interfaced with a perfectly good data processor?
America doesn't read anymore (present company excepted, of course). Sometimes I'm baffled how bookstores stay in business. (Gifts mostly, I'd wager.)
Movies based on books mostly just use the title, and the author's name if they are famous enough.
Passing tangental thought: Shouldn't RIAA be spelled SYRINX?
Actually, TiVo does have commercial skip but after trying it out, I turned it back off, for a couple of reasons:
1) As others have pointed out, there are a few commercials I actually want to see - movie trailers for instance. If I skip over them completely, I miss visuals that might indicate an interesting flick.
2) Overshoot. If the last commercial is a 10-second blurb, you find yourself 20 seconds into the show. If there was mini-clifhanger before the commercial, you've ruined the effect. I would rather watch a few seconds of commercial brought in by the Reaction Time Compensator than jump too far into the show.
And you expect this trend to continue forever? Unless you think there is a cornucopia down there somewhere continuously pouring out hydrocarbons, you must realize the supply of fossil fuels is finite. Maybe you believe the hypernova will arrive before the supply runs out. I believe it makes a lot of sense to look for alternatives.
The most sober meditation I've seen on this was a Scientific American article archived at dieoff.com called The End of Cheap Oil. It doesn't attempt to forecast the day the wells run dry, just the year when gas prices finally rise to the point where the society that depends on them begins to break down.
It's an exercise in frog boiling. I think Iceland's leadership is wise to begin looking for ways out of the pot now.
"Gullible" isn't in there either. Don't take my word for it - look it up yourself!
This is a dangerous first step. We must be sure that this "temporary recommendation" is indeed temporary and remains a recommendation.
Eternal vigilance, everyone.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.