You've just hit on the main problem with accessibility interfaces. They need to be customizable to how the user works, not according to how the developer imagines that they work. For example, with programming using speech recognition I need an interface that feeds me questions based on what I'm doing so that I can answer them and generate code. The typical developer solution is to have me speak keyboard characters which runs the risk of damaging my vocal apparatus on top of my other disability. Talk about being well and truly screwed.
As a person with a disability acquired in adulthood, let me give you a little insight into my life. I lost my career as a programmer. I lost my ability to write. I lost my ability to communicate by email, instant messenger, IRC etc. I lost my ability to use Web services, commercial or governmental. I lost my ability to participate in the educational system. Yes I can read, I can turn the pages of a book but I can't fill in web forms, take online exams, or even write legibly enough for exams on paper.
In other words, I lost my ability to participate in society. My perceived value is near zero even though my brain still works, I still have all the skills I had as a programmer/analyst, I just can't use my hands to express it. And according to your logic, there's no way a company could justify the expense of a personal assistant to transcribe what I say into something the company can use. They could just hire a person whose body works right. Many disabled people are quite competent cognitively, treating disabled folks this way is a pretty huge waste of human capital.
Fortunately, with speech recognition I regained my ability to write and some programming but most GUI interfaces including web forms are still out of reach.
For what it's worth, I acquired my disability as a result of programming. From what I've been able to determine, my disability hits about 30,000 to 40,000 developers a year. To be honest, the numbers are fuzzy because many red states have declared this kind of disability a nonreportable workplace injury and is not covered by Worker's Comp.
Personally, I don't want you to build an accessibility interface. I want you to give me an API so I can write my own interface. The reason is simple. Given that most technologists royally fark up a GUI for ordinary people, there's no chance in heaven or earth that you will make an accessibility interface that's useful. An accessibility interface requires specialized knowledge because it is not just a replacement if your hands or your eyes, it's a whole different way of using an application and if you are not living the life of a crip, the chances of you understanding what the interface should be like is vanishingly small.
You touch on a whole bunch of really important points. Yes buses are more flexible than rail but also consider that rail create significant pricing distortions in real estate. Ever try to rent an apartment near a transit stop? Damn near impossible even if you could afford it. Here in Boston, it's approximately a $500-$1000 premium per month if your place is within 10 min walking distance of a T stop.
Look at autonomous vehicles, they have greater flexibility than buses if electric can be significantly more energy-efficient, and if you can do on demand carpooling, will significantly reduce congestion. So with autonomous vehicles would have the best of automobiles and transit combined. Shareable public resource, energy efficiency, and shorter transit times.
I think if you drill down on the economics, you will find that we're probably better off, as a society, putting our money into rapid deployment of autonomous vehicles, especially within urban zones instead of trying to wedge in another transit system that only serves a narrow geographic range.
Info exhaust. You can take down big brother by creating info exhaust. Run bots accessing random web sites, generate other kinds of random traffic. Lie to corporate BB. Overwhelm their ability to gather and analyze.
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I do agree with Beijers - bad UI is the bane of the blind - SHAME ON PROGRAMMERS WHO CANT FOLLOW SIMPLE GUIDELINES AND TOOLSETS TO ACCOMODATE THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPARIED.
bad UI's are the bane of any person of any ability level. the UI induced pain gets worse with an increase in one's level of disablity. what may be a speed bump for you is a brick wall to a crip like me.
I feel his pain because I've been living for over 20 years with nerve damage in my hands and it basically ended my programming career. I've been trying to build a programming by speech environment that matches the capabilities speech recognition versus the current efforts of trying to make speech recognition replicate the capabilities of one's hands.
Much of the accessibility problems can be summed up as not being able to truly understand what it means to live with a disability, the steadfast belief that it will never happen to them, and the inability to accept any other application/user interface combination other than the all in one bundle we use today.Age will make us all disabled it's only a question of how much, how fast. The lack of understanding about disabilities and how they affect people has created generation after generation programmers writing software that they will never be able to use once their hands or eyes stop working..
The biggest technical issue with accessibility is the fixation on the all-in-one user interface and application model. If you separate the user interface from the application then you can swap out the UI for another one. I could remove the GUI and put in a speech or an interface with graphical augmentation for feedback. Or use text-to-speech for feedback. Splitting off the UI from the application makes it possible to make an application accessible without having to go through the effort of writing an accessibility interface and it reduces the cost of accessibility on the developers making it possible to make more applications accessible.
There is a secondary, less obvious reason for splitting off the UI from the application. We all know how messed up many GUIs are. These interfaces were written by people who've use the same interface for years but they still mess it up. You will not be surprised if I tell you that in the speech recognition world, the speech interfaces we are given are messed up even more than the GUI interfaces are and I believe that is directly due to the lack of empathy or experience with being disabled. So with the split I propose, I can do or other disability activists can build UIs based on the actual needs of disabled people versus forcing them to live with the interface you think they need.
Hiring people just to give them a paycheck is the ditch diggers fallacy. Spending money to dig ditches and fill them in moves money around, but doesn't actually produce anything of value - at the end you've spent money but have nothing to show for it. It would be better to use use that same money to produce something (anything) of value, so society benefits.
http://theclassicalliberalblog...
As the above article points out, paying unemployment saves other people's jobs by virtue of the fact that the unemployment dollars are spent. This interesting secondary factor which is unemployment once people find jobs roughly equivalent to what they had before. If people were forced to take low paying jobs, cutting their income to a fraction was before, the economic multiplier works the other way that we lose twice as much economic activity as the person lost in wages.
So, I'm cool with paying people to dig ditches and then fill them in, (it would be nice if there were publicly owned fiber in the bottom of the ditch). More people working, getting paid, buying necessities keeps other people working and the economy grows. Starve people's financial resources, reduces demand, the economy shrinks, more people are starved for financial resources and you spiral down. It's the law of supply and demand, no supply of money, no demand for goods.
. That has happened in Copenhagen, for example: it's very expensive to park in the city. It's legal to drive into downtown, but most people either bike or transit, because it's more practical.
(Another thing that helps: don't bulldoze giant freeways through city centers.)
I think you have a misstep in logic. You said that in Copenhagen it's expensive the park so people take transit because it's more practical. Try people take transit because it costs less. Cost being equal, people would drive because it's more efficient use of their time and personal (mental/physical) energy.
Don't underestimate how draining public transit is. You have to be on guard for pickpockets, backpack/messenger bag theft, intrusion your physical space, body odor, contagion of flu and cold. Being on alert for that for hours every day is exhausting.
They are faster if you have dedicated bus lanes and everywhere you go is on a bus lane. As soon as you need to transfer, it's automatically faster with the car even during rush-hour. As for being stuck in traffic jams, I cannot tell you the number of times I've been stuck in a traffic jam with a bus. Even so, I still make it home a good 20 minutes before the same bus makes it there.
But I don't think it's either buses or cars. If you scale a bus size down and use smart routes going where people go, not where the routes are you could get the speed that is needed to make public transit acceptable and reduce congestion.
Diabetes is actually less common in vegetarians than the general population, and diabetes has a strong positive correlation with overall meat intake.
The insistence that the type of carbohydrate doesn't matter to diabetes risk is absolutely false. Plenty of plant based foods contain sufficient calories without causing problems with blood sugar.
Protein intake in many first world countries, especially the US, is hugely higher than it has been in any other era of the world. People subsisted just fine off grains and beans for millennia, without the high incidence of diabetes that exists in today's age of high meat intake and high refined sugar intake.
here is one of many studies that says othewise http://www.todaysdietitian.com.... also, this vid helps understand normal blood glucose reaction to carbohydrate intake. I forget where is in the video but he does say something about how there is an excessively high spike at breakfast as a result of our traditional high carbohydrate breakfast.
http://www.diabetes-symposium....
I'm willing to believe that diabetes is less common in vegetarians, I just wish there were better studies on the topic. I suspect it's the same mechanism as how I've been able to reduce my blood sugars through caloric restriction. I suspect that from a dietary perspective, vegetarianism is inherently inefficient and many of the calories consumed just pass through the body without being utilized. That is one possible explanation for why a lot of vegetarians are very skinny. One snarky question is are they self-righteous because of hunger or does self-righteousness lead to vegetarianism.
At the same time, the-diabetic-vegans I have met are grossly obese, probably because of diabetes, and have untreated blood sugars running at a level that should have them hospitalized. Another thing about diabetes I've learned through experiences that the higher the carbohydrate intake, the more likely that insulin-based treatments are going to cause wide-ranging blood swings (i.e. 40 to 300 in two hours and back down again). Most the diabetics I've met have been willing to experiment, find that they can reduce their blood swings if they reduce their carbohydrate intake.
The assertion that the type of carbohydrate doesn't matter is also experimentally false. You can test it yourself with a blood glucose meter. For me, most whole-grain products spike high and drop fast. There's a couple of exceptions such as barley which spikes high and stays there for 4+ hours, again, counter to conventional wisdom. I confirmed this multiple times with my blood glucose meter.
My personal experimental results say I have to have, in the meal, no less than 18 cal per gram of carbohydrate if my blood sugars can stay in the normal range. This is not unusual. Many of the diabetics have the similar requirements for calories per gram of carbohydrate. I've yet to find a plant-based diet that will do this unless that meal is supplemented with 200 to 300 cal of oil.
Diabetes is one of the few illnesses where the patient can verify, on their own, how successful treatment is if they're willing to follow a good measurement protocol. This protocol lets them determine which foods react badly in their body, the excursion of blood sugars as result of food and insulin intake and how modifications to food and insulin can reduce excursions, drop their A1c, and reduce the risk to diabetic complications. Sadly too much myth and magical thinking clouds effective treatment protocols.
Moving almost entirely to plant-based food is the only way to substantially improve the environmental impact of our food production, and it's urgent for us to do.
Hampton Creek's mission is an important part of that. It's just unfortunate that they seem to some extent to have bought into the anti-science, environmentally counterproductive attitudes of the Whole Foods crowds.
Unfortunately, one side effect of a plant-based diet will be an increase in the rate of diabetes. Older studies associated fat with diabetes Because that's what they were looking for the time. This was driven by the heart health studies such as the Framingham study which we are now finding was also flawed with regards to cholesterol and cardiac health. The current generation of studies are now looking at carbohydrate consumption and there's a much stronger association showing carbohydrate intake driving cardiac and diabetes risk. For a fun research read, look up glycated LDL
The primary signal seems to be spiky blood sugar levels which produce insulin resistance and, the start of diabetic neuropathy (if the BG level rises above 140 mg/dL). Doesn't matter if the carbohydrate is net, fast or slow, it's the absolute amount that matters. You can test this on yourself with a blood glucose meter. Many diabetics have reported that they get the same BG rise from a can of soda or the same number of carbohydrates in the form of whole-grain foods.
If you want to reduce your risk of diabetes follow this rule of thumb evolving from current experience. Limit yourself to no more than 40 g of carbohydrates in the meal or 120 g per day. No more big bowls of pasta, whole bagels, muffins. This also leaves out large quantities of lentils, beans, rice or any other starch used to make up the calorie difference between green vegetables and what you need for your daily caloric requirements.
Try it, run the science project. Figure out how many calories you should have, limit yourself to 40 g of the meal and figure out what you can eat to meet both the calorie requirement and carbohydrate limit. If you want to make it more of a project, by a blood glucose meter and measure your BG every 20 minutes for three hours after a meal.
http://annals.org/article.aspx...
This article is one study in a long line of studies that show that a low (40g/day) carb diet is healthier than a high carb one. how does the future of food keep diets under 40 carbs per day and still supply enough calories? assume 1200 cals for a woman and 2000 for a man. 30 cals/carb and 50 cals/carb respectively
SPF records are not sufficient anymore. More spammers use them than legitimate sites. As others have suggested, check your PTR record. Since Comcast owns that, they may not have set it up for you, and sign all of your messages with DKIM. It works amazingly well for helping you bypass blockages.
I know your pain, and I wish you the best of luck in beating poorly engineered antispam systems.
It's not clear that that makes sense for health care, and for health care, you pay the same whether the costs arise as a consequence of your choice or by accident.
If I choose to ride a car, motorcycle, subway, do I pay different costs of I get hurt because of who is at fault? If I choose to take a shortcut home through an "unsafe" neighborhood and get hurt in a mugging do I pay more? I cut code, I develop rsi, I can no longer work. is it my fault for choosing programming as a career? you take a dr prescribed drug that puts on 60 lb and will not come off because of non-reversible biochemical changes? are you at fault for being fat?.you live in a city, poor and can't afford or find off working hours, food that isn't cheap carbs and become diabetic? are you at fault because your living environment and income won't pay for food that doesn't make you sick?
today, each of those very real examples has a "and then you sue" component to determine fault. big waste of time and money when the goal should be restoring the person injured to health asap? chasing all of these corner cases would probably cost more than just paying without question.
We're going to have to cut trillions from the budget just to break even and then to tack on another few trillion to pay for socialized medicine, we will need to cut from somewhere else.
we are already spending twice the most expensive single payer system to service fewer people
why do you think we would need to add to out tax burden? take what we are spending today on health insurance, eliminate all but 10% admin overhead and we could have a gold plated health coverage for everybody. starting up means rearranging what we spend on health, not adding to it.
I don't see why the blind or any other group should escape that harshness.
they don't. I've worked for blind people, I've worked for deaf people. I'm disabled as well and we all get no end of crap from tabs (temporarily able-bodied).
I lost roughly 30% of my hand function because I was busting my ass working normal IT programmer hours in a hostile work environment. I was fired from my job, I was denied workers compensation because "it wasn't workplace injury", I've been denied employment because "you can't have any technical knowledge because your hands don't work". I really understand now the discrimination that some women are told they're no longer qualified for the job just because they became pregnant.
I've even been discriminated against by geeks. I need to use proprietary package for speech recognition in order to be able to write and do some command-and-control. there were a few of us that wants to bridge NaturallySpeaking to Emacs but the Breaking with alarming frequency. After explaining the problem to Stallman and a few other fsf types, I was told that the official position of the free software foundation is that the needs of free software come before the needs of disabled people. If that meant that the free software equivalent wasn't going to arrive for a decade, disabled people would have to sit on their hands and wait till arrived or, do without free software that worked with speech recognition. Rather shortsighted, and rather harsh.
As I sometimes say, geeks don't give a crap about accessibility until they become injured and then they can't do anything about it because their hands don't work. They spend a couple of years reinventing and failing with the same solutions that failed for decades in the past and then either they give up and change careers or they fall off the economic ladder.
If we had greater accessibility for all types of disabilities, allow rsi injured, blind and tab programmers to compete on a level playing field by raising us up, not tearing others down, it would be okay for us to succeed or fail because it would be on our merits, not on our disabilities. We still have to deal with the bigotry of hiring managers but that's true for all of us.
The sad thing is, from the work I've been doing with speech user interfaces, I'm coming to believe that it's possible to build a common API to accommodate both text-to-speech and speech recognition user interfaces. With a bit more work, the interface can be expanded to also include a graphical user interface and once you have partition the application into everything else and the user interface, then accessibility becomes cheap, dirt cheap.
If it's open source, why couldn't people with said disabilities adapt it to their own unique needs?
simple. Because the act of writing code is one of the most handicap hostile acts in computer science. Pump your favorite language through a text-to-speech engine. What comes out is complete and total gibberish. It usually sounds like something the old gods would speak if they wanted to assure their own destruction.
Since code is neither speakable nor listenable, how would a blind person or a person with an upper extremity disability write code? If it was easy, we would see at least an order of magnitude more blind or hand disabled programmers in the workplace. But we don't the problem hasn't been solved yet.
therefore, we need to count on people like you to write code to our needs. Not what you think we need but what we actually need. Far too often I've seen accessibility code written by tabs that had nothing to do with the actual disability and in fact was less accessible than standard keyboards and mice.
Want to learn about how bad our systems are for disabled people? Wear a blindfold for a week. Try to set up a Linux system and try to use it. Or, bind your hands into fists and try to use Emacs. That experience will teach you a small fraction of what you need to know. Walk in my shoes for a few years and then we can talk about handicap accessibility design issues.
That's an interesting post. I disagree that RMS isn't about people's freedom - he's just refusing to compromise on the licensing to allow proprietary software to "piggyback" onto GPL code.
that is the sick sad thing. the proprietary accessibility tools are more like a keyboard with feedback or a video card. They're well-defined interfaces that do put a lot of shallow tendrils into a system but those same tendrils are needed anyway for open or closed systems.
I agree that it's a shame that the accessibility components aren't available in GPL form, but he's not affecting your right to use free software, it's just that you may not have the capabilities to use it.
it's not just being denied use it, without accessibility features, you are denied employment opportunities, education, access to online services such as government, industry, social networks etc. effectively, without accessibility, you don't exist in our society and your disability may keep you any job no matter how mind numbingly dull it may be.
The problem with the hybrid solution would be that it opens the door to allowing all kinds of proprietary software to interface with GPL code without respecting the license.
As I said, self-contained module with well-defined interfaces doesn't have this problem. You can interface via network and protocol connection. The bridge could be made out of lgpl code which gets you away from the GPL. This is why I license my work under LGPL and never GPL.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure how a "self-contained" proprietary module can't be used with free software unless it requires to be linked with the GPL code, but if I had to bet money, I'd put it on RMS' interpretation of the GPL. It's a real pity that there aren't more GPL accessibility components, but it's not stopping you from using open source - you just have to go for differently licensed open source (e.g. BSD).
as I pointed out, there's more than one way to communicate between GPL and non-GPL code and usually a couple of them solve the problem.
I think the main problem, and this contributes to the lack of accessibility, is that accessibility is not interesting to a developer until they are injured at which point they can't do anything about it and have to leave the field. According to a study I read in 1994, we were losing 30,000 developers are year to RSI. You would think with that volume of injuries, you would see injured developers working with accessibility aids so they can continue to write code. You don't because it's a hard problem and it hasn't been solved yet. one of the complicating factors is that programmers with hands have less than no clue about how to make something work for speech recognition users. They keep coming up with ideas that have been tried and failed for decades and still get offended when pointed the history books and told to "go read". a programming by speech toolkit will take about five years to complete. Other accessibility tools such as speech recognition will take at least 10 years to implement as they navigate the funding, staffing, and patent minefields that exist. I can't afford to wait and neither can anyone else. I've been waiting 15 years and been working on programming by speech issues for 10. we need working solutions now because folks have pissed away at least 15 years in which we could have made a change.
don't get caught up in the question of whether or not you can interface proprietary tools to a GPL system and still respect the GPL. The real question is what is more important, supporting human beings who have needs of food, medicine and shelter to become self-sufficient or supporting a software movement which excludes some of the more vulnerable parts of our population.
my vote hasn't changed as a result of my injury. The free software foundation has always had a big lack of clue on social areas that matter to people.
Stallman is not about people's freedom. I had a dustup with him a few months ago on accessibility issues. Today, the only way to provide accessible system is to start with a proprietary package for text to speech or speech recognition then with proper bridge code, you can make a connection to an open source system and use it as your computing base.
Tried to get support for doing this with Emacs (VR-mode) and was soundly rebuffed by the Emacs community and Stallman himself. At the end of the conversation, I was left with the official stance that disabled people are less important than free software. That if there was going to be any disabled support, they would have to wait until the free software community got around to doing what they needed even if it was going to take the better part of a decade.
This is unacceptable. The disabled person has as much right to use free software as any other person even if the hands or eyes have been replaced by self-contained proprietary module. It does not make sense to force potential advocates and talent down a path of end to end proprietary solutions when there is a hybrid solution that would let them move to open-source incrementally.
The needs of the human should never be subordinate to any form of technology. Technology is here to serve us.
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I believe you are right about bots. Now I need to create one that understands code features, templates, and emacs.
You've just hit on the main problem with accessibility interfaces. They need to be customizable to how the user works, not according to how the developer imagines that they work. For example, with programming using speech recognition I need an interface that feeds me questions based on what I'm doing so that I can answer them and generate code. The typical developer solution is to have me speak keyboard characters which runs the risk of damaging my vocal apparatus on top of my other disability. Talk about being well and truly screwed.
As a person with a disability acquired in adulthood, let me give you a little insight into my life. I lost my career as a programmer. I lost my ability to write. I lost my ability to communicate by email, instant messenger, IRC etc. I lost my ability to use Web services, commercial or governmental. I lost my ability to participate in the educational system. Yes I can read, I can turn the pages of a book but I can't fill in web forms, take online exams, or even write legibly enough for exams on paper. In other words, I lost my ability to participate in society. My perceived value is near zero even though my brain still works, I still have all the skills I had as a programmer/analyst, I just can't use my hands to express it. And according to your logic, there's no way a company could justify the expense of a personal assistant to transcribe what I say into something the company can use. They could just hire a person whose body works right. Many disabled people are quite competent cognitively, treating disabled folks this way is a pretty huge waste of human capital. Fortunately, with speech recognition I regained my ability to write and some programming but most GUI interfaces including web forms are still out of reach. For what it's worth, I acquired my disability as a result of programming. From what I've been able to determine, my disability hits about 30,000 to 40,000 developers a year. To be honest, the numbers are fuzzy because many red states have declared this kind of disability a nonreportable workplace injury and is not covered by Worker's Comp. Personally, I don't want you to build an accessibility interface. I want you to give me an API so I can write my own interface. The reason is simple. Given that most technologists royally fark up a GUI for ordinary people, there's no chance in heaven or earth that you will make an accessibility interface that's useful. An accessibility interface requires specialized knowledge because it is not just a replacement if your hands or your eyes, it's a whole different way of using an application and if you are not living the life of a crip, the chances of you understanding what the interface should be like is vanishingly small.
You touch on a whole bunch of really important points. Yes buses are more flexible than rail but also consider that rail create significant pricing distortions in real estate. Ever try to rent an apartment near a transit stop? Damn near impossible even if you could afford it. Here in Boston, it's approximately a $500-$1000 premium per month if your place is within 10 min walking distance of a T stop. Look at autonomous vehicles, they have greater flexibility than buses if electric can be significantly more energy-efficient, and if you can do on demand carpooling, will significantly reduce congestion. So with autonomous vehicles would have the best of automobiles and transit combined. Shareable public resource, energy efficiency, and shorter transit times. I think if you drill down on the economics, you will find that we're probably better off, as a society, putting our money into rapid deployment of autonomous vehicles, especially within urban zones instead of trying to wedge in another transit system that only serves a narrow geographic range.
geary is abandon-ware. the developers could not get enough funding to buy food and shelter while they worked on a open source project.
you got it backwards. the is no natural right to property otherwise you would not need laws and force to back up property ownership.
Info exhaust. You can take down big brother by creating info exhaust. Run bots accessing random web sites, generate other kinds of random traffic. Lie to corporate BB. Overwhelm their ability to gather and analyze. .
I do agree with Beijers - bad UI is the bane of the blind - SHAME ON PROGRAMMERS WHO CANT FOLLOW SIMPLE GUIDELINES AND TOOLSETS TO ACCOMODATE THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPARIED.
bad UI's are the bane of any person of any ability level. the UI induced pain gets worse with an increase in one's level of disablity. what may be a speed bump for you is a brick wall to a crip like me.
I feel his pain because I've been living for over 20 years with nerve damage in my hands and it basically ended my programming career. I've been trying to build a programming by speech environment that matches the capabilities speech recognition versus the current efforts of trying to make speech recognition replicate the capabilities of one's hands.
Much of the accessibility problems can be summed up as not being able to truly understand what it means to live with a disability, the steadfast belief that it will never happen to them, and the inability to accept any other application/user interface combination other than the all in one bundle we use today.Age will make us all disabled it's only a question of how much, how fast. The lack of understanding about disabilities and how they affect people has created generation after generation programmers writing software that they will never be able to use once their hands or eyes stop working..
The biggest technical issue with accessibility is the fixation on the all-in-one user interface and application model. If you separate the user interface from the application then you can swap out the UI for another one. I could remove the GUI and put in a speech or an interface with graphical augmentation for feedback. Or use text-to-speech for feedback. Splitting off the UI from the application makes it possible to make an application accessible without having to go through the effort of writing an accessibility interface and it reduces the cost of accessibility on the developers making it possible to make more applications accessible.
There is a secondary, less obvious reason for splitting off the UI from the application. We all know how messed up many GUIs are. These interfaces were written by people who've use the same interface for years but they still mess it up. You will not be surprised if I tell you that in the speech recognition world, the speech interfaces we are given are messed up even more than the GUI interfaces are and I believe that is directly due to the lack of empathy or experience with being disabled. So with the split I propose, I can do or other disability activists can build UIs based on the actual needs of disabled people versus forcing them to live with the interface you think they need.
not to mention that the newer device uses less energy and has better performance.
Hiring people just to give them a paycheck is the ditch diggers fallacy. Spending money to dig ditches and fill them in moves money around, but doesn't actually produce anything of value - at the end you've spent money but have nothing to show for it. It would be better to use use that same money to produce something (anything) of value, so society benefits. http://theclassicalliberalblog...
The fallacy of that analysis is the economic multiplier of paying someone to work. http://www.economicsonline.co.... I've seen estimated multipliers of 1.6 to 2.0 every dollar spent on unemployment payouts http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/p...
As the above article points out, paying unemployment saves other people's jobs by virtue of the fact that the unemployment dollars are spent. This interesting secondary factor which is unemployment once people find jobs roughly equivalent to what they had before. If people were forced to take low paying jobs, cutting their income to a fraction was before, the economic multiplier works the other way that we lose twice as much economic activity as the person lost in wages.
So, I'm cool with paying people to dig ditches and then fill them in, (it would be nice if there were publicly owned fiber in the bottom of the ditch). More people working, getting paid, buying necessities keeps other people working and the economy grows. Starve people's financial resources, reduces demand, the economy shrinks, more people are starved for financial resources and you spiral down. It's the law of supply and demand, no supply of money, no demand for goods.
. That has happened in Copenhagen, for example: it's very expensive to park in the city. It's legal to drive into downtown, but most people either bike or transit, because it's more practical.
(Another thing that helps: don't bulldoze giant freeways through city centers.)
I think you have a misstep in logic. You said that in Copenhagen it's expensive the park so people take transit because it's more practical. Try people take transit because it costs less. Cost being equal, people would drive because it's more efficient use of their time and personal (mental/physical) energy. Don't underestimate how draining public transit is. You have to be on guard for pickpockets, backpack/messenger bag theft, intrusion your physical space, body odor, contagion of flu and cold. Being on alert for that for hours every day is exhausting.
They are faster if you have dedicated bus lanes and everywhere you go is on a bus lane. As soon as you need to transfer, it's automatically faster with the car even during rush-hour. As for being stuck in traffic jams, I cannot tell you the number of times I've been stuck in a traffic jam with a bus. Even so, I still make it home a good 20 minutes before the same bus makes it there. But I don't think it's either buses or cars. If you scale a bus size down and use smart routes going where people go, not where the routes are you could get the speed that is needed to make public transit acceptable and reduce congestion.
Diabetes is actually less common in vegetarians than the general population, and diabetes has a strong positive correlation with overall meat intake.
The insistence that the type of carbohydrate doesn't matter to diabetes risk is absolutely false. Plenty of plant based foods contain sufficient calories without causing problems with blood sugar.
Protein intake in many first world countries, especially the US, is hugely higher than it has been in any other era of the world. People subsisted just fine off grains and beans for millennia, without the high incidence of diabetes that exists in today's age of high meat intake and high refined sugar intake.
here is one of many studies that says othewise http://www.todaysdietitian.com.... also, this vid helps understand normal blood glucose reaction to carbohydrate intake. I forget where is in the video but he does say something about how there is an excessively high spike at breakfast as a result of our traditional high carbohydrate breakfast. http://www.diabetes-symposium.... I'm willing to believe that diabetes is less common in vegetarians, I just wish there were better studies on the topic. I suspect it's the same mechanism as how I've been able to reduce my blood sugars through caloric restriction. I suspect that from a dietary perspective, vegetarianism is inherently inefficient and many of the calories consumed just pass through the body without being utilized. That is one possible explanation for why a lot of vegetarians are very skinny. One snarky question is are they self-righteous because of hunger or does self-righteousness lead to vegetarianism. At the same time, the-diabetic-vegans I have met are grossly obese, probably because of diabetes, and have untreated blood sugars running at a level that should have them hospitalized. Another thing about diabetes I've learned through experiences that the higher the carbohydrate intake, the more likely that insulin-based treatments are going to cause wide-ranging blood swings (i.e. 40 to 300 in two hours and back down again). Most the diabetics I've met have been willing to experiment, find that they can reduce their blood swings if they reduce their carbohydrate intake. The assertion that the type of carbohydrate doesn't matter is also experimentally false. You can test it yourself with a blood glucose meter. For me, most whole-grain products spike high and drop fast. There's a couple of exceptions such as barley which spikes high and stays there for 4+ hours, again, counter to conventional wisdom. I confirmed this multiple times with my blood glucose meter. My personal experimental results say I have to have, in the meal, no less than 18 cal per gram of carbohydrate if my blood sugars can stay in the normal range. This is not unusual. Many of the diabetics have the similar requirements for calories per gram of carbohydrate. I've yet to find a plant-based diet that will do this unless that meal is supplemented with 200 to 300 cal of oil. Diabetes is one of the few illnesses where the patient can verify, on their own, how successful treatment is if they're willing to follow a good measurement protocol. This protocol lets them determine which foods react badly in their body, the excursion of blood sugars as result of food and insulin intake and how modifications to food and insulin can reduce excursions, drop their A1c, and reduce the risk to diabetic complications. Sadly too much myth and magical thinking clouds effective treatment protocols.
Moving almost entirely to plant-based food is the only way to substantially improve the environmental impact of our food production, and it's urgent for us to do.
Hampton Creek's mission is an important part of that. It's just unfortunate that they seem to some extent to have bought into the anti-science, environmentally counterproductive attitudes of the Whole Foods crowds.
Unfortunately, one side effect of a plant-based diet will be an increase in the rate of diabetes. Older studies associated fat with diabetes Because that's what they were looking for the time. This was driven by the heart health studies such as the Framingham study which we are now finding was also flawed with regards to cholesterol and cardiac health. The current generation of studies are now looking at carbohydrate consumption and there's a much stronger association showing carbohydrate intake driving cardiac and diabetes risk. For a fun research read, look up glycated LDL
The primary signal seems to be spiky blood sugar levels which produce insulin resistance and, the start of diabetic neuropathy (if the BG level rises above 140 mg/dL). Doesn't matter if the carbohydrate is net, fast or slow, it's the absolute amount that matters. You can test this on yourself with a blood glucose meter. Many diabetics have reported that they get the same BG rise from a can of soda or the same number of carbohydrates in the form of whole-grain foods.
If you want to reduce your risk of diabetes follow this rule of thumb evolving from current experience. Limit yourself to no more than 40 g of carbohydrates in the meal or 120 g per day. No more big bowls of pasta, whole bagels, muffins. This also leaves out large quantities of lentils, beans, rice or any other starch used to make up the calorie difference between green vegetables and what you need for your daily caloric requirements.
Try it, run the science project. Figure out how many calories you should have, limit yourself to 40 g of the meal and figure out what you can eat to meet both the calorie requirement and carbohydrate limit. If you want to make it more of a project, by a blood glucose meter and measure your BG every 20 minutes for three hours after a meal.
http://annals.org/article.aspx... This article is one study in a long line of studies that show that a low (40g/day) carb diet is healthier than a high carb one. how does the future of food keep diets under 40 carbs per day and still supply enough calories? assume 1200 cals for a woman and 2000 for a man. 30 cals/carb and 50 cals/carb respectively
trig history pre hi carb, 400. high carb diet, 600. low carb diet back down to 400 then up to 850.
SPF records are not sufficient anymore. More spammers use them than legitimate sites. As others have suggested, check your PTR record. Since Comcast owns that, they may not have set it up for you, and sign all of your messages with DKIM. It works amazingly well for helping you bypass blockages. I know your pain, and I wish you the best of luck in beating poorly engineered antispam systems.
I wrote the computervision cgos kermit many moons ago.
It's not clear that that makes sense for health care, and for health care, you pay the same whether the costs arise as a consequence of your choice or by accident.
If I choose to ride a car, motorcycle, subway, do I pay different costs of I get hurt because of who is at fault? If I choose to take a shortcut home through an "unsafe" neighborhood and get hurt in a mugging do I pay more? I cut code, I develop rsi, I can no longer work. is it my fault for choosing programming as a career? you take a dr prescribed drug that puts on 60 lb and will not come off because of non-reversible biochemical changes? are you at fault for being fat? .you live in a city, poor and can't afford or find off working hours, food that isn't cheap carbs and become diabetic? are you at fault because your living environment and income won't pay for food that doesn't make you sick?
today, each of those very real examples has a "and then you sue" component to determine fault. big waste of time and money when the goal should be restoring the person injured to health asap? chasing all of these corner cases would probably cost more than just paying without question.
We're going to have to cut trillions from the budget just to break even and then to tack on another few trillion to pay for socialized medicine, we will need to cut from somewhere else.
we are already spending twice the most expensive single payer system to service fewer people why do you think we would need to add to out tax burden? take what we are spending today on health insurance, eliminate all but 10% admin overhead and we could have a gold plated health coverage for everybody. starting up means rearranging what we spend on health, not adding to it.
I don't see why the blind or any other group should escape that harshness.
they don't. I've worked for blind people, I've worked for deaf people. I'm disabled as well and we all get no end of crap from tabs (temporarily able-bodied).
I lost roughly 30% of my hand function because I was busting my ass working normal IT programmer hours in a hostile work environment. I was fired from my job, I was denied workers compensation because "it wasn't workplace injury", I've been denied employment because "you can't have any technical knowledge because your hands don't work". I really understand now the discrimination that some women are told they're no longer qualified for the job just because they became pregnant.
I've even been discriminated against by geeks. I need to use proprietary package for speech recognition in order to be able to write and do some command-and-control. there were a few of us that wants to bridge NaturallySpeaking to Emacs but the Breaking with alarming frequency. After explaining the problem to Stallman and a few other fsf types, I was told that the official position of the free software foundation is that the needs of free software come before the needs of disabled people. If that meant that the free software equivalent wasn't going to arrive for a decade, disabled people would have to sit on their hands and wait till arrived or, do without free software that worked with speech recognition. Rather shortsighted, and rather harsh.
As I sometimes say, geeks don't give a crap about accessibility until they become injured and then they can't do anything about it because their hands don't work. They spend a couple of years reinventing and failing with the same solutions that failed for decades in the past and then either they give up and change careers or they fall off the economic ladder.
If we had greater accessibility for all types of disabilities, allow rsi injured, blind and tab programmers to compete on a level playing field by raising us up, not tearing others down, it would be okay for us to succeed or fail because it would be on our merits, not on our disabilities. We still have to deal with the bigotry of hiring managers but that's true for all of us.
The sad thing is, from the work I've been doing with speech user interfaces, I'm coming to believe that it's possible to build a common API to accommodate both text-to-speech and speech recognition user interfaces. With a bit more work, the interface can be expanded to also include a graphical user interface and once you have partition the application into everything else and the user interface, then accessibility becomes cheap, dirt cheap.
If it's open source, why couldn't people with said disabilities adapt it to their own unique needs?
simple. Because the act of writing code is one of the most handicap hostile acts in computer science. Pump your favorite language through a text-to-speech engine. What comes out is complete and total gibberish. It usually sounds like something the old gods would speak if they wanted to assure their own destruction. Since code is neither speakable nor listenable, how would a blind person or a person with an upper extremity disability write code? If it was easy, we would see at least an order of magnitude more blind or hand disabled programmers in the workplace. But we don't the problem hasn't been solved yet. therefore, we need to count on people like you to write code to our needs. Not what you think we need but what we actually need. Far too often I've seen accessibility code written by tabs that had nothing to do with the actual disability and in fact was less accessible than standard keyboards and mice. Want to learn about how bad our systems are for disabled people? Wear a blindfold for a week. Try to set up a Linux system and try to use it. Or, bind your hands into fists and try to use Emacs. That experience will teach you a small fraction of what you need to know. Walk in my shoes for a few years and then we can talk about handicap accessibility design issues.
That's an interesting post. I disagree that RMS isn't about people's freedom - he's just refusing to compromise on the licensing to allow proprietary software to "piggyback" onto GPL code.
that is the sick sad thing. the proprietary accessibility tools are more like a keyboard with feedback or a video card. They're well-defined interfaces that do put a lot of shallow tendrils into a system but those same tendrils are needed anyway for open or closed systems.
I agree that it's a shame that the accessibility components aren't available in GPL form, but he's not affecting your right to use free software, it's just that you may not have the capabilities to use it.
it's not just being denied use it, without accessibility features, you are denied employment opportunities, education, access to online services such as government, industry, social networks etc. effectively, without accessibility, you don't exist in our society and your disability may keep you any job no matter how mind numbingly dull it may be.
The problem with the hybrid solution would be that it opens the door to allowing all kinds of proprietary software to interface with GPL code without respecting the license.
As I said, self-contained module with well-defined interfaces doesn't have this problem. You can interface via network and protocol connection. The bridge could be made out of lgpl code which gets you away from the GPL. This is why I license my work under LGPL and never GPL.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure how a "self-contained" proprietary module can't be used with free software unless it requires to be linked with the GPL code, but if I had to bet money, I'd put it on RMS' interpretation of the GPL. It's a real pity that there aren't more GPL accessibility components, but it's not stopping you from using open source - you just have to go for differently licensed open source (e.g. BSD).
as I pointed out, there's more than one way to communicate between GPL and non-GPL code and usually a couple of them solve the problem. I think the main problem, and this contributes to the lack of accessibility, is that accessibility is not interesting to a developer until they are injured at which point they can't do anything about it and have to leave the field. According to a study I read in 1994, we were losing 30,000 developers are year to RSI. You would think with that volume of injuries, you would see injured developers working with accessibility aids so they can continue to write code. You don't because it's a hard problem and it hasn't been solved yet. one of the complicating factors is that programmers with hands have less than no clue about how to make something work for speech recognition users. They keep coming up with ideas that have been tried and failed for decades and still get offended when pointed the history books and told to "go read". a programming by speech toolkit will take about five years to complete. Other accessibility tools such as speech recognition will take at least 10 years to implement as they navigate the funding, staffing, and patent minefields that exist. I can't afford to wait and neither can anyone else. I've been waiting 15 years and been working on programming by speech issues for 10. we need working solutions now because folks have pissed away at least 15 years in which we could have made a change. don't get caught up in the question of whether or not you can interface proprietary tools to a GPL system and still respect the GPL. The real question is what is more important, supporting human beings who have needs of food, medicine and shelter to become self-sufficient or supporting a software movement which excludes some of the more vulnerable parts of our population. my vote hasn't changed as a result of my injury. The free software foundation has always had a big lack of clue on social areas that matter to people.
Stallman is not about people's freedom. I had a dustup with him a few months ago on accessibility issues. Today, the only way to provide accessible system is to start with a proprietary package for text to speech or speech recognition then with proper bridge code, you can make a connection to an open source system and use it as your computing base. Tried to get support for doing this with Emacs (VR-mode) and was soundly rebuffed by the Emacs community and Stallman himself. At the end of the conversation, I was left with the official stance that disabled people are less important than free software. That if there was going to be any disabled support, they would have to wait until the free software community got around to doing what they needed even if it was going to take the better part of a decade. This is unacceptable. The disabled person has as much right to use free software as any other person even if the hands or eyes have been replaced by self-contained proprietary module. It does not make sense to force potential advocates and talent down a path of end to end proprietary solutions when there is a hybrid solution that would let them move to open-source incrementally. The needs of the human should never be subordinate to any form of technology. Technology is here to serve us.