Since we all live on a planet with finite resources, overconsumption of limited resources is everyone's business.
Unless you live in a clay hut without a motorized vehicle, electricity, fruit loops or Internet access moral relativism necessary to keep from being branded a hypocrite would be funny if it were not so outrageously sad. Don't judge least ye be judged. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...etc. ad nauseam.
So you are saying that since I live in a society that uses more resources than most, I should just look the other way when I see someone using up as much as he can afford to use since everyone else is doing it? And if I think that's a bad philosophy then I had just better shut up about it because I don't live in a mud hut so who am I to point the finger at someone building a house twice the size of the USA average (and nearly 4 times most European country averages).
>And yes, everything that consumes finite resources is everybody's business, that's why water and energy policies are so often in the news -- you can't separate water and energy from consumption, since whether it's food, lumber, or home automation equipment, everything needs water and energy to create.
I propose we create a system that will regulate how society allocates limited resources to people. We could even set it up so that people who contribute more to society are given more allocations, in order to incentivize them to contribute to society instead of just consuming resources. We could even create a secondary market for allocations, so people could choose what interests them more - energy, housing space, water, location, etc. We could even set up the government to operate by just taking percentages of these allocations, and trading those allocations to accomplish things like building roads and parks.
We could call this system "money".
That sounds like a wonderful system -- I'm curious about your plan to ensure that those who contribute more to society are given more allocations of this so called "money" rather than money being used to reward those that already have money.
one of the western civilized societies (yes, I know, the U.S. doesn't exactly fit that description)
Will every country that has put a man on the moon raise their hand? (Don't make us wish it was you.)
Better count quickly, because if China keeps its space program moving forward, there might be another billion hands to count.
And you really ought to count everyone in Germany since it was German scientists that helped get the american space program off the ground (pun intended).
WTF do you need to ask questions that are really none of your business?
Since we all live on a planet with finite resources, overconsumption of limited resources is everyone's business.
That's great. A few questions.... Since you have no idea where this house is going to be (Orlando or the Outback), how it's going to be used (shop space? home business?) and who is going to live there (extended family? orphans?) how is it that you know it involves "overconsumption"? Could you clarify the existence of this nebulous planetary authority that makes it "everybody's" business? Is everything that consumes finite limited resources "everyone's business"?
Will the state that specifies or limits the size of a bedroom also stay out of it? After all, things that go on in the bedroom tend to result in the consumption of many resources. (children or diseases)
Do you know where the committee that oversees you meets? Someone here might want to put in an application.
I'm not sure why the location matters - are square feet smaller in Orlando? Are home building supplies shipped in from some other planet to the Outback?
If he had some special use for the house like running an orphanage, or devoting half of it a shop or a photo studio or some other special use, you'd think he would have mentioned it since that would be pertinent for automation. All he said was "my dream home" and "4000 sq ft", so it's not unreasonable to assume a single family home.
And yes, everything that consumes finite resources is everybody's business, that's why water and energy policies are so often in the news -- you can't separate water and energy from consumption, since whether it's food, lumber, or home automation equipment, everything needs water and energy to create. For that matter, you can hardly separate water and energy since the two are so intertwined.
Any individual can ignore the consequences of overuse, since it's true that one person really doesn't make any difference. But that doesn't mean that as a society that we should encourage it. The population is growing and, barring any catastrophes, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future - in 50 years there could be 100 - 300M more people living in the USA (depending on which population growth figures you believe) and it will be a lot harder to accommodate that growth if everyone lives in 4000 sq ft houses. Plus, as the world population grows and more and more people graduate to a 1st world lifestyle, energy (and other resource) demand will grow even faster than the population.
Conduits between rooms, with pull strings, would be very useful. But you need to plan for those access panels. If the switches need to be installed, one should plan for those too. I have no such conduits, outside of the cable that is already in place, and some rooms are missing network. My phones are all SIP (and one DECT wireless phone on an SIP adapter,) all connected to 3CX, so network is required everywhere. Wireless is not an option, you need cable.
Wireless is still an option, even with SIP -- I spent 2 years in a place where the SIP phone in the living room ran on the same wireless bridge that fed the TV. Ran quite well, (even better after I set up QoS on the internet router properly). But since everyone in the house has a cell phone, we just use cell phones and stopped using VoIP.
IMO ethernet AND coax should go to each living space, possibly two (or more) outlets of each for bigger areas. I had both installed in each non bathroom area in my house after having to gut the walls after a fire and it's been remarkably convenient and useful. Most important, good inter-connected battery-powered fire alarms, possibly fire suppression (sprinklers) and good insurance.
I wouldn't bother pulling coax unless you have a known use for it -- all of my video comes in over IP (delivered wirelessly to the TV's). I actually have ethernet (Cat-5 or 5E) in the walls in most rooms, but don't have a use for it, I can stream ripped DVD's over Wifi from the fileserver upstairs to the TV downstairs.
Though I would run conduit with a pull-string as others recommended.
Ever lived in a house with a built-in intercom? Find yourself using it? Don't feel bad. No one else does, either.
For long-term value, try to resist the urge to automate it today. Lasting value will come from routing high quality, shielded cables both for data and power to multiple outlets in every room as well as creating strong rooms and creating lots of easily accessible, strong mount points where you can install things you'd like to automate with whatever the latest and greatest tech is.
But you still have to decide today what you might want to automate tomorrow unless you like making holes in walls.
If you don't realize that you could have window shades that automatically shield the midday sun or skylights that close when it rains, then you're not going to know that you need to run power and data to those locations and you'll end up tearing up walls and ceilings later on.
..an amazon prime subscription here. What have you [unlucky ones] had to phone the fraud department about?
Damn that's seriously stupid thief. You buy actual goods and gift cards with stolen credit cards.. Or better, you sell the data to some stupid people.
Why not buy an amazon prime subscription if it saves him money? The card thief likely wants to ship as many packages as possible as quickly as possible to whoever is fencing or forwarding the goods for him, so an Amazon Prime membership might make sense to get the $3.99 one-day shipping.
This version of Windows is guaranteed to be great. Windows has been going back and forth between one crap version and one great version for over a decade.
It is kind of like some IQ test pattern matching questions: Win 95 - crap Win 98 - great Win ME - crap Win XP - great Vista - crap Win 7 - great Win 8 - crap Win 9 - (see the pattern?)
I don't know where you get your scientific study from, but EVERY single person I personally know who has 8 or 8.1 likes it after the initial hours of adjustment
But are they using Metro on 8.1 or do they spend those initial hours of adjustment turning it off?
Even my Apple loving son and his wife (won't ever change) like it. It is called NEGATIVE publicity by all these supposedly techie sites and then the articles are picked-up on by mainline press.
It's not much of a recommendation to say that a user that primarily uses (and prefers) a different operating system likes Metro. It's not hard to like something that you rarely use.
I don't know where you get your scientific study from, but EVERY single person I personally know who has 8 or 8.1 likes it after the initial hours of adjustment
Me, I can't wait until I can get me a touch screen for the desktop and have 3 ways to input -keyboard, mouse and touch. I love that aspect about my Surface Rt-3 ways to input.
Will you really use a 27" monitor as a touch screen? The fingerprints alone would drive me crazy.
So are car airbags, but you don't notice the expense because it's hidden in the $30,000 purchase price of the car.
So... we should increase the price of bicycles?
Either that, or those that want an airbag for their heads can use the money they saved by buying a $1,000 bike instead of a $30,000 car and use it to buy a $700 biking airbag.
That's the thing about CREDIT cards, the customer generally doesn't take the financial fall for fraud.
Actually, Visa doesn't take the risk -- the merchant accepting the card does. Visa charges back fraudulent purchases to the merchant that accepted the card.
If Visa was taking on the risk, they'd have mandated smart credit cards by now.
I use my first initial+last name as my email address and get mail destined for a half dozen people. One person is an elderly gentleman in the midwest, I've given up any hope of getting him to stop giving out my email address. I only get a half dozen or so a month so it's not too bad.
I usually send a form letter to emails where it looks like a person might read the response (as opposed to newsletters, etc). For those emails where I don't think a human will read the response, I usually just hit the Spam button, unless there's a quick and easy to find unsubscribe link.
Sometimes when an email has a signature that says that if I receive a copy of the email in error I must delete all copies, in my reply, I ask whether they want to work on a time and materials basis or a fixed price $500 contract for me to track down and delete the email from all devices that it may have been delivered to (having emails go to a phone, tablet, several computers, imap download + backup means a fair amount of work to find and delete it everywhere). So far none have been willing to pay. I wonder if I could accept their demand to delete all copies of the email as implicit authorization to do the work and then bill them for the work.
Note that rent control in SF only applies to buildings built before June 1979, so none of the expensive new luxury apartments that have been built in the last 34 years are under rent control.
So what's wrong with South San Francisco? Oakland? Richmond? What is magical about the city border where one foot outside it is undesirable?
When people say they want to live in San Francisco, few are thinking of living in the Outer Sunset, which is what South SF resembles, except SSF is almost entirely unwalkable low density neighborhoods with little access to transit. There is a tiny main street in SSF, but those used to the variety of restaurants and other entertainment in SF would quickly tire of it.
People want to live in Noe Valley, the Marina, SOMA, etc -- they have dozens of fancy (or not so fancy) and expensive bars and restaurants within blocks of their homes, and if they want something new, they can hop on a bus or train and be in an entirely different neighborhood in 20 minutes.
It's not so much that SF stops being magical when you step one foot outside the border, but that it becomes less and less magical the farther away you get from the desirable neighborhoods, and neighboring towns are way too far away from the areas where people want to live (and some, like Oakland and Richmond, are undesirable for other reasons). Those that love SF don't want to travel to SF to get the city experience, they want to live in the city experience. Driving in to SF every night for dinner quickly gets old.
That said, there are plenty of people that live outside SF and are perfectly happy where they live, but those that are happy living in Richmond, aren't really the same set of people that are clamoring to live inside SF.
I find "fashionable urban places" to be an oxymoron. What's fashionable about having to step over homeless people when you walk out your front door, or having to clean vomit off your steps every weekend, or dealing with the overall crime. I am baffled why SF people stick up their noses at cleaner and safer locations.
Why don't need dormitories in the boonies (don't be stupid, Google is in Mountain View, it is most emphatically not the boonies, it is ground zero of the tech boom whereas SF is the boonies as far as tech goes). We have enough housing in silicon valley for Googles workers, most of the workers who are up in SF used to actually live in silicon valley but left in search of artisanal cupcakes and bacon martinis.
Didn't you just answer your question? If Mountain view had the artisanal cupcakes and bacon martinis or whatever else the Googlers left Mountain View for, then they would have never left.
City living isn't for everyone, but Mountain View living isn't either. Some people like living where there are over a dozen bars and restaurants, a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker within a 3 block radius of their house. A 20 minute ride on the train takes them to a new neighborhood with its own set of shops and restaurants to explore. Everything is within easy biking distance since the city is only 7 miles wide, and you really don't need to own a car to get around (especially with Zip Car and City Carshare available for when you *do* need a car).
I only know a few Google employees that live in SF and they work our of the SF office as much as possible, only making the trek to mountain view when absolutely neccessary.
And yet, the doctor seems to have determined that it had nothing to do with the current stuff and moved on:
There, on MugShots.com, was a younger version of my patient's face, with details about how she had been detained for cocaine possession more than three decades earlier. I looked away from the screen, feeling like I had violated my patient's privacy. I resumed our medical exam, without bringing up the finding on the Internet, and her subsequent hospital course was uneventful.
So, depending on the kinds of tests he was doing, he apparently concluded it was a red herring.
Let me give you some insight as a doctor.
Patient comes in, lies, is actually abusing cocaine. Cocaine is a stimulant, and can cause overexertion of the heart through either chronic use or acute overdose, leading to shortness of breath and weakness, which the patient came in with. Additionally, smoking cocaine and all its impurities can damage the lungs.
It had everything to do with the "current stuff", as the patient lying and abusing cocaine as an elderly person ties everything together logically. Medical mystery solved, the doctor goes about his day. Seeing gramps come into the hospital after shooting up or smoking some dope is uncommon, but not unheard of.
Now, elderly person comes in, unknown care situation at home or what passes for home. Tests positive for drugs in their system. This explains why they came in with their symptoms, but not how it got there. That possibility requires further investigation, and may be cause for a call to adult protective services.
TL,DR: Not a red herring. The doctor reacting as they did was because they got the answers they needed, not because it wasn't relevant.
The problem is that they didn't get any answers at all -- just because she used Cocaine 30 years ago doesn't mean she still does. I used a number of drugs 20 years ago that I literally haven't touched in decades.
If he suspects abuse, then he shouldn't dismiss that suspicion just because she once used the drugs. If she associated with people 30 years ago that had access to cocaine, there's a good chance that she still comes into contact with people today that have access to cocaine, so if anything, the fact that she once used the drug makes it more likely that someone may be giving it to her now.
I may tell my friends that I like a particular restaurant, but that doesn't mean that I want that restaurant to pay one of my friends to wear my picture around his neck and tell all of the rest of my friends that I like the restaurant.
Since when can a waiter afford a Prius? You aren't the guy a couple weeks ago that told me all about waiters that pull 6 figures are you?
You don't need to buy a Prius to get 40mpg. The Nissan Versa gets 40mpg highway and costs around $12000, which can be financed for $260/month for 60 months.
Whether or not a waiter can afford that depends on where you live - I know waiters that drive BMW's.
In the old days, if you blew a transmission, the shop could rebuild it while you waited. Now, they wait for a replacement to be flown in, then swap it out.
That's true, but that's not limited to Priuses -- when I thought I had a leaking shaft seal in my transmission, they were going to have to send it out to a specialty shop and wait a week for them to rebuild it because they don't rebuild transmissions in-house.
Oh wait, I can't afford it. Please give me grooves for an extra 2 miles a gallon in a way that the local shop can fix (looking at you, battery/hybrid-CVT/regen-braking monster).
My local shop can fix Priuses. Last time I was there with my car (not a Prius), they had one up on the rack for a transmission/transaxle replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
Since we all live on a planet with finite resources, overconsumption of limited resources is everyone's business.
Unless you live in a clay hut without a motorized vehicle, electricity, fruit loops or Internet access moral relativism necessary to keep from being branded a hypocrite would be funny if it were not so outrageously sad. Don't judge least ye be judged. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...etc. ad nauseam.
So you are saying that since I live in a society that uses more resources than most, I should just look the other way when I see someone using up as much as he can afford to use since everyone else is doing it? And if I think that's a bad philosophy then I had just better shut up about it because I don't live in a mud hut so who am I to point the finger at someone building a house twice the size of the USA average (and nearly 4 times most European country averages).
>And yes, everything that consumes finite resources is everybody's business, that's why water and energy policies are so often in the news -- you can't separate water and energy from consumption, since whether it's food, lumber, or home automation equipment, everything needs water and energy to create.
I propose we create a system that will regulate how society allocates limited resources to people. We could even set it up so that people who contribute more to society are given more allocations, in order to incentivize them to contribute to society instead of just consuming resources. We could even create a secondary market for allocations, so people could choose what interests them more - energy, housing space, water, location, etc. We could even set up the government to operate by just taking percentages of these allocations, and trading those allocations to accomplish things like building roads and parks.
We could call this system "money".
That sounds like a wonderful system -- I'm curious about your plan to ensure that those who contribute more to society are given more allocations of this so called "money" rather than money being used to reward those that already have money.
http://theunderstatement.com/post/3999331289/us-wealth-distribution-visualized
one of the western civilized societies (yes, I know, the U.S. doesn't exactly fit that description)
Will every country that has put a man on the moon raise their hand? (Don't make us wish it was you.)
Better count quickly, because if China keeps its space program moving forward, there might be another billion hands to count.
And you really ought to count everyone in Germany since it was German scientists that helped get the american space program off the ground (pun intended).
WTF do you need to ask questions that are really none of your business?
Since we all live on a planet with finite resources, overconsumption of limited resources is everyone's business.
That's great. A few questions .... Since you have no idea where this house is going to be (Orlando or the Outback), how it's going to be used (shop space? home business?) and who is going to live there (extended family? orphans?) how is it that you know it involves "overconsumption"? Could you clarify the existence of this nebulous planetary authority that makes it "everybody's" business? Is everything that consumes finite limited resources "everyone's business"?
Will the state that specifies or limits the size of a bedroom also stay out of it? After all, things that go on in the bedroom tend to result in the consumption of many resources. (children or diseases)
Do you know where the committee that oversees you meets? Someone here might want to put in an application.
I'm not sure why the location matters - are square feet smaller in Orlando? Are home building supplies shipped in from some other planet to the Outback?
If he had some special use for the house like running an orphanage, or devoting half of it a shop or a photo studio or some other special use, you'd think he would have mentioned it since that would be pertinent for automation. All he said was "my dream home" and "4000 sq ft", so it's not unreasonable to assume a single family home.
And yes, everything that consumes finite resources is everybody's business, that's why water and energy policies are so often in the news -- you can't separate water and energy from consumption, since whether it's food, lumber, or home automation equipment, everything needs water and energy to create. For that matter, you can hardly separate water and energy since the two are so intertwined.
Any individual can ignore the consequences of overuse, since it's true that one person really doesn't make any difference. But that doesn't mean that as a society that we should encourage it. The population is growing and, barring any catastrophes, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future - in 50 years there could be 100 - 300M more people living in the USA (depending on which population growth figures you believe) and it will be a lot harder to accommodate that growth if everyone lives in 4000 sq ft houses. Plus, as the world population grows and more and more people graduate to a 1st world lifestyle, energy (and other resource) demand will grow even faster than the population.
Conduits between rooms, with pull strings, would be very useful. But you need to plan for those access panels. If the switches need to be installed, one should plan for those too. I have no such conduits, outside of the cable that is already in place, and some rooms are missing network. My phones are all SIP (and one DECT wireless phone on an SIP adapter,) all connected to 3CX, so network is required everywhere. Wireless is not an option, you need cable.
Wireless is still an option, even with SIP -- I spent 2 years in a place where the SIP phone in the living room ran on the same wireless bridge that fed the TV. Ran quite well, (even better after I set up QoS on the internet router properly). But since everyone in the house has a cell phone, we just use cell phones and stopped using VoIP.
IMO ethernet AND coax should go to each living space, possibly two (or more) outlets of each for bigger areas. I had both installed in each non bathroom area in my house after having to gut the walls after a fire and it's been remarkably convenient and useful. Most important, good inter-connected battery-powered fire alarms, possibly fire suppression (sprinklers) and good insurance.
I wouldn't bother pulling coax unless you have a known use for it -- all of my video comes in over IP (delivered wirelessly to the TV's). I actually have ethernet (Cat-5 or 5E) in the walls in most rooms, but don't have a use for it, I can stream ripped DVD's over Wifi from the fileserver upstairs to the TV downstairs.
Though I would run conduit with a pull-string as others recommended.
Ever lived in a house with a built-in intercom? Find yourself using it? Don't feel bad. No one else does, either.
For long-term value, try to resist the urge to automate it today. Lasting value will come from routing high quality, shielded cables both for data and power to multiple outlets in every room as well as creating strong rooms and creating lots of easily accessible, strong mount points where you can install things you'd like to automate with whatever the latest and greatest tech is.
But you still have to decide today what you might want to automate tomorrow unless you like making holes in walls.
If you don't realize that you could have window shades that automatically shield the midday sun or skylights that close when it rains, then you're not going to know that you need to run power and data to those locations and you'll end up tearing up walls and ceilings later on.
WTF do you need to ask questions that are really none of your business?
Since we all live on a planet with finite resources, overconsumption of limited resources is everyone's business.
..an amazon prime subscription here. What have you [unlucky ones] had to phone the fraud department about?
Damn that's seriously stupid thief. You buy actual goods and gift cards with stolen credit cards.. Or better, you sell the data to some stupid people.
Why not buy an amazon prime subscription if it saves him money? The card thief likely wants to ship as many packages as possible as quickly as possible to whoever is fencing or forwarding the goods for him, so an Amazon Prime membership might make sense to get the $3.99 one-day shipping.
This version of Windows is guaranteed to be great. Windows has been going back and forth between one crap version and one great version for over a decade.
It is kind of like some IQ test pattern matching questions:
Win 95 - crap
Win 98 - great
Win ME - crap
Win XP - great
Vista - crap
Win 7 - great
Win 8 - crap
Win 9 - (see the pattern?)
Past performance doesn't predict future results.
I don't know where you get your scientific study from, but EVERY single person I personally know who has 8 or 8.1 likes it after the initial hours of adjustment
But are they using Metro on 8.1 or do they spend those initial hours of adjustment turning it off?
Even my Apple loving son and his wife (won't ever change) like it. It is called NEGATIVE publicity by all these supposedly techie sites and then the articles are picked-up on by mainline press.
It's not much of a recommendation to say that a user that primarily uses (and prefers) a different operating system likes Metro. It's not hard to like something that you rarely use.
I don't know where you get your scientific study from, but EVERY single person I personally know who has 8 or 8.1 likes it after the initial hours of adjustment
Me, I can't wait until I can get me a touch screen for the desktop and have 3 ways to input -keyboard, mouse and touch. I love that aspect about my Surface Rt-3 ways to input.
Will you really use a 27" monitor as a touch screen? The fingerprints alone would drive me crazy.
It's also freaking expensive.
So are car airbags, but you don't notice the expense because it's hidden in the $30,000 purchase price of the car.
So... we should increase the price of bicycles?
Either that, or those that want an airbag for their heads can use the money they saved by buying a $1,000 bike instead of a $30,000 car and use it to buy a $700 biking airbag.
That looks pretty cool but what happens if you fall face first?
Looks like it still protects your forehead, even if your face ultimately hits the ground:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7Oud3iGXWY
(The face down crash starts around 3:30 (there's a couple slow-motion replays after the full speed crash)
It's also freaking expensive.
So are car airbags, but you don't notice the expense because it's hidden in the $30,000 purchase price of the car.
That's the thing about CREDIT cards, the customer generally doesn't take the financial fall for fraud.
Actually, Visa doesn't take the risk -- the merchant accepting the card does. Visa charges back fraudulent purchases to the merchant that accepted the card.
If Visa was taking on the risk, they'd have mandated smart credit cards by now.
I use my first initial+last name as my email address and get mail destined for a half dozen people. One person is an elderly gentleman in the midwest, I've given up any hope of getting him to stop giving out my email address. I only get a half dozen or so a month so it's not too bad.
I usually send a form letter to emails where it looks like a person might read the response (as opposed to newsletters, etc). For those emails where I don't think a human will read the response, I usually just hit the Spam button, unless there's a quick and easy to find unsubscribe link.
Sometimes when an email has a signature that says that if I receive a copy of the email in error I must delete all copies, in my reply, I ask whether they want to work on a time and materials basis or a fixed price $500 contract for me to track down and delete the email from all devices that it may have been delivered to (having emails go to a phone, tablet, several computers, imap download + backup means a fair amount of work to find and delete it everywhere). So far none have been willing to pay. I wonder if I could accept their demand to delete all copies of the email as implicit authorization to do the work and then bill them for the work.
It's just common sense.
Unless you use a long random string as your email account name, you can still run into the same problem.
Note that rent control in SF only applies to buildings built before June 1979, so none of the expensive new luxury apartments that have been built in the last 34 years are under rent control.
So what's wrong with South San Francisco? Oakland? Richmond? What is magical about the city border where one foot outside it is undesirable?
When people say they want to live in San Francisco, few are thinking of living in the Outer Sunset, which is what South SF resembles, except SSF is almost entirely unwalkable low density neighborhoods with little access to transit. There is a tiny main street in SSF, but those used to the variety of restaurants and other entertainment in SF would quickly tire of it.
People want to live in Noe Valley, the Marina, SOMA, etc -- they have dozens of fancy (or not so fancy) and expensive bars and restaurants within blocks of their homes, and if they want something new, they can hop on a bus or train and be in an entirely different neighborhood in 20 minutes.
It's not so much that SF stops being magical when you step one foot outside the border, but that it becomes less and less magical the farther away you get from the desirable neighborhoods, and neighboring towns are way too far away from the areas where people want to live (and some, like Oakland and Richmond, are undesirable for other reasons). Those that love SF don't want to travel to SF to get the city experience, they want to live in the city experience. Driving in to SF every night for dinner quickly gets old.
That said, there are plenty of people that live outside SF and are perfectly happy where they live, but those that are happy living in Richmond, aren't really the same set of people that are clamoring to live inside SF.
I find "fashionable urban places" to be an oxymoron. What's fashionable about having to step over homeless people when you walk out your front door, or having to clean vomit off your steps every weekend, or dealing with the overall crime. I am baffled why SF people stick up their noses at cleaner and safer locations.
Why don't need dormitories in the boonies (don't be stupid, Google is in Mountain View, it is most emphatically not the boonies, it is ground zero of the tech boom whereas SF is the boonies as far as tech goes). We have enough housing in silicon valley for Googles workers, most of the workers who are up in SF used to actually live in silicon valley but left in search of artisanal cupcakes and bacon martinis.
Didn't you just answer your question? If Mountain view had the artisanal cupcakes and bacon martinis or whatever else the Googlers left Mountain View for, then they would have never left.
City living isn't for everyone, but Mountain View living isn't either. Some people like living where there are over a dozen bars and restaurants, a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker within a 3 block radius of their house. A 20 minute ride on the train takes them to a new neighborhood with its own set of shops and restaurants to explore. Everything is within easy biking distance since the city is only 7 miles wide, and you really don't need to own a car to get around (especially with Zip Car and City Carshare available for when you *do* need a car).
I only know a few Google employees that live in SF and they work our of the SF office as much as possible, only making the trek to mountain view when absolutely neccessary.
And yet, the doctor seems to have determined that it had nothing to do with the current stuff and moved on:
So, depending on the kinds of tests he was doing, he apparently concluded it was a red herring.
Let me give you some insight as a doctor.
Patient comes in, lies, is actually abusing cocaine. Cocaine is a stimulant, and can cause overexertion of the heart through either chronic use or acute overdose, leading to shortness of breath and weakness, which the patient came in with. Additionally, smoking cocaine and all its impurities can damage the lungs.
It had everything to do with the "current stuff", as the patient lying and abusing cocaine as an elderly person ties everything together logically. Medical mystery solved, the doctor goes about his day. Seeing gramps come into the hospital after shooting up or smoking some dope is uncommon, but not unheard of.
Now, elderly person comes in, unknown care situation at home or what passes for home. Tests positive for drugs in their system. This explains why they came in with their symptoms, but not how it got there. That possibility requires further investigation, and may be cause for a call to adult protective services.
TL,DR: Not a red herring. The doctor reacting as they did was because they got the answers they needed, not because it wasn't relevant.
The problem is that they didn't get any answers at all -- just because she used Cocaine 30 years ago doesn't mean she still does. I used a number of drugs 20 years ago that I literally haven't touched in decades.
If he suspects abuse, then he shouldn't dismiss that suspicion just because she once used the drugs. If she associated with people 30 years ago that had access to cocaine, there's a good chance that she still comes into contact with people today that have access to cocaine, so if anything, the fact that she once used the drug makes it more likely that someone may be giving it to her now.
I may tell my friends that I like a particular restaurant, but that doesn't mean that I want that restaurant to pay one of my friends to wear my picture around his neck and tell all of the rest of my friends that I like the restaurant.
Since when can a waiter afford a Prius? You aren't the guy a couple weeks ago that told me all about waiters that pull 6 figures are you?
You don't need to buy a Prius to get 40mpg. The Nissan Versa gets 40mpg highway and costs around $12000, which can be financed for $260/month for 60 months.
Whether or not a waiter can afford that depends on where you live - I know waiters that drive BMW's.
In the old days, if you blew a transmission, the shop could rebuild it while you waited. Now, they wait for a replacement to be flown in, then swap it out.
That's true, but that's not limited to Priuses -- when I thought I had a leaking shaft seal in my transmission, they were going to have to send it out to a specialty shop and wait a week for them to rebuild it because they don't rebuild transmissions in-house.
This is 2014, where's my flying car?
Oh wait, I can't afford it.
Please give me grooves for an extra 2 miles a gallon in a way that the local shop can fix (looking at you, battery/hybrid-CVT/regen-braking monster).
My local shop can fix Priuses. Last time I was there with my car (not a Prius), they had one up on the rack for a transmission/transaxle replacement.