I do no think it means what you think it means. In governmental terms, it means "give us unlimited money so that we don't have to prioritize among the thousands of special interests begging and scraping for more cash."
In any other context it means that you are seriously lacking resources and have cut things to the bone. For you or me, it means we get rid of cable TV, the gym membership, take cheaper vacations, don't buy a new car, live in a smaller place, don't eat and drink out as often, etc.
Governments have a much, much different approach: they begin by exacting revenge on the unwashed masses that dare not give them every dime their hearts desire. They find popular things (especially parks and libraries) and immediately begin the slashing there. This is, of course, utterly petulant - these items aren't even rounding errors in the budgets and no real savings are made. In the US, we call it "Washington Monument Syndrome" - popular tourist destinations like the Washington Monument are shut down during budget battles for basically no reason other than a giant political temper tantrum. There still is, of course, plenty of money (billions! trillions!) for new fighter planes that don't work and imprisoning people for owning certain plants and giving people and corporations lifetime welfare benefits, etc.,etc., etc.
There is no "governmental austerity." Anybody who brings it up is playing Orwellian word games with you, and should have filthy socks shoved in their mouths (and possibly other body orifices) until they stop.
Well, since Elon Musk funds all of his ideas with government money, why should he give a shit if it actually works or not? I'm pretty sure the guy has never made a dime of profit that wasn't picked from the taxpayers' pockets.
Because they don't do what we want!!! Therefore.... Conspiracy!!!1!!!11!!!!1!!!!!eleven!!!!
Do these people pay attention to literally anything else? I have no idea whether they're right, wrong, or whatever, but if they are right then Occam's razor would suggest lobbyists and stupidity, in that order.
It's an interesting concept, but I don't think I want to turn my router over to a company like Google or Facebook that makes their money Hoovering up every last bit of data they can get about me.
You have to love how they use gallons as a unit of measurement because it gives a really big number - 300,000,000. But in water terms, that's actually very little. That computes out to just under 921 acre-feet, which is the standard unit of measuring large quantities of water. Not so impressive-sounding now, so let's see what the actual costs are. Divide the $34,500,000 cost by the number of acre-feet and then again by the expected lifetime of the balls - say, 20 years. You wind up with $1,900 per acre-foot. This is a lot of money, but California residents and normal businesses normally pay around $1,000 per acre-foot. If you amortize the cost of these balls over the total water going through the system it's still a bit pricey but not insane when you consider the effects of droughts. For example, in Carlsbad, California they are building a desalinization plant with guaranteed annual sales at a cost of just over $2,000 per acre-foot.
Of course, real sanity would address the real causes of the "drought" - the fact that the two groups that use 85% of California's water pay nowhere near this much. Government pays $0 per acre-foot and wastes a breathtaking amount of water. Big agriculture pays around $10 per acre-foot (the small organic farms I buy my produce from still pay the two-orders-of-magnitude-higher residential rates). I'm all for agriculture - California is an amazing place to grow food and provides a huge percentage of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the US - but the artificially low prices have been abused by some farms and orchards. There is still a lot of flood irrigation being used (and some farmers were actually growing rice in the desert). A massive amount of alfalfa is being grown in the desert and then shipped to China, because at the subsidized water prices this is actually cheaper than China growing their own hay. Sit back and bask in that insanity. The government has dumped as much as a third of California's water supply for various environmental purposes - you could argue the costs and merits of this except for the fact that none of these projects are having their desired effect, so all of that water is just pure waste (around 33% of state water usage). And then they threaten to fine us if we water our lawns more than twice a week (> 5% of state water usage).
So anyway, for once, the black balls are the government doing something expensive but not completely stupid. But the fact that this is even necessary due to government stupidity and a breathtakingly colossal mismanagement of a valuable natural resource sort of makes it all moot in the end. There is no shortage due to drought - there's a shortage due to bad policies.
"the vast majority of internet users who refuse to pay for news."
I don't think ad blockers exist because people don't want ads or "refuse to pay for news." Ad blockers exist because ads have become so ridiculously obnoxious and disruptive with animations or even sound that they make the web pages they're on pretty close to unusable. This is on top of the occasional but still-to-frequent usage of ad networks as malware distribution platforms. If the ad networks set some reasonable standards and actually enforced them, then ad blockers wouldn't be as much of an issue. As it is right now, using an ad block is a security requirement, not an option. From an aesthetic and usability standpoint it's just highly desirable.
Speed of implementation in various organizations (or even departments, divisions, etc) runs a spectrum of "do stuff on more or less a whim" to "go through eight years of planning meetings to discuss the possibility of actually doing something." On the former end of the spectrum you buy extra capacity. At the latter end of the spectrum it doesn't matter, because you won't get the budget to buy extra capacity.
Argh - I just set up my Household on Amazon... there are some issues with sharing Prime within a household, and nobody in Customer Service understands what's going on. After an hour wasted with an idiot and a supervisor I finally figured it out on my own (you have to enable Content sharing or Prime doesn't share). Most of the documentation appears to be wrong. Apparently Amazon has never heard of this whole UX testing thing... but at least I get a pun out of it.
1) I can get anywhere I want with public transportation as it is right now. The problem is that it takes literally four to eight times more time (in my specific circumstances), and my time is far from free.
2) The notion that it's free is, frankly, dishonest and disingenuous. *Somebody* is paying for it, and that somebody is me, in one form or another. Just because the money is not coming directly from your wallet at that instant doesn't mean it's not happening.
3) It ignores subjective value. I often enjoy driving. I don't enjoy being crowded into a bus or tram / trolley. Trains aren't too bad from a comfort standpoint, but still not as fun as driving.
You are always selling yourself, your plans, and your ideas, no matter what business environment you are in - self-employed or corporate. Certifications can be a tool for that - and even a vital tool if you're dealing with HR drones that don't understand anything else.
That being said, I have no formal certs and have done extremely well for myself - but I also have very good sales skills. It's the one thing I encourage to everyone that asks me for career advice - learn to sell. It doesn't matter what you do in life, but you will always be selling something (assuming your work is of any sort of significance).
So, who, effectively, is going to regulate them? They'll just find a place where the regulatory regime will permit (if not actively encourage) their activities. The regulation argument is hilarious.
It's a nice desk, fashionable, well-made, holds plenty of weight without complaint. It schedules when I should stand up and sit down, and the "breathe" gentle reminder is effective without being obtrusive.
The biggest downside is that the sensor that detects whether or not you are standing next to it is extremely picky about distance. Apparently I often stand too close and so it doesn't always recognize that I'm there and credit me accordingly. Also, it would be better if it integrated with Apple's HealthKit in addition to their own cloud stuff. Do I really want data about when I'm at my home office desk to even exist, let alone be stored in the cloud? No - that's pretty much a "Let's figure out the best time to burglarize my house" toolkit.
So what? Have you seen who writes laws? A bunch of vote-leeching sociopaths that span the moral spectrum between used car salespeople and outright pedophiles... Let's just support the whims of every elected bunch of assholes. War, slavery, genocide, hey, gotta do it! It's the law!
Seriously, this is one of the lamest reasons for anything, ever.
Let's be honest: in most countries, taxis suck and belong in a forgotten age. They're the epitome of tightly-government-regulated industry: slow, filthy, rude, overpriced - assuming you can get one to actually show up. Uber is fast, clean, polite, and - most importantly - reliable. The whole argument here is that some group of people paid the government a stupid amount of money for the special privilege of shitting all over a captive customer base, therefore throw the Uber guys in jail, take or smash the driver's cars, throw rocks at them, riot, jump up and down, scream and shout, and take Courtney Love hostage (OK, that last one I can get behind).
If some government is going to ban Uber, just go ahead and consider yourself a third-world country. If you're going to start piling stupid inconveniences onto my visit, you might as well go ahead and make me boil my drinking water as well.
even if it means re-defining the second or decoupling official time measurements from planetary movement. Leap days, leap seconds, etc., are silly hacks that belong in a bygone era.
... like you're dealing with a toddler that you really like because it's yours or its mom is a total MILF or something. No, this is not ordinarily a good way to initiate a conversation with another human being, but in this case it's pretty effective. I've found that in the overwhelming majority of the cases I can get passed up a few levels very quickly.
Re:I'm loving the future thing !!!
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
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· Score: 2
See what next week's stock market will look like or.
They actually joked about that in the presentation: "We're having a bit of trouble getting the stock ticker to work..."
Having witnessed first hand how the Red Cross spends its money on IT infrastructure it doesn't need, I refuse to give them a single dime.
This! I've seen this in other large "non-profits" as well. It's like they don't even know how to do more with less (I own two businesses and could speak volumes on the subject) - they just declare that they "need" more money, fundraise, and then blow it out the way their high-priced consultants tell them to. I don't think they're necessarily evil, but they are run by people whose good intentions far outweigh their management skills (to be charitable, pun intended).
Are the fish capable of digesting plastic? One would think that it would just pass through. It's hard to know whether or not to take the matter seriously, as (sadly) the average environmentalist has no idea what the definition of toxic is. One would think that if there were some interesting data the article would at least link it.
I've got a system in my current car (BMW M5) that uses a camera to read speed limit signs and puts the current speed limit on my heads-up display. It's a cool system, but it's not perfect. It frequently has problems in school zones where it sees the 25 MPH sign and displays that whether the "school zone" rules are currently in effect or not. I'd agree with most of the posters here that allege that speed limits are set by ass-covering bureaucrats with absolutely zero consideration to actual public safety. Slow zones in residential areas are fine - I don't even have to be told to drive between 20 and 25 MPH is a neighborhood with kids out and about. But the speed limits on major roads and highways are... I would say "childish," but that would be an insult to children. We're living with generations of people who grew up playing video games, and our car's steering, breaks, suspension, steering, etc. are massively superior to what our parents had (or even what we had a decade ago). When speed limits are set too low people get bored and find other ways to distract themselves, which virtually all more dangerous than going faster.
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I do no think it means what you think it means. In governmental terms, it means "give us unlimited money so that we don't have to prioritize among the thousands of special interests begging and scraping for more cash."
In any other context it means that you are seriously lacking resources and have cut things to the bone. For you or me, it means we get rid of cable TV, the gym membership, take cheaper vacations, don't buy a new car, live in a smaller place, don't eat and drink out as often, etc.
Governments have a much, much different approach: they begin by exacting revenge on the unwashed masses that dare not give them every dime their hearts desire. They find popular things (especially parks and libraries) and immediately begin the slashing there. This is, of course, utterly petulant - these items aren't even rounding errors in the budgets and no real savings are made. In the US, we call it "Washington Monument Syndrome" - popular tourist destinations like the Washington Monument are shut down during budget battles for basically no reason other than a giant political temper tantrum. There still is, of course, plenty of money (billions! trillions!) for new fighter planes that don't work and imprisoning people for owning certain plants and giving people and corporations lifetime welfare benefits, etc.,etc., etc.
There is no "governmental austerity." Anybody who brings it up is playing Orwellian word games with you, and should have filthy socks shoved in their mouths (and possibly other body orifices) until they stop.
Well, since Elon Musk funds all of his ideas with government money, why should he give a shit if it actually works or not? I'm pretty sure the guy has never made a dime of profit that wasn't picked from the taxpayers' pockets.
Because they don't do what we want!!! Therefore.... Conspiracy!!!1!!!11!!!!1!!!!!eleven!!!!
Do these people pay attention to literally anything else? I have no idea whether they're right, wrong, or whatever, but if they are right then Occam's razor would suggest lobbyists and stupidity, in that order.
It's an interesting concept, but I don't think I want to turn my router over to a company like Google or Facebook that makes their money Hoovering up every last bit of data they can get about me.
You have to love how they use gallons as a unit of measurement because it gives a really big number - 300,000,000. But in water terms, that's actually very little. That computes out to just under 921 acre-feet, which is the standard unit of measuring large quantities of water. Not so impressive-sounding now, so let's see what the actual costs are. Divide the $34,500,000 cost by the number of acre-feet and then again by the expected lifetime of the balls - say, 20 years. You wind up with $1,900 per acre-foot. This is a lot of money, but California residents and normal businesses normally pay around $1,000 per acre-foot. If you amortize the cost of these balls over the total water going through the system it's still a bit pricey but not insane when you consider the effects of droughts. For example, in Carlsbad, California they are building a desalinization plant with guaranteed annual sales at a cost of just over $2,000 per acre-foot.
Of course, real sanity would address the real causes of the "drought" - the fact that the two groups that use 85% of California's water pay nowhere near this much. Government pays $0 per acre-foot and wastes a breathtaking amount of water. Big agriculture pays around $10 per acre-foot (the small organic farms I buy my produce from still pay the two-orders-of-magnitude-higher residential rates). I'm all for agriculture - California is an amazing place to grow food and provides a huge percentage of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the US - but the artificially low prices have been abused by some farms and orchards. There is still a lot of flood irrigation being used (and some farmers were actually growing rice in the desert). A massive amount of alfalfa is being grown in the desert and then shipped to China, because at the subsidized water prices this is actually cheaper than China growing their own hay. Sit back and bask in that insanity. The government has dumped as much as a third of California's water supply for various environmental purposes - you could argue the costs and merits of this except for the fact that none of these projects are having their desired effect, so all of that water is just pure waste (around 33% of state water usage). And then they threaten to fine us if we water our lawns more than twice a week (> 5% of state water usage).
So anyway, for once, the black balls are the government doing something expensive but not completely stupid. But the fact that this is even necessary due to government stupidity and a breathtakingly colossal mismanagement of a valuable natural resource sort of makes it all moot in the end. There is no shortage due to drought - there's a shortage due to bad policies.
I don't think ad blockers exist because people don't want ads or "refuse to pay for news." Ad blockers exist because ads have become so ridiculously obnoxious and disruptive with animations or even sound that they make the web pages they're on pretty close to unusable. This is on top of the occasional but still-to-frequent usage of ad networks as malware distribution platforms. If the ad networks set some reasonable standards and actually enforced them, then ad blockers wouldn't be as much of an issue. As it is right now, using an ad block is a security requirement, not an option. From an aesthetic and usability standpoint it's just highly desirable.
Speed of implementation in various organizations (or even departments, divisions, etc) runs a spectrum of "do stuff on more or less a whim" to "go through eight years of planning meetings to discuss the possibility of actually doing something." On the former end of the spectrum you buy extra capacity. At the latter end of the spectrum it doesn't matter, because you won't get the budget to buy extra capacity.
C'mon, at some point you're just hoarding junk.
Argh - I just set up my Household on Amazon... there are some issues with sharing Prime within a household, and nobody in Customer Service understands what's going on. After an hour wasted with an idiot and a supervisor I finally figured it out on my own (you have to enable Content sharing or Prime doesn't share). Most of the documentation appears to be wrong. Apparently Amazon has never heard of this whole UX testing thing... but at least I get a pun out of it.
Going long on whoever the hell makes aluminum foil...
1) I can get anywhere I want with public transportation as it is right now. The problem is that it takes literally four to eight times more time (in my specific circumstances), and my time is far from free.
2) The notion that it's free is, frankly, dishonest and disingenuous. *Somebody* is paying for it, and that somebody is me, in one form or another. Just because the money is not coming directly from your wallet at that instant doesn't mean it's not happening.
3) It ignores subjective value. I often enjoy driving. I don't enjoy being crowded into a bus or tram / trolley. Trains aren't too bad from a comfort standpoint, but still not as fun as driving.
You are always selling yourself, your plans, and your ideas, no matter what business environment you are in - self-employed or corporate. Certifications can be a tool for that - and even a vital tool if you're dealing with HR drones that don't understand anything else.
That being said, I have no formal certs and have done extremely well for myself - but I also have very good sales skills. It's the one thing I encourage to everyone that asks me for career advice - learn to sell. It doesn't matter what you do in life, but you will always be selling something (assuming your work is of any sort of significance).
So, who, effectively, is going to regulate them? They'll just find a place where the regulatory regime will permit (if not actively encourage) their activities. The regulation argument is hilarious.
It's a nice desk, fashionable, well-made, holds plenty of weight without complaint. It schedules when I should stand up and sit down, and the "breathe" gentle reminder is effective without being obtrusive.
The biggest downside is that the sensor that detects whether or not you are standing next to it is extremely picky about distance. Apparently I often stand too close and so it doesn't always recognize that I'm there and credit me accordingly. Also, it would be better if it integrated with Apple's HealthKit in addition to their own cloud stuff. Do I really want data about when I'm at my home office desk to even exist, let alone be stored in the cloud? No - that's pretty much a "Let's figure out the best time to burglarize my house" toolkit.
So what? Have you seen who writes laws? A bunch of vote-leeching sociopaths that span the moral spectrum between used car salespeople and outright pedophiles... Let's just support the whims of every elected bunch of assholes. War, slavery, genocide, hey, gotta do it! It's the law!
Seriously, this is one of the lamest reasons for anything, ever.
Let's be honest: in most countries, taxis suck and belong in a forgotten age. They're the epitome of tightly-government-regulated industry: slow, filthy, rude, overpriced - assuming you can get one to actually show up. Uber is fast, clean, polite, and - most importantly - reliable. The whole argument here is that some group of people paid the government a stupid amount of money for the special privilege of shitting all over a captive customer base, therefore throw the Uber guys in jail, take or smash the driver's cars, throw rocks at them, riot, jump up and down, scream and shout, and take Courtney Love hostage (OK, that last one I can get behind).
If some government is going to ban Uber, just go ahead and consider yourself a third-world country. If you're going to start piling stupid inconveniences onto my visit, you might as well go ahead and make me boil my drinking water as well.
Who will curate the curators? Lots of thought control implications here.
even if it means re-defining the second or decoupling official time measurements from planetary movement. Leap days, leap seconds, etc., are silly hacks that belong in a bygone era.
... like you're dealing with a toddler that you really like because it's yours or its mom is a total MILF or something. No, this is not ordinarily a good way to initiate a conversation with another human being, but in this case it's pretty effective. I've found that in the overwhelming majority of the cases I can get passed up a few levels very quickly.
See what next week's stock market will look like or.
They actually joked about that in the presentation: "We're having a bit of trouble getting the stock ticker to work..."
Having witnessed first hand how the Red Cross spends its money on IT infrastructure it doesn't need, I refuse to give them a single dime.
This! I've seen this in other large "non-profits" as well. It's like they don't even know how to do more with less (I own two businesses and could speak volumes on the subject) - they just declare that they "need" more money, fundraise, and then blow it out the way their high-priced consultants tell them to. I don't think they're necessarily evil, but they are run by people whose good intentions far outweigh their management skills (to be charitable, pun intended).
Their CEO, Gail McGovern makes $500,000 / year in base salary. I bet it's built her a house or two...
Are the fish capable of digesting plastic? One would think that it would just pass through. It's hard to know whether or not to take the matter seriously, as (sadly) the average environmentalist has no idea what the definition of toxic is. One would think that if there were some interesting data the article would at least link it.
Wish I could mod you up today.
I've got a system in my current car (BMW M5) that uses a camera to read speed limit signs and puts the current speed limit on my heads-up display. It's a cool system, but it's not perfect. It frequently has problems in school zones where it sees the 25 MPH sign and displays that whether the "school zone" rules are currently in effect or not. I'd agree with most of the posters here that allege that speed limits are set by ass-covering bureaucrats with absolutely zero consideration to actual public safety. Slow zones in residential areas are fine - I don't even have to be told to drive between 20 and 25 MPH is a neighborhood with kids out and about. But the speed limits on major roads and highways are ... I would say "childish," but that would be an insult to children. We're living with generations of people who grew up playing video games, and our car's steering, breaks, suspension, steering, etc. are massively superior to what our parents had (or even what we had a decade ago). When speed limits are set too low people get bored and find other ways to distract themselves, which virtually all more dangerous than going faster.