security installation technicians—because somebody needs to install the cameras and sensors—can expect to earn $31,680
That's because there is no actual skill involved. Any idiot with a drill and a screwdriver can mount a camera to a wall. Doesn't require any special training or skills. This is the sort of thing that people with work documents of questionable origin tend to get hired to do.
According to a 2014 report from Global Knowledge and Penton, those armed with certifications such as CRISC, CISM, and CISA can expect to earn a healthy six figures a year.
Umm, great. Living where? $100K in Silicon Valley or Manhattan won't get you much. Same amount in the mid-west is pretty comfortable living.
Some guys in Cleveland decided to sell the old stock of sweaters that their family business had made in the past. Apparently it was a lot of them. The sweaters sold for high prices and customers said they were purchasing to wear them as they we much better than what is now generally available. Naturally they thought reestablishing the family manufacturing business. Looking into this they discovered that not only would machinery have to be imported but the entire supply chain was gone from the US.
I was born and raised in Cleveland and my whole family has worked in manufacturing there, myself included. So some hypothetical (?) businessmen who were clueless about how global supply chains and manufacturing works wanted to revive a labor intensive business they had no personal experience in, in an area with high labor costs, no particular tradition in clothing manufacturing and no existing supply chain. Awesome business plan.
The reason we now say measured in dollars is because by any other measure we are outdone by China and not "just getting better" but still declining.
Not only not true, easily shown to be not true. The vast majority of manufacturing work that has left US shores for China is work that is labor intensive. That is work that will go wherever labor rates are lowest. Since that isn't the US anymore, most of that work has left US shores, probably never to return. Absent an economic catastrophe you won't see garment manufacturing come back to the US because that means US wages have fallen drastically.
US manufacturing is alive and well. We just make stuff like cars and jumbo jets and earth movers and microprocessors instead of happy meal toys, and clothes and walmart junk. Personally I see that as a good thing that it is rather than trying to mourn the loss of industries that are incompatible with earning good wages. Let China have those jobs so they can grow their economy and bring millions out of poverty the like of which you've never even seen much less lived with.
People bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs that weren't going to stay here anyway. Used to be you could graduate high school and get a job on an assembly line that hugely overpaid you for what amounted to unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Then the real world caught up and people have to compete and get educated for decent paying jobs. There's plenty of work to be had in manufacturing but you'll need to be educated if you want to get paid more than minimum wages for it.
The dollar figures include military contracts to build things that never actually seem to get built where individual contracts dwarf the gdp of some countries.
Oh, well. Some military contractors got some jobs so clearly manufacturing is dead. Clearly the $3 TRILLION in manufacturing the US does every year and that keeps growing every year doesn't mean anything. US manufacturing by itself is an economy roughly the size of the GDP of Russia. All of Russia. And it is growing despite idiots like yourself trying to throw dirt on it.
The rust belt is real. Detroit is dead.
HA! I've lived in the "rust belt" most of my life and live in Detroit metro right now. You have no idea what you are talking about.
I think some people are just confused by the whole idea of factories in the US. We keep being told that all of that "factory-stuff" happens in China now.
Heh. Yeah, I get that a lot. The notion that we don't make anything in the US is a pretty bizarre one given that measured in dollars we manufacture more stuff than anyone. Funny thing is that many people take it as a given even though it's trivial to show that American manufacturing is alive and well and continuing to grow.
Any company that does not have a good video conferencing system in at least 2 conference rooms is ran by morons.
Really? So I run a manufacturing company. My customers are almost all within 1 day's driving distance. Furthermore I have yet to run into a single problem that would have been better solved if only we had a video conferencing system in our conference room. Why? Because our problems are out of the factory floor, not in a conference room. When I need to visit a customer for something I can't do over the phone or email it's because I'm going to be spending time on a factory floor looking into the guts of a machine most likely. A conference room video chat would be utterly useless.
But we're morons because we don't have a good video conferencing system in two conference rooms. [/eyeroll] I think you don't know much about how business works in the real world.
That's my basic impression of most of NYC. Beat up, dirty, and falling apart and no one seems to care much. I went to school not far from the city and have visited plenty of times. Almost moved there for a job once. But never have thought it was a pleasant place to be. Interesting? Sure. Impressive? Definitely. But also dirty, gross and highly overrated. New Yorkers simply don't seem to care much about living in a clean place. It's among the dirtiest big cities I've been to and I've been to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Mexico City, and most of the big US and Canadian cities. (Singapore incidentally is by far the cleanest big city I've ever seen)
Having an airport close to the center of the city is a really useful asset but NYC seems to have neglected it like so much of the rest of the city. La Guardia could be really something special but it's just taken for granted.
Of course global warning is a major problem. But it's not a problem of pollution, it's a problem of global warming.
That's a tautology if I've ever heard one. Global warming isn't the only problem caused by pollution but global warming IS caused by pollution. This is true even if you ignore whether the source is human or natural. And yes CO2 can be (and is) a form of pollution. It's not particulate matter like soot but it's still pollution.
CO2 is a pollutant AND a greenhouse gas. It is both. The source of the CO2 is from an artificial source and the quantity is FAR beyond what the evidence shows us can be absorbed in a reasonable time by the natural means.
Otherwise you're making an argument that every time you exhale, you're polluting the air.
We are evolved part of a natural ecosystem. The emissions from a car are not. Every bit of CO2 emitted from cars into the atmosphere is a pollutant because it would not be there otherwise. Anything can be a pollutant if it is put somewhere it would not otherwise be to the detriment of the environment. Water can be a pollutant under the right circumstances.
New cars sold in America are amazingly clean. In some cities the air coming out of the tail pipe is cleaner than the air going in.
Even if that were true (and it isn't really - more on that below) that speaks more to how dirty the incoming air is than to how clean the cars are. Would you breath the air from any car tailpipe? Of course you wouldn't, no matter how clean they claim it to be.
You are not accounting for carbon dioxide emissions because I assure you that more CO2 comes out than goes in and no gasoline or diesel engine cleans that up. Even if the car cleans up the particulate matter nearly perfectly it still emits huge amounts of CO2 and other gases which is still a problem. Cars are a lot cleaner than they used to be but lets not pretend internal combustion engines are anything remotely resembling pollutant free.
When I was just out of college and broke I had a car that was clean and was reliable. When our state began emissions inspections my car failed and I was required to fix it.
Then while it may have been reliable it was by definition not a clean (emissions) car.
For a lot of people, though, they just don't make enough money to afford these kinds of repairs and they NEED a car to get to work or school or childcare or whatever their responsibilities are.
This is true and it is a real problem. The appropriate solution would be for the government to incorporate some form of need based financial assistance for those individuals unduly burdened by the program. Shamefully some state governments appear to not do this.
The poorer you are, the less likely you are to be able to afford to live close to work.
Not every place is like San Francisco where there is a strong correlation between longer commute length and affordable housing. It varies quite a lot by municipality regarding how far your commute might be.
Many schools provide tutors as part of the sports scholarship.
It's not a part of the scholarship. Scholarships don't work that way. What is in those scholarship packages is rather rigidly defined.
Your time as a college athlete is rather regimented and most programs require both freshmen and students who are at risk of ineligibility to attend study sessions where tutors are made available. This is a good thing because it can be very hard to be disciplined with your time and a lot of 18 year olds away from home for the first time often don't make the best choices. They make tutors available because the athletes don't have an abundance of free time to seek out extra help when needed. Competing in D1 sports is effectively a full time job on top of your academic load. It's challenging for anyone.
The tutors help the athletes, sometimes during tests.
This does NOT happen as a routine matter. Perhaps you can find some examples of that happening but it simply doesn't work like that in reality. The tutors are not present during tests and would have no reason in general to be present during the tests. If this were to happen it is a CLEAR violation of NCAA rules and a program could face sanctions. Most aren't quite that stupid.
And professors "leaned on" to be lenient for retests and such.
Again, not a routine thing any more than among the general school population. I can probably point out examples of abuse better than you can but your perception of what is happening doesn't match what happens in the real world at most schools most of the time.
While it is true that we are using a smaller percentage of coal in the last few years, it is largely because we have replaced it with cheap natural gas which is still a fossil fuel and while cleaner, still pretty dirty. Renewables (solar/wind) have had significant growth but they have replaced less coal than gas has in recent years.
Here's the thing about coal in the US. The US has VAST reserves of coal, just under a quarter of the worlds reserves. We are to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. For better or worse I do not see any reasonable scenario whereby coal as a source of power will not continue to be a substantial percentage of our power production for the next several decades at minimum.
Except that, when the "little stack" is sitting in your driveway, it isn't consuming ANYTHING, nor producing ANY pollution, whereas the "big stack" WILL be running 24/7, and at many times, will be actually CONSUMING and PRODUCING without actual NEED.
What do you mean "producing without actual need"? There is a need, it just isn't your need. Just because you aren't using the lights in your home doesn't mean someone else isn't. The amount of electricity the power plants generate has to pretty closely match the amount actually being used or else bad things happen to the grid.
If you are trying to make an argument that automobiles are in any way efficient, you're failing miserably. They are terribly inefficient, dirty and wasteful.
There's no need to synthesize gasoline, when bacteria will make Butanol for you. It's a 1:1 replacement for gasoline.
And why would we want to do that? Butanol has some advantages but the feedstocks are the same as for ethanol and has the same ultimate problem of little/no net energy gain. You burn a bunch of fuel farming feedstock so you can make butanol/ethanol/etc which provides no more fuel at the end of the day than if you had simply burned gasoline/diesel without all the extra work. You still have the pollution problems, you haven't closed the carbon cycle and you've spent a lot of money for no actual energy gain at the end of the day.
I've got nothing against bio fuels but I have seen very little in that industry that is anything more than a subsidy to the farming industry at the end of the day.
The 3 will be a market changer for the low-end of electric vehicles.
Maybe. Hopefully. Never a good idea to declare a product to be a market changer until you can actually get your hands on one. Tesla has done some really good work so far (the Model S is an awesome car) but it is still very possible they could drop the ball in some way. I'm hoping they hit it out of the park because I think it would be a shakeup that that the auto industry needs but I've seen too many failures before to be confident of it.
If they hit $35K with 200+ mile range, it means all the other electric vehicles in that range, such as the Nissan Leaf, will also have to hit 200+ miles or drop below $25K.
I certainly hope the do this. A vehicle that can't cover 100 miles can never really be more than a toy or a test bed. I hope Tesla can keep pushing the state of the art in electric vehicles because no one else is really trying or at least not competently trying. The Leaf is swell but it's the very definition of a niche vehicle. All the rest have thrown their effort at hybrids which is cool too but not going to push certain key technologies like fast charging.
Football, by its very nature, is played by jocks. Jocks who have been scoring with cheerleaders since highschool. Worse yet, these are elite jocks.
Did you REALLY want to date the cheerleaders? Was that an actual goal in your life? If so then I have to say I think that is pretty sad. Personally I'd suggest trying to date someone you actually find interesting.
Do you REALLY think the "jock" versus "nerd" thing is really a thing? If so then you've been watching too many movies. The real world doesn't work that way. I was a D1 college athlete and I also earned an engineering degree. I wore coke bottle glasses, was terribly shy with girls, got generally good grades and was all state in my sport in high school. The generic concept of a "jock" is as laughably absurd as trying to paint all the smart kids as identical.
They make millions to play, have the hottest wives (and GFs on the side), and are parts of a team/corporate entity that makes billions of dollars tax free.
And the nerds who sign the checks for those athletes make billions and own the team/corporate entity. Current owners of major league sports franchises include Marc Cuban, Steve Balmer, and Paul Allen. All nerds who made their money in tech and didn't have to destroy their body to do it in the process. Who would you rather be, the millionaire athlete or the billionaire owner?
What, exactly, in this story makes us care even the tiniest amount about "sportsball" ?
Some people do care. If you aren't one of them that's fine. Go on to the next story and quit whining about how oppressed you think nerds are.
College football is a big money business. Players bring in big money for their schools. The players have to keep up a minimum GPA or they are not allowed to play. If they don't play the school doesn't do as well and loses money. So the schools "help" the players by making sure they keep up their GPA. Help meaning they steer them towards fluff courses. At the end of it they give them a diploma, basically as payback for all the money they helped the school earn.
You are painting with an awfully broad brush there my friend. The real picture is FAR more complicated than you paint it. How do I know? I was a Division 1 college athlete. (wrestling if you care) Yes there are some schools that in football and basketball seriously bend or just plain ignore the rules in the pursuit of wins. Others do quite well and actually do have high academic standards. I can assure you that you won't find players at schools like Northwestern or Stanford getting cut a lot of slack in the classroom. While the NCAA is a hugely hypocritical organization, most college athletes are legitimately there to try to get a degree. The ones that aren't tend to either not graduate at all or for a very few leave early for a pro draft. The ones that shouldn't be there tend to wash out or leave before graduation.
Claiming that they have earned the diploma in any real academic sense is laughable.
Then you don't know what you are talking about. Had you bothered to actually look you would find rather few examples of college athletes being given degrees that they didn't actually earn. Don't be so quick to assume that everyone who plays college sports is a dumb jock who couldn't possibly have earned their degree.
Of those degree holders, how many ex-players have degrees in Communication or Business?
What is wrong with a degree in communications or business? Are you implying something snide? Do you think someone interested in those topics is somehow inferior?
I have personally encountered truck drivers weaving side to side, tailgating and making sudden lane changes (the worst one was also in heavy rain just as I was about to pass a truck) - and I don't even drive that much.
Having driven a large rig before I can assure you that usually the problem is NOT the big rig driver. It is the idiots in passenger vehicles who cut them off and do all kinds of stupid driving around big vehicles. You cannot really appreciate how little regard many people have for the risks they take until you've driven one of these.
I thought the Teamsters were more into the loading and unloading, and the drivers were often owner/operators.
Teamsters are significantly though not exclusively truckers, including drivers but also warehouse workers and various other blue collar workers. Companies like UPS are commonly organized by the Teamsters. Some drivers are owner/operators but plenty drive for large companies like Con-Way, etc.
Never heard of more than one person operating a truck at a time.
Long distance hauling often has teams of two drivers (often husband/wife) though obviously they don't operate the vehicle at exactly the same moment.
Laws that need to be made in secret are bad laws. Period. I am hard pressed to think of an exception.
Then you haven't thought about it very hard. There sometimes are very good reasons for negotiating positions to be secret prior to the final version of a law. The most important one is that what needs to happen isn't always popular. If politicians and negotiators have no room to offer deals because everything is public then it becomes impossible to reach any sort of compromise. That said, you can take the secrecy thing too far. Room to float ideas and propose compromises is one thing. Negotiating deals that are nothing but ghost writing for special interests and lobbies is something else entirely.
If negotiating positions are always public, politicians frequently have to harden their position to match their political rhetoric or party positions even if that results in a worse deal at the end of the day. Lots of our most important laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were negotiated significantly in secret because, let's face it - racism was hardly disguised back then and in many cases it could be hard for a politician to support something that he knew was right but that many of his constituents opposed. Sometimes what is best isn't popular and a limited amount ability to conduct back channel negotiations is actually far more important than most people realize. Read a biography of LBJ sometime if you want to see a real world example of some of what I'm talking about.
The oil industry wont stop until they can sell us water for $3 a gallon.
That would be a discount from what people already are paying for water. People are voluntarily buying bottled tap water at $7.57 per gallon right now. Approximately 2000X what it would cost from the tap.
I don't disagree but stream what? The options for streaming content are still pretty sad though I do see progress. Cable TV is generally a rip off but the alternatives don't provide any better value for money to me. I had a Netflix subscription and I dropped it because I wasn't using it enough. Most streaming services don't have enough original content or it's too hard to find something worth watching to be worth the trouble. I'm optimistic that will change but right now it just doesn't work for me.
Looked at it but not really quite there. As far as I can tell it doesn't work with my DVR or provide equivalent functionality and the channel list is worse than what I already have for not much less money. Some channels prohibit you from pausing, rewinding or skipping commercials. Not really a great deal to me though I do see the appeal to some.
Well that fortunate for you but there aren't any realistic alternatives where I live. So what do you suggest I do about it? I'm perfectly well aware that some places have better service and/or better prices than I do at my residence.
The only competition to Comcast in my town is Frontier Communications DSL service which is much slower and not any cheaper for similar speeds. I think their fastest service where I live is 20Mb down/3Mb up. And that's it for landlines. I could go cellular but that is very expensive, slower and has small bandwidth caps. Satellite? Yeah... no.
That said, I'm ok with the price though not thrilled about it. I can afford it, it's fast enough for my needs (up and down), the price hasn't changed and the service has been very reliable. Would I like to pay less? Sure. Do I think Comcast is making a healthier than strictly necessary profit? I'm sure of it. But given the scenario I'm in it's not bad and it's an amount within my willingness to pay. I don't think I'd be willing to pay any more than I am but I use it enough to get decent value for money.
Slashdot Mirror
security installation technicians—because somebody needs to install the cameras and sensors—can expect to earn $31,680
That's because there is no actual skill involved. Any idiot with a drill and a screwdriver can mount a camera to a wall. Doesn't require any special training or skills. This is the sort of thing that people with work documents of questionable origin tend to get hired to do.
According to a 2014 report from Global Knowledge and Penton, those armed with certifications such as CRISC, CISM, and CISA can expect to earn a healthy six figures a year.
Umm, great. Living where? $100K in Silicon Valley or Manhattan won't get you much. Same amount in the mid-west is pretty comfortable living.
Some guys in Cleveland decided to sell the old stock of sweaters that their family business had made in the past. Apparently it was a lot of them. The sweaters sold for high prices and customers said they were purchasing to wear them as they we much better than what is now generally available. Naturally they thought reestablishing the family manufacturing business. Looking into this they discovered that not only would machinery have to be imported but the entire supply chain was gone from the US.
I was born and raised in Cleveland and my whole family has worked in manufacturing there, myself included. So some hypothetical (?) businessmen who were clueless about how global supply chains and manufacturing works wanted to revive a labor intensive business they had no personal experience in, in an area with high labor costs, no particular tradition in clothing manufacturing and no existing supply chain. Awesome business plan.
The reason we now say measured in dollars is because by any other measure we are outdone by China and not "just getting better" but still declining.
Not only not true, easily shown to be not true. The vast majority of manufacturing work that has left US shores for China is work that is labor intensive. That is work that will go wherever labor rates are lowest. Since that isn't the US anymore, most of that work has left US shores, probably never to return. Absent an economic catastrophe you won't see garment manufacturing come back to the US because that means US wages have fallen drastically.
US manufacturing is alive and well. We just make stuff like cars and jumbo jets and earth movers and microprocessors instead of happy meal toys, and clothes and walmart junk. Personally I see that as a good thing that it is rather than trying to mourn the loss of industries that are incompatible with earning good wages. Let China have those jobs so they can grow their economy and bring millions out of poverty the like of which you've never even seen much less lived with.
People bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs that weren't going to stay here anyway. Used to be you could graduate high school and get a job on an assembly line that hugely overpaid you for what amounted to unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Then the real world caught up and people have to compete and get educated for decent paying jobs. There's plenty of work to be had in manufacturing but you'll need to be educated if you want to get paid more than minimum wages for it.
The dollar figures include military contracts to build things that never actually seem to get built where individual contracts dwarf the gdp of some countries.
Oh, well. Some military contractors got some jobs so clearly manufacturing is dead. Clearly the $3 TRILLION in manufacturing the US does every year and that keeps growing every year doesn't mean anything. US manufacturing by itself is an economy roughly the size of the GDP of Russia. All of Russia. And it is growing despite idiots like yourself trying to throw dirt on it.
The rust belt is real. Detroit is dead.
HA! I've lived in the "rust belt" most of my life and live in Detroit metro right now. You have no idea what you are talking about.
I think some people are just confused by the whole idea of factories in the US. We keep being told that all of that "factory-stuff" happens in China now.
Heh. Yeah, I get that a lot. The notion that we don't make anything in the US is a pretty bizarre one given that measured in dollars we manufacture more stuff than anyone. Funny thing is that many people take it as a given even though it's trivial to show that American manufacturing is alive and well and continuing to grow.
Any company that does not have a good video conferencing system in at least 2 conference rooms is ran by morons.
Really? So I run a manufacturing company. My customers are almost all within 1 day's driving distance. Furthermore I have yet to run into a single problem that would have been better solved if only we had a video conferencing system in our conference room. Why? Because our problems are out of the factory floor, not in a conference room. When I need to visit a customer for something I can't do over the phone or email it's because I'm going to be spending time on a factory floor looking into the guts of a machine most likely. A conference room video chat would be utterly useless.
But we're morons because we don't have a good video conferencing system in two conference rooms. [/eyeroll] I think you don't know much about how business works in the real world.
Dirty, nasty, and falling apart.
That's my basic impression of most of NYC. Beat up, dirty, and falling apart and no one seems to care much. I went to school not far from the city and have visited plenty of times. Almost moved there for a job once. But never have thought it was a pleasant place to be. Interesting? Sure. Impressive? Definitely. But also dirty, gross and highly overrated. New Yorkers simply don't seem to care much about living in a clean place. It's among the dirtiest big cities I've been to and I've been to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Mexico City, and most of the big US and Canadian cities. (Singapore incidentally is by far the cleanest big city I've ever seen)
Having an airport close to the center of the city is a really useful asset but NYC seems to have neglected it like so much of the rest of the city. La Guardia could be really something special but it's just taken for granted.
Of course global warning is a major problem. But it's not a problem of pollution, it's a problem of global warming.
That's a tautology if I've ever heard one. Global warming isn't the only problem caused by pollution but global warming IS caused by pollution. This is true even if you ignore whether the source is human or natural. And yes CO2 can be (and is) a form of pollution. It's not particulate matter like soot but it's still pollution.
CO2 is not a pollutant but a greenhouse gas.
CO2 is a pollutant AND a greenhouse gas. It is both. The source of the CO2 is from an artificial source and the quantity is FAR beyond what the evidence shows us can be absorbed in a reasonable time by the natural means.
Otherwise you're making an argument that every time you exhale, you're polluting the air.
We are evolved part of a natural ecosystem. The emissions from a car are not. Every bit of CO2 emitted from cars into the atmosphere is a pollutant because it would not be there otherwise. Anything can be a pollutant if it is put somewhere it would not otherwise be to the detriment of the environment. Water can be a pollutant under the right circumstances.
New cars sold in America are amazingly clean. In some cities the air coming out of the tail pipe is cleaner than the air going in.
Even if that were true (and it isn't really - more on that below) that speaks more to how dirty the incoming air is than to how clean the cars are. Would you breath the air from any car tailpipe? Of course you wouldn't, no matter how clean they claim it to be.
You are not accounting for carbon dioxide emissions because I assure you that more CO2 comes out than goes in and no gasoline or diesel engine cleans that up. Even if the car cleans up the particulate matter nearly perfectly it still emits huge amounts of CO2 and other gases which is still a problem. Cars are a lot cleaner than they used to be but lets not pretend internal combustion engines are anything remotely resembling pollutant free.
When I was just out of college and broke I had a car that was clean and was reliable. When our state began emissions inspections my car failed and I was required to fix it.
Then while it may have been reliable it was by definition not a clean (emissions) car.
For a lot of people, though, they just don't make enough money to afford these kinds of repairs and they NEED a car to get to work or school or childcare or whatever their responsibilities are.
This is true and it is a real problem. The appropriate solution would be for the government to incorporate some form of need based financial assistance for those individuals unduly burdened by the program. Shamefully some state governments appear to not do this.
The poorer you are, the less likely you are to be able to afford to live close to work.
Not every place is like San Francisco where there is a strong correlation between longer commute length and affordable housing. It varies quite a lot by municipality regarding how far your commute might be.
Many schools provide tutors as part of the sports scholarship.
It's not a part of the scholarship. Scholarships don't work that way. What is in those scholarship packages is rather rigidly defined.
Your time as a college athlete is rather regimented and most programs require both freshmen and students who are at risk of ineligibility to attend study sessions where tutors are made available. This is a good thing because it can be very hard to be disciplined with your time and a lot of 18 year olds away from home for the first time often don't make the best choices. They make tutors available because the athletes don't have an abundance of free time to seek out extra help when needed. Competing in D1 sports is effectively a full time job on top of your academic load. It's challenging for anyone.
The tutors help the athletes, sometimes during tests.
This does NOT happen as a routine matter. Perhaps you can find some examples of that happening but it simply doesn't work like that in reality. The tutors are not present during tests and would have no reason in general to be present during the tests. If this were to happen it is a CLEAR violation of NCAA rules and a program could face sanctions. Most aren't quite that stupid.
And professors "leaned on" to be lenient for retests and such.
Again, not a routine thing any more than among the general school population. I can probably point out examples of abuse better than you can but your perception of what is happening doesn't match what happens in the real world at most schools most of the time.
Coal power is a declining percentage.
While it is true that we are using a smaller percentage of coal in the last few years, it is largely because we have replaced it with cheap natural gas which is still a fossil fuel and while cleaner, still pretty dirty. Renewables (solar/wind) have had significant growth but they have replaced less coal than gas has in recent years.
Here's the thing about coal in the US. The US has VAST reserves of coal, just under a quarter of the worlds reserves. We are to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. For better or worse I do not see any reasonable scenario whereby coal as a source of power will not continue to be a substantial percentage of our power production for the next several decades at minimum.
Except that, when the "little stack" is sitting in your driveway, it isn't consuming ANYTHING, nor producing ANY pollution, whereas the "big stack" WILL be running 24/7, and at many times, will be actually CONSUMING and PRODUCING without actual NEED.
What do you mean "producing without actual need"? There is a need, it just isn't your need. Just because you aren't using the lights in your home doesn't mean someone else isn't. The amount of electricity the power plants generate has to pretty closely match the amount actually being used or else bad things happen to the grid.
If you are trying to make an argument that automobiles are in any way efficient, you're failing miserably. They are terribly inefficient, dirty and wasteful.
There's no need to synthesize gasoline, when bacteria will make Butanol for you. It's a 1:1 replacement for gasoline.
And why would we want to do that? Butanol has some advantages but the feedstocks are the same as for ethanol and has the same ultimate problem of little/no net energy gain. You burn a bunch of fuel farming feedstock so you can make butanol/ethanol/etc which provides no more fuel at the end of the day than if you had simply burned gasoline/diesel without all the extra work. You still have the pollution problems, you haven't closed the carbon cycle and you've spent a lot of money for no actual energy gain at the end of the day.
I've got nothing against bio fuels but I have seen very little in that industry that is anything more than a subsidy to the farming industry at the end of the day.
The 3 will be a market changer for the low-end of electric vehicles.
Maybe. Hopefully. Never a good idea to declare a product to be a market changer until you can actually get your hands on one. Tesla has done some really good work so far (the Model S is an awesome car) but it is still very possible they could drop the ball in some way. I'm hoping they hit it out of the park because I think it would be a shakeup that that the auto industry needs but I've seen too many failures before to be confident of it.
If they hit $35K with 200+ mile range, it means all the other electric vehicles in that range, such as the Nissan Leaf, will also have to hit 200+ miles or drop below $25K.
I certainly hope the do this. A vehicle that can't cover 100 miles can never really be more than a toy or a test bed. I hope Tesla can keep pushing the state of the art in electric vehicles because no one else is really trying or at least not competently trying. The Leaf is swell but it's the very definition of a niche vehicle. All the rest have thrown their effort at hybrids which is cool too but not going to push certain key technologies like fast charging.
Football, by its very nature, is played by jocks. Jocks who have been scoring with cheerleaders since highschool. Worse yet, these are elite jocks.
Did you REALLY want to date the cheerleaders? Was that an actual goal in your life? If so then I have to say I think that is pretty sad. Personally I'd suggest trying to date someone you actually find interesting.
Do you REALLY think the "jock" versus "nerd" thing is really a thing? If so then you've been watching too many movies. The real world doesn't work that way. I was a D1 college athlete and I also earned an engineering degree. I wore coke bottle glasses, was terribly shy with girls, got generally good grades and was all state in my sport in high school. The generic concept of a "jock" is as laughably absurd as trying to paint all the smart kids as identical.
They make millions to play, have the hottest wives (and GFs on the side), and are parts of a team/corporate entity that makes billions of dollars tax free.
And the nerds who sign the checks for those athletes make billions and own the team/corporate entity. Current owners of major league sports franchises include Marc Cuban, Steve Balmer, and Paul Allen. All nerds who made their money in tech and didn't have to destroy their body to do it in the process. Who would you rather be, the millionaire athlete or the billionaire owner?
What, exactly, in this story makes us care even the tiniest amount about "sportsball" ?
Some people do care. If you aren't one of them that's fine. Go on to the next story and quit whining about how oppressed you think nerds are.
College football is a big money business. Players bring in big money for their schools. The players have to keep up a minimum GPA or they are not allowed to play. If they don't play the school doesn't do as well and loses money. So the schools "help" the players by making sure they keep up their GPA. Help meaning they steer them towards fluff courses. At the end of it they give them a diploma, basically as payback for all the money they helped the school earn.
You are painting with an awfully broad brush there my friend. The real picture is FAR more complicated than you paint it. How do I know? I was a Division 1 college athlete. (wrestling if you care) Yes there are some schools that in football and basketball seriously bend or just plain ignore the rules in the pursuit of wins. Others do quite well and actually do have high academic standards. I can assure you that you won't find players at schools like Northwestern or Stanford getting cut a lot of slack in the classroom. While the NCAA is a hugely hypocritical organization, most college athletes are legitimately there to try to get a degree. The ones that aren't tend to either not graduate at all or for a very few leave early for a pro draft. The ones that shouldn't be there tend to wash out or leave before graduation.
Claiming that they have earned the diploma in any real academic sense is laughable.
Then you don't know what you are talking about. Had you bothered to actually look you would find rather few examples of college athletes being given degrees that they didn't actually earn. Don't be so quick to assume that everyone who plays college sports is a dumb jock who couldn't possibly have earned their degree.
Of those degree holders, how many ex-players have degrees in Communication or Business?
What is wrong with a degree in communications or business? Are you implying something snide? Do you think someone interested in those topics is somehow inferior?
I have personally encountered truck drivers weaving side to side, tailgating and making sudden lane changes (the worst one was also in heavy rain just as I was about to pass a truck) - and I don't even drive that much.
Having driven a large rig before I can assure you that usually the problem is NOT the big rig driver. It is the idiots in passenger vehicles who cut them off and do all kinds of stupid driving around big vehicles. You cannot really appreciate how little regard many people have for the risks they take until you've driven one of these.
I thought the Teamsters were more into the loading and unloading, and the drivers were often owner/operators.
Teamsters are significantly though not exclusively truckers, including drivers but also warehouse workers and various other blue collar workers. Companies like UPS are commonly organized by the Teamsters. Some drivers are owner/operators but plenty drive for large companies like Con-Way, etc.
Never heard of more than one person operating a truck at a time.
Long distance hauling often has teams of two drivers (often husband/wife) though obviously they don't operate the vehicle at exactly the same moment.
Laws that need to be made in secret are bad laws. Period. I am hard pressed to think of an exception.
Then you haven't thought about it very hard. There sometimes are very good reasons for negotiating positions to be secret prior to the final version of a law. The most important one is that what needs to happen isn't always popular. If politicians and negotiators have no room to offer deals because everything is public then it becomes impossible to reach any sort of compromise. That said, you can take the secrecy thing too far. Room to float ideas and propose compromises is one thing. Negotiating deals that are nothing but ghost writing for special interests and lobbies is something else entirely.
If negotiating positions are always public, politicians frequently have to harden their position to match their political rhetoric or party positions even if that results in a worse deal at the end of the day. Lots of our most important laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were negotiated significantly in secret because, let's face it - racism was hardly disguised back then and in many cases it could be hard for a politician to support something that he knew was right but that many of his constituents opposed. Sometimes what is best isn't popular and a limited amount ability to conduct back channel negotiations is actually far more important than most people realize. Read a biography of LBJ sometime if you want to see a real world example of some of what I'm talking about.
The oil industry wont stop until they can sell us water for $3 a gallon.
That would be a discount from what people already are paying for water. People are voluntarily buying bottled tap water at $7.57 per gallon right now. Approximately 2000X what it would cost from the tap.
Just stream, Cable tv is anacronistic scam.
I don't disagree but stream what? The options for streaming content are still pretty sad though I do see progress. Cable TV is generally a rip off but the alternatives don't provide any better value for money to me. I had a Netflix subscription and I dropped it because I wasn't using it enough. Most streaming services don't have enough original content or it's too hard to find something worth watching to be worth the trouble. I'm optimistic that will change but right now it just doesn't work for me.
SlingTV (from Dish Network)
Looked at it but not really quite there. As far as I can tell it doesn't work with my DVR or provide equivalent functionality and the channel list is worse than what I already have for not much less money. Some channels prohibit you from pausing, rewinding or skipping commercials. Not really a great deal to me though I do see the appeal to some.
Well that fortunate for you but there aren't any realistic alternatives where I live. So what do you suggest I do about it? I'm perfectly well aware that some places have better service and/or better prices than I do at my residence.
The only competition to Comcast in my town is Frontier Communications DSL service which is much slower and not any cheaper for similar speeds. I think their fastest service where I live is 20Mb down/3Mb up. And that's it for landlines. I could go cellular but that is very expensive, slower and has small bandwidth caps. Satellite? Yeah... no.
That said, I'm ok with the price though not thrilled about it. I can afford it, it's fast enough for my needs (up and down), the price hasn't changed and the service has been very reliable. Would I like to pay less? Sure. Do I think Comcast is making a healthier than strictly necessary profit? I'm sure of it. But given the scenario I'm in it's not bad and it's an amount within my willingness to pay. I don't think I'd be willing to pay any more than I am but I use it enough to get decent value for money.