Have you looked at what they are eating? If you don't fuel your body to rebuild itself, then it's going to fall apart.
What they eat isn't the problem. You could feed them the most optimal diet in the world and they would still be a physical wreck A typical flooring guy will have his knees and probably his back shot by the time he is 40-50. The ergonomics of the job just wreck their joints. Operate heavy machinery like a jack hammer and you'll be a mess pretty quickly. Most skilled trades guys I know have some amount of physical ailments thanks to their job if they are older than 40 or so and have been doing it for a long time. It's a good way to make a living but it's not terribly easy on the body.
That's when you go and scored 1400+ on the SAT just to prove that a few Cs aren't your total sum worth as a student.
That still might not get you into Princeton or Harvard etc when everyone else has 1400+ on their SATs too plus straight A grades and all the rest of the stuff they look for. I was a B-C student myself with pretty good SAT scores and while it got me into a better college than my grades alone would have allowed, I didn't get into as good a school as my actual talent level (later proven) would have dictated. It wasn't until much later than I got my act together and got into a top flight grad school. In fact until grad school I pretty much hated academia. Grad school was the first time I actually enjoyed school and my grades reflected that fact.
How the fuck would a person as smart as Steve Wozniak be flipping burgers?
Because life it difficult sometimes. Smarts is helpful but no assurance of success.
I see exceptionally bright people all the time who underachieve. I have a lady working for me who has amazing facility with numbers and would have made a hell of a good engineer. But she has had a lot of difficult life circumstances that prevented her from getting the education and support she needed. (Abusive parents, kids when young, abusive ex-spouse, etc) So she works a blue collar job and is very good at it but earns barely double minimum wage. She is my age and at least as smart as I am but isn't likely to advance much further because life is tough. To her credit she has a very bright daughter who is skipping grades and will be quite a legacy for her.
I knew a guy in high school who had a full ride scholarship to Harvard. He got into drug dealing and they found him beaten, bound and resting on the ice on a lake, barely alive. Sometimes people who are very smart do very stupid things.
I was a college athlete in a Division 1 college. I attended an academically rigorous school (Lehigh University) and got an engineering degree while playing sports.
You will have to spend a lot of time training in highschool at the expense of academic endeavors to get anywhere close to being competitive at the college level.
This is not true at all. Academics is only sacrificed if your time management skills are poor. Sports practice typically takes 2-5 hours per day depending on the sport and time of year. With game days and weekends it's usually a 20-35 hours/week commitment. If you cannot cram your academic schedule into the remaining 11-12+ waking hours when you aren't practicing/competing then you are doing it wrong.
They give you tutors because they know you don't have enough time to do proper studying.
No, they have tutors because if you are struggling with a subject your eligibility to play can be revoked. Some students need the tutoring, others don't. No different than any other part of the student body. Generally speaking most teams insist that athletes attend mandatory study halls with the rest of the team until they prove they can handle the academic load without help. On our team all freshman were required to attend, as was anyone whose GPA was under 3.0.
You'll have to choose classes that work around your training schedule rather than the ones that are important academically.
Again, generally not true. Sometimes there is a conflict with a class but it's the exception rather than the rule. I had one conflict once and I simply took the class in question the following semester.
You won't be able to take degrees like engineering because there are too many class and lab hours and it would conflict with the training regimen.
Not at all true. I got an engineering degree with all the attendant labs and other classes. I'd be happy to introduce you to (literally) hundreds of other student athletes who did the same thing. My wife played D1 sports in the Big 10 and now is a physician. I had a lab that ran into practice once a week on two occasions. The lab ended at 4 and practice started at 3:30. I just got to practice a bit late those days and stayed a little after. The notion that you cannot get the classes you need/want is complete nonsense except in rare cases.
I seriously doubt that most people could pull off a useful degree while still maintaining their obligations to the sports side of things.
Then you have no idea what you are talking about. It's not only possible, it happens all the time. Very few athletes are going to become professionals in their sports and the rest of them have to get a degree they can do something with.
The coach isn't going to recommend that they stay on the team for next year when they constantly want to skip practice to study.
NOBODY in Division 1 sports skips practice to study. They don't even ask. You learn to manage your time and work very hard. If you cannot handle it then you drop the sport, not the studying.
And there's always the chance you will have an injury, and then your scholarship is gone.
It's a possibility but then you are just like every other student. In practice it rarely happens. Generally speaking they don't pull scholarships before the end of the academic year unless you quit the team. Even for serious injuries they'll generally keep you on scholarship until it is absolutely certain you cannot play ever again. I'm sure you can find some examples of shit-head coaches being mean but it doesn't usually happen. There have been discussions (serious ones) of multi-year non-revokable scholarships though nothing to my knowledge has happened yet.
I don't really use it for texting or notes since it makes too many mistakes but I think that's more of my problem. I feel weird talking to a computer so I talk weird and not loud enough.
Not unusual. Dictating is a learned skill and not that many people are used to doing it. I'm not particularly good at it either.
Instead of innovation the tech companies are more interested in dog fights, and the one thing that I need to know is this --- Why are they doing all these?
Because they have to. It has nothing to do with their desire (or lack thereof) to innovate. Once you are an established player part of remaining a successful company is competitive strategy. Some products simply cannot be rapidly innovated. Coca-Cola isn't going to come up with some new miracle drink. Apple is not likely to reinvent the personal computer. Those are mature businesses and they have to be tended to and protected. The notion that every problem can be solved and every business can be run if we are just more innovative is incredibly naive. Even if you do have some incredibly innovative new product it is going to be copied within days and you will be out of business if you cannot protect that new product. To do otherwise is irresponsible and a one way ticket to bankruptcy.
For Apple or Samsung or Microsoft to grow at even a modest 5-8% rate they would have to create as much new business as the entire revenue of EBay *every year*. You think it is easy to create a new company the size of eBay each any every year? When you become big enough there simply are not that many new lines of business that are big enough to really move the needle. It is unbelievably difficult
Please pay a visit to India or Russia or China, if you have the chance. Over there they still have a lot of people devoting their lives on innovation, because to them, it is the right thing to do
I have been to China and India. There is no religion of innovation over there any more than there is lack of it here in the US. There are a bunch of people who are working hard to find economic opportunities, just like here. A lot of the effort over there is largely aimed at copying industry from other parts of the world with the advantage of cheaper Chinese labor rates. Sure there are a few companies doing some pretty nifty new stuff, but their economy is in no way centered around innovation. Most of it is engaged in contract manufacturing for export. They don't design the products, the just make or copy them. Nothing (generally) wrong with that but China is not driving product innovation in any big way yet. One day maybe but not today.
Any day of the week, I'll take an H1N1 injection over an Ebola injection because, Ebola is vastly more capable of causing death.
That my friend is a strawman argument. Of course you would rather take your chances with influenza over ebola if you were certain to be infected with one or the other but that scenario is absurd. You aren't certain to be infected with either one and the odds of infection are VASTLY different between the two. Unless you actually live in West Africa you should be FAR more concerned about the disease with a small mortality rate that infects huge populations than the disease with a 50%+ mortality rate that infects virtually no one. The current Ebola outbreak has affected approximately 0.0001% of the world's population.
1) The fact that other H1N1 strains have killed millions of people has little bearing on how lethal the particular, modern-day H1N1 strain they were referring to happens to be
H1N1 family viruses are constantly mutating and there is more than one. The notion that I should be more worried about ebola than H1N1 is frankly absurd because the odds of me contracting ebola is almost nil.
you realize that the particular H1N1 strain they're talking about in this thread (the 2009 strain) wasn't actually that lethal in comparison to Ebola.
Perhaps I'm not being clear. I don't really care much about a disease with 50%-80% mortality rates when the chance of infection is almost zero. I care a lot of about a disease with 1% mortality rates when the chance of infection is quite substantial.
2) You're clearly confused about what "lethal" means.
I'm not confused at all. I'm merely point out that people are panicking over the scary but very very unlikely disease when they really should worry about the less scary but far more likely one. If you happen to be in West Africa then by all means exercise appropriate caution. Otherwise it's absurd to get very worked up about it.
Pointing out that the Spanish Flu was indiscriminate in whom it killed in no way takes away from his claim that the 2009 H1N1 strain's deaths were primarily those who "were already ill or had other issues."
He cherry picked a bit of data to support his conclusion. The situation is more complicated than "50%+ mortality rates = OMG".
Tens of millions of people get the flu (of many variants) each year, and many thousands die from it - but in general it is mostly the very young or elderly who don't have the immune systems to fight it off
That depends on what strain of H1N1 you are talking about. It's not a single virus and at times it has mutated into strains that are much more lethal. The pandemic in 1918 was notable in part because it tended to affect young healthy people. Epidemiologist don't worry about ebola too much. They worry a lot about pandemic influenza or Vancomycin resistant staph-aureus or any number of other diseases that are much tougher to contain.
The flu kills a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of those who contract it...
But it infects FAR more people. 1% of a very big number is a bigger deal than 50% of a very small number. The chances of you or I contracting ebola is a good approximation of zero. The chances of your or I contracting some strain of influenza is actually quite high. Worrying about ebola is kind of like worrying about a shark attack. Scary but absurdly unlikely to actually occur.
Saying that something is more lethal doesn't mean the same as saying it kills more people.
It's pretty clueless to worry only about lethality without considering the likelihood of transmission. Of course ebola is scary if you contract it or have a significant risk of contracting it. But frankly being worried about ebola is kind of like being worried about a shark attack. Scary as hell and you'll probably die if it happens but not something you should worry about much because the odds are so absurdly low.
between April 2009 and April 2010 there were 61M cases of H1N1 resulting in 12.5K deaths. WHO says that, so far, there are 7192 cases of EBOV in the West African outbreak, and 3286 deaths.
Unless you were actually in West Africa your chances of contracting ebola were and remain close to nil whereas your chances of contracting H1N1 were and are FAR higher no matter where you live. Risk = Consequences X Likelihood X Detectibility . Ebola has high consequences, very low likelihood (hard to transmit) and fairly high detectibility. H1N1 is more variable on the consequences though generally lower mortality rates but has much higher likelihood because it is more easily communicable and H1N1 has worse detectibility prior to infection. Occasionally strains of H1N1 mutate into something very deadly that can kill millions of people. There are strains of H1N1 that have infected virtually the entire global population and it does not always just kill the old and the infirm.
Maybe blown out of proportion but Ebola is far more lethal virus than H1N1.
Variants of H1N1 have killed tens of millions of people. You should probably spend 30 seconds researching the issue before spouting off nonsense publicly.
Also, deaths were mostly people who were ill already or had other issues.
Amazing how the government freaked out over H1N1 years ago and simply nothing happened. Yet, a real virus is on the move and "everything is a-ok" is the word from everyone.
H1N1 is a "real virus" which has variants that have killed millions of people. Influenza has killed and has the potential to kill FAR more people than ebola is ever likely to. Read up on influenza pandemics of the past.
The current ebola outbreak is a serious issue but it isn't what keeps epidemiologists awake at night.
So what's with all these people estimating weeks to learn such things?
Because for many people that's what it takes. If you've got 60 years in one measurement system, it's probably going to take you a little longer to adjust.
when I took my first trip to the UK, and people talked about the weeks it'd take to learn to drive on the left side of the road. I found that, by the time I'd got a few blocks from the airport, maybe 5 minutes, I'd already stopped consciously thinking about it, and just drove like the others around me.
Well good for you. However as others have pointed out previously, the plural of anecdote is not data. Some people take a little longer. Cut them some slack.
The only real difficulty I've found with such things is learning the words in a different language.
And some people pick that up quite easily. (I'm not one of them) We're all a little different. If you pick things up faster than others then good for you but be patient with others who take a little longer.
And because you don't see it (possibly because the responsible users have been driven underground alike with the irresponsible ones, but the irresponsible ones are the ones who act out, and thus are seen) it doesn't exist!
Are you done with the empty rhetorical arguments yet? You know damn well what I meant by "I see no reason" or if you don't you need to go figure that out first. If you want to make an argument backed up by something then by all means enlighten us with your brilliance since you seem to think you have this problem solved.
I'm puzzled what you think "responsible" use of heroin might look like. Bizarre notion you have there. That said, responsible or irresponsible, underground or not, you haven't given me a single reason why we as a society should condone the use of dangerous drugs like heroin or legalize their use.
And it should be drawn before alcohol, by gum! It's the devil's spirit!
Boy that's a convincing argument. I guess you aren't done with the content free rhetorical arguments.
I don't have a problem with adults drinking or smoking (tobacco or pot) provided they do so without endangering others or causing problems for society. I think that any costs of the health problems caused by those products should be borne entirely by the person who used them. If that means you get shitty health care because you chose to smoke tobacco then that is your problem because it is 100% in your control. Got a bad liver because you drank too much? Tough shit on getting a transplant. If you want to use drugs recreationally then the costs of that are on you. If you decide to use a particularly dangerous drug like heroin then there should be consequences for that. I think throwing drug users in jail is stupid but there are plenty of other societal consequences we can utilize.
If you have a screw with a 1 inch head you use a 1 inch tool to manage it. No one is going to ask you to call that screw a 26.xx mm screw, now will the tool be renamed.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not talking about simply relabeling drawings to be metric. It would be pointless to simply label things differently. I'm talking about actually designing the products using existing metric standards going forward. Instead of using a 1/4" screw you use a 6mm (M6) screw when you design the product. Lengths are specified in drawings in metric. Wire gauges are mm^2 instead of AWG. Etc. The goal is to get to one set of measurements, one set of tools. Not one set of measurements with two sets of tools.
Probably the best way to make it happen is for the government to provide some tax benefits to companies willing to do the conversion, and allow the transition to occur a bit more naturally over time.
I think the best way for it to happen is for certain key parts of industry to demand the conversion. Let's say hypothetically that Ford, GM, Chrysler, Boeing and Caterpillar all demanded that their supply chains convert to metric. Doesn't have to be all at once but over the course of some years. All drawings, fasteners, etc has to meet a global standard. Heck, make it a part of ISO9000 or TS16949. That would force wide swaths of industry to convert whether they like it or not.
The government is already doing this to a significant degree. Suppliers to the military and government can and should require metric. However they should take it to the next level. Require all packaging of food products to be in metric units. Start by requiring the metric unit to be prominent and then slowly phase out the US Customary units over time.
The tough one will be the construction industry. They are soooo ingrained to non-metric measurements that getting them to switch is going to be a bear because there is no single company or group aside from the government that can mandate the change.
All the evidence shows that this is nonsense, that you always cause more problems than you solve because you drive addiction underground and people wind up taking drugs of varying quality because of their illegal nature.
"Cause more problems than you solve"? I don't think so - not for the more serious drugs like morphine, cocaine and the like. If we freely permitted use of some of the more problematic drugs then things would not be better than they are. Heroin is not the same thing as alcohol and should not be treated the same way. Same with many other drugs. There are some things we just cannot condone as a society even if doing so is costly. Are you seriously arguing that we should be ok with people addicted to illegal narcotics? I think it is a waste of resources to incarcerate adults for drug use unless they cause some other problem in the process. But that doesn't mean they should be legal to possess or that we should allow companies to sell addiction as a recreational product. It's bad enough with the cigarette companies - I can only imagine the problems that would arise if we allowed corporate interests to sell heroin for recreational use.
If prohibition prevented use, you would have a point.
Prohibition does prevent a lot of use. Nobody's arguing that the prohibitions cannot be circumvented. To use an analogy, security against shoplifters doesn't eliminate shoplifting but it does help keep it from getting out of control. It keeps honest people honest so to speak. If someone really wants to use heroin then they will probably find a way but that doesn't mean we should make it easy or condone its recreational use. And we certainly should not have private companies selling morphine for recreational use.
Don't get me wrong, I have NO problem with responsible recreational use by adults of alcohol or other mild chemical substances like marijuana. If someone wants to get a little tipsy now and then and they do it in such a way that it doesn't hurt anyone then that is fine. (I also have no problem with companies refusing to hire people who use these chemicals for recreation.) But I see no way to allow certain substances to be used for recreational purposes. We can argue about exactly where that line should be drawn but there is and should be a line.
Because all drug charges are BS, except perhaps for driving under the influence.
This is way off topic but...
Tell that to the people whose lives they affect. Would you like a doctor who operates on you while high? Perhaps you think someone showing up to work while high is not a serious matter? Some drug charges are BS (like most relating to marijuana) but many are quite serious matters.
We restrict access to certain drugs for (mostly) very good reasons. If someone wants to live away from society where their actions cannot affect anyone else then by all means they can use whatever drugs make them happy and none of us will care much. But when actions start to have negative consequences for others then we have a problem and it's hard for certain drugs to not negatively affect others. If you can explain to me the upside to society of someone having a cocaine or heroin addiction then I'll concede the point.
Vipers are straight line cars. They utterly suck in corners. so on public roads you cant go fast unless it's the desert or open Freeway.
I'm guessing you've never driven one. I have one sitting 30 feet from me as I type this. One of the partners in my company has one he bought this January and I've driven it. They can turn just fine. Are there cars that are better in the corners? Sure. But the Viper is quite capable I assure you - well beyond most people's driving ability including my own. What the Viper is not is refined. The Viper is a sledgehammer - not a precision instrument. They don't carve the corners like a Lotus. But they are NOT just straight line muscle cars. Anyone who tells you they are hasn't been behind the wheel of one.
On a price/performance basis it is incredibly cheap among new cars. You can have a new 2015 WRX for MRSP $26,295 and you'll probably pay less than that. And unlike the US muscle cars in the same price range it can actually turn and be driven in sloppy conditions. It's not the prettiest car out there but value/speed for money it is hard to beat.
In general, trying to follow a US recipe that needs some level of accuracy is basically impossible.
That is so not true that I think you are trolling. If not you must be an engineer because you are worrying about levels of precision that simply rarely matter. It's not even remotely difficult to follow a US recipe unless you are wildly incompetent. Few recipes require highly precise measurement and the recipes that do need a high level of accuracy are written to reflect that fact. Professional bakers and competent cooks/chefs know when to use weight versus volume and they know when it doesn't actually matter. Experienced cooks often don't even need to measure. My grandmother can whip up all sorts of fantastic baked goods without measuring a thing because she has decades of experience and knows what the dough is supposed to look like. Professional chefs like Bobby Flay rarely measure anything. Watch a few episodes of Iron Chef and tell me how many measuring cups you see. It won't be many I assure you.
If you're trying to bake bread, you'd better have a metric recipe, or you're screwed.
Is that so? Then explain mister smarty pants how we somehow manage to bake huge amounts of very yummy bread despite the lack of this supposedly vital metric system.
Hell I'm even a huge proponent of switching to metric and I think your argument is complete nonsense. There are a few places in cooking were high precision is necessary (baking mostly) and NONE of them require metric measurements. US Customary units work just fine. You can argue against using Imperial/US Customary and I'll be right there with you. But your claim that it is impossible to follow a US recipe tells us about your competence as a cook but nothing about the relative merits of metric vs imperial measurements.
Do they get tickets because they drive these vehicles, or do they drive these vehicles because they're the sort who get tickets?
Almost certainly the later. Think about it. These are relatively inexpensive, fast cars driven mostly by young men who like to go fast. Put the same guy in a Corvette and they will still get tickets because they drive like asshats and don't know when to take their foot off the accelerator.
Dealing only in KPH is sufficiently hard for someone like myself raised with MPH that even if i switch my GPS / speedometer to KPH, I still have to do the mental conversion back into MPH to get a feeling for "how fast is that".
A couple of weeks of driving in a KPH based country and you'd get over it. It just takes a little experience is all.
I have a feeling any "conversion" would be about as difficult to handle as your cable company changing the channel lineup around. Perhaps a few weeks of grumbling, but eventually you get used to it.
The bigger problem is actually in documentation and tooling. The big costs in converting aren't in changing some signs which is really more of a political problem than anything else. It's really just a bunch of old farts who don't want to change. Thing is that old farts rarely forget to vote so politicians aren't going to do anything about the problem until they all die. Unfortunately by the time they do die there is now a new generation of old farts that doesn't want to change.
The bigger problem is in converting all the documents (work instructions, legal documents, product drawings, etc) and all the tooling to SI/metric. There is an enormous cost to doing that and that is the biggest economic obstacle to overcome. It can be done but there is precisely zero political will in Washington to make it happen. If it does happen in the US the change will be very slow. Some progress has been made but the big steps have yet to be taken.
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Have you looked at what they are eating? If you don't fuel your body to rebuild itself, then it's going to fall apart.
What they eat isn't the problem. You could feed them the most optimal diet in the world and they would still be a physical wreck A typical flooring guy will have his knees and probably his back shot by the time he is 40-50. The ergonomics of the job just wreck their joints. Operate heavy machinery like a jack hammer and you'll be a mess pretty quickly. Most skilled trades guys I know have some amount of physical ailments thanks to their job if they are older than 40 or so and have been doing it for a long time. It's a good way to make a living but it's not terribly easy on the body.
That's when you go and scored 1400+ on the SAT just to prove that a few Cs aren't your total sum worth as a student.
That still might not get you into Princeton or Harvard etc when everyone else has 1400+ on their SATs too plus straight A grades and all the rest of the stuff they look for. I was a B-C student myself with pretty good SAT scores and while it got me into a better college than my grades alone would have allowed, I didn't get into as good a school as my actual talent level (later proven) would have dictated. It wasn't until much later than I got my act together and got into a top flight grad school. In fact until grad school I pretty much hated academia. Grad school was the first time I actually enjoyed school and my grades reflected that fact.
How the fuck would a person as smart as Steve Wozniak be flipping burgers?
Because life it difficult sometimes. Smarts is helpful but no assurance of success.
I see exceptionally bright people all the time who underachieve. I have a lady working for me who has amazing facility with numbers and would have made a hell of a good engineer. But she has had a lot of difficult life circumstances that prevented her from getting the education and support she needed. (Abusive parents, kids when young, abusive ex-spouse, etc) So she works a blue collar job and is very good at it but earns barely double minimum wage. She is my age and at least as smart as I am but isn't likely to advance much further because life is tough. To her credit she has a very bright daughter who is skipping grades and will be quite a legacy for her.
I knew a guy in high school who had a full ride scholarship to Harvard. He got into drug dealing and they found him beaten, bound and resting on the ice on a lake, barely alive. Sometimes people who are very smart do very stupid things.
I was a college athlete in a Division 1 college. I attended an academically rigorous school (Lehigh University) and got an engineering degree while playing sports.
You will have to spend a lot of time training in highschool at the expense of academic endeavors to get anywhere close to being competitive at the college level.
This is not true at all. Academics is only sacrificed if your time management skills are poor. Sports practice typically takes 2-5 hours per day depending on the sport and time of year. With game days and weekends it's usually a 20-35 hours/week commitment. If you cannot cram your academic schedule into the remaining 11-12+ waking hours when you aren't practicing/competing then you are doing it wrong.
They give you tutors because they know you don't have enough time to do proper studying.
No, they have tutors because if you are struggling with a subject your eligibility to play can be revoked. Some students need the tutoring, others don't. No different than any other part of the student body. Generally speaking most teams insist that athletes attend mandatory study halls with the rest of the team until they prove they can handle the academic load without help. On our team all freshman were required to attend, as was anyone whose GPA was under 3.0.
You'll have to choose classes that work around your training schedule rather than the ones that are important academically.
Again, generally not true. Sometimes there is a conflict with a class but it's the exception rather than the rule. I had one conflict once and I simply took the class in question the following semester.
You won't be able to take degrees like engineering because there are too many class and lab hours and it would conflict with the training regimen.
Not at all true. I got an engineering degree with all the attendant labs and other classes. I'd be happy to introduce you to (literally) hundreds of other student athletes who did the same thing. My wife played D1 sports in the Big 10 and now is a physician. I had a lab that ran into practice once a week on two occasions. The lab ended at 4 and practice started at 3:30. I just got to practice a bit late those days and stayed a little after. The notion that you cannot get the classes you need/want is complete nonsense except in rare cases.
I seriously doubt that most people could pull off a useful degree while still maintaining their obligations to the sports side of things.
Then you have no idea what you are talking about. It's not only possible, it happens all the time. Very few athletes are going to become professionals in their sports and the rest of them have to get a degree they can do something with.
The coach isn't going to recommend that they stay on the team for next year when they constantly want to skip practice to study.
NOBODY in Division 1 sports skips practice to study. They don't even ask. You learn to manage your time and work very hard. If you cannot handle it then you drop the sport, not the studying.
And there's always the chance you will have an injury, and then your scholarship is gone.
It's a possibility but then you are just like every other student. In practice it rarely happens. Generally speaking they don't pull scholarships before the end of the academic year unless you quit the team. Even for serious injuries they'll generally keep you on scholarship until it is absolutely certain you cannot play ever again. I'm sure you can find some examples of shit-head coaches being mean but it doesn't usually happen. There have been discussions (serious ones) of multi-year non-revokable scholarships though nothing to my knowledge has happened yet.
I don't really use it for texting or notes since it makes too many mistakes but I think that's more of my problem. I feel weird talking to a computer so I talk weird and not loud enough.
Not unusual. Dictating is a learned skill and not that many people are used to doing it. I'm not particularly good at it either.
Instead of innovation the tech companies are more interested in dog fights, and the one thing that I need to know is this --- Why are they doing all these?
Because they have to. It has nothing to do with their desire (or lack thereof) to innovate. Once you are an established player part of remaining a successful company is competitive strategy. Some products simply cannot be rapidly innovated. Coca-Cola isn't going to come up with some new miracle drink. Apple is not likely to reinvent the personal computer. Those are mature businesses and they have to be tended to and protected. The notion that every problem can be solved and every business can be run if we are just more innovative is incredibly naive. Even if you do have some incredibly innovative new product it is going to be copied within days and you will be out of business if you cannot protect that new product. To do otherwise is irresponsible and a one way ticket to bankruptcy.
For Apple or Samsung or Microsoft to grow at even a modest 5-8% rate they would have to create as much new business as the entire revenue of EBay *every year*. You think it is easy to create a new company the size of eBay each any every year? When you become big enough there simply are not that many new lines of business that are big enough to really move the needle. It is unbelievably difficult
Please pay a visit to India or Russia or China, if you have the chance. Over there they still have a lot of people devoting their lives on innovation, because to them, it is the right thing to do
I have been to China and India. There is no religion of innovation over there any more than there is lack of it here in the US. There are a bunch of people who are working hard to find economic opportunities, just like here. A lot of the effort over there is largely aimed at copying industry from other parts of the world with the advantage of cheaper Chinese labor rates. Sure there are a few companies doing some pretty nifty new stuff, but their economy is in no way centered around innovation. Most of it is engaged in contract manufacturing for export. They don't design the products, the just make or copy them. Nothing (generally) wrong with that but China is not driving product innovation in any big way yet. One day maybe but not today.
Any day of the week, I'll take an H1N1 injection over an Ebola injection because, Ebola is vastly more capable of causing death.
That my friend is a strawman argument. Of course you would rather take your chances with influenza over ebola if you were certain to be infected with one or the other but that scenario is absurd. You aren't certain to be infected with either one and the odds of infection are VASTLY different between the two. Unless you actually live in West Africa you should be FAR more concerned about the disease with a small mortality rate that infects huge populations than the disease with a 50%+ mortality rate that infects virtually no one. The current Ebola outbreak has affected approximately 0.0001% of the world's population.
1) The fact that other H1N1 strains have killed millions of people has little bearing on how lethal the particular, modern-day H1N1 strain they were referring to happens to be
H1N1 family viruses are constantly mutating and there is more than one. The notion that I should be more worried about ebola than H1N1 is frankly absurd because the odds of me contracting ebola is almost nil.
you realize that the particular H1N1 strain they're talking about in this thread (the 2009 strain) wasn't actually that lethal in comparison to Ebola.
Perhaps I'm not being clear. I don't really care much about a disease with 50%-80% mortality rates when the chance of infection is almost zero. I care a lot of about a disease with 1% mortality rates when the chance of infection is quite substantial.
2) You're clearly confused about what "lethal" means.
I'm not confused at all. I'm merely point out that people are panicking over the scary but very very unlikely disease when they really should worry about the less scary but far more likely one. If you happen to be in West Africa then by all means exercise appropriate caution. Otherwise it's absurd to get very worked up about it.
Pointing out that the Spanish Flu was indiscriminate in whom it killed in no way takes away from his claim that the 2009 H1N1 strain's deaths were primarily those who "were already ill or had other issues."
He cherry picked a bit of data to support his conclusion. The situation is more complicated than "50%+ mortality rates = OMG".
Tens of millions of people get the flu (of many variants) each year, and many thousands die from it - but in general it is mostly the very young or elderly who don't have the immune systems to fight it off
That depends on what strain of H1N1 you are talking about. It's not a single virus and at times it has mutated into strains that are much more lethal. The pandemic in 1918 was notable in part because it tended to affect young healthy people. Epidemiologist don't worry about ebola too much. They worry a lot about pandemic influenza or Vancomycin resistant staph-aureus or any number of other diseases that are much tougher to contain.
The flu kills a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of those who contract it...
But it infects FAR more people. 1% of a very big number is a bigger deal than 50% of a very small number. The chances of you or I contracting ebola is a good approximation of zero. The chances of your or I contracting some strain of influenza is actually quite high. Worrying about ebola is kind of like worrying about a shark attack. Scary but absurdly unlikely to actually occur.
Saying that something is more lethal doesn't mean the same as saying it kills more people.
It's pretty clueless to worry only about lethality without considering the likelihood of transmission. Of course ebola is scary if you contract it or have a significant risk of contracting it. But frankly being worried about ebola is kind of like being worried about a shark attack. Scary as hell and you'll probably die if it happens but not something you should worry about much because the odds are so absurdly low.
between April 2009 and April 2010 there were 61M cases of H1N1 resulting in 12.5K deaths. WHO says that, so far, there are 7192 cases of EBOV in the West African outbreak, and 3286 deaths.
Unless you were actually in West Africa your chances of contracting ebola were and remain close to nil whereas your chances of contracting H1N1 were and are FAR higher no matter where you live. Risk = Consequences X Likelihood X Detectibility . Ebola has high consequences, very low likelihood (hard to transmit) and fairly high detectibility. H1N1 is more variable on the consequences though generally lower mortality rates but has much higher likelihood because it is more easily communicable and H1N1 has worse detectibility prior to infection. Occasionally strains of H1N1 mutate into something very deadly that can kill millions of people. There are strains of H1N1 that have infected virtually the entire global population and it does not always just kill the old and the infirm.
Maybe blown out of proportion but Ebola is far more lethal virus than H1N1.
Variants of H1N1 have killed tens of millions of people. You should probably spend 30 seconds researching the issue before spouting off nonsense publicly.
Also, deaths were mostly people who were ill already or had other issues.
Again, demonstrably not true in previous H1N1 pandemics.
Amazing how the government freaked out over H1N1 years ago and simply nothing happened. Yet, a real virus is on the move and "everything is a-ok" is the word from everyone.
H1N1 is a "real virus" which has variants that have killed millions of people. Influenza has killed and has the potential to kill FAR more people than ebola is ever likely to. Read up on influenza pandemics of the past.
The current ebola outbreak is a serious issue but it isn't what keeps epidemiologists awake at night.
So what's with all these people estimating weeks to learn such things?
Because for many people that's what it takes. If you've got 60 years in one measurement system, it's probably going to take you a little longer to adjust.
when I took my first trip to the UK, and people talked about the weeks it'd take to learn to drive on the left side of the road. I found that, by the time I'd got a few blocks from the airport, maybe 5 minutes, I'd already stopped consciously thinking about it, and just drove like the others around me.
Well good for you. However as others have pointed out previously, the plural of anecdote is not data. Some people take a little longer. Cut them some slack.
The only real difficulty I've found with such things is learning the words in a different language.
And some people pick that up quite easily. (I'm not one of them) We're all a little different. If you pick things up faster than others then good for you but be patient with others who take a little longer.
And because you don't see it (possibly because the responsible users have been driven underground alike with the irresponsible ones, but the irresponsible ones are the ones who act out, and thus are seen) it doesn't exist!
Are you done with the empty rhetorical arguments yet? You know damn well what I meant by "I see no reason" or if you don't you need to go figure that out first. If you want to make an argument backed up by something then by all means enlighten us with your brilliance since you seem to think you have this problem solved.
I'm puzzled what you think "responsible" use of heroin might look like. Bizarre notion you have there. That said, responsible or irresponsible, underground or not, you haven't given me a single reason why we as a society should condone the use of dangerous drugs like heroin or legalize their use.
And it should be drawn before alcohol, by gum! It's the devil's spirit!
Boy that's a convincing argument. I guess you aren't done with the content free rhetorical arguments.
I don't have a problem with adults drinking or smoking (tobacco or pot) provided they do so without endangering others or causing problems for society. I think that any costs of the health problems caused by those products should be borne entirely by the person who used them. If that means you get shitty health care because you chose to smoke tobacco then that is your problem because it is 100% in your control. Got a bad liver because you drank too much? Tough shit on getting a transplant. If you want to use drugs recreationally then the costs of that are on you. If you decide to use a particularly dangerous drug like heroin then there should be consequences for that. I think throwing drug users in jail is stupid but there are plenty of other societal consequences we can utilize.
If you have a screw with a 1 inch head you use a 1 inch tool to manage it.
No one is going to ask you to call that screw a 26.xx mm screw, now will the tool be renamed.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not talking about simply relabeling drawings to be metric. It would be pointless to simply label things differently. I'm talking about actually designing the products using existing metric standards going forward. Instead of using a 1/4" screw you use a 6mm (M6) screw when you design the product. Lengths are specified in drawings in metric. Wire gauges are mm^2 instead of AWG. Etc. The goal is to get to one set of measurements, one set of tools. Not one set of measurements with two sets of tools.
Probably the best way to make it happen is for the government to provide some tax benefits to companies willing to do the conversion, and allow the transition to occur a bit more naturally over time.
I think the best way for it to happen is for certain key parts of industry to demand the conversion. Let's say hypothetically that Ford, GM, Chrysler, Boeing and Caterpillar all demanded that their supply chains convert to metric. Doesn't have to be all at once but over the course of some years. All drawings, fasteners, etc has to meet a global standard. Heck, make it a part of ISO9000 or TS16949. That would force wide swaths of industry to convert whether they like it or not.
The government is already doing this to a significant degree. Suppliers to the military and government can and should require metric. However they should take it to the next level. Require all packaging of food products to be in metric units. Start by requiring the metric unit to be prominent and then slowly phase out the US Customary units over time.
The tough one will be the construction industry. They are soooo ingrained to non-metric measurements that getting them to switch is going to be a bear because there is no single company or group aside from the government that can mandate the change.
All the evidence shows that this is nonsense, that you always cause more problems than you solve because you drive addiction underground and people wind up taking drugs of varying quality because of their illegal nature.
"Cause more problems than you solve"? I don't think so - not for the more serious drugs like morphine, cocaine and the like. If we freely permitted use of some of the more problematic drugs then things would not be better than they are. Heroin is not the same thing as alcohol and should not be treated the same way. Same with many other drugs. There are some things we just cannot condone as a society even if doing so is costly. Are you seriously arguing that we should be ok with people addicted to illegal narcotics? I think it is a waste of resources to incarcerate adults for drug use unless they cause some other problem in the process. But that doesn't mean they should be legal to possess or that we should allow companies to sell addiction as a recreational product. It's bad enough with the cigarette companies - I can only imagine the problems that would arise if we allowed corporate interests to sell heroin for recreational use.
If prohibition prevented use, you would have a point.
Prohibition does prevent a lot of use. Nobody's arguing that the prohibitions cannot be circumvented. To use an analogy, security against shoplifters doesn't eliminate shoplifting but it does help keep it from getting out of control. It keeps honest people honest so to speak. If someone really wants to use heroin then they will probably find a way but that doesn't mean we should make it easy or condone its recreational use. And we certainly should not have private companies selling morphine for recreational use.
Don't get me wrong, I have NO problem with responsible recreational use by adults of alcohol or other mild chemical substances like marijuana. If someone wants to get a little tipsy now and then and they do it in such a way that it doesn't hurt anyone then that is fine. (I also have no problem with companies refusing to hire people who use these chemicals for recreation.) But I see no way to allow certain substances to be used for recreational purposes. We can argue about exactly where that line should be drawn but there is and should be a line.
Because all drug charges are BS, except perhaps for driving under the influence.
This is way off topic but...
Tell that to the people whose lives they affect. Would you like a doctor who operates on you while high? Perhaps you think someone showing up to work while high is not a serious matter? Some drug charges are BS (like most relating to marijuana) but many are quite serious matters.
We restrict access to certain drugs for (mostly) very good reasons. If someone wants to live away from society where their actions cannot affect anyone else then by all means they can use whatever drugs make them happy and none of us will care much. But when actions start to have negative consequences for others then we have a problem and it's hard for certain drugs to not negatively affect others. If you can explain to me the upside to society of someone having a cocaine or heroin addiction then I'll concede the point.
Vipers are straight line cars. They utterly suck in corners. so on public roads you cant go fast unless it's the desert or open Freeway.
I'm guessing you've never driven one. I have one sitting 30 feet from me as I type this. One of the partners in my company has one he bought this January and I've driven it. They can turn just fine. Are there cars that are better in the corners? Sure. But the Viper is quite capable I assure you - well beyond most people's driving ability including my own. What the Viper is not is refined. The Viper is a sledgehammer - not a precision instrument. They don't carve the corners like a Lotus. But they are NOT just straight line muscle cars. Anyone who tells you they are hasn't been behind the wheel of one.
The WRX is not an inexpensive car...
On a price/performance basis it is incredibly cheap among new cars. You can have a new 2015 WRX for MRSP $26,295 and you'll probably pay less than that. And unlike the US muscle cars in the same price range it can actually turn and be driven in sloppy conditions. It's not the prettiest car out there but value/speed for money it is hard to beat.
In general, trying to follow a US recipe that needs some level of accuracy is basically impossible.
That is so not true that I think you are trolling. If not you must be an engineer because you are worrying about levels of precision that simply rarely matter. It's not even remotely difficult to follow a US recipe unless you are wildly incompetent. Few recipes require highly precise measurement and the recipes that do need a high level of accuracy are written to reflect that fact. Professional bakers and competent cooks/chefs know when to use weight versus volume and they know when it doesn't actually matter. Experienced cooks often don't even need to measure. My grandmother can whip up all sorts of fantastic baked goods without measuring a thing because she has decades of experience and knows what the dough is supposed to look like. Professional chefs like Bobby Flay rarely measure anything. Watch a few episodes of Iron Chef and tell me how many measuring cups you see. It won't be many I assure you.
If you're trying to bake bread, you'd better have a metric recipe, or you're screwed.
Is that so? Then explain mister smarty pants how we somehow manage to bake huge amounts of very yummy bread despite the lack of this supposedly vital metric system.
Hell I'm even a huge proponent of switching to metric and I think your argument is complete nonsense. There are a few places in cooking were high precision is necessary (baking mostly) and NONE of them require metric measurements. US Customary units work just fine. You can argue against using Imperial/US Customary and I'll be right there with you. But your claim that it is impossible to follow a US recipe tells us about your competence as a cook but nothing about the relative merits of metric vs imperial measurements.
Do they get tickets because they drive these vehicles, or do they drive these vehicles because they're the sort who get tickets?
Almost certainly the later. Think about it. These are relatively inexpensive, fast cars driven mostly by young men who like to go fast. Put the same guy in a Corvette and they will still get tickets because they drive like asshats and don't know when to take their foot off the accelerator.
drivers of the Subaru WRX, Pontiac GTO, and Scion FR-S get a higher percentage of tickets than drivers of any other cars.
Wow. Cars most commonly driven by young men who like to go fast get the most tickets. Who would have guessed?
Dealing only in KPH is sufficiently hard for someone like myself raised with MPH that even if i switch my GPS / speedometer to KPH, I still have to do the mental conversion back into MPH to get a feeling for "how fast is that".
A couple of weeks of driving in a KPH based country and you'd get over it. It just takes a little experience is all.
I have a feeling any "conversion" would be about as difficult to handle as your cable company changing the channel lineup around. Perhaps a few weeks of grumbling, but eventually you get used to it.
The bigger problem is actually in documentation and tooling. The big costs in converting aren't in changing some signs which is really more of a political problem than anything else. It's really just a bunch of old farts who don't want to change. Thing is that old farts rarely forget to vote so politicians aren't going to do anything about the problem until they all die. Unfortunately by the time they do die there is now a new generation of old farts that doesn't want to change.
The bigger problem is in converting all the documents (work instructions, legal documents, product drawings, etc) and all the tooling to SI/metric. There is an enormous cost to doing that and that is the biggest economic obstacle to overcome. It can be done but there is precisely zero political will in Washington to make it happen. If it does happen in the US the change will be very slow. Some progress has been made but the big steps have yet to be taken.