1) Leader says, "I need someone for this assignment who won't burn in the sun." Okay, so a Finn is probably out. Someone with darker skin is a better candidate.
2) Leader says, "I need someone brave and strong for this assignment." Okay, well, you say the black is physically powerful. But random selection provides an Urkel. Or random selection could provide a Pat Tillman.
3) Leader says, "I need someone really smart for this assignment." Okay, the black choice is a Neil deGrasse Tyson and the white choice is an underclass meth-head.
So, another thing to remember is that these group differences are at best, only true in terms of aggregate measures and statistical sampling. They don't provide a reliable way to provide information about any particular individual, except on the attributes which actually define membership in the group.
One characteristic I often see ignored in the discussion of successful versus unsuccessful groups is this: High intra-group empathy. Empathy and esteem the group members have for each other.
Intra-group empathy means less internal violence, more cooperation, less corruption and criminality, less preying of one group member on another. Leaders see this and make use of it. "Our group is the best! Each of you is fabulous because you're a member of this group!"
And then another important, somewhat coincident characteristic is low empathy for those outside of the group. This allows the group to remain cohesive. And allows group members to be directed to more willingly take advantage of those outside of the group. Leaders take advantage of this as well. "Those other groups are not as good as us."
I've heard this stated as "Amity within, enmity without." I would think also that there would need to be a certain level of intelligence for the group then to be highly successful. But if they're looking for important characteristics for success, I'd think high intra-group empathy and low extra-group empathy are important ones as well, in addition to intelligence.
Dog breeds are certainly more tightly genetically controlled than humans. But they're still all dogs. They can all interbreed. And they share certain typical characteristics within breeds.
A German Shepherd has a certain set of typical attributes. A Siberian Husky has another set of typical attributes. A Shepherd-Husky cross has yet another set of attributes. Dogs are grouped into logical classes on the basis of those attributes.
Humans are pretty diverse even within races and ethnicities, in terms of their physical appearances, intellectual attributes and emotional makeups. Eventually, with increases in medical and gene science, it may be possible to group people in a much more informative way, taking into account intellectual attributes and emotional makeups, than the simple physical classifications that now exist.
Compare and contrast to a psychologist that runs a scientific study. They can then use their data to make a model, but they cannot fork all of civilization into two separate universes and change one target variable; all they can do is model it and make some reasonable estimations.
The problem with the soft sciences is that they can only yield statistical correlations, and make best guesses at the mechanisms yielding the correlations. The hard sciences can identify the actual physical mechanism of action.
So the soft sciences are stuck with identifying correlations, and coming up with plausible explanations for those correlations. There are some brilliant social scientists, but there are a lot of clowns too, coming up with textbook "Junk Science."
It's exceedingly difficult for me seeing that people are still doing that. The genetic difference between homo sapiens and Chimpanzies is vanishingly small, yet some portion of the population continues to believe the outward physical differences between Blacks, Caucasians, and Orientals are significant. Why haven't we outgrown that crap yet?
There are many breeds of dogs. They're all dogs and they can all interbreed. But defining different breeds helps more accurately describe the physical reality. Ditto with humans.
Now, visually observable differences is not the only way to group humans or dogs, and may not be the best way, but it's a quick and dirty way which conveys some pieces of information.
1) iptables to block all ports but the ones you allow.
2) fail2ban - 5 tries and they're gone for 30 minutes. Only the most persistent continue. But they get 10 tries an hour.
3) Configure ssh to disable remote root login (in ubuntu, it's in sshd_config - "PermitRootLogin No"). You can still log on as root if you're sitting at the computer and have a console window. Or you can su to root after you login as another user. Just can't ssh in and directly login as root. From what I've seen, this moots over half of the login attempts.
4) And of course, strong passwords.
So, they can try higher ports, or even port 22, all day long with no consequence.
iptables can be fantastically complex and powerful to protect enterprise networks from all manner of attack. It is also fast and easy to do a simple, basic, strong setup which will provide a powerful firewall to secure a server.
I recommend typing in a simple text file with the iptables commands, the chmod'ing it so that it is executable. Then execute it ("./myrules"). This works for a small, but powerful list of rules that can protect a server. Some of the tutorials talk of rulesets with thousands of lines. There are different, more efficient ways to load those.
Quick overview of iptables: 1) There are three default chains (containers which sets of rules) called INPUT, FORWARD and OUTPUT.
2) Each of these can have a default policy of ACCEPT or DROP. Input should have a default policy of drop. IMPORTANT - while you're first playing with iptables, make sure input has a default policy of Accept ("iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT") or you may well lock yourself out of your machine. Once you've got the rules set up as you'd like (you view the rules with "iptables -L -v"), then you can do "iptables -P INPUT DROP".
3) Always set these three "housekeeping" or basic rules (prefacing with a '#' is a comment):
# For the loopback interface 127.0.0.1, accept everything. Append to input chain. iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT # For ICMP packets, accept pings only iptables -A INPUT -p ICMP --icmp-type echo-request -j ACCEPT # For established connections, accept everything, using the older state module iptables -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
4) Your input chain, which deals with incoming packets, will have a default policy of drop. Only ports which are then specifically allowed will be open:
# Accept SSH on port 22 iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT # Accept HTTP on port 80 iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT # Accept HTTPS on port 443 iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
5) You're not using your box as a router, so your FORWARD chain should not get any activity. I leave the policy as Accept, so if there is any traffic logged here, I know something unusual is going on:
# Otherwise, accept all for FORWARD iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
6) Finally your output chain should just allow everything:
# Accept everything: iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
7) Check your iptables ruleset with "iptables -L -v". If everything looks good, set your default input policy to drop with "iptables -P INPUT DROP"
And that is a spiffy, powerful way to block all ports but 22 (ssh), 80 (http) and 443 (https) by using iptables.
Problem 1: Sales team says yes to everything the customer wants. Problem 2: The business managers think anything tech-related is trivial. Commoditized. Already been done before. Simple to implement. Problem 3: Uncooperative government employees who don't want to be bothered or want to protect their little empire.
These are very difficult issues.
Re: Problem 1 - if our sales team doesn't nod eagerly at every requirement, someone else's team will. The customer can't tell if he's being lied to or not. Re: Problem 2 - business managers like to look at things in the aggregate. BUT - the devil's in the details. And getting the right people is very difficult. You need a talented business manager to understand what what is complex, what is possible, what is impossible. Re: Problem 3 - You have to find a way to circumvent many of the government employees / chieftains with this attitude. It requires buy-in from top management. But if it's a powerful sysadmin chieftain who doesn't want his empire f--ked with, well... you're going to need a full separate testbed on which to deploy and test the system. Hard to do if you're working almost totally on the client site.
But ultimately, to the business, it's about getting paid. And someone's been paid 100's of millions so far. So, from the business side, that would be considered a success. That's a problem too, if you're the customer trying to get a quality final product..
Car analogy: He had the massive brain, but not the emotional suspension to effectively harness the power to his benefit.
Valuing discipline is so important in life. No one is smart enough to flit from one task to another, leaving brilliant solutions in one's wake. 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.
From what I've read, he was never really comfortable. Emotionally or physically.
Growing up is about finding out what you are, finding out about the world. He was such a prodigy and as a result, this soft, depressive, immature kid was thrust into the real world, the big stage, of hard, combative people. A world he had no opportunity to learn about. Many of us have made mistakes but were able to recover. He never had that chance. He stepped into something he, as an introverted young man, had no idea about. He was an introverted, depressive youth on the big stage. He never learned how to cage his internal tormentors. He followed hard men, Stallman and Lessig, into battle. And the battle he stumbled into crushed him.
An unfortunate confluence of circumstances. A tragedy.
"All this added to a weight that had oppressed him for many years. “Look up, not down,” he urged readers of his weblog; “Embrace your failings.” “Lean into the pain.” It was hard to take that advice himself. He kept getting ill, several illnesses at once. Migraines sliced into his scalp; his body burned. And he was sad most of the time, a sadness like streaks of pain running through him. Books, friends, philosophy, even blogs didn’t help. He just wanted to lie in bed and keep the lights off.
In 2002 he posted instructions for after his death (though I’m not dead yet! he added). To be in a grave would be all right, as long as he had access to oxygen and no dirt on top of him; and as long as all the contents of his hard drives were made publicly available, nothing deleted, nothing withheld, nothing secret, nothing charged for; all information out in the light of day, as everything should be."
Henry VIII was so vexed by the Catholic Church's meddling in his affairs, he broke away from it. It was a competing power structure. He took the brilliant position of combining church and state and making himself the head of both. Islam also consolidates church and state so the leader has no competing power structures with which to contend. If you don't think churches are competing power structures, then you don't understand the meaning of "competing power structure."
Anyway, back to the original point, which you probably don't want to hear: the financial sector has become extraordinarily powerful and has become a competing power structure to the government in this country. The data points I listed provide support for that assertion.
The founders of the United States banned a state religion in the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof") because they realized churches were competing power structures.
Nowadays, we have the new church, corporations and specifically corporations of the financial sector.
You really want to know who runs this country? Here are four data points from which you can draw your own conclusions:
Noticing a trend? If you're a financial sector executive, you run the show. It doesn't matter that you've swindled billions of dollars from the country, nothing is going to happen to you.
However, If you cross the financial sector, even over relatively trivial matters and sums, it won't matter if you're the elected head of the city council or a justice on the state supreme court, you will be removed from office and suffer significant consequences.
For a long time, humans had little scientific discovery. And little technological progress. Then it seemed like a lot of previously undiscovered facets of nature were discovered. With it came technological progress.
I think the author is lamenting a perceived lack of new fundamental scientific discoveries about nature, not so much a lack of technological progress. The discovery of bacteria. Molecules. Atoms. Electromagnetism. Radio waves. And the like. New fundamental discoveries about nature. Which don't seem to happen nowadays.
Scientific discoveries versus technological progress - a dichotomy? We're making fewer new scientific discoveries about the nature of the physical reality in which we live, yet increasing our number of technological applications? In graph terms, I suspect the author believes that scientific discoveries are following a bell curve, whereas technological progress is following a line rising continuously. Y axis would represent number of new scientific discoveries as well as number of technological inventions while X is time, ever increasing.
At one point, Rain X was glorious. I could be in the wash of a tractor trailer in a heavy rain and barely need my wipers.
But then, something happened. The Rain X started making my windshield kind of blurry. I'm pretty sure it was the Rain X. I spent a lot of effort scrubbing that windshield afterwards to get the Rain X off. ISTR that after several months, it went back to normal, and I was stuck with regularly replacing wiper blades and keeping the windshield clean. I think it was because it got old and became less than perfectly smooth. This was like ten years ago.
"That drop in stock price, too, has cut some of HP's executive pay in the form of restricted stock awards from earlier years, according to the proxy filing. The payment of these awards were tied to the firm's per-share performance against the Standard & Poor's 500 Index over a period of time.
HP changed its compensation program last year, and is now giving stock options that vest if the company's stock price meets or exceeds specific goals or thresholds.
Whitman's base salary was just $1. Her bonus was $1.7 million, while the remainder of her compensation was granted in the form of Hewlett-Packard stock options, stock awards and other income, according to the proxy filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday."
Executive compensation is tied to share price. The things done to maximize shareholder value are done to enrich executives themselves, not out of some technocratic, altruistic desire to enrich others or adhere to a principle.
It's directly linked to our quality of life. So you better believe the society, via the government, should be getting a clear picture of WHAT EXACTLY is going on with the oil supply chain.
1) Don't go out to lunch with the crew everyday. Don't hit the FatBurger five days a week, even though it feels good. The damnable thing is, to get plugged into the company culture and know what's going on, doing lunch is important. It's important for networking. So... what do you do? Might just have to eat salads, or small servings and have the real lunch back at your desk or some such.
2) Keep the vending machine runs, and the lattes and hot chocolates to a minimum. FYI, mixing hot chocolate and coffee is pretty fab. Don't do it all the time.
3) Walk. Seriously. Thirty minutes a day like 3 times a week is my goal. Ninety minutes of walking a week. Is there something magical about this number? It seems doable to me. Park far away from the building (doesn't apply if you're in a bad area and might get mugged as a result).
If you take in more calories than you burn, you're going to become a big ol' marshmallow.
It's a generally free country. People can do and say and think what they want, whether it is supported by evidence or not. However, to avoid legal liability in medicine, and other public safety / public service occupations, one must adhere to evidence-based best practices.
You can secretly believe that getting naked, painting yourself with fresh cow's blood while running in circles and barking at the moon will keep you disease-free, that's your right. However, until your study results are repeated and published in a peer-reviewed journal, don't expect the hospital to pay you to do it or advocate it to patients.
One of his observations was that crime shot up during a period of declining poverty, during the 60s, which cast doubt on the popular notion that poverty is the primary driving factor of crime. He also discussed the notion that people do in fact respond to rewards and penalties, which supported the notion that punishment can deter. This seems rather obvious to most observers but was not accepted by the sociology/criminology "orthodoxy" the 1960s and 1970s.
Has the author ever seen a slaughterhouse? Huge animals hanging from bleed rails, their throats cut, blood gushing out of the gaping wound, snot and saliva hanging down from their mouths and noses, secretions on their eyes?
Ever smelled a cow, or a pig?
Now, don't get me wrong. I like fried chicken strips. Salami. Bacon. Steak. But after it's cleaned and well-prepared.
If someone wants to educate themselves, they can just go to youtube or liveleak and type in "cow slaughter" or "pig slaughter" and compare whether the yuck factor of a laboratory-grown meat is greater-than, equal-to, or less-than the yuck factor of a farm and a slaughterhouse.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on the information one is looking for:
1) Leader says, "I need someone for this assignment who won't burn in the sun." Okay, so a Finn is probably out. Someone with darker skin is a better candidate.
2) Leader says, "I need someone brave and strong for this assignment." Okay, well, you say the black is physically powerful. But random selection provides an Urkel. Or random selection could provide a Pat Tillman.
3) Leader says, "I need someone really smart for this assignment." Okay, the black choice is a Neil deGrasse Tyson and the white choice is an underclass meth-head.
So, another thing to remember is that these group differences are at best, only true in terms of aggregate measures and statistical sampling. They don't provide a reliable way to provide information about any particular individual, except on the attributes which actually define membership in the group.
One characteristic I often see ignored in the discussion of successful versus unsuccessful groups is this: High intra-group empathy. Empathy and esteem the group members have for each other.
Intra-group empathy means less internal violence, more cooperation, less corruption and criminality, less preying of one group member on another. Leaders see this and make use of it. "Our group is the best! Each of you is fabulous because you're a member of this group!"
And then another important, somewhat coincident characteristic is low empathy for those outside of the group. This allows the group to remain cohesive. And allows group members to be directed to more willingly take advantage of those outside of the group. Leaders take advantage of this as well. "Those other groups are not as good as us."
I've heard this stated as "Amity within, enmity without." I would think also that there would need to be a certain level of intelligence for the group then to be highly successful. But if they're looking for important characteristics for success, I'd think high intra-group empathy and low extra-group empathy are important ones as well, in addition to intelligence.
Dog breeds are certainly more tightly genetically controlled than humans. But they're still all dogs. They can all interbreed. And they share certain typical characteristics within breeds.
A German Shepherd has a certain set of typical attributes. A Siberian Husky has another set of typical attributes. A Shepherd-Husky cross has yet another set of attributes. Dogs are grouped into logical classes on the basis of those attributes.
Humans are pretty diverse even within races and ethnicities, in terms of their physical appearances, intellectual attributes and emotional makeups. Eventually, with increases in medical and gene science, it may be possible to group people in a much more informative way, taking into account intellectual attributes and emotional makeups, than the simple physical classifications that now exist.
The problem with the soft sciences is that they can only yield statistical correlations, and make best guesses at the mechanisms yielding the correlations. The hard sciences can identify the actual physical mechanism of action.
This fact is why Big Tobacco could get away for so long with saying that cigarettes didn't cause cancer. The epidemiological studies couldn't prove the link ("Epidemiological studies can never prove causation ... The higher the correlation the more certain the association, but it cannot prove the causation"), only provide (very compelling) correlations. Big Tobacco would only relent when finally the actual physical cancer-causing mechanism was discovered.
So the soft sciences are stuck with identifying correlations, and coming up with plausible explanations for those correlations. There are some brilliant social scientists, but there are a lot of clowns too, coming up with textbook "Junk Science."
There are many breeds of dogs. They're all dogs and they can all interbreed. But defining different breeds helps more accurately describe the physical reality. Ditto with humans.
Now, visually observable differences is not the only way to group humans or dogs, and may not be the best way, but it's a quick and dirty way which conveys some pieces of information.
True enough. I'd been meaning to make an iptables tutorial post for a while. Perhaps this wasn't the best place for it.
1) iptables to block all ports but the ones you allow.
2) fail2ban - 5 tries and they're gone for 30 minutes. Only the most persistent continue. But they get 10 tries an hour.
3) Configure ssh to disable remote root login (in ubuntu, it's in sshd_config - "PermitRootLogin No"). You can still log on as root if you're sitting at the computer and have a console window. Or you can su to root after you login as another user. Just can't ssh in and directly login as root. From what I've seen, this moots over half of the login attempts.
4) And of course, strong passwords.
So, they can try higher ports, or even port 22, all day long with no consequence.
iptables can be fantastically complex and powerful to protect enterprise networks from all manner of attack. It is also fast and easy to do a simple, basic, strong setup which will provide a powerful firewall to secure a server.
Some useful iptables tutorials and references:
1) From CentOS, but iptables runs the same way regardless of OS. This one creates a pretty solid simple iptables ruleset to protect a server.
2) An Ubuntu tutorial, again simple and informative.
3) From the netfilter/iptables project homepage. Good primer on network concepts too.
4) Deeper information, but very useful. Another good discussion of network concepts.
I recommend typing in a simple text file with the iptables commands, the chmod'ing it so that it is executable. Then execute it ("./myrules"). This works for a small, but powerful list of rules that can protect a server. Some of the tutorials talk of rulesets with thousands of lines. There are different, more efficient ways to load those.
Quick overview of iptables:
1) There are three default chains (containers which sets of rules) called INPUT, FORWARD and OUTPUT.
2) Each of these can have a default policy of ACCEPT or DROP. Input should have a default policy of drop. IMPORTANT - while you're first playing with iptables, make sure input has a default policy of Accept ("iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT") or you may well lock yourself out of your machine. Once you've got the rules set up as you'd like (you view the rules with "iptables -L -v"), then you can do "iptables -P INPUT DROP".
3) Always set these three "housekeeping" or basic rules (prefacing with a '#' is a comment):
# For the loopback interface 127.0.0.1, accept everything. Append to input chain.
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
# For ICMP packets, accept pings only
iptables -A INPUT -p ICMP --icmp-type echo-request -j ACCEPT
# For established connections, accept everything, using the older state module
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
4) Your input chain, which deals with incoming packets, will have a default policy of drop. Only ports which are then specifically allowed will be open:
# Accept SSH on port 22
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
# Accept HTTP on port 80
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
# Accept HTTPS on port 443
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
5) You're not using your box as a router, so your FORWARD chain should not get any activity. I leave the policy as Accept, so if there is any traffic logged here, I know something unusual is going on:
# Otherwise, accept all for FORWARD
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
6) Finally your output chain should just allow everything:
# Accept everything:
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
7) Check your iptables ruleset with "iptables -L -v". If everything looks good, set your default input policy to drop with "iptables -P INPUT DROP"
And that is a spiffy, powerful way to block all ports but 22 (ssh), 80 (http) and 443 (https) by using iptables.
Problem 1: Sales team says yes to everything the customer wants.
Problem 2: The business managers think anything tech-related is trivial. Commoditized. Already been done before. Simple to implement.
Problem 3: Uncooperative government employees who don't want to be bothered or want to protect their little empire.
These are very difficult issues.
Re: Problem 1 - if our sales team doesn't nod eagerly at every requirement, someone else's team will. The customer can't tell if he's being lied to or not.
Re: Problem 2 - business managers like to look at things in the aggregate. BUT - the devil's in the details. And getting the right people is very difficult. You need a talented business manager to understand what what is complex, what is possible, what is impossible.
Re: Problem 3 - You have to find a way to circumvent many of the government employees / chieftains with this attitude. It requires buy-in from top management. But if it's a powerful sysadmin chieftain who doesn't want his empire f--ked with, well... you're going to need a full separate testbed on which to deploy and test the system. Hard to do if you're working almost totally on the client site.
But ultimately, to the business, it's about getting paid. And someone's been paid 100's of millions so far. So, from the business side, that would be considered a success. That's a problem too, if you're the customer trying to get a quality final product..
The engine transfers power through the transmission to the wheels. Disengage the transmission from the wheels by putting it in neutral.
The most exotic transmission I can think of is a CVT transmission. But can't that be put into neutral too?
8.3 percent alcohol by volume.
Need to get an early start if you expect to stay drunk all day long.
Car analogy: He had the massive brain, but not the emotional suspension to effectively harness the power to his benefit.
Valuing discipline is so important in life. No one is smart enough to flit from one task to another, leaving brilliant solutions in one's wake. 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.
From what I've read, he was never really comfortable. Emotionally or physically.
Growing up is about finding out what you are, finding out about the world. He was such a prodigy and as a result, this soft, depressive, immature kid was thrust into the real world, the big stage, of hard, combative people. A world he had no opportunity to learn about. Many of us have made mistakes but were able to recover. He never had that chance. He stepped into something he, as an introverted young man, had no idea about. He was an introverted, depressive youth on the big stage. He never learned how to cage his internal tormentors. He followed hard men, Stallman and Lessig, into battle. And the battle he stumbled into crushed him.
An unfortunate confluence of circumstances. A tragedy.
From his obituary in The Economist:
"All this added to a weight that had oppressed him for many years. “Look up, not down,” he urged readers of his weblog; “Embrace your failings.” “Lean into the pain.” It was hard to take that advice himself. He kept getting ill, several illnesses at once. Migraines sliced into his scalp; his body burned. And he was sad most of the time, a sadness like streaks of pain running through him. Books, friends, philosophy, even blogs didn’t help. He just wanted to lie in bed and keep the lights off.
In 2002 he posted instructions for after his death (though I’m not dead yet! he added). To be in a grave would be all right, as long as he had access to oxygen and no dirt on top of him; and as long as all the contents of his hard drives were made publicly available, nothing deleted, nothing withheld, nothing secret, nothing charged for; all information out in the light of day, as everything should be."
Henry VIII was so vexed by the Catholic Church's meddling in his affairs, he broke away from it. It was a competing power structure. He took the brilliant position of combining church and state and making himself the head of both. Islam also consolidates church and state so the leader has no competing power structures with which to contend. If you don't think churches are competing power structures, then you don't understand the meaning of "competing power structure."
Anyway, back to the original point, which you probably don't want to hear: the financial sector has become extraordinarily powerful and has become a competing power structure to the government in this country. The data points I listed provide support for that assertion.
The founders of the United States banned a state religion in the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof") because they realized churches were competing power structures.
Nowadays, we have the new church, corporations and specifically corporations of the financial sector.
You really want to know who runs this country? Here are four data points from which you can draw your own conclusions:
1) The head of Goldman Sachs goes before Congress and admits he was selling bad products to clients, products which he was betting against. A classic swindle. Nothing ever came of it. Or any of the other revelations.
2) There was a PBS show called "The Untouchables" which chronicled why Wall Street executives were never prosecuted for fraud.
3) However, someone you'd think was powerful and connected, a former Michigan state Supreme Court justice is facing jail time for lying to a bank which she was working with in order to get a short sale completed for a house she owned. Her crime? She tried to hide another asset, a paid off house, from the bank.
4) Another person you'd think is powerful and connected, the chairman of the Washington DC City Council, Kwame Brown, was removed from office and convicted of a felony for lying about his income on a pair of loan applications, totaling around 200,000 dollars. Absolute small potatoes. Also a very common practice in the mid-to-late 2000s, on home loans.
Noticing a trend? If you're a financial sector executive, you run the show. It doesn't matter that you've swindled billions of dollars from the country, nothing is going to happen to you.
However, If you cross the financial sector, even over relatively trivial matters and sums, it won't matter if you're the elected head of the city council or a justice on the state supreme court, you will be removed from office and suffer significant consequences.
The financial sector runs this country.
For a long time, humans had little scientific discovery. And little technological progress. Then it seemed like a lot of previously undiscovered facets of nature were discovered. With it came technological progress.
I think the author is lamenting a perceived lack of new fundamental scientific discoveries about nature, not so much a lack of technological progress. The discovery of bacteria. Molecules. Atoms. Electromagnetism. Radio waves. And the like. New fundamental discoveries about nature. Which don't seem to happen nowadays.
Scientific discoveries versus technological progress - a dichotomy? We're making fewer new scientific discoveries about the nature of the physical reality in which we live, yet increasing our number of technological applications? In graph terms, I suspect the author believes that scientific discoveries are following a bell curve, whereas technological progress is following a line rising continuously. Y axis would represent number of new scientific discoveries as well as number of technological inventions while X is time, ever increasing.
Gee. Wonder if the possibility of that position guided his regulatory efforts.
Sounds like the very definition of regulatory capture.
At one point, Rain X was glorious. I could be in the wash of a tractor trailer in a heavy rain and barely need my wipers.
But then, something happened. The Rain X started making my windshield kind of blurry. I'm pretty sure it was the Rain X. I spent a lot of effort scrubbing that windshield afterwards to get the Rain X off. ISTR that after several months, it went back to normal, and I was stuck with regularly replacing wiper blades and keeping the windshield clean. I think it was because it got old and became less than perfectly smooth. This was like ten years ago.
FYI. YMMV.
"That drop in stock price, too, has cut some of HP's executive pay in the form of restricted stock awards from earlier years, according to the proxy filing. The payment of these awards were tied to the firm's per-share performance against the Standard & Poor's 500 Index over a period of time.
HP changed its compensation program last year, and is now giving stock options that vest if the company's stock price meets or exceeds specific goals or thresholds.
Whitman's base salary was just $1. Her bonus was $1.7 million, while the remainder of her compensation was granted in the form of Hewlett-Packard stock options, stock awards and other income, according to the proxy filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday."
Meg Whitman's Pay Package Tops $15 Million After HP Posts Net Loss In 2012
Reuters | By P.J. Huffstutter Posted: 01/12/2013 11:11 am EST
via Huffington Post
Executive compensation is tied to share price. The things done to maximize shareholder value are done to enrich executives themselves, not out of some technocratic, altruistic desire to enrich others or adhere to a principle.
We executed Gulf War I to prevent Saddam from controlling Kuwait's oil fields and stop threatening the Saudi fields.
Greenspan said that we were in Iraq for oil. Controlling global energy sources was likely a significant sweetener for going into Iraq.
It's directly linked to our quality of life. So you better believe the society, via the government, should be getting a clear picture of WHAT EXACTLY is going on with the oil supply chain.
Bloody hell :(
Go talk to the doctor if you start feeling this way. Just a regular ol' doctor, and he can send you to a specialist.
Subject line comes from Tom Waits
1) Don't go out to lunch with the crew everyday. Don't hit the FatBurger five days a week, even though it feels good. The damnable thing is, to get plugged into the company culture and know what's going on, doing lunch is important. It's important for networking. So... what do you do? Might just have to eat salads, or small servings and have the real lunch back at your desk or some such.
2) Keep the vending machine runs, and the lattes and hot chocolates to a minimum. FYI, mixing hot chocolate and coffee is pretty fab. Don't do it all the time.
3) Walk. Seriously. Thirty minutes a day like 3 times a week is my goal. Ninety minutes of walking a week. Is there something magical about this number? It seems doable to me. Park far away from the building (doesn't apply if you're in a bad area and might get mugged as a result).
If you take in more calories than you burn, you're going to become a big ol' marshmallow.
It's a generally free country. People can do and say and think what they want, whether it is supported by evidence or not. However, to avoid legal liability in medicine, and other public safety / public service occupations, one must adhere to evidence-based best practices.
You can secretly believe that getting naked, painting yourself with fresh cow's blood while running in circles and barking at the moon will keep you disease-free, that's your right. However, until your study results are repeated and published in a peer-reviewed journal, don't expect the hospital to pay you to do it or advocate it to patients.
I highly recommend this book: "Thinking About Crime" by James Q. Wilson, who lectured at Harvard for 26 years. He backs up his arguments with a lot of data and makes a compelling case.
One of his observations was that crime shot up during a period of declining poverty, during the 60s, which cast doubt on the popular notion that poverty is the primary driving factor of crime. He also discussed the notion that people do in fact respond to rewards and penalties, which supported the notion that punishment can deter. This seems rather obvious to most observers but was not accepted by the sociology/criminology "orthodoxy" the 1960s and 1970s.
Has the author ever seen a slaughterhouse? Huge animals hanging from bleed rails, their throats cut, blood gushing out of the gaping wound, snot and saliva hanging down from their mouths and noses, secretions on their eyes?
Ever smelled a cow, or a pig?
Now, don't get me wrong. I like fried chicken strips. Salami. Bacon. Steak. But after it's cleaned and well-prepared.
If someone wants to educate themselves, they can just go to youtube or liveleak and type in "cow slaughter" or "pig slaughter" and compare whether the yuck factor of a laboratory-grown meat is greater-than, equal-to, or less-than the yuck factor of a farm and a slaughterhouse.