All the extreme standards and requirements are just punitive at best. Slow but steady, gradual improvement is what the government should be doing. There are lots of warts to CAFE that should be fixed, but setting that aside...Bush held the MPG standards flat, which was just stupid. Now Obama is raising them tremendously which is equally stupid (especially given the bailouts and that just about the only profitable vehicles by the big three are SUVs). Raise the CAFE standards by a very small, attainable amount every year. The engineers will figure it out and we'll get to where we need to be with a lot less collateral damage.
...While I'm sure overall mileage is much lower the stress on the engine is very high. The engines are supercharged, high compression monsters putting out 1000+ hp (much more for professional cars).
Agreed, the stress on the motors is not comparable. But the issue is the corrosive effects of the ethanol over time, not stress at any given moment. I have no reason not believe you, that my experience was not typical. But I think my point still stands, that the service life in terms of years, miles and hours of a race car motor are not comparable to that of a street car's. Add to that the components (and corresponding price) are drastically different, and then the maintenance - race motors are being maintained literally constantly compared to street cars that need to go years and tens of thousands of miles without any real work.
Tell me this - how long did they run their engines? I worked pit crew for a short track racer for a few years. I think he'd send the motor out for a total rebuild every season and would buy an entirely new motor every 3-4 years. And we're not talking about a ton of miles here - all tolled, maybe 1000 miles a season. I don't know if this was normal or not - he was relatively well funded. Compare this to consumer cars that need to get at least 10 years/100,000.
OK, so if more people want to be teachers, that's good: Make hiring competitive. Go from a teacher shortage to a teacher surplus. "Too many teachers" means that schools can hire only the best ones or the most passionate ones. Sure, that means they need a selection process that's tuned for that, but that's the easy part relative to competitive salaries.
Actually I'd argue that coming up with the money to pay more is the easy part compared to getting school administrators and hiring processes that are more effective.
Attracting more people to the teaching profession will not filter out those who love teaching. Interviewing and selecting for the most skilled and passionate candidates is a problem all employers face.
You're right, I think it's like running a restaurant. The most overlooked, and most important issue is hiring and effectively managing the best people. Well it's true for any operation, but it's absolutely critical for some. But the problem is, administrators doing the hiring of teachers are bad at it. Just awful. So a low starting salary that weeds out many of the people who aren't willing to sacrifice financially in order to make a difference in kids' lives helps make the job easier for the people doing the hiring. And ultimately, for the kids, parents and community, that "only the most determined" filtering minimizes the impact of bad hiring decisions.
Is this the best way to do things? Absolutely not. But it's a mechanism for routing around the damage that is bad administrators & management.
Sort of depends where you are though. In my state, though starting wage is not great, the healthcare is exceptional and free. No co-pay, no increasing premiums each year. In the face of where healthcare costs have been and are continuing to go, this is not an insignificant thing. It's probably worth another $10,000+ compared to a typical job. The other thing is exceptional retirement plans/pensions. Nearly all of the teachers I had retired early - some even in their early to mid 50's. Again given the healthcare especially the huge costs later in life...the choice of eating some meals of Ramen the first few years of employment in exchange for the ability to retire when you're still young enough to enjoy it and excellent healthcare benefits when you're not...well that's looking pretty good right now.
That's what I was thinking 'cept since he mentioned Mac & that's what I'm typing on now, I figured, just get one of those silver-metallic markers & cover over it. It should keep the vast majority of people away, it can't be peeled up like a sticker, should pretty effectively disable the thing.
But then, if the issue really is high-security type places, then bottom line really would be completely removing the camera.
Fox has a show with a very set arc - Reunion. While it wasn't great by any means, it was a murder mystery with some twists & turns and each episode represented 1 year of the 20 years covered in the story arc. Like I said, it wasn't great by any means (fairly low production value) but I really looked forward to it because there had been a couple of shows I really liked that got abruptly canceled, so I was looking forward to the finality & completed arc it would provide. Only thing was Fox put it on hiatus during baseball playoffs without ever advertising it or when it would be back and it lost so many viewers that it got canceled before without even finishing it's set course.
Given the understanding of copyright they've displayed - and the fact that it was what, 10 years ago when they famously started railing against the evils of filesharing. If it took Lars 10 years to actually take the step of looking into it for himself, I'd just guess taking the step of securing the copyrights to their music would be too much work and require more initiative.
I'm not someone who's done a lot with VMs. I worked with Softwindows ages ago, but performance was pretty dreadful. I recently picked up a MacBook Pro - a nothing special 2.4 Ghz machine & decided to give VMWare Fusion a try. I gotta say I was absolutely floored by the performance. Once you've launched it, restoring a suspended Vista session is really fast. The biggest shocker - at least for me, Flash CS3 launches faster through a Fusion/Vista VM on my Mac than it does natively on my Windows machine. If Parallels is actually faster yet, then...wow.
Kinda funny - at a former job, I developed interactive software - presentations, calculators, etc for sales reps at a financial services company. One anecdotal way we assessed how compelling our stuff was, was the fingerprint test. The best endorsement we could get would be when the reps would complain that they'd always have to clean their screen off.
No, it's not. While keeping people employed and on the tax rolls is a good thing, there is a cost. Diving deeper and deeper into debt to pay for make-work programs that ultimately do nothing productive - good today, but making the day of reckoning that much worse. The false dichotomy is intellectually dishonest - or just plain stupid. It's not a choice between wasting billions and doing nothing. The opposite of doing something idiotic is not inaction - it is doing something intelligent. Spend money helping foster growth industries. Help otherwise good companies, who are just hanging on because of the current market, to get through this so they can continue to employ people. By no means is it time to increase business taxes - at best, they pass their added expenses to the customer who can't afford it right now either. And at worst, it becomes the nail in the coffin so they cut jobs or close up entirely.
And yet the republicans cried when the jobs the stimulus package created temporary jobs. That of course was the whole point. Creating temporary jobs in a recession to avoid having labor go unused while not creating permanent jobs that are difficult to make away with.
Make-work jobs do nothing to solve the fundamental problems. How about encouraging new/growing industries to replace the dying ones. Though I have issues with the all of the money dumped on green industry - because so much of it has lousy long-term viability prospects - it's at least movement in a forward direction. But tax breaks are the better way to go in terms of encouragement with less waste. Instead of dumping free money out there, encourage profitability by giving the money out on the back end - if you create a profitable enterprise in a "green industry" we won't confiscate your profits. And obviously the green stuff is only one example.
If you want to yell at wastage, yell at the bailouts (bank, auto industry, mortage). Those are about throwing money at bad investments which is almost always a bad idea.
Nearly every conservative I know was yelling at the bailouts.
Tax is a zero sum game? I don't think that means what you think it means. Does every dollar collected get returned to the economy/people in the form of services of the same amount? Of freaking course not. It goes through the federal money-laundering, pork and bureaucratic filter where only a small percentage of it actually goes towards providing any kind of useful services.
I'm from Wisconsin. Our Governor & now both houses controlled by the same party are doing whatever they want with no floor or public debate. The gov. has been playing a shell game - moving money from one account to another to make claims about reducing the deficit while only making it worse. For example, gas taxes (which are among the highest in the country) specifically for funding highway improvements & maintenance have been rolled into the general fund. A trust fund voluntarily funded by doctors to help keep malpractice premiums (and thus medical expenses) down was well, the most appropriate word is raided. We've lost thousands of jobs because is more expensive to do business here than elsewhere - and his answer to the budget problem is to raise business taxes. Our budget deficit is right up there with the worst of them - much worse when you consider it as a percentage of GDP. Last one out, turn out the lights.
That's what I thought too - but when you do the math - $179 actually seems like a pretty reasonable price. If it is price gouging, it's less gouging than other OEMs. Dell charges $155 for a 85WHr battery, $134 for the 53WHr one to replace my 2 year old machine. Apple charging $179 for a 95WHr one including service to do it doesn't seem like a huge profit center.
The other thing of course is the time degradation of Li-ion is doubled. 20% per year is lost as a function of time - completely independent of use. I bought two right off the bat once as well. After a year, you have two batteries that have diminished capacity & at about 2 years, you got two that are crap. You're better off waiting & buying another battery after a year or 2 than right away.
Also, A legal "finding of fact" also does not make it empirically true. Since a court is only able to use the the evidence presented before it (and prior legal rulings) the ultimate truth of a decision can always be in question. Our legal system is a general framework to solve sociological issues, not determine absolute truths.
The best example would be evidence ruled inadmissible for some reason - say a judge rules police didn't have probable cause and didn't get a search warrant so incontrovertible evidence is not allowed to be presented. A court may well find a someone not guilty as a matter of law - but as a matter of absolute truth we can know, and prove otherwise.
...So Obama's insistence on keeping "his" blackberry makes a kind of sense in this context; it reflects a desire to have some other channel of communication that isn't completely managed on his behalf by his usual staff.
Well said and on an a personal level, we would do well to understand that he's still a human being. That said, as a voter that get's put to the side - we elect the President and bestow on him more power than any other single person. We have a right to total transparency with very few exceptions. National Security and family/friends not in any way serving a role in the government are about the only ones I can think of. Everything else, we have a right to know & if a President doesn't like that, then he or she can give up the office or not run in the first place.
An antire group of people devoted to tracking and reporting on the whereabouts of the president. They could hire pundits to theorize on why he is there, film him getting in the car, getting out of the car. They could even predict where he's going to be, like "The president will be in Miami next Tuesday to talk to the guy in that place". Now that would be really freaky.
And we could give them a cute name, like "media".
You didn't mention fawning, drooling or licking of boots so I assume you're speaking in the hypotheticals rather than describing the current "followers.";)
The other thing is that I look at my energy bill and as much as I hate to say it, I think the value is pretty amazing. For all of the crap I have in my house sucking power off the grid, I pay just under $3.50 a day. Granted we use gas for heat & hot water - but a couple of computers, TV & DVR, lights, oven, laundry, refrige, etc all for a couple of bucks. I still got Kill-a-watt for Christmas & have been going through my house, trying to cut down - but that's just the tweaker in me. If it weren't for a need to optimize because of some OCD tendencies, I wouldn't for a second think that my electric usage is something that needs attention.
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Here, here. There's never been an elected official I as desperately want to see get bumped from office as Doyle.
All the extreme standards and requirements are just punitive at best. Slow but steady, gradual improvement is what the government should be doing. There are lots of warts to CAFE that should be fixed, but setting that aside...Bush held the MPG standards flat, which was just stupid. Now Obama is raising them tremendously which is equally stupid (especially given the bailouts and that just about the only profitable vehicles by the big three are SUVs). Raise the CAFE standards by a very small, attainable amount every year. The engineers will figure it out and we'll get to where we need to be with a lot less collateral damage.
Why is it so f***ing hard?
...While I'm sure overall mileage is much lower the stress on the engine is very high. The engines are supercharged, high compression monsters putting out 1000+ hp (much more for professional cars).
Agreed, the stress on the motors is not comparable. But the issue is the corrosive effects of the ethanol over time, not stress at any given moment. I have no reason not believe you, that my experience was not typical. But I think my point still stands, that the service life in terms of years, miles and hours of a race car motor are not comparable to that of a street car's. Add to that the components (and corresponding price) are drastically different, and then the maintenance - race motors are being maintained literally constantly compared to street cars that need to go years and tens of thousands of miles without any real work.
Tell me this - how long did they run their engines? I worked pit crew for a short track racer for a few years. I think he'd send the motor out for a total rebuild every season and would buy an entirely new motor every 3-4 years. And we're not talking about a ton of miles here - all tolled, maybe 1000 miles a season. I don't know if this was normal or not - he was relatively well funded. Compare this to consumer cars that need to get at least 10 years/100,000.
OK, so if more people want to be teachers, that's good: Make hiring competitive. Go from a teacher shortage to a teacher surplus. "Too many teachers" means that schools can hire only the best ones or the most passionate ones. Sure, that means they need a selection process that's tuned for that, but that's the easy part relative to competitive salaries.
Actually I'd argue that coming up with the money to pay more is the easy part compared to getting school administrators and hiring processes that are more effective.
Attracting more people to the teaching profession will not filter out those who love teaching. Interviewing and selecting for the most skilled and passionate candidates is a problem all employers face.
You're right, I think it's like running a restaurant. The most overlooked, and most important issue is hiring and effectively managing the best people. Well it's true for any operation, but it's absolutely critical for some. But the problem is, administrators doing the hiring of teachers are bad at it. Just awful. So a low starting salary that weeds out many of the people who aren't willing to sacrifice financially in order to make a difference in kids' lives helps make the job easier for the people doing the hiring. And ultimately, for the kids, parents and community, that "only the most determined" filtering minimizes the impact of bad hiring decisions.
Is this the best way to do things? Absolutely not. But it's a mechanism for routing around the damage that is bad administrators & management.
Sort of depends where you are though. In my state, though starting wage is not great, the healthcare is exceptional and free. No co-pay, no increasing premiums each year. In the face of where healthcare costs have been and are continuing to go, this is not an insignificant thing. It's probably worth another $10,000+ compared to a typical job. The other thing is exceptional retirement plans/pensions. Nearly all of the teachers I had retired early - some even in their early to mid 50's. Again given the healthcare especially the huge costs later in life...the choice of eating some meals of Ramen the first few years of employment in exchange for the ability to retire when you're still young enough to enjoy it and excellent healthcare benefits when you're not...well that's looking pretty good right now.
That's what I was thinking 'cept since he mentioned Mac & that's what I'm typing on now, I figured, just get one of those silver-metallic markers & cover over it. It should keep the vast majority of people away, it can't be peeled up like a sticker, should pretty effectively disable the thing.
But then, if the issue really is high-security type places, then bottom line really would be completely removing the camera.
Fox has a show with a very set arc - Reunion. While it wasn't great by any means, it was a murder mystery with some twists & turns and each episode represented 1 year of the 20 years covered in the story arc. Like I said, it wasn't great by any means (fairly low production value) but I really looked forward to it because there had been a couple of shows I really liked that got abruptly canceled, so I was looking forward to the finality & completed arc it would provide. Only thing was Fox put it on hiatus during baseball playoffs without ever advertising it or when it would be back and it lost so many viewers that it got canceled before without even finishing it's set course.
Given the understanding of copyright they've displayed - and the fact that it was what, 10 years ago when they famously started railing against the evils of filesharing. If it took Lars 10 years to actually take the step of looking into it for himself, I'd just guess taking the step of securing the copyrights to their music would be too much work and require more initiative.
I'm not someone who's done a lot with VMs. I worked with Softwindows ages ago, but performance was pretty dreadful. I recently picked up a MacBook Pro - a nothing special 2.4 Ghz machine & decided to give VMWare Fusion a try. I gotta say I was absolutely floored by the performance. Once you've launched it, restoring a suspended Vista session is really fast. The biggest shocker - at least for me, Flash CS3 launches faster through a Fusion/Vista VM on my Mac than it does natively on my Windows machine. If Parallels is actually faster yet, then...wow.
Kinda funny - at a former job, I developed interactive software - presentations, calculators, etc for sales reps at a financial services company. One anecdotal way we assessed how compelling our stuff was, was the fingerprint test. The best endorsement we could get would be when the reps would complain that they'd always have to clean their screen off.
No, it's not. While keeping people employed and on the tax rolls is a good thing, there is a cost. Diving deeper and deeper into debt to pay for make-work programs that ultimately do nothing productive - good today, but making the day of reckoning that much worse. The false dichotomy is intellectually dishonest - or just plain stupid. It's not a choice between wasting billions and doing nothing. The opposite of doing something idiotic is not inaction - it is doing something intelligent. Spend money helping foster growth industries. Help otherwise good companies, who are just hanging on because of the current market, to get through this so they can continue to employ people. By no means is it time to increase business taxes - at best, they pass their added expenses to the customer who can't afford it right now either. And at worst, it becomes the nail in the coffin so they cut jobs or close up entirely.
Well rest easy. Gov. is considering implementing tolls so we can have better roads again...Well until he raids that pile of cash too.
And yet the republicans cried when the jobs the stimulus package created temporary jobs. That of course was the whole point. Creating temporary jobs in a recession to avoid having labor go unused while not creating permanent jobs that are difficult to make away with.
Make-work jobs do nothing to solve the fundamental problems. How about encouraging new/growing industries to replace the dying ones. Though I have issues with the all of the money dumped on green industry - because so much of it has lousy long-term viability prospects - it's at least movement in a forward direction. But tax breaks are the better way to go in terms of encouragement with less waste. Instead of dumping free money out there, encourage profitability by giving the money out on the back end - if you create a profitable enterprise in a "green industry" we won't confiscate your profits. And obviously the green stuff is only one example.
If you want to yell at wastage, yell at the bailouts (bank, auto industry, mortage). Those are about throwing money at bad investments which is almost always a bad idea.
Nearly every conservative I know was yelling at the bailouts.
Tax is a zero sum game? I don't think that means what you think it means. Does every dollar collected get returned to the economy/people in the form of services of the same amount? Of freaking course not. It goes through the federal money-laundering, pork and bureaucratic filter where only a small percentage of it actually goes towards providing any kind of useful services.
Government doesn't tax businesses - it only uses businesses to help collect taxes from individuals.
I'm from Wisconsin. Our Governor & now both houses controlled by the same party are doing whatever they want with no floor or public debate. The gov. has been playing a shell game - moving money from one account to another to make claims about reducing the deficit while only making it worse. For example, gas taxes (which are among the highest in the country) specifically for funding highway improvements & maintenance have been rolled into the general fund. A trust fund voluntarily funded by doctors to help keep malpractice premiums (and thus medical expenses) down was well, the most appropriate word is raided. We've lost thousands of jobs because is more expensive to do business here than elsewhere - and his answer to the budget problem is to raise business taxes. Our budget deficit is right up there with the worst of them - much worse when you consider it as a percentage of GDP. Last one out, turn out the lights.
That's what I thought too - but when you do the math - $179 actually seems like a pretty reasonable price. If it is price gouging, it's less gouging than other OEMs. Dell charges $155 for a 85WHr battery, $134 for the 53WHr one to replace my 2 year old machine. Apple charging $179 for a 95WHr one including service to do it doesn't seem like a huge profit center.
The other thing of course is the time degradation of Li-ion is doubled. 20% per year is lost as a function of time - completely independent of use. I bought two right off the bat once as well. After a year, you have two batteries that have diminished capacity & at about 2 years, you got two that are crap. You're better off waiting & buying another battery after a year or 2 than right away.
Also, A legal "finding of fact" also does not make it empirically true. Since a court is only able to use the the evidence presented before it (and prior legal rulings) the ultimate truth of a decision can always be in question. Our legal system is a general framework to solve sociological issues, not determine absolute truths.
The best example would be evidence ruled inadmissible for some reason - say a judge rules police didn't have probable cause and didn't get a search warrant so incontrovertible evidence is not allowed to be presented. A court may well find a someone not guilty as a matter of law - but as a matter of absolute truth we can know, and prove otherwise.
No good, the bear will follow you around looking for more handouts.
Sounds about like the American voter. Or banking industry. Or auto industry. Or state & local governments.
...So Obama's insistence on keeping "his" blackberry makes a kind of sense in this context; it reflects a desire to have some other channel of communication that isn't completely managed on his behalf by his usual staff.
Well said and on an a personal level, we would do well to understand that he's still a human being. That said, as a voter that get's put to the side - we elect the President and bestow on him more power than any other single person. We have a right to total transparency with very few exceptions. National Security and family/friends not in any way serving a role in the government are about the only ones I can think of. Everything else, we have a right to know & if a President doesn't like that, then he or she can give up the office or not run in the first place.
An antire group of people devoted to tracking and reporting on the whereabouts of the president. They could hire pundits to theorize on why he is there, film him getting in the car, getting out of the car. They could even predict where he's going to be, like "The president will be in Miami next Tuesday to talk to the guy in that place". Now that would be really freaky.
And we could give them a cute name, like "media".
You didn't mention fawning, drooling or licking of boots so I assume you're speaking in the hypotheticals rather than describing the current "followers." ;)
The other thing is that I look at my energy bill and as much as I hate to say it, I think the value is pretty amazing. For all of the crap I have in my house sucking power off the grid, I pay just under $3.50 a day. Granted we use gas for heat & hot water - but a couple of computers, TV & DVR, lights, oven, laundry, refrige, etc all for a couple of bucks. I still got Kill-a-watt for Christmas & have been going through my house, trying to cut down - but that's just the tweaker in me. If it weren't for a need to optimize because of some OCD tendencies, I wouldn't for a second think that my electric usage is something that needs attention.