This change will force users of pages that utilize Google maps to auth to Google in order to display the result.
No, it doesn't. Signing in is optional. If you don't sign in you'll get the same map you're getting now. If you're signed in you'll get additional personalized information.
What an oversimplified analogy. Limiting certain people's travel from Western African countries doesn't mean limiting aid to those places.
How do you think the aid actually gets to those places? Humanitarian agencies like MSF don't have their own fleets of planes. Sure, governments could arrange military transport, but then it would be on their timetable, and likely only when enough stuff/staff is ready to go to justify a flight. Not to mention the fact that setting up alternative arrangements would take time, delaying relief efforts.
I know, Dunning-Kruger and all, but it still amazes me how many people assume they know better than the experts in the field.
I dunno, so why do you think the uptake on Google Wallet has been so poor?
Because Google never advertised or promoted it to users.
Swillden is either an employee of has an "It's Complicated" relationship status with Google Inc.
If you look at my/. user page, you'll see I'm an employee. However, that really has nothing to do with my comments, except that since I worked on some of the Wallet supporting infrastructure I'm more familiar than most with how it works and how it evolved.
If these people are living in poverty, how are they going to have a computer to access the internet with?
Go to your local public library with free Wifi. What you'll find there is lots of low-income and no-income people with cheap second-hand smartphones using it for e-mail, facebook, etc. Devices are cheap and plentiful, connectivity less so.
Chip and PIN (notice it's not "in") is exactly what these retailers want to avoid, because they don't want the credit card networks, with their fees and their tendency to shift all liability onto the merchants, to be involved. The goal of CurrentC is to get the card networks and their Chip and PIN solution out of their stores/
They didn't partner with any card issuers; you can use any credit card with Google Wallet. The way it works is that you're actually paying with a Google-issued MasterCard debit card, then Google charges whatever credit card you gave them on the back end, so there are no restrictions.
they didn't really work with any merchants to get them on board
Untrue.
Verizon blocked their app on their phones
That was true for a while, but hasn't been true for about two years now.
It's not that Congress always passes laws that are specific and require little interpretation. (Sometimes, they're deliberately ambiguous in order to get enough support to pass.) Many laws do require a lot of interpretation, and until the courts decide (if they ever do), it's up to the executive branch to interpret them. I don't see any way around such things.
Oh, certainly. Further, in many cases Congress deliberately and explicitly passes the buck, by passing laws that direct some component of the executive branch to define regulations to implement some much more general directive.
You can't be convicted of violating a signing statement, and to be convicted of an executive order the prosecutor will have to show how the Constitution, treaties, and Congressional statutes give the President the power to enforce that.
But if you're a federal employee you can be fired for failing to execute a presidential order. This means the president can unilaterally stop enforcement of any law he dislikes, and can create new restrictions on citizens as long as he's careful to do it in a way that doesn't get enforced in court. The most prominent example of signing statement abuse was Bush's statement the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, in which he basically said that the executive branch was directed to construe the law however Bush told them to.
This is definitely a loophole. Companies are allowed to depreciate or amortize an asset because it loses value over time, like a piece of machinery. Where is the evidence the club is losing value?
It doesn't matter all that much, because any value incorrectly depreciated off becomes a capital gain upon resale. So even if it's completely bogus, it at most delays the taxes. I suppose if there's a massive reduction in gains taxes, or some other real loophole is discovered, Ballmer could sell the team to himself, realize the gain and then exploit that future tax reduction/avoidance. Delays can sometimes be parlayed into avoidance. But I think it's more likely that gains taxes will increase.
So when someone buys a team at overvalue, the regular tax payer is on the hook for that overvalue.
I don't think you understand what "deduction" means. It doesn't mean that Ballmer gets to recover his billion dollars from taxpayers, it just means that he doesn't have to pay taxes on that much of his capital gains income. Essentially, they're treating this as a bad investment on which Ballmer has taken a billion-dollar loss. In any investments you pay taxes on gains, but you get to deduct any losses against those gains.
In this case, it's actually an asset depreciation, not an actual loss... but those details don't really matter.
Note that the other side of this is that if Ballmer turns around in a few years and sells the team for exactly what he bought it for, any portion of the original value which he has claimed as a loss (depreciated away), but which he then recovers in the sale becomes a new capital gain. Basically, if the buys for $2B, argues that $1B of that was a loss and offsets it against other gains (using all of the $1B) then sells for $2B, the IRS will say "You bought for $1B and sold for $2B, so you have to pay capital gains on $1B".
There are lots of actual loopholes out there, but this isn't really one of them.
Your method of dealing with a virulent disease has worked... never.
Meh. Virulence (severity of effects) is only one of two relevant factors when trying to figure out how to manage a disease. The other is communicability, and that, in fact, is the variable that matters most when you decide to what extent quarantine is necessary or appropriate. The more communicable the disease the more important it is to isolate those that have it, unless its virulence is so low that you just don't care.
Ebola, however, is one of the least communicable diseases possible. Literally. If it were much less infectious it would just die out on its own.
Infectious disease modelling uses several values to describe communicability, but the most important one is basic reproduction number, called R0. Diseases with an R0 of <1 will die out on their own because the number specifies the average number of new infections that will arise from an infected person in "normal" society. The exact value of R0 is society-dependent. Measles, for example, has an R0 of between 12 and 18, lower in societies with greater personal space and higher in societies with less personal space, because measles is transmitted via aerosols.
Recent studies put R0 for Ebola in the 1-2 range, in Africa. Given the way in which it's transmitted, the highest infection rates are in societies with poor sanitation infrastructure and/or practices, like Liberia, and even there Ebola is barely able to reproduce enough to grow. This is why it's been hanging around with only periodic, mostly small, outbreaks for 40+ years. The same recent studies say that all that's necessary to stop the outbreak completely is to reduce the new cases by 50%. That's all, and Ebola's poor communicability will mean that the outbreak will collapse.
I posit -- though we'll never have the numbers needed to evaluate it statistically -- that Ebola's R0 in developed countries with good sanitation infrastructure is <<1. Notice that so far the only infections that have occurred in the US were of health care workers treating the ill, and doing so with inadequate care. None of the family members or other people the infected individuals have come in contact with have contracted the disease, in spite of the fact that there have been hundreds. The sparse data so far argues for an R0 of ~0.01 in the US.
This means that quarantining people who may have come into brief contact with an Ebola patient is unnecessarily restrictive and -- as the GP explained quite clearly -- very likely to be counterproductive.
It doesn't make sense to use the same response for every disease any more than it makes sense to give the same medicine for every disease. Let the professionals who know what they're doing devise the protocols for limiting the spread. And what they -- very sensibly! -- recommend is simply to quarantine those actually diagnosed, and to have their caregivers take appropriate precautions against infection. Barring a mutation that dramatically increases the communicability of the disease, that will be perfectly adequate.
I read your post, and I agreed with, and supported, the fact of dimorphism. But you did say, for example "Because men are willing to get into things that might not be the best financial move. If women only go into it if there is a lot of money then they're showing up for the money... not the coding." I noticed the "if" in that second sentence, but the implication was still that it's true, rather than conditional.
I think you're misinterpreting it. Women like money well enough, but generally aren't as focused on total compensation as they are on risk. Men are much more likely to take larger risks in exchange for larger rewards, which is what the article is basing its conclusions on: If CS jobs follow a boom-and-bust pattern (note: I don't believe that's true, but I'm going with it for the moment), and if this pattern is well-known, then men will be more likely to take the risk hoping for a big payday, while women will be more likely to avoid it, preferring something potentially less lucrative but more stable.
Obviously, I'm talking about broad trends and tendencies here. There are plenty of risk-averse men and plenty of risk-taking women, but on average the descriptions are reasonably accurate, and it's very easy to see evolutionary reasons why we are the way we are.
With that said, I think the article is bunk, because I don't think there's a boom-and-bust pattern in CS employment. Yes there was the dot com boom and following bust, but that's the only real example, and it happened after the biggest part of the decline. Also, I don't think even the dot boom is a very good example; a lot of people who fancied themselves "coders" because they could throw together some functional (but usually wrong) HTML lost their jobs, but CS graduates with even moderate software development skills, or with decent IT skills around managing or troubleshooting systems, stayed employed and didn't really even take a pay hit in most regions.
Granted that the reality matters less than the perception, I really haven't see a widespread perception that CS is a boom-and-bust career field. I have seen a lot of perception that it's a young man's career field, with rampant sexism and ageism, but not that it's boom-and-bust.
Oh, I neglected to mention another key part of the president's lawmaking power, at least in practice: signing statements and executive orders. In neither case can he blatantly override the expressed will of Congress, but he can bend it pretty darned far, and he can fill in almost any gaps that they neglected to address.
The president is part of the executive branch I mentioned earlier.
He is, but he is effectively part of the legislative branch as well. He has a direct and extremely powerful vote on all legislation, since he can override the expressed will of the simple majority of both houses, though only in the negative direction. As the leader of his party he also has a very active role in proposing legislation, and while it's going through legislative debate he often steps in to politick for or against various bills, and has considerably more power and leverage in that role than all but the most powerful of elected legislators.
I don't think the framers really intended the president to have as large a role in the lawmaking process as he does. From what I've read, the theory behind giving him veto authority was primarily to enable him to kill legislation which he didn't think could be executed. Regardless of intent, though, the president is, in fact, the most powerful member of the legislative branch.
Given that the president is the boss of the entire federal justice system other than the courts themselves, and he has a major role in appointing court justices, it's easy to argue that he's also a part of the judicial branch, and a powerful player there as well. For a long time we believed that the Supreme Court was somewhat free of presidential power, at least once they were seated, but FDR proved that hollow when he successfully bullied the Court into upholding his New Deal bills with the court packing proposal.
The president's powers over the legislative and judicial branches aren't unlimited, but they're extremely broad when he chooses to exercise them aggressively. Doing so too obviously is politically expensive, but he can do it and many presidents have.
There will never be a legitimate independent candidate with a chance to make it to office. The big two will see to that.
Indeed they will, but if you're implying they're going to do something nefarious to accomplish it, you're wrong. They don't have to. The system as designed tends so strongly towards two parties that the nation has essentially always had two parties, except for brief periods where it had only one, and very early where there was something of an attempt to avoid parties entirely (utterly doomed to failure, no matter how Washington pushed for it, because blocs are exponentially more effective).
This tendency is known as Duverger's Law, and it arises from the simple majority-rules voting system. Essentially, third party candidates can never rise to positions of significant power because as they gain influence they draw their support from the major party ideologically closest to them. This means that to the degree they're successful, they help the candidate that is ideologically furthest from them to get elected. To avoid having that effect, they'd have to rise from nothing to a winning position in a single election cycle, which is extremely unlikely.
That doesn't mean that your only hope is to stock up on guns and ammunition in preparation for the revolution if you disagree with the big two, though. The solution is to work to accept that they will win, and to work within them to change their platforms and their nominated candidates. Given how few people participate in the party caucuses, those who choose to step up and get involved magnify the effect of their votes by three or more orders of magnitude, even if they only work behind the scenes to help define policy and select candidates. Those who choose to run can, of course, have even greater impact.
So, if you want to have an effect, pick a party and get involved. A very wise friend of mine pointed out that you don't even need to pick the party you are ideologically closest to, indeed you may achieve the greatest effect by joining the party you most disagree with and shifting them a bit towards your opinions and preferences, even if all you do is to soften their resistance to your ideas.
Measles is considered pretty communicable, at a rate of 1.2.
Ebola is a 1.7.
I did manage to find some metrics for disease transmission. There are a variety, but the primary one is R0, the "basic reproduction number". Measles is one of the most communicable diseases, with an R0 of between 12 and 18. Ebola is one of the least communicable diseases, with an R0 between 1 and 2.
It's Wikipdedia, but contains links to its sources, which are WHO and CDC for the measles number and an international research study published in September for Ebola. The latter suggests that if just half of the Ebola cases could be avoided, the R0 would drop below 1, causing the disease to die out. That means Ebola is so hard to transmit that it's just barely able to continue.
In contrast, Measles is so communicative that it's expected that 90% of the people who come into contact with an infected person will get it.
You're so wrong and so backwards here, it's not even funny.
Cite? I've never heard of, nor have I been able to find, any numeric rating scale for communicability, much less documentation of those two numbers for those two diseases.
Assuming the measure exists, and that those numbers are accurate, I strongly suspect that the scale measures difficulty of transmission, and that lower numbers indicate more communicable diseases. Measles is spread via aerosol transmission, Ebola is not.
Sadly, the likely outcome is drop in the quality of life for everyone involved.
That makes no sense.
Look at it from a macro-economic perspective: The reason we're moving to automation is because it increases efficiency, allowing us to produce more goods with fewer resources. That will increase average standard of living.
There are a couple of ways it could go wrong, of course. One is that the increased efficiency and therefore increased wealth could end up concentrated in the hands a small percentage of super-wealthy people. We've actually seen a lot of this over the last few decades, but we've seen it previously during other technology-driven economic restructurings as well, and what always happens is that competition eventually drives the margins of the super successful down and in the end the wealth ends up getting spread more broadly.
That points to the other way it could go wrong: The common man only gets his share of the increased wealth by doing something to earn it. Even though increased efficiency means there's more to go around, barring some sort of large scale government-driven redistribution, you still have to work for your share of it... which means you have to be able to do something that others who have wealth consider of sufficient value to pay you. So the other way it could go wrong is that there may simply be nothing available for such people to do.
That last is also a risk we've seen bandied about in past economic shifts, especially the shift from agricultural to industrial labor. What has happened in the past is that we've created new kinds of jobs doing previously unheard-of or even previously-frivolous things. I don't see any reason that this time should be different. I expect the transition to be painful -- and the faster it happens the more painful it will be -- but I don't think there's any end to what people want. People with resources will always want things that people without resources can supply. I don't claim to have any idea what those things will be.
It's also possible that I'm wrong, and that we'll have to take a socialistic approach to distributing the fruits of automation-driven productivity increases. I don't think so, and I think we should be careful not to move that direction too quickly, because it has huge negative impacts on productivity and we're going to need all of the productivity increases we can get, but it is possible.
Now, I'm not so thick-headed as to imagine that they wouldn't come up with something like this to help franchises with wage costs, but I'm also aware that this tech is coming to all sorts of places other than Seattle where the minimum wage actually went up.
The fact is that it's going to happen regardless of where minimum wages are set, or even if there are legally-mandated minimum wages (as opposed to the market-determined real minimum wages). Anyone who thinks most unskilled jobs aren't going away is crazy. The question is at what rate this change will occur, and it seems quite clear that high minimum wages will make more automation economical sooner, pushing the rate of change.
We're edging towards a major economic restructuring driven by widespread automation. We've had automation-driven restructurings in the past, and dealt with them, and this too will be handled. But when you're talking about widespread elimination of old jobs and creation of new jobs, speed kills. Retraining, and even just adjusting to the new reality, take time, and in the meantime millions upon millions of displaced workers are a huge drain on the economy, not to mention miserable.
I think it's pretty clear that high minimum wages are a forcing function for this transition, and I don't think it's something we really want to force. Ideally, it would be better to slow it down, at least in terms of the human cost, though the most obvious mechanisms for slowing it (labor subsidies) may also dangerously distort the economy.
just to be careful I'm not spreading a highly communicable deadly disease
Ebola is not highly communicable. It's more communicable than, say, HIV, but it's still pretty low on the communicability scale, and even lower if you're asymptomatic.
so where was his "strong anti-authoritarian and anti-military streak" when he was rolling over for the NSA **for years**...
That never happened. The NSA tapped Google's fiber without Google's knowledge, but there's no evidence that Google ever willingly participated. As soon as Google found out about the taps, it accelerated a program to get the data on all those fibers encrypted, to lock the NSA out.
Google invades privacy for profit and for decades gave the NSA (and god knows who else) an unaccountable back door to all our data
Google trades the right to target ads to you in exchange for services, and enables you to opt out of the trade if you want, even providing the necessary tools for you to do it. Google has never given the NSA an "unaccountable back door". See David Drummond's numerous public statements on this issue. From my personal perspective as a Google security engineer, I think it would be virtually impossible for such a back door to exist in Google's systems without my having noticed some trace of it. Take that as you will.
You're coming to this question with a whole bunch of inaccurate assumptions, which are seriously skewing your perspective. You should take a breath, look into what really happened (as much as is public information anyway) vis a vis the NSA, PRISM, etc., and then re-evaluate.
Or not, that's your choice. I'll merely point out that time will prove me right with respect to any purported military-focused work by Google X and leave it there.
why dont you explain? if it is lol funny then you should be able to say why
Sergey Brin, director of X projects at Google and co-founder of the company, has a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-military streak. The idea that he'd invest himself so deeply into a project focused on military applications is laugh-out-loud funny.
Have you ever seen a hurricane or a tropical storm? It means the Internet will be down during these critical events when it is often most needed. That is the reason they are talking about 13 miles altitude drones and not just zeppelins. The altitude record for a zeppelin is 7.6 km or 4.7 miles. Large hurricanes can reach an altitude of 50 000 feet or 9.5 miles or 15.25 km. Zeppelins couldn't clear a large hurricane.
The balloons Google is experimenting with do reach the stratosphere. 20 km altitude.
Slashdot Mirror
This change will force users of pages that utilize Google maps to auth to Google in order to display the result.
No, it doesn't. Signing in is optional. If you don't sign in you'll get the same map you're getting now. If you're signed in you'll get additional personalized information.
What an oversimplified analogy. Limiting certain people's travel from Western African countries doesn't mean limiting aid to those places.
How do you think the aid actually gets to those places? Humanitarian agencies like MSF don't have their own fleets of planes. Sure, governments could arrange military transport, but then it would be on their timetable, and likely only when enough stuff/staff is ready to go to justify a flight. Not to mention the fact that setting up alternative arrangements would take time, delaying relief efforts.
I know, Dunning-Kruger and all, but it still amazes me how many people assume they know better than the experts in the field.
I dunno, so why do you think the uptake on Google Wallet has been so poor?
Because Google never advertised or promoted it to users.
Swillden is either an employee of has an "It's Complicated" relationship status with Google Inc.
If you look at my /. user page, you'll see I'm an employee. However, that really has nothing to do with my comments, except that since I worked on some of the Wallet supporting infrastructure I'm more familiar than most with how it works and how it evolved.
If these people are living in poverty, how are they going to have a computer to access the internet with?
Go to your local public library with free Wifi. What you'll find there is lots of low-income and no-income people with cheap second-hand smartphones using it for e-mail, facebook, etc. Devices are cheap and plentiful, connectivity less so.
(Note that doesn't mean I like this proposal.)
Chip and PIN (notice it's not "in") is exactly what these retailers want to avoid, because they don't want the credit card networks, with their fees and their tendency to shift all liability onto the merchants, to be involved. The goal of CurrentC is to get the card networks and their Chip and PIN solution out of their stores/
they only partnered with a few card issuers
They didn't partner with any card issuers; you can use any credit card with Google Wallet. The way it works is that you're actually paying with a Google-issued MasterCard debit card, then Google charges whatever credit card you gave them on the back end, so there are no restrictions.
they didn't really work with any merchants to get them on board
Untrue.
Verizon blocked their app on their phones
That was true for a while, but hasn't been true for about two years now.
How many banks signed on to Google Wallet vs Apple Pay?
Umm, effectively all of them, since you can use Google Wallet with any credit or debit card, which is far more than Apple Pay supports, at present.
It's not that Congress always passes laws that are specific and require little interpretation. (Sometimes, they're deliberately ambiguous in order to get enough support to pass.) Many laws do require a lot of interpretation, and until the courts decide (if they ever do), it's up to the executive branch to interpret them. I don't see any way around such things.
Oh, certainly. Further, in many cases Congress deliberately and explicitly passes the buck, by passing laws that direct some component of the executive branch to define regulations to implement some much more general directive.
You can't be convicted of violating a signing statement, and to be convicted of an executive order the prosecutor will have to show how the Constitution, treaties, and Congressional statutes give the President the power to enforce that.
But if you're a federal employee you can be fired for failing to execute a presidential order. This means the president can unilaterally stop enforcement of any law he dislikes, and can create new restrictions on citizens as long as he's careful to do it in a way that doesn't get enforced in court. The most prominent example of signing statement abuse was Bush's statement the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, in which he basically said that the executive branch was directed to construe the law however Bush told them to.
This is definitely a loophole. Companies are allowed to depreciate or amortize an asset because it loses value over time, like a piece of machinery. Where is the evidence the club is losing value?
It doesn't matter all that much, because any value incorrectly depreciated off becomes a capital gain upon resale. So even if it's completely bogus, it at most delays the taxes. I suppose if there's a massive reduction in gains taxes, or some other real loophole is discovered, Ballmer could sell the team to himself, realize the gain and then exploit that future tax reduction/avoidance. Delays can sometimes be parlayed into avoidance. But I think it's more likely that gains taxes will increase.
So when someone buys a team at overvalue, the regular tax payer is on the hook for that overvalue.
I don't think you understand what "deduction" means. It doesn't mean that Ballmer gets to recover his billion dollars from taxpayers, it just means that he doesn't have to pay taxes on that much of his capital gains income. Essentially, they're treating this as a bad investment on which Ballmer has taken a billion-dollar loss. In any investments you pay taxes on gains, but you get to deduct any losses against those gains.
In this case, it's actually an asset depreciation, not an actual loss... but those details don't really matter.
Note that the other side of this is that if Ballmer turns around in a few years and sells the team for exactly what he bought it for, any portion of the original value which he has claimed as a loss (depreciated away), but which he then recovers in the sale becomes a new capital gain. Basically, if the buys for $2B, argues that $1B of that was a loss and offsets it against other gains (using all of the $1B) then sells for $2B, the IRS will say "You bought for $1B and sold for $2B, so you have to pay capital gains on $1B".
There are lots of actual loopholes out there, but this isn't really one of them.
Your method of dealing with a virulent disease has worked... never.
Meh. Virulence (severity of effects) is only one of two relevant factors when trying to figure out how to manage a disease. The other is communicability, and that, in fact, is the variable that matters most when you decide to what extent quarantine is necessary or appropriate. The more communicable the disease the more important it is to isolate those that have it, unless its virulence is so low that you just don't care.
Ebola, however, is one of the least communicable diseases possible. Literally. If it were much less infectious it would just die out on its own.
Infectious disease modelling uses several values to describe communicability, but the most important one is basic reproduction number, called R0. Diseases with an R0 of <1 will die out on their own because the number specifies the average number of new infections that will arise from an infected person in "normal" society. The exact value of R0 is society-dependent. Measles, for example, has an R0 of between 12 and 18, lower in societies with greater personal space and higher in societies with less personal space, because measles is transmitted via aerosols.
Recent studies put R0 for Ebola in the 1-2 range, in Africa. Given the way in which it's transmitted, the highest infection rates are in societies with poor sanitation infrastructure and/or practices, like Liberia, and even there Ebola is barely able to reproduce enough to grow. This is why it's been hanging around with only periodic, mostly small, outbreaks for 40+ years. The same recent studies say that all that's necessary to stop the outbreak completely is to reduce the new cases by 50%. That's all, and Ebola's poor communicability will mean that the outbreak will collapse.
I posit -- though we'll never have the numbers needed to evaluate it statistically -- that Ebola's R0 in developed countries with good sanitation infrastructure is <<1. Notice that so far the only infections that have occurred in the US were of health care workers treating the ill, and doing so with inadequate care. None of the family members or other people the infected individuals have come in contact with have contracted the disease, in spite of the fact that there have been hundreds. The sparse data so far argues for an R0 of ~0.01 in the US.
This means that quarantining people who may have come into brief contact with an Ebola patient is unnecessarily restrictive and -- as the GP explained quite clearly -- very likely to be counterproductive.
It doesn't make sense to use the same response for every disease any more than it makes sense to give the same medicine for every disease. Let the professionals who know what they're doing devise the protocols for limiting the spread. And what they -- very sensibly! -- recommend is simply to quarantine those actually diagnosed, and to have their caregivers take appropriate precautions against infection. Barring a mutation that dramatically increases the communicability of the disease, that will be perfectly adequate.
I read your post, and I agreed with, and supported, the fact of dimorphism. But you did say, for example "Because men are willing to get into things that might not be the best financial move. If women only go into it if there is a lot of money then they're showing up for the money... not the coding." I noticed the "if" in that second sentence, but the implication was still that it's true, rather than conditional.
I think you're misinterpreting it. Women like money well enough, but generally aren't as focused on total compensation as they are on risk. Men are much more likely to take larger risks in exchange for larger rewards, which is what the article is basing its conclusions on: If CS jobs follow a boom-and-bust pattern (note: I don't believe that's true, but I'm going with it for the moment), and if this pattern is well-known, then men will be more likely to take the risk hoping for a big payday, while women will be more likely to avoid it, preferring something potentially less lucrative but more stable.
Obviously, I'm talking about broad trends and tendencies here. There are plenty of risk-averse men and plenty of risk-taking women, but on average the descriptions are reasonably accurate, and it's very easy to see evolutionary reasons why we are the way we are.
With that said, I think the article is bunk, because I don't think there's a boom-and-bust pattern in CS employment. Yes there was the dot com boom and following bust, but that's the only real example, and it happened after the biggest part of the decline. Also, I don't think even the dot boom is a very good example; a lot of people who fancied themselves "coders" because they could throw together some functional (but usually wrong) HTML lost their jobs, but CS graduates with even moderate software development skills, or with decent IT skills around managing or troubleshooting systems, stayed employed and didn't really even take a pay hit in most regions.
Granted that the reality matters less than the perception, I really haven't see a widespread perception that CS is a boom-and-bust career field. I have seen a lot of perception that it's a young man's career field, with rampant sexism and ageism, but not that it's boom-and-bust.
Oh, I neglected to mention another key part of the president's lawmaking power, at least in practice: signing statements and executive orders. In neither case can he blatantly override the expressed will of Congress, but he can bend it pretty darned far, and he can fill in almost any gaps that they neglected to address.
The president is part of the executive branch I mentioned earlier.
He is, but he is effectively part of the legislative branch as well. He has a direct and extremely powerful vote on all legislation, since he can override the expressed will of the simple majority of both houses, though only in the negative direction. As the leader of his party he also has a very active role in proposing legislation, and while it's going through legislative debate he often steps in to politick for or against various bills, and has considerably more power and leverage in that role than all but the most powerful of elected legislators.
I don't think the framers really intended the president to have as large a role in the lawmaking process as he does. From what I've read, the theory behind giving him veto authority was primarily to enable him to kill legislation which he didn't think could be executed. Regardless of intent, though, the president is, in fact, the most powerful member of the legislative branch.
Given that the president is the boss of the entire federal justice system other than the courts themselves, and he has a major role in appointing court justices, it's easy to argue that he's also a part of the judicial branch, and a powerful player there as well. For a long time we believed that the Supreme Court was somewhat free of presidential power, at least once they were seated, but FDR proved that hollow when he successfully bullied the Court into upholding his New Deal bills with the court packing proposal.
The president's powers over the legislative and judicial branches aren't unlimited, but they're extremely broad when he chooses to exercise them aggressively. Doing so too obviously is politically expensive, but he can do it and many presidents have.
There will never be a legitimate independent candidate with a chance to make it to office. The big two will see to that.
Indeed they will, but if you're implying they're going to do something nefarious to accomplish it, you're wrong. They don't have to. The system as designed tends so strongly towards two parties that the nation has essentially always had two parties, except for brief periods where it had only one, and very early where there was something of an attempt to avoid parties entirely (utterly doomed to failure, no matter how Washington pushed for it, because blocs are exponentially more effective).
This tendency is known as Duverger's Law, and it arises from the simple majority-rules voting system. Essentially, third party candidates can never rise to positions of significant power because as they gain influence they draw their support from the major party ideologically closest to them. This means that to the degree they're successful, they help the candidate that is ideologically furthest from them to get elected. To avoid having that effect, they'd have to rise from nothing to a winning position in a single election cycle, which is extremely unlikely.
That doesn't mean that your only hope is to stock up on guns and ammunition in preparation for the revolution if you disagree with the big two, though. The solution is to work to accept that they will win, and to work within them to change their platforms and their nominated candidates. Given how few people participate in the party caucuses, those who choose to step up and get involved magnify the effect of their votes by three or more orders of magnitude, even if they only work behind the scenes to help define policy and select candidates. Those who choose to run can, of course, have even greater impact.
So, if you want to have an effect, pick a party and get involved. A very wise friend of mine pointed out that you don't even need to pick the party you are ideologically closest to, indeed you may achieve the greatest effect by joining the party you most disagree with and shifting them a bit towards your opinions and preferences, even if all you do is to soften their resistance to your ideas.
Measles is considered pretty communicable, at a rate of 1.2.
Ebola is a 1.7.
I did manage to find some metrics for disease transmission. There are a variety, but the primary one is R0, the "basic reproduction number". Measles is one of the most communicable diseases, with an R0 of between 12 and 18. Ebola is one of the least communicable diseases, with an R0 between 1 and 2.
Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
It's Wikipdedia, but contains links to its sources, which are WHO and CDC for the measles number and an international research study published in September for Ebola. The latter suggests that if just half of the Ebola cases could be avoided, the R0 would drop below 1, causing the disease to die out. That means Ebola is so hard to transmit that it's just barely able to continue.
In contrast, Measles is so communicative that it's expected that 90% of the people who come into contact with an infected person will get it.
You're so wrong and so backwards here, it's not even funny.
Cite? I've never heard of, nor have I been able to find, any numeric rating scale for communicability, much less documentation of those two numbers for those two diseases.
Assuming the measure exists, and that those numbers are accurate, I strongly suspect that the scale measures difficulty of transmission, and that lower numbers indicate more communicable diseases. Measles is spread via aerosol transmission, Ebola is not.
Sadly, the likely outcome is drop in the quality of life for everyone involved.
That makes no sense.
Look at it from a macro-economic perspective: The reason we're moving to automation is because it increases efficiency, allowing us to produce more goods with fewer resources. That will increase average standard of living.
There are a couple of ways it could go wrong, of course. One is that the increased efficiency and therefore increased wealth could end up concentrated in the hands a small percentage of super-wealthy people. We've actually seen a lot of this over the last few decades, but we've seen it previously during other technology-driven economic restructurings as well, and what always happens is that competition eventually drives the margins of the super successful down and in the end the wealth ends up getting spread more broadly.
That points to the other way it could go wrong: The common man only gets his share of the increased wealth by doing something to earn it. Even though increased efficiency means there's more to go around, barring some sort of large scale government-driven redistribution, you still have to work for your share of it... which means you have to be able to do something that others who have wealth consider of sufficient value to pay you. So the other way it could go wrong is that there may simply be nothing available for such people to do.
That last is also a risk we've seen bandied about in past economic shifts, especially the shift from agricultural to industrial labor. What has happened in the past is that we've created new kinds of jobs doing previously unheard-of or even previously-frivolous things. I don't see any reason that this time should be different. I expect the transition to be painful -- and the faster it happens the more painful it will be -- but I don't think there's any end to what people want. People with resources will always want things that people without resources can supply. I don't claim to have any idea what those things will be.
It's also possible that I'm wrong, and that we'll have to take a socialistic approach to distributing the fruits of automation-driven productivity increases. I don't think so, and I think we should be careful not to move that direction too quickly, because it has huge negative impacts on productivity and we're going to need all of the productivity increases we can get, but it is possible.
Now, I'm not so thick-headed as to imagine that they wouldn't come up with something like this to help franchises with wage costs, but I'm also aware that this tech is coming to all sorts of places other than Seattle where the minimum wage actually went up.
The fact is that it's going to happen regardless of where minimum wages are set, or even if there are legally-mandated minimum wages (as opposed to the market-determined real minimum wages). Anyone who thinks most unskilled jobs aren't going away is crazy. The question is at what rate this change will occur, and it seems quite clear that high minimum wages will make more automation economical sooner, pushing the rate of change.
We're edging towards a major economic restructuring driven by widespread automation. We've had automation-driven restructurings in the past, and dealt with them, and this too will be handled. But when you're talking about widespread elimination of old jobs and creation of new jobs, speed kills. Retraining, and even just adjusting to the new reality, take time, and in the meantime millions upon millions of displaced workers are a huge drain on the economy, not to mention miserable.
I think it's pretty clear that high minimum wages are a forcing function for this transition, and I don't think it's something we really want to force. Ideally, it would be better to slow it down, at least in terms of the human cost, though the most obvious mechanisms for slowing it (labor subsidies) may also dangerously distort the economy.
just to be careful I'm not spreading a highly communicable deadly disease
Ebola is not highly communicable. It's more communicable than, say, HIV, but it's still pretty low on the communicability scale, and even lower if you're asymptomatic.
so where was his "strong anti-authoritarian and anti-military streak" when he was rolling over for the NSA **for years**...
That never happened. The NSA tapped Google's fiber without Google's knowledge, but there's no evidence that Google ever willingly participated. As soon as Google found out about the taps, it accelerated a program to get the data on all those fibers encrypted, to lock the NSA out.
Google invades privacy for profit and for decades gave the NSA (and god knows who else) an unaccountable back door to all our data
Google trades the right to target ads to you in exchange for services, and enables you to opt out of the trade if you want, even providing the necessary tools for you to do it. Google has never given the NSA an "unaccountable back door". See David Drummond's numerous public statements on this issue. From my personal perspective as a Google security engineer, I think it would be virtually impossible for such a back door to exist in Google's systems without my having noticed some trace of it. Take that as you will.
You're coming to this question with a whole bunch of inaccurate assumptions, which are seriously skewing your perspective. You should take a breath, look into what really happened (as much as is public information anyway) vis a vis the NSA, PRISM, etc., and then re-evaluate.
Or not, that's your choice. I'll merely point out that time will prove me right with respect to any purported military-focused work by Google X and leave it there.
why dont you explain? if it is lol funny then you should be able to say why
Sergey Brin, director of X projects at Google and co-founder of the company, has a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-military streak. The idea that he'd invest himself so deeply into a project focused on military applications is laugh-out-loud funny.
I should know better than to engage with trolls.
Have you ever seen a hurricane or a tropical storm? It means the Internet will be down during these critical events when it is often most needed. That is the reason they are talking about 13 miles altitude drones and not just zeppelins. The altitude record for a zeppelin is 7.6 km or 4.7 miles. Large hurricanes can reach an altitude of 50 000 feet or 9.5 miles or 15.25 km. Zeppelins couldn't clear a large hurricane.
The balloons Google is experimenting with do reach the stratosphere. 20 km altitude.