Fun fact: The money spent on the admins is part of what they are talking about when they talk about the spending per student.
The thing is, all the things you list are things that the school district should be covering--especially the textbooks. If there's not enough? Well, you know roughly who would be in a position to be pocketing the money, right...?
I think you missed the point: The working conditions are what seriously suck. At this point? It'd be better to improve working conditions than raise pay. As others point out, it doesn't matter how much you pay them if the brats' parents can come in whining about how their little perfect darlings would not have done whatever the fuck they did this time and pretty much automatically win.
This is something that was already happening when I left public school--and it's worse than what the other person mentioned. Some schools will refuse to actually call the cops when students do some rather illegal stuff, and in some places this has been going on long enough that they're already to the kids of past batches under these new rules.
More pay won't fix knowing management is going to be very likely to toss you under the bus. Unionizing isn't going to help, when you cannot trust the union to be interested in actually backing you up. Cleaning up administration will--and, admittedly, this might also free up money for raising teacher pay, but that should be considered a bonus.
Your citation is a news source. The studies I've heard of, which actually were serious shit done by actual researchers, suggest that the difference is actually really simple: How much value the parents put into their kids learning shit.
This explains a lot more, incidentally: The kid whose illiterate, extremely impoverished mother is going "No, honey, you learn how to read 'cause that's important" is going to do better than the kid whose existence can only be explained as 'parents wished living proof their genitalia was fully functional' because they certainly don't seem to care to have anything to do with their offspring. (For the record: Examples of these two extremes were easily found at the schools I went to, due to where they were located.)
You can spend as much money as you care to on these two children at school. It won't actually do that much to change the outcomes to expect from both of them, though the first is going to be vastly more likely to learn things than the latter. The one thing that does work effectively to counter the parents' lack of fucks is if the kid decides that it's personally important, and if you want to insist on trying to solve the problem with money you can spend it on ensuring those kids get some sort of support. However, at all points? Learning outcomes are significantly effected by how much the student cares to learn the material; how much you spend isn't particularly important.
This does mean you'll have a correlation between higher SES neighborhoods and better schools--but it's not the causal one you're thinking of. Both simply tend to share a cause: 'education is importants' as a value tends to result in you both having a higher income and considering 'has a good school' an important factor when buying a house.
But, yeah, parents gotta be involved. You cannot just toss your brat on the bus and expect them to get an education. They will still learn things, though, such as an accurate sense of how much you actually value education...and possibly them. (Kids are naive. They are not stupid.)
Oh, and I will note that teachers who moved on to teaching from being in the work force are, in my experience, very good at getting students interested. You have to love the subject to make that move, it seems, and that is rather infectious.
You can use some laptops with the battery removed. Not all are capable of running with the battery removed, due to various types of interesting design choices, including Apple's favorite of 'unremovable battery.'
If it's one of the genres I'm suspecting it is, the computer is the instrument--for example, trackers are used a lot in quite a few genres and quite a few excellent ones are FOSS--and a lot of the old sound equipment has been replaced by computers, because it turns out that it's easier to haul around a computer than, say, a traditional soundboard which is about the size and sometimes also the weight of a large, solid couch.
If you're also trying to get your next album ready without having to cut into your touring time--which is a Good Idea because live performances are where musicians currently actually make their money--then you're going to need a laptop along because yes, you can do professional studio work on a computer now. (You can even do it on a 100% FOSS *nix box, if you want to, with excellent results.)
Basically? If you're big enough that you're on a tour that involves flying places, you're now going to be running a decent chunk of most concerts off computers. You're also going to need music along if you've got any new songs, and/or people who are hired on for just the tour or part of the tour--some bands have to pick up extra people for live performances.
Actually, this study's amusing because it's reporting, roughly speaking, that water is wet--a high IQ is positively correlated with more complex neural networks. The more complex a system is, the more ways things can go wrong--which is mental illness in a nutshell, especially since a decent chunk of them are turning out to be probably more accurately described as neurological diseases that simply happen to primarily display psychiatric symptoms. (You can find a few studies where there are series of brain scans over time during disease progression.)
There's also the inverse on the IQ, incidentally: People with conditions which have damaged the ability of the neurons of their brain to form networks are going to have lower IQs, though this isn't the sole factor in determining intelligence...and sometimes what gets hit is EQ or other sets of skills because of how a given individual's brain is affected and compensates.
You probably would have the museums charging for access to the scans, especially for off-site access. Preservation costs money to do, and is an ongoing cost. You're also not going to get some types of museums doable by VR until it's Holodeck-level realism--indistinguishable from real life, all senses reproduced--because of the nature of the museum. What we've got currently for VR is a very fancy 3D movie.
They'll help test scores very much if they either are to help you understand the material better--some subjects have to be seen, at least the first time, because that's what lets you get a sense of what the words to describe them actually mean--or are set up as an explicit reward for hitting milestones on time.
The insurance, though, is definitely a significant issue, especially in school systems where you've got a decent chunk of the population who would consider insurance fraud a 'victimless' crime & if not a morally good act then at least a justifiable one because hey, they don't have to deal with an identifiable victim being unhappy where they can see it. One of the things that means it definitely isn't victimless? It raises the cost of getting insurance (and the hoops to get it to pay for anything) for everybody else there...
You all do realize that for some of the poorer kids, this would basically be a gigantic middle finger to them, right? I had some classmates when I was at the school mostly pulling from one of the local Projects who could be gotten farther than they'd ever have been in their life just by tossing them on a cross-town bus.
This definitely did make field trips with them sometimes have the additional entertainment of getting to see them realize that the city was a lot more diverse than they'd thought--but if most school systems are like the ones I grew up around? Most of the administrative staff could easily be replaced with computer programs, which would do the job just as well as the humans doing those jobs now, and that would save distinctly more money.
They'll probably go with VR field trips, though, and with whichever company offers the best kickbacks.
Part of the negative reaction to Black Lives Matter has to do with the problematic history of the African-American Civil Rights movement having an unfortunately tendency to view race in a very...well...black-and-white manner; this is part of why you have had the effort to get it more inclusive, even if many of the terms proposed that would include the other non-white minorities have had problems since they've used terms that have been used as synonyms for African-American. It gets particularly nasty when you're one of the groups which is just generally pale--and it's rude to say that it's 'easier' if you can pass, because it carries the assumption that anybody who can wants to. (Personal advice here? Suggesting abandoning their identity is a really easy way to piss off anybody from a group which has been subjected to forcible attempts to absorb them--you're basically suggesting their efforts to retain and/or reclaim their identity was stupid.)
Black Lives Matter could have picked a better name, or could have gone from the start with "We can only speak for ourselves"--broken themselves from the history of erasure of other people of color, either by including them or taking the view that it's inappropriate to pretend to speak for them but it's explicitly okay for them to protest injustices against them. Instead, they've failed to distance themselves--which it is necessary for them to do--from the unfortunately functionally racist parts of their history, since I don't think there's really much else you could call things like whining when the Latinos point out that hey, the cops are doing that to us too! Shut up, help them organize Latino Lives Matter or change your name to Colored Lives Matter or something, just don't make it sound like they're racist for pointing out it isn't just African-Americans whom the cops are reacting inappropriately with deadly force.
Some of us are also having a problem with the fact that they're not also protesting things like how African-American victims of crime are generally considered less newsworthy than white ones--don't they matter, too?
As somebody who actually ended up very heavily into the cognitive end of psychology: Thank you, I needed a good laugh.
The question of at what point an AI may become a person in the legal sense will be long settled before a computer is capable of reading a mind with the preciseness you're suggesting and filter intentions with sufficient reliability to be safe outside of the lab on isolated systems. Just because in theory it's possible doesn't mean that it will be a Good Idea in practice.
Yep. I can believe it happens, but for entirely different reasons--the logistics of arranging the funeral and corpse-disposal of somebody who committed suicide can be decidedly complex, especially if cremation is not an option. However, if the death certificate doesn't say suicide, most of those problems won't exist.
Really, if you want to be somewhat polite about your suicide, pick something nicely heroic to die in the process of doing. There will be very few fucks given that you had no expectation of surviving it--and the insurance company may even still pay out, even if for no other reason than avoiding bad PR.
If it was sent by UPS: The warehouse does not, in fact, have a sign of where you ought to go until you get really close to it & their pick-up points tend to keep hours where the answer is "Anybody working a 9-5 job." Also, if you're going to be picking it up at the warehouse, there is a chance that you will get there only to discover that it's been loaded onto a truck despite explicit instructions that you would be picking it up, and the pickup/dropoff office just plain doesn't open until all the trucks are out for the day so don't expect to be able to get your package today.
If it is being delivered by USPS? Not much difference from UPS except there's no warehouse-haunting option and the post offices that keep the hours the UPS Stores do are considered to have extended hours.
FedEx is the only one which actually considers the person who is receiving the package as being a customer--they're the ones I can find 24/7 locations for. I've also repeatedly had them make sure that I can get my package (at least when it's one sent express) the same day even if I've got to go to their office to snag it, which is open late enough that somebody who is working office hours actually can get there before they close and it will reliably be there. (UPS makes you wait an extra day unless you are very lucky and are hanging out at the place--basically, you better hope that your package was on the truck that also does the last pickup for that store if it's something you have to have that day.)
I suspect heavy competition is a very significant driver of that--in the US, you've got three major options, DHL being a fourth but marginal in many ways, and various courier options. Odds are your delivery warehouses also have decent signage on where you go to pick stuff up and drop it off, and if they've got in-town offices that can be used for such, they keep good hours. (FedEx does a decent job--you can even find 24/7 locations--but UPS and USPS sometimes don't even manage to be open long enough so somebody with a 9-5 job can stop by.)
UPS refused to deliver to my legal postal address at my last apartment and, for a very long time, did not default to dropping it off at the management office. They would, unless instructed otherwise, keep putting it on the truck, and did not have the brains to take advantage of the local UPS store being pretty much the last stop of the day to drop it off. (This seems to have changed recently but been typically unreliable.) It took several days to get them to cough up a package, and camping out in front of the shipping center's one findable non-employee door too.
Sometimes I do wonder if they eventually realized that perhaps they ought to put a sign on the office, because people do go to drop off packages there...
Especially since delivery drivers are tracked and timed--so the driver's very likely to get caught if they do it themselves. If they just forget or 'forget' to close the place up right? That won't show up on the logs anywhere near as well.
A prybar will still work. You learn a lot of interesting things when you've had a neighbor who isn't too bright even when sober try to get into his home while drunk because he cannot find his key--even when it's rather obviously on him However, what he lacked in brains he made up for in creativity...
Actually, it's more a cultural bias against telling the truth when asked an improper question, and an awareness that you can typically expect the person to (incorrectly) assume anything other than a 'no' is a 'yes.' Incidentally, it's...not wise for them to push it, especially if somebody flat-out tells them that it's an improper question. (If you want lots of fun? Repeat that, unless they're cops in which case you end it the first time with "If I am not under arrest, I'm leaving" and if they say you're under arrest or refuse to let you leave? The answer to everything afterwards is "I want a lawyer" unless the question is directly related to getting you said lawyer.)
That's actually exactly why the standard boilerplate on life insurance policies is that at least a minimum amount of time--usually in the years range--has to have passed after you got it, if it's not a "does not pay off after suicide ever" type of policy. It's pretty effective against the 'buy large policy, off self' plan and I suspect that the insurance companies figure that the rare person who manages to follow all the steps including the required delay deserves the payoff.
Maybe you should stop pretending like you know what you're talking about--life insurance is not health insurance. Life insurance is not covered by HIPAA--note that it is named the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
There's also some pretty...disturbing stats on how accurate a suicide ruling may actually be, which has resulted in some places flat out requiring that you rule homicide out in order to rule it a suicide. This makes it harder to pass a homicide off as a suicide, because typically if the police think it's a suicide they don't even pause to think about such things as "The deceased managed to shot themselves in the head from 3 feet away, doing sufficient damage to their brain as to result in immediate paralysis, meaning that the only way they would have gotten the gun into their hand is telekinesis." (This is actually less absurd than what would be required for some known cases of 'suicides' later realized to be murders to have actually been a suicide.)
That said: Some life insurance policies will still pay off in case of suicide as long as it happens sufficiently after the policy is bought, and it's going to generally be easier to get an accident ruling...corrected, later, especially if it turns out to be less "Bob shot himself" and more something along the lines of "Bob's spouse feels that murder was just so much better a solution than divorcing him."
Don't do a shed, do an entryway/enclosed porch. Set it up so you absolutely need either a key or somebody inside to let you into the house proper; if you want, you can even have it so you can give somebody a key that'll only let them into the porch area while your key will let you get both the porch and house doors' locks.
And in some cases, mainly in "big data" analysis fields, even moreso in bioinformatics, the "OS that runs the software I have to use" tend to be flavors of Unix - so're basically limited to macOS X or Linux.
(With only very recently Windows starting to be able to run these same software, thanks to WSL).
I have software that I run that is only available on MacOS. I don't brag about it like the Windows users who strut around because they are forced to use Office365.
My job insists I run Windows and have MS Office installed. I feel that it ought to pay me extra for this, especially since they're not giving me a cheap way to obtain the latter if I don't wish to pirate it. (It'd need to be significantly better to be worth it.)
ICQ generally is good, as is any XMPP server though your milage may vary. Both can be accessed via Pidgin, and XMPP is an open source protocol so you can find clients for it for pretty much any system that isn't hipster-levels of obscure...
Email tends to have some lag, and you won't necessarily know if the person on the other end is going to be avalible to read it now or will be going "huh" upon finding it in their spam folder a week or two later.
No one would bother taking it. with people using third party aim clients to block ads, there's no money to be made to offset the expense of running the servers.
Funny what happens when you don't put some thought into "Hey, maybe my ads are annoying, obnoxious, and rude?"
Slashdot Mirror
Fun fact: The money spent on the admins is part of what they are talking about when they talk about the spending per student.
The thing is, all the things you list are things that the school district should be covering--especially the textbooks. If there's not enough? Well, you know roughly who would be in a position to be pocketing the money, right...?
I think you missed the point: The working conditions are what seriously suck. At this point? It'd be better to improve working conditions than raise pay. As others point out, it doesn't matter how much you pay them if the brats' parents can come in whining about how their little perfect darlings would not have done whatever the fuck they did this time and pretty much automatically win.
This is something that was already happening when I left public school--and it's worse than what the other person mentioned. Some schools will refuse to actually call the cops when students do some rather illegal stuff, and in some places this has been going on long enough that they're already to the kids of past batches under these new rules.
More pay won't fix knowing management is going to be very likely to toss you under the bus. Unionizing isn't going to help, when you cannot trust the union to be interested in actually backing you up. Cleaning up administration will--and, admittedly, this might also free up money for raising teacher pay, but that should be considered a bonus.
Your citation is a news source. The studies I've heard of, which actually were serious shit done by actual researchers, suggest that the difference is actually really simple: How much value the parents put into their kids learning shit.
This explains a lot more, incidentally: The kid whose illiterate, extremely impoverished mother is going "No, honey, you learn how to read 'cause that's important" is going to do better than the kid whose existence can only be explained as 'parents wished living proof their genitalia was fully functional' because they certainly don't seem to care to have anything to do with their offspring. (For the record: Examples of these two extremes were easily found at the schools I went to, due to where they were located.)
You can spend as much money as you care to on these two children at school. It won't actually do that much to change the outcomes to expect from both of them, though the first is going to be vastly more likely to learn things than the latter. The one thing that does work effectively to counter the parents' lack of fucks is if the kid decides that it's personally important, and if you want to insist on trying to solve the problem with money you can spend it on ensuring those kids get some sort of support. However, at all points? Learning outcomes are significantly effected by how much the student cares to learn the material; how much you spend isn't particularly important.
This does mean you'll have a correlation between higher SES neighborhoods and better schools--but it's not the causal one you're thinking of. Both simply tend to share a cause: 'education is importants' as a value tends to result in you both having a higher income and considering 'has a good school' an important factor when buying a house.
But, yeah, parents gotta be involved. You cannot just toss your brat on the bus and expect them to get an education. They will still learn things, though, such as an accurate sense of how much you actually value education...and possibly them. (Kids are naive. They are not stupid.)
Oh, and I will note that teachers who moved on to teaching from being in the work force are, in my experience, very good at getting students interested. You have to love the subject to make that move, it seems, and that is rather infectious.
You can use some laptops with the battery removed. Not all are capable of running with the battery removed, due to various types of interesting design choices, including Apple's favorite of 'unremovable battery.'
If it's one of the genres I'm suspecting it is, the computer is the instrument--for example, trackers are used a lot in quite a few genres and quite a few excellent ones are FOSS--and a lot of the old sound equipment has been replaced by computers, because it turns out that it's easier to haul around a computer than, say, a traditional soundboard which is about the size and sometimes also the weight of a large, solid couch.
If you're also trying to get your next album ready without having to cut into your touring time--which is a Good Idea because live performances are where musicians currently actually make their money--then you're going to need a laptop along because yes, you can do professional studio work on a computer now. (You can even do it on a 100% FOSS *nix box, if you want to, with excellent results.)
Basically? If you're big enough that you're on a tour that involves flying places, you're now going to be running a decent chunk of most concerts off computers. You're also going to need music along if you've got any new songs, and/or people who are hired on for just the tour or part of the tour--some bands have to pick up extra people for live performances.
Actually, this study's amusing because it's reporting, roughly speaking, that water is wet--a high IQ is positively correlated with more complex neural networks. The more complex a system is, the more ways things can go wrong--which is mental illness in a nutshell, especially since a decent chunk of them are turning out to be probably more accurately described as neurological diseases that simply happen to primarily display psychiatric symptoms. (You can find a few studies where there are series of brain scans over time during disease progression.)
There's also the inverse on the IQ, incidentally: People with conditions which have damaged the ability of the neurons of their brain to form networks are going to have lower IQs, though this isn't the sole factor in determining intelligence...and sometimes what gets hit is EQ or other sets of skills because of how a given individual's brain is affected and compensates.
You probably would have the museums charging for access to the scans, especially for off-site access. Preservation costs money to do, and is an ongoing cost. You're also not going to get some types of museums doable by VR until it's Holodeck-level realism--indistinguishable from real life, all senses reproduced--because of the nature of the museum. What we've got currently for VR is a very fancy 3D movie.
They'll help test scores very much if they either are to help you understand the material better--some subjects have to be seen, at least the first time, because that's what lets you get a sense of what the words to describe them actually mean--or are set up as an explicit reward for hitting milestones on time.
The insurance, though, is definitely a significant issue, especially in school systems where you've got a decent chunk of the population who would consider insurance fraud a 'victimless' crime & if not a morally good act then at least a justifiable one because hey, they don't have to deal with an identifiable victim being unhappy where they can see it. One of the things that means it definitely isn't victimless? It raises the cost of getting insurance (and the hoops to get it to pay for anything) for everybody else there...
You all do realize that for some of the poorer kids, this would basically be a gigantic middle finger to them, right? I had some classmates when I was at the school mostly pulling from one of the local Projects who could be gotten farther than they'd ever have been in their life just by tossing them on a cross-town bus.
This definitely did make field trips with them sometimes have the additional entertainment of getting to see them realize that the city was a lot more diverse than they'd thought--but if most school systems are like the ones I grew up around? Most of the administrative staff could easily be replaced with computer programs, which would do the job just as well as the humans doing those jobs now, and that would save distinctly more money.
They'll probably go with VR field trips, though, and with whichever company offers the best kickbacks.
Part of the negative reaction to Black Lives Matter has to do with the problematic history of the African-American Civil Rights movement having an unfortunately tendency to view race in a very...well...black-and-white manner; this is part of why you have had the effort to get it more inclusive, even if many of the terms proposed that would include the other non-white minorities have had problems since they've used terms that have been used as synonyms for African-American. It gets particularly nasty when you're one of the groups which is just generally pale--and it's rude to say that it's 'easier' if you can pass, because it carries the assumption that anybody who can wants to. (Personal advice here? Suggesting abandoning their identity is a really easy way to piss off anybody from a group which has been subjected to forcible attempts to absorb them--you're basically suggesting their efforts to retain and/or reclaim their identity was stupid.)
Black Lives Matter could have picked a better name, or could have gone from the start with "We can only speak for ourselves"--broken themselves from the history of erasure of other people of color, either by including them or taking the view that it's inappropriate to pretend to speak for them but it's explicitly okay for them to protest injustices against them. Instead, they've failed to distance themselves--which it is necessary for them to do--from the unfortunately functionally racist parts of their history, since I don't think there's really much else you could call things like whining when the Latinos point out that hey, the cops are doing that to us too! Shut up, help them organize Latino Lives Matter or change your name to Colored Lives Matter or something, just don't make it sound like they're racist for pointing out it isn't just African-Americans whom the cops are reacting inappropriately with deadly force.
Some of us are also having a problem with the fact that they're not also protesting things like how African-American victims of crime are generally considered less newsworthy than white ones--don't they matter, too?
As somebody who actually ended up very heavily into the cognitive end of psychology: Thank you, I needed a good laugh.
The question of at what point an AI may become a person in the legal sense will be long settled before a computer is capable of reading a mind with the preciseness you're suggesting and filter intentions with sufficient reliability to be safe outside of the lab on isolated systems. Just because in theory it's possible doesn't mean that it will be a Good Idea in practice.
Yep. I can believe it happens, but for entirely different reasons--the logistics of arranging the funeral and corpse-disposal of somebody who committed suicide can be decidedly complex, especially if cremation is not an option. However, if the death certificate doesn't say suicide, most of those problems won't exist.
Really, if you want to be somewhat polite about your suicide, pick something nicely heroic to die in the process of doing. There will be very few fucks given that you had no expectation of surviving it--and the insurance company may even still pay out, even if for no other reason than avoiding bad PR.
Where I am in the US? Depends on the shipper.
If it was sent by UPS: The warehouse does not, in fact, have a sign of where you ought to go until you get really close to it & their pick-up points tend to keep hours where the answer is "Anybody working a 9-5 job." Also, if you're going to be picking it up at the warehouse, there is a chance that you will get there only to discover that it's been loaded onto a truck despite explicit instructions that you would be picking it up, and the pickup/dropoff office just plain doesn't open until all the trucks are out for the day so don't expect to be able to get your package today.
If it is being delivered by USPS? Not much difference from UPS except there's no warehouse-haunting option and the post offices that keep the hours the UPS Stores do are considered to have extended hours.
FedEx is the only one which actually considers the person who is receiving the package as being a customer--they're the ones I can find 24/7 locations for. I've also repeatedly had them make sure that I can get my package (at least when it's one sent express) the same day even if I've got to go to their office to snag it, which is open late enough that somebody who is working office hours actually can get there before they close and it will reliably be there. (UPS makes you wait an extra day unless you are very lucky and are hanging out at the place--basically, you better hope that your package was on the truck that also does the last pickup for that store if it's something you have to have that day.)
I suspect heavy competition is a very significant driver of that--in the US, you've got three major options, DHL being a fourth but marginal in many ways, and various courier options. Odds are your delivery warehouses also have decent signage on where you go to pick stuff up and drop it off, and if they've got in-town offices that can be used for such, they keep good hours. (FedEx does a decent job--you can even find 24/7 locations--but UPS and USPS sometimes don't even manage to be open long enough so somebody with a 9-5 job can stop by.)
UPS refused to deliver to my legal postal address at my last apartment and, for a very long time, did not default to dropping it off at the management office. They would, unless instructed otherwise, keep putting it on the truck, and did not have the brains to take advantage of the local UPS store being pretty much the last stop of the day to drop it off. (This seems to have changed recently but been typically unreliable.) It took several days to get them to cough up a package, and camping out in front of the shipping center's one findable non-employee door too.
Sometimes I do wonder if they eventually realized that perhaps they ought to put a sign on the office, because people do go to drop off packages there...
Especially since delivery drivers are tracked and timed--so the driver's very likely to get caught if they do it themselves. If they just forget or 'forget' to close the place up right? That won't show up on the logs anywhere near as well.
A prybar will still work. You learn a lot of interesting things when you've had a neighbor who isn't too bright even when sober try to get into his home while drunk because he cannot find his key--even when it's rather obviously on him However, what he lacked in brains he made up for in creativity...
Actually, it's more a cultural bias against telling the truth when asked an improper question, and an awareness that you can typically expect the person to (incorrectly) assume anything other than a 'no' is a 'yes.' Incidentally, it's...not wise for them to push it, especially if somebody flat-out tells them that it's an improper question. (If you want lots of fun? Repeat that, unless they're cops in which case you end it the first time with "If I am not under arrest, I'm leaving" and if they say you're under arrest or refuse to let you leave? The answer to everything afterwards is "I want a lawyer" unless the question is directly related to getting you said lawyer.)
That's actually exactly why the standard boilerplate on life insurance policies is that at least a minimum amount of time--usually in the years range--has to have passed after you got it, if it's not a "does not pay off after suicide ever" type of policy. It's pretty effective against the 'buy large policy, off self' plan and I suspect that the insurance companies figure that the rare person who manages to follow all the steps including the required delay deserves the payoff.
Maybe you should stop pretending like you know what you're talking about--life insurance is not health insurance. Life insurance is not covered by HIPAA--note that it is named the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
There's also some pretty...disturbing stats on how accurate a suicide ruling may actually be, which has resulted in some places flat out requiring that you rule homicide out in order to rule it a suicide. This makes it harder to pass a homicide off as a suicide, because typically if the police think it's a suicide they don't even pause to think about such things as "The deceased managed to shot themselves in the head from 3 feet away, doing sufficient damage to their brain as to result in immediate paralysis, meaning that the only way they would have gotten the gun into their hand is telekinesis." (This is actually less absurd than what would be required for some known cases of 'suicides' later realized to be murders to have actually been a suicide.)
That said: Some life insurance policies will still pay off in case of suicide as long as it happens sufficiently after the policy is bought, and it's going to generally be easier to get an accident ruling...corrected, later, especially if it turns out to be less "Bob shot himself" and more something along the lines of "Bob's spouse feels that murder was just so much better a solution than divorcing him."
Don't do a shed, do an entryway/enclosed porch. Set it up so you absolutely need either a key or somebody inside to let you into the house proper; if you want, you can even have it so you can give somebody a key that'll only let them into the porch area while your key will let you get both the porch and house doors' locks.
And in some cases, mainly in "big data" analysis fields, even moreso in bioinformatics, the "OS that runs the software I have to use" tend to be flavors of Unix - so're basically limited to macOS X or Linux.
(With only very recently Windows starting to be able to run these same software, thanks to WSL).
I have software that I run that is only available on MacOS. I don't brag about it like the Windows users who strut around because they are forced to use Office365.
My job insists I run Windows and have MS Office installed. I feel that it ought to pay me extra for this, especially since they're not giving me a cheap way to obtain the latter if I don't wish to pirate it. (It'd need to be significantly better to be worth it.)
ICQ generally is good, as is any XMPP server though your milage may vary. Both can be accessed via Pidgin, and XMPP is an open source protocol so you can find clients for it for pretty much any system that isn't hipster-levels of obscure...
Email tends to have some lag, and you won't necessarily know if the person on the other end is going to be avalible to read it now or will be going "huh" upon finding it in their spam folder a week or two later.
Haven't used in almost a decade. Would've been nice if they'd spun it off instead of killing something still used by millions though. (quoted as single-digit millions by someone from AOL back in February)
No one would bother taking it. with people using third party aim clients to block ads, there's no money to be made to offset the expense of running the servers.
Funny what happens when you don't put some thought into "Hey, maybe my ads are annoying, obnoxious, and rude?"