If you're conflating bias and "fake news," then what you might want to do is invert your plan, and instead build a 'consensus' news aggregation algorithm that picks sources according to their factual reliability and transparently flag sources for their biases. You might even give more weight to sources known to be honest enough to report stories that are harmful to their side--especially, perhaps, when those stories are hitting the news--and give 'sets' so people can read how multiple sources report the same story, without much effort, if they want to.
You also would want to ensure that no single source or set of sources sharing the same bias dominates the feed--this is really just plain good sanitation issues, to keep down any given editorial staff's influence and reduce overall bias. (It might be best to actually have the feed algorithm set up to always favor low-scored sources, and try to have every edition's sum of bias scores be 0.)
All bigotry is, in general, fostered by fraud and deception, including self-deception. Part of why the mainstream media as a whole has been bleeding credibility is that it's getting easier to check--do you think things like the libelous article in the Rolling Stone would have emerged quite as quickly and publicly before the internet?
More importantly, people are gaining awareness that this is a thing--journalists are losing the ability to have their readers just take their word for things, and as more people question, the more problems are caused by things like journalists turning in bad articles & editors giving them a pass for it.
Also, it's funny that you mention on the list Anti-Russian sentiment, given that people decried as fraud reports of...less than pleasant things happening in Soviet Russia, which we know now were rather accurate overall. It's unfortunately not a rare thing for people to reject verifiable facts and replace them with their own reality--nor does it have any connection whatsoever to which side of the political spectrum you're on.
If you're going "But my side doesn't!"...you're part of the problem.
This is the same logic which had "But she said yes to the N other guys!" be a usable defense against rape charges against the N+1th guy who just assumed she was consenting and helped himself.
They wanted to be parents to their own, genetic offspring. They did not agree to anything else. It doesn't precisely help that in some cultures the child would be seen as having a right to a say in all of this--that in their view, the adoptee ought to be a consenting party when you're cutting ties to their blood kin.
It's also differences in how cultures consider family ties--a lot of places, including a swath of ones in that part of the world, consider blood ties to be a lot more important than the West does, and would consider what the clinic did as a wrong done not only to the parents but also to the child, who has been partially deprived as a result of the clinic's bad and wrong actions. (I don't know for certain if Singapore is on the list of ones where these are the norms, but given this suit not being laughed out of court? It probably is.)
I'd expect any academic place with a name like 'Genetic Engineering and Society Center' to actually have a few people who had a decent enough background in anthropology to be aware of this sort of thing, actually.
Genital Retraction Syndrome involves a distinctly more...extreme version of shrinking--the expectation is more along the lines of 'extreme feminizing' or 'will end up with an infant boy's twig and berries.' The interesting thing is that men with it genuinely percieve that this level of shrinkage is happening--and very little will convince them that there is anything to be done except to go find and kill the black magic user who inflicted this upon them, because that's what they believe the cause of the (nonexistent) retraction.
There's another reason why it's not really workable... it requires a unique solution for each movie. Building a more general solution that can be applied to all movies would be a better use of resources.
Easy. If it's not been released in a region, nobody whose IP is out of that region can review it, period, and just blacklist the proxies.
The suggestion of there being a cap on how quickly you can post reviews on the same movie from the same IP address will also work for this, and I'd flat-out have it indifferent to the star rating given to block a movie from getting astroturfed, too.
The guy who tells the truth, that we have bad problems and they may not be entirely fixable, or that the middle class must necessarily bear the lions share of the tax burden, or that many of our perceived problems are more about not making the huge profits from WWII reparations that our parents benefitted from, and instead having huge debt from various police actions since then which we shouldered the costs for, that while there is a better way to live our country is largely ruled by a small group of wealthy self-interested pricks that we cannot effectively stop all at once, but must work collectively, both nationally and internationally to ensure they such people do not have a place on earth in the future.
Do you want to vote for that guy? He's probably right, but his story is depressing and he's telling us uncomfortable things.
No, I don't want to vote for that guy, because if history's anything to go by, the problem is going to be the solution--which is going to involve significant amounts of magical thinking, and possibly also some flavor or other of mass murder, because he's probably not going to even consider that some of these bad problems are better framed as 'reality' because as long as we frame them as any sort of problem people are going to whine and bitch and moan and riot and insist on a solution even when the problem is distinctly better than any solution.
Sometimes they'll even insist that they've got a perfect solution and if only we try it everything will be perfect and if we've already tried it then it's failure is because we just didn't try it hard enough/believe enough/had somebody thinking skeptical thoughts which made the magic not work.
Anybody who is both going to tell the truth and not offer a solution that'll make our previous problems seem wonderful--is not going anywhere near politics, regardless of how many people might want to vote for them.
What attack? That was normal operation of the sirens.
An attack would have been if he cranked up the volume and blew them out. Or maybe planting malware for more nefarious purposes.
If you leave your door unlocked and somebody comes by and opens then closes it every few minutes is that an attack?
You don't buy into psychological warfare?
Depends on what is done when the door is opened and closed. If the person is opening it, reminding the people inside that "This door is supposed to be locked," and closing it--the only problems are if it doesn't get done, if the person(s) who ought to have locked the door keep their jobs if this goes on for long, and if the person who is delivering the 'lock the effing door' message isn't part of security because then it means somebody else is having to do security's job.
It's not just a fairly harmless way, but in a way that ensures they can't stick their fingers in their ears and pretend the flaw doesn't exist. I'd not precisely be surprised if they did that to less...drastic attempts to tip them off to security flaws. The state seems to generally attempt for security through obscurity when it comes to their own internet things.
It's Russia. If that's not paranoia, the odds are that those subs have been there since before the USSR collapsed--and are still there because they're not going anywhere, unless somebody works out how to tow a mildly defunct sub that can't manage to surface.
I'm getting rather amused by the Left's current paranoia about Russia's abilities. I'm more inclined to think that this air raid siren hack will turn out to be the result of incompetence, particularly given the speed of the patching of security. It looks suspiciously like they'd been told politely to patch, were too lazy to patch, and got put in a position where they had to patch.
Actually, the interesting thing is that a decent amount of what's left of the gap once you've properly controlled for all factors can be explained by, well, the long-known problem that women just don't ask. But hey, let's keep on not talking about how girls being socialized to suck at aggression is a problem--not just in being aggressive, but in using it properly.
If you want to get rid of the gap, you might well be better off having any question of what wage you're currently making, have made in the past, and want left off the table until it is time to settle pay--unless the employer wants to give what the minimum assured wage or the like is, leave it as something not talked about until the decision has been made to hire, and even then it might be best to require the employer make the opening move.
Not surprising considering how few people actually use twitter.
Agreed, I'm not really surprised that this is going on, pretty much because I quit using Twitter when the first part of what's being talked about started hitting--it should have told them that there was a problem when people started going after the verified check mark as a status symbol. I don't actually care if it's a person or a bot, and in fact most of the very few remaining reasons I even stop by Twitter anymore are bots. (The remaining few are anon humans manually posting site status notifications and I know they're official because they're where you get directed by the sites themselves if you want to know more than merely if it's just down for you or not, so the blue check wouldn't tell me anything I didn't know already--and in some ways is less informative.)
I didn't stick around long enough to know if they started revoking them, but I'd certainly consider that problematic if their purpose is to identify merely that this account belongs to a person, and it belongs to the person who it claims to belong to. If it's a case of 'did, got hijacked,' the account ought to be gone; if it's 'made a mistake,' quietly fixing it doesn't help with trust.
If you're going to use it for editorial purposes while still insisting it just means the person is high enough status that Twitter will make sure the account's owner is the person they claim they are? This will become a Problem, no matter what the biases are, because the practice in and of itself is toxic.
Things like what Comcast did in forcing Netflix to pay not to be throttled should be recognized as the fraud on the consumer that it is, with all the criminal and civil implications thereof. I'd argue that the best regulations here shouldn't block the consumer from being given the option of buying a package with throttling--but the consumer has to actively consent to anything that's not a dumb-as-a-rock pipe that the ISP only can control the total overall speed thereof & they have to have that as their basic package(s).
A long time ago, the ACLU defended the right of Neo-Nazis to hold a march--because if they left the court deny them that right, then it'd be established that a community has the ability to deny groups the right to march merely because of what that group is.
You don't have to agree with what they did to recognize that if we get an established precedent that says that "You cannot record public officials (whom the state defines as broadly as possible) without their consent, for any purpose," this can and will be abused, and it will be too late to do your push for how photography is not a crime. The law here, in and of itself, has Problems, but if it's permitted to stand without successful challenge, the courts can and will use that to keep it.
Odds are, this case was chosen as a test case--by California, to get the precedent they want. If you're not willing to care about everybody's rights--you don't really care about anybody's. Regardless of who happens to be charged, the problem some of us have here is that this is a bit too transparent a way to get it so the state can make it a crime to record the cops.
Also, honestly, your entire argument is pretty authoritarian--it's certainly not that of classical liberalism. It's the state's responsibility to prove they are criminals; merely charging somebody with a crime does not mean they committed that crime nor make them criminals, and the state is the one upon whom the burden rests to prove that the person has committed the specific crime they are charged with--not that they committed a crime, but that they committed what they have been charged with. (That the defendant committed a different crime has been quite successfully used as a defense, and sometimes it happens that the state simply fails to prove that specific important part of their case.)
certain number of bits for each key (let's say, half the length in bits) could be placed in escrow and could be obtained by the government under court order.
And who is going to keep that escrow secure? And not provide a convenient back door for the intelligence community when that court ordered warranty is just too inconvenient of a process to go through?
If it's part of just the range of things the escrow services can allow you to put into escrow instead of a unitary single-purpose service--they'll be kept honest for pretty much the same reasons your bank is going to insist on those warrants before letting somebody not on the list into your safe deposit box.
Namely, their situation is such that they need that warrant. It's their neck that's in the noose legally if they don't insist on the warrant--and their business pretty much depends on their reputation. That warrant lets them wash their hands of the matter, and assure the other customers (and potential customers) that the matter was out of their hands.
A key escrow service would also be useful if you want to make sure that under certain circumstances, a copy of the key will be available. This might allow people in organizations where some vital material needs to be stored using encryption to place their key in escrow so if they do get run over by a bus, it's not going to be necessary to crack the encryption--especially if these files absolutely cannot be lost. (It also might let you do something like have your will stored as an encrypted file using a key unique to it, which is placed in escrow until you die.)
You should only let the number of deaths caused by a particular thing decide your focus once you've already discounted the ones that all reasonable measures to prevent had been taken. This isn't to take away from the tragedy ect ect ect, but if the vast majority of deaths are due to the deceased's knowingly stupid choices--let's move on.
The important thing to ask is if this measure would be effective, followed by if it'd be effective enough to be worth it.
Otherwise? It's merely a politician wanting to be seen as Doing Something, do not reward this behavior. Insist it not be purely theater before you reward them.
I find that the DC movies generally commit a worse sin than taking themselves way too seriously: they seem to typically spend the entire movie manipulating the 'Seriousness Level' slider in an aimless manner, to ensure that they don't even by accident manage to have a moment that has the right level of seriousness. It's a bit of an exercise in how many different methods can be found to reach the result of bathos.
There's some movies out there where the trailer is nearly the complete story, told better--I don't remember any examples because, well, three guesses about how memorable a movie is when it's functionally the trailer with the ending added and padded out to run around two hours. After a few rounds I just took it as a bad sign for the movie when the trailer gave me the feeling it was one of these.
While I agree that there should be more intelligent movies and in particular Sci-Fi; the problem is that a large part of the population prefers ignorance. Hence they are only serving what the market wants. Then they complain that the market doesn't want it and movie attendance is down because the ignorant poor slobs can't pay high enough prices for tickets so that movie executives can afford more blow and hookers.
If it's what the market wants, the audience would turn up. The problem is that they choose to assume the audience 'prefers ignorance,' so they make it even dumber than it has to be for them to understand it because they assume that they're the brightest people in the room. The minor fact that blow and its kin tend to not be good for your mental abilities is probably a bit complex for them.
The ticket prices are actually pretty much in line with what they were decades ago--which should tell you a lot about how much a dollar's worth now vs then.
While true, there is something to be said that review sites gathering *all* opinions and presenting a single metric for all users of all preferences to see obliterates some depth. People who know will go and read more thoughtful reviews of course.
And it's really, really easy to see if one of the reviewers you know does good in-depth reviews has written a review for that movie (yet) by visiting a site like Rotten Tomatoes--or find out if anybody has done a good in-depth review, if you're not particularly picky about who did it. It can also quickly give you a sense of if your usual reviewer is just plain Weird about this movie (maybe just hates the genre with the passion of a thousand burning suns?) or if no, even the reviewers who are normally suckers for this type of movie hate it.
When that latter happens? Well, it's safe to assume that it's a bad movie, so all that's left is figuring out if it's bad like Plan 9 or bad like The Star Wars Christmas Special...
Neither is government regulation a magic fixall for every problem. It might be best to not outsource your concern for actual people and their living conditions to the state--or, at least, recognize the state's contributions to and share of responsibility for the situation, and not just its (claimed or actual) positive contributions.
Don't let politicians off the hook for making it so it's cheaper for companies to offer lousy gigs than hire employees--especially since the solutions that seem to be getting the most pushing by politicians would result in many, if not all, of these people having no job at all. I think it's pretty safe to say that very few of the people in the gig economy would consider that an improvement--if they would, they'd have walked away from their job already, and it doesn't exactly help that in some cases the gig economy is really not managing anything but being differently bad from the traditional model's version of the same job.
Honestly, I thought it was basic knowledge that doctors don't get paid to write scripts for pain medications--unless the 'patient' is bribing them to write ones for them.
Also, don't forget that you've got to pick the right specialty--neuro and OB/Gyn can be bad here, because of a long history of ambulance-chasing trial lawyers and bad science in the tort system has resulted in the malpractice insurance being high, which in some states has resulted in a lack because nearly nobody can afford to practice those fields of medicine there anymore.
That will be very, very interesting given that in some states, for them to do the paper temp license they need you to present photo ID.
I assume that's only for getting a paper temp license after surrendering a license from another state. If you're in your own state, they should have your photo in the system already.
Actually, all of this is based on in-state moves and renewals, so I can say with great assurance that nope, you need some form of photo ID to get them to process it unless you do it online--in which case the paper version you get will NOT be a photo ID. I've been through this process a somewhat insane number of times lately, because the postal system kept losing the new one. I actually went over two months on the paper IDs last time, and they had to take a new photo each time in order to get it to print.
Even if they do want you to have photo ID, I suspect that they want to be sure that you're you, and not somebody else who is claiming to be you.
Open source project for a Mechanical Engineer? Wow RTFA.
Open Source Ecology is one of several open source projects that almost certainly would enjoy having a mechanical engineer's help. Look around and you'll find other such projects; open designs are definitely a thing people are trying to get developed and out.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're conflating bias and "fake news," then what you might want to do is invert your plan, and instead build a 'consensus' news aggregation algorithm that picks sources according to their factual reliability and transparently flag sources for their biases. You might even give more weight to sources known to be honest enough to report stories that are harmful to their side--especially, perhaps, when those stories are hitting the news--and give 'sets' so people can read how multiple sources report the same story, without much effort, if they want to.
You also would want to ensure that no single source or set of sources sharing the same bias dominates the feed--this is really just plain good sanitation issues, to keep down any given editorial staff's influence and reduce overall bias. (It might be best to actually have the feed algorithm set up to always favor low-scored sources, and try to have every edition's sum of bias scores be 0.)
There may be, but it also needs to not be so wide open to abuse that it's absolutely certain it will be.
All bigotry is, in general, fostered by fraud and deception, including self-deception. Part of why the mainstream media as a whole has been bleeding credibility is that it's getting easier to check--do you think things like the libelous article in the Rolling Stone would have emerged quite as quickly and publicly before the internet?
More importantly, people are gaining awareness that this is a thing--journalists are losing the ability to have their readers just take their word for things, and as more people question, the more problems are caused by things like journalists turning in bad articles & editors giving them a pass for it.
Also, it's funny that you mention on the list Anti-Russian sentiment, given that people decried as fraud reports of...less than pleasant things happening in Soviet Russia, which we know now were rather accurate overall. It's unfortunately not a rare thing for people to reject verifiable facts and replace them with their own reality--nor does it have any connection whatsoever to which side of the political spectrum you're on.
If you're going "But my side doesn't!"...you're part of the problem.
This is the same logic which had "But she said yes to the N other guys!" be a usable defense against rape charges against the N+1th guy who just assumed she was consenting and helped himself.
They wanted to be parents to their own, genetic offspring. They did not agree to anything else. It doesn't precisely help that in some cultures the child would be seen as having a right to a say in all of this--that in their view, the adoptee ought to be a consenting party when you're cutting ties to their blood kin.
It's also differences in how cultures consider family ties--a lot of places, including a swath of ones in that part of the world, consider blood ties to be a lot more important than the West does, and would consider what the clinic did as a wrong done not only to the parents but also to the child, who has been partially deprived as a result of the clinic's bad and wrong actions. (I don't know for certain if Singapore is on the list of ones where these are the norms, but given this suit not being laughed out of court? It probably is.)
I'd expect any academic place with a name like 'Genetic Engineering and Society Center' to actually have a few people who had a decent enough background in anthropology to be aware of this sort of thing, actually.
Genital Retraction Syndrome involves a distinctly more...extreme version of shrinking--the expectation is more along the lines of 'extreme feminizing' or 'will end up with an infant boy's twig and berries.' The interesting thing is that men with it genuinely percieve that this level of shrinkage is happening--and very little will convince them that there is anything to be done except to go find and kill the black magic user who inflicted this upon them, because that's what they believe the cause of the (nonexistent) retraction.
There's another reason why it's not really workable... it requires a unique solution for each movie. Building a more general solution that can be applied to all movies would be a better use of resources.
Easy. If it's not been released in a region, nobody whose IP is out of that region can review it, period, and just blacklist the proxies.
The suggestion of there being a cap on how quickly you can post reviews on the same movie from the same IP address will also work for this, and I'd flat-out have it indifferent to the star rating given to block a movie from getting astroturfed, too.
The guy who tells the truth, that we have bad problems and they may not be entirely fixable, or that the middle class must necessarily bear the lions share of the tax burden, or that many of our perceived problems are more about not making the huge profits from WWII reparations that our parents benefitted from, and instead having huge debt from various police actions since then which we shouldered the costs for, that while there is a better way to live our country is largely ruled by a small group of wealthy self-interested pricks that we cannot effectively stop all at once, but must work collectively, both nationally and internationally to ensure they such people do not have a place on earth in the future.
Do you want to vote for that guy? He's probably right, but his story is depressing and he's telling us uncomfortable things.
No, I don't want to vote for that guy, because if history's anything to go by, the problem is going to be the solution--which is going to involve significant amounts of magical thinking, and possibly also some flavor or other of mass murder, because he's probably not going to even consider that some of these bad problems are better framed as 'reality' because as long as we frame them as any sort of problem people are going to whine and bitch and moan and riot and insist on a solution even when the problem is distinctly better than any solution.
Sometimes they'll even insist that they've got a perfect solution and if only we try it everything will be perfect and if we've already tried it then it's failure is because we just didn't try it hard enough/believe enough/had somebody thinking skeptical thoughts which made the magic not work.
Anybody who is both going to tell the truth and not offer a solution that'll make our previous problems seem wonderful--is not going anywhere near politics, regardless of how many people might want to vote for them.
What attack? That was normal operation of the sirens. An attack would have been if he cranked up the volume and blew them out. Or maybe planting malware for more nefarious purposes. If you leave your door unlocked and somebody comes by and opens then closes it every few minutes is that an attack?
You don't buy into psychological warfare?
Depends on what is done when the door is opened and closed. If the person is opening it, reminding the people inside that "This door is supposed to be locked," and closing it--the only problems are if it doesn't get done, if the person(s) who ought to have locked the door keep their jobs if this goes on for long, and if the person who is delivering the 'lock the effing door' message isn't part of security because then it means somebody else is having to do security's job.
It's not just a fairly harmless way, but in a way that ensures they can't stick their fingers in their ears and pretend the flaw doesn't exist. I'd not precisely be surprised if they did that to less...drastic attempts to tip them off to security flaws. The state seems to generally attempt for security through obscurity when it comes to their own internet things.
It's Russia. If that's not paranoia, the odds are that those subs have been there since before the USSR collapsed--and are still there because they're not going anywhere, unless somebody works out how to tow a mildly defunct sub that can't manage to surface.
I'm getting rather amused by the Left's current paranoia about Russia's abilities. I'm more inclined to think that this air raid siren hack will turn out to be the result of incompetence, particularly given the speed of the patching of security. It looks suspiciously like they'd been told politely to patch, were too lazy to patch, and got put in a position where they had to patch.
Actually, the interesting thing is that a decent amount of what's left of the gap once you've properly controlled for all factors can be explained by, well, the long-known problem that women just don't ask. But hey, let's keep on not talking about how girls being socialized to suck at aggression is a problem--not just in being aggressive, but in using it properly.
If you want to get rid of the gap, you might well be better off having any question of what wage you're currently making, have made in the past, and want left off the table until it is time to settle pay--unless the employer wants to give what the minimum assured wage or the like is, leave it as something not talked about until the decision has been made to hire, and even then it might be best to require the employer make the opening move.
Not widely. I've never heard of this.
Not surprising considering how few people actually use twitter.
Agreed, I'm not really surprised that this is going on, pretty much because I quit using Twitter when the first part of what's being talked about started hitting--it should have told them that there was a problem when people started going after the verified check mark as a status symbol. I don't actually care if it's a person or a bot, and in fact most of the very few remaining reasons I even stop by Twitter anymore are bots. (The remaining few are anon humans manually posting site status notifications and I know they're official because they're where you get directed by the sites themselves if you want to know more than merely if it's just down for you or not, so the blue check wouldn't tell me anything I didn't know already--and in some ways is less informative.)
I didn't stick around long enough to know if they started revoking them, but I'd certainly consider that problematic if their purpose is to identify merely that this account belongs to a person, and it belongs to the person who it claims to belong to. If it's a case of 'did, got hijacked,' the account ought to be gone; if it's 'made a mistake,' quietly fixing it doesn't help with trust.
If you're going to use it for editorial purposes while still insisting it just means the person is high enough status that Twitter will make sure the account's owner is the person they claim they are? This will become a Problem, no matter what the biases are, because the practice in and of itself is toxic.
Things like what Comcast did in forcing Netflix to pay not to be throttled should be recognized as the fraud on the consumer that it is, with all the criminal and civil implications thereof. I'd argue that the best regulations here shouldn't block the consumer from being given the option of buying a package with throttling--but the consumer has to actively consent to anything that's not a dumb-as-a-rock pipe that the ISP only can control the total overall speed thereof & they have to have that as their basic package(s).
A long time ago, the ACLU defended the right of Neo-Nazis to hold a march--because if they left the court deny them that right, then it'd be established that a community has the ability to deny groups the right to march merely because of what that group is.
You don't have to agree with what they did to recognize that if we get an established precedent that says that "You cannot record public officials (whom the state defines as broadly as possible) without their consent, for any purpose," this can and will be abused, and it will be too late to do your push for how photography is not a crime. The law here, in and of itself, has Problems, but if it's permitted to stand without successful challenge, the courts can and will use that to keep it.
Odds are, this case was chosen as a test case--by California, to get the precedent they want. If you're not willing to care about everybody's rights--you don't really care about anybody's. Regardless of who happens to be charged, the problem some of us have here is that this is a bit too transparent a way to get it so the state can make it a crime to record the cops.
Also, honestly, your entire argument is pretty authoritarian--it's certainly not that of classical liberalism. It's the state's responsibility to prove they are criminals; merely charging somebody with a crime does not mean they committed that crime nor make them criminals, and the state is the one upon whom the burden rests to prove that the person has committed the specific crime they are charged with--not that they committed a crime, but that they committed what they have been charged with. (That the defendant committed a different crime has been quite successfully used as a defense, and sometimes it happens that the state simply fails to prove that specific important part of their case.)
And who is going to keep that escrow secure? And not provide a convenient back door for the intelligence community when that court ordered warranty is just too inconvenient of a process to go through?
If it's part of just the range of things the escrow services can allow you to put into escrow instead of a unitary single-purpose service--they'll be kept honest for pretty much the same reasons your bank is going to insist on those warrants before letting somebody not on the list into your safe deposit box.
Namely, their situation is such that they need that warrant. It's their neck that's in the noose legally if they don't insist on the warrant--and their business pretty much depends on their reputation. That warrant lets them wash their hands of the matter, and assure the other customers (and potential customers) that the matter was out of their hands.
A key escrow service would also be useful if you want to make sure that under certain circumstances, a copy of the key will be available. This might allow people in organizations where some vital material needs to be stored using encryption to place their key in escrow so if they do get run over by a bus, it's not going to be necessary to crack the encryption--especially if these files absolutely cannot be lost. (It also might let you do something like have your will stored as an encrypted file using a key unique to it, which is placed in escrow until you die.)
You should only let the number of deaths caused by a particular thing decide your focus once you've already discounted the ones that all reasonable measures to prevent had been taken. This isn't to take away from the tragedy ect ect ect, but if the vast majority of deaths are due to the deceased's knowingly stupid choices--let's move on.
The important thing to ask is if this measure would be effective, followed by if it'd be effective enough to be worth it.
Otherwise? It's merely a politician wanting to be seen as Doing Something, do not reward this behavior. Insist it not be purely theater before you reward them.
I find that the DC movies generally commit a worse sin than taking themselves way too seriously: they seem to typically spend the entire movie manipulating the 'Seriousness Level' slider in an aimless manner, to ensure that they don't even by accident manage to have a moment that has the right level of seriousness. It's a bit of an exercise in how many different methods can be found to reach the result of bathos.
There's some movies out there where the trailer is nearly the complete story, told better--I don't remember any examples because, well, three guesses about how memorable a movie is when it's functionally the trailer with the ending added and padded out to run around two hours. After a few rounds I just took it as a bad sign for the movie when the trailer gave me the feeling it was one of these.
While I agree that there should be more intelligent movies and in particular Sci-Fi; the problem is that a large part of the population prefers ignorance. Hence they are only serving what the market wants. Then they complain that the market doesn't want it and movie attendance is down because the ignorant poor slobs can't pay high enough prices for tickets so that movie executives can afford more blow and hookers.
If it's what the market wants, the audience would turn up. The problem is that they choose to assume the audience 'prefers ignorance,' so they make it even dumber than it has to be for them to understand it because they assume that they're the brightest people in the room. The minor fact that blow and its kin tend to not be good for your mental abilities is probably a bit complex for them.
The ticket prices are actually pretty much in line with what they were decades ago--which should tell you a lot about how much a dollar's worth now vs then.
While true, there is something to be said that review sites gathering *all* opinions and presenting a single metric for all users of all preferences to see obliterates some depth. People who know will go and read more thoughtful reviews of course.
And it's really, really easy to see if one of the reviewers you know does good in-depth reviews has written a review for that movie (yet) by visiting a site like Rotten Tomatoes--or find out if anybody has done a good in-depth review, if you're not particularly picky about who did it. It can also quickly give you a sense of if your usual reviewer is just plain Weird about this movie (maybe just hates the genre with the passion of a thousand burning suns?) or if no, even the reviewers who are normally suckers for this type of movie hate it.
When that latter happens? Well, it's safe to assume that it's a bad movie, so all that's left is figuring out if it's bad like Plan 9 or bad like The Star Wars Christmas Special...
Neither is government regulation a magic fixall for every problem. It might be best to not outsource your concern for actual people and their living conditions to the state--or, at least, recognize the state's contributions to and share of responsibility for the situation, and not just its (claimed or actual) positive contributions.
Don't let politicians off the hook for making it so it's cheaper for companies to offer lousy gigs than hire employees--especially since the solutions that seem to be getting the most pushing by politicians would result in many, if not all, of these people having no job at all. I think it's pretty safe to say that very few of the people in the gig economy would consider that an improvement--if they would, they'd have walked away from their job already, and it doesn't exactly help that in some cases the gig economy is really not managing anything but being differently bad from the traditional model's version of the same job.
Honestly, I thought it was basic knowledge that doctors don't get paid to write scripts for pain medications--unless the 'patient' is bribing them to write ones for them.
Also, don't forget that you've got to pick the right specialty--neuro and OB/Gyn can be bad here, because of a long history of ambulance-chasing trial lawyers and bad science in the tort system has resulted in the malpractice insurance being high, which in some states has resulted in a lack because nearly nobody can afford to practice those fields of medicine there anymore.
I assume that's only for getting a paper temp license after surrendering a license from another state. If you're in your own state, they should have your photo in the system already.
Actually, all of this is based on in-state moves and renewals, so I can say with great assurance that nope, you need some form of photo ID to get them to process it unless you do it online--in which case the paper version you get will NOT be a photo ID. I've been through this process a somewhat insane number of times lately, because the postal system kept losing the new one. I actually went over two months on the paper IDs last time, and they had to take a new photo each time in order to get it to print.
Even if they do want you to have photo ID, I suspect that they want to be sure that you're you, and not somebody else who is claiming to be you.
Open source project for a Mechanical Engineer? Wow RTFA.
Open Source Ecology is one of several open source projects that almost certainly would enjoy having a mechanical engineer's help. Look around and you'll find other such projects; open designs are definitely a thing people are trying to get developed and out.