That's a double edged sword. No, doctors don't want their misdeeds and incompetence on display for all to see. Despite the rigor or medical school, you still have a lot of people who become physicians who are barely qualified. They're not all geniuses - quite far from it, really.
OTOH, there's a lot about the human condition we just don't know. There is often no way to know exactly how a single person will react to a set of modifications - and statistics used for determining treatment efficacy are useless if you have to know the exact results of a treatment beforehand. And that's the standard people will hold a doctor to after the fact. 0.001% chance of fatal side effects? Sounds like a slam dunk, but that means one in twenty general physicians has just condemned a patient to death for that treatment (estimating about 5000 patients per doctor in the US, which is likely low for the career of an established physician). Was there a test which might have revealed 30% of those in the 0.001% that the doctor didn't order? Oh, that's a big lawsuit indeed - even worse if the patient didn't die but was severely damaged. Ignore the fact that to cover all of the possibilities, there may have needed to be 20 or more tests for all the options to be considered and there STILL would be a small percentage that would have a reaction not previously attributed to the treatment.
The problem is that doctors aren't omniscient, but we expect them to be. Some of them are downright careless, or just incompetent. Unfortunately, regulatory means never works except in the most egregious cases, and law suits foul the issues with very large paydays for the lawyers involved, making it less about what's right and more about meeting payroll (and the new boat payment).
Some doctors will argue that by allowing the patient full access to the notes in the system, a doctor may be less frank about the mental condition of the patient or be reluctant to place information in the record which reflects poorly on the patient's demeanor, such as cooperativeness, a tenancy toward hypochondria, or just plan belligerence. In their defense, this honesty could lead to lawsuits (in the worst cases). Even in the instance where it's a simple difference of opinion, some patients are going to be fairly vocal about having the records changed or modified to suit their version of reality (correctly or not), resulting in more time spent by the doctor and administrative staff on uncompensated work.
Now, the best way to combat this is to allow comments on the records by patients. It will keep some of the sillyness out of records (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Last-Page-UBI-in-the-Knife-and-Gun-Club.html) and will allow legitimate differences of opinions. A chart which is riddled with patient comments contradicting past providers will be just as valuable to a future provider as a note that the patient is difficult or uncooperative in treatment decisions.
Another item of concern is from the insurer's side. There will be people who attempt to expunge their records of items which decrease their insurability or increase their rates (and this will only get worse with mandatory insurance without cost caps or guaranteed rates). The way the questions were worded wasn't mentioned in the fine article, so if write/erase access was included in "full access," then continuity of care may be jeopardized by those seeking to minimize the impact of previous conditions on current health care rates - or simple embarrassment.
"rogue tank drivers were killed by police without military being involved"
"we do NOT have a constitutional basis for killing U.S. citizens without due process"
Those two statements are completely at odds. The rouge tank drivers were killed (presumably by law enforcement) WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. There was no hearing, there was no judge, there was no jury. They were summarily executed based on the mere supposition that they intended to cause harm, without a trial.
Drones have nothing to do with it. Whether it's a man with a rifle pulling a trigger or a man with a drone-mounted rifle pushing a trigger button is really just semantics from a legal standpoint. It is currently allowed on American citizens who pose a viable threat to their surroundings and are otherwise unable to be restricted in their actions.
Please, don't bring logic to the argument. It only infuriates the nut case groups and makes them double down on the bat-shit insane rhetoric.
To your point - there is no difference. The strikes are ordered based on a simple value judgement which puts the life of a number of Americans not yet identified to be in the "victim" class against the life of a suspect which poses, through action or actionable rhetoric, a significant and viable risk. A citizen who has sent threatening letters to another citizen, and who has obtained a means to carry out a threat and is actively engaged in the process of planning or executing an attack and does not respond to law enforcement demands to surrender may be considered "armed and dangerous" and the only way to subdue the individual is with deadly force.
Here's the question you have to ask Rand: given the knowledge that he had obtained and prepared the necessary explosives, would a law enforcement officer been justified in using deadly force to stop him from delivering the payload to Oklahoma City, knowing what we know today? If the answer is yes, would a remotely fired round that stopped Timothy McVeigh on the morning of April 19, 1995 been less justified?
Even better: How about the 9/11 hijackers? Fighter jets had been scrambled and, as I understand it, authorized to shoot down the plane headed for the White house. Would it have been different if they had scrambled remotely piloted vehicles (drones)?
If you're getting paid more than that, you should be expected to do more than just show up and expect them to give you a shovel, a hammer, or a keyboard and to train you to do every single task you're asked.
I'm going to give your co-worker a hint: that voluntary training is increasing your worth in the marketplace. It's not just an advantage to your current employer. Put another way - imagine you are a small employer and your employee wants you to pay for their training. Would you offer them an hour a day to study, plus costs of books? That's 12% of their total compensation package, 12% loss of revenue (or an increase in 12% effort spread over the rest of the "team") that you have no guarantee of ever recouping. Before you ask an employer for money, take a good hard look at whether that money is going to provide a guaranteed, tangible benefit to the bottom line of the business. If you can't find a way that it either saves or increases revenue by 20% of the investment*, it's going to be a hard sell.
*when counting costs, take the actual materials and course cost, then add your hourly rate x 2.0-2.5 x total work hours you'll spend. That will give you the actual cost to the business.
I'll agree that this may not be the drive we're looking for, but to expect that SSDs don't offer much benefit day to day because of RAM caching is false. Yes, initial startup is faster (in my case *minutes* faster), but even loading and unloading frequently used applications is markedly better. The performance increase on startup and access of local files was an order of magnitude - every time I switch applications or projects - and I have 24GB of RAM.
Speeding up access to my on-disc document library, or my current 20+/- project folders, would actually be a help if I couldn't afford a SSD. Still, 8GB is pretty paltry imho.
That is a profound piece of prose, and you didn't even mean it that way.
You do realize that political correctness WAS labeling a heretic of Galileo or Copernicus and dismissing their works simply because their points of view differ from the pervading mob consciousness. That Rosa Parks was a troublemaker and an uppity nigger by the mob consciousness of the time. That witches were the cause of all ills in the puritan north in our past.
All of these things you revile and feel offended by are simply an alternate reality. You happen to be in a dwindling - but still plurally superior - market segment, and there will be a time when we have to "put up" with all the sillyness that the white male Christians seem to spew. And we'll have to be politically correct and call them Christians instead of Jesus-nutcakes, or Cross Dorks, just as you are currently chided for calling Muslims towel-heads, and Africans Porch monkeys, and Jews Kikes. And we'll hate you for wanting us to respect you, even though your are - or should be - second class citizens.
It is my hope that someday everyone will learn empathy, but based on how I see people raise their children to hate and denigrate those who are different I think it will never happen.
When you write, do you form and choose your prose based on the dictionary on your desk (or online)? Of course not. A dictionary is the ultimate reference for words in your language, though. If you have a word, you can look up its part of speech, spelling, definition, pronunciation, even sample usage in some cases. But if you're writing an essay, or a book, or a brief, or a memo, a dictionary is very close to unusable. If you want to describe the action of a bipedal animal moving swiftly over land by means of propulsive contact with the ground, you're not going to find what word to use in a dictionary. If you don't know what the word run means, or how to use it, a dictionary is ideal.
Sometimes - no, often - the official documentation is exactly the *wrong* reference to use when creating from scratch. I'm not a programmer, but anyone who has ever even used software to do anything - from Autocad to Wordperfect - knows that the official documentation is almost never going to give you a useful answer to a problem you are having. You have to know the command to use before you can look it up. I still have programs whose documentation is a list of definitions, in order, of every menu and submenu command. And when I get stuck, I know that the answer I'm looking for is never going to be in that "help" file.
It's actually close. It wouldn't be the end of the world to get a partial victory. I'm not sure it it's the nuances they don't understand* or this is big telco making sure to keep their thumb on top of subscribers, but it's better than the alternative. I'd like to see this as the first crack in the DMCA dam.
*The people who work at the top of the administration are not, in any way, intellectual midgets - they either know what they've written or they simply haven't put much thought into it. I'm betting on the former.
That's one more than we got out of the last two presidents combined. (I won't go further back, since the internet didn't exist in any meaningful way for the public before 1992).
FTFR: "neither criminal law nor technological locks should prevent consumers from switching carriers when they are no longer bound by a service agreement or other obligation."
Emphasis mine. It doesn't matter what service agreement you have, it should not be illegal to unlock the phone. If you have an agreement (aka a contract), then the contract language states what you may do with your device to remain within the bounds of the contract, and if you choose to violate that agreement what the injured party is allowed to recover as a result of your default. It's basic contract law - and it's straight forward. The carriers don't really give a rat's ass what you do with your subsidized phone, as long as you fulfill your 24 months of minimum service. If you buy your device, unlock it, and go buy service with another company they really don't care - just as long as your check clears every month for the next two years. Hell, I'll bet AT&T would sell unlocked iPhones for $2000 with no commitment at all ($200+$75/mo for 24 months) if they though they could sell enough of them.
Point is - this should not be a criminal statute. It's contract law; civil stuff - plain and simple.
I can see a market for these, but in this case it's not me. It would have to replace my phone to be "worth it". I wear a watch - it's a time piece, not quite jewelry. I'm particular about how my watch looks as a reflection of my style, but not in a way that is statusy. Quite the same for my phone - which does happen to be an iPhone - which I got because at the time I bought it it was easy to use, comfortable to hold and store, and had the apps I needed when other phones did not.
It seems like a solution looking for a problem. Most of the things I can imagine it being useful for require a second component. Except for basic time, weather, fb status updates, text messages, maybe a bezel mounted camera, it lacks enough screen real estate for very intensive information or touch interaction. It also lacks an elegant way to communicate via voice without a headset. I could see it as part of a suite of components - a core watch with wireless internet and connectivity, a super-slim screen linked over a wireless connection, an intra-aureal transducer (like a hearing aid) with both speaker and conduction microphone with a "release" to allow outside sounds in without removing the unit. It could be your communication hub, with the peripherals added to subtracted as you had space/desire to carry them. But that's a lot of wireless transmission for a battery which is going have to weigh no more than a few grams.
The iDevices are more and more tethered to internet based services, which means data all the time. That seems at direct odds to the cost of data in power consumption. Maybe they've found a need I just don't know about yet (aside from cool factor...for which you can already pay $500-$50,000 to put something cool on your wrist).
I watched the jaw of a physicist hit the table in a design meeting where I claimed that I was confident in my engineering model to "single digit percent" errors. The director of engineering was pleased with the answer, and my friend asked me afterwards what I meant and how that could possibly be good. I told her that we only have a certain level of confidence in the materials and fabrication capability, and that the environmental loads were really just a guide - anything closer then 5-10% was probably wasting effort for no actual increase in performance.
This is an appropriate place for this quote:
"Structural engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess in such a way that the public at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance." -Dr. A. R. Dykes
It depends on who you let in. When I attend Virginia Tech in the 80s they'd let just about anyone into the engineering program, but very few actually graduated with engineering degrees. Today a far higher percentage who enter graduate, but the admissions standards (for engineering, at least) are quite a bit higher.
Everyone who drives a car pays a "road tax," though that is not it's official name. Most automotive fuel taxes are used to offset the costs of road maintenance. It's why "green diesel" (undyed) is sold with a tax and "red diesel" (dyed red) is sold without one. If you get caught with red diesel in an on-road vehicle there are stiff penalties. It's meant for off road usage such as generators and tractors.
If you base the actual costs on wear and tear on the road bicycles will/should have a tax of near zero, as the effects of a bicycle per mile (due to the weight), and the fraction of miles normally ridden in a year on an average bike (vs the average car) makes the effects negligible or nearly so.
If you're tied down by your phone, then you're doing it wrong. Get a second number if you have to (i.e. GVoice) and dump everybody in there if you hate getting calls. Turn of alerts if you find them distracting.
I am the master of my phone, not the other way around. The only alerts I get are incoming calls (you know, the prime purpose) and text messages from about 6 people, all of whom I want to hear from immediately if anything important comes up (Parents, wife, daughter, two friends). Everything else is passive. If I need to look something up - it's right there. If I'm running late or have to reschedule - it's right there. If I'm stuck because someone without a phone didn't tell me hey'd be late (that inconsiderate bastard), or I just have 10 minutes to kill, I can either entertain myself or weed out my inbox so when I get back home or to work I don't have to waste more time there. I use it to jot notes down, take pictures of opportunity, and store a myriad of information that - while not critical - is convenient to have - like a running list of things to pick up when out on errands. Saves me time and gas money.
First, I like to remember my life the way I remember it - not from some video recording. It just seems cold and impersonal - nothing can capture what I was thinking and feeling at those moments. Second, oh my God it would be boring. There is so much down time, so much wasted space, so much mundane. Have you ever heard someone singing with headphones on - live? Have you ever compared that to the final, fully produced version? I don't care how good a singer you are (and I know some very, very good singers) - there is no may it will measure up.
The best and brightest will find other employment, and the rest will move to HQ and be mediocre in person rather than from home. When given an option like this, everyone looks for another position, and the ones who have marketable skills get hired away, leaving the dead weight on board.
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That's a double edged sword. No, doctors don't want their misdeeds and incompetence on display for all to see. Despite the rigor or medical school, you still have a lot of people who become physicians who are barely qualified. They're not all geniuses - quite far from it, really.
OTOH, there's a lot about the human condition we just don't know. There is often no way to know exactly how a single person will react to a set of modifications - and statistics used for determining treatment efficacy are useless if you have to know the exact results of a treatment beforehand. And that's the standard people will hold a doctor to after the fact. 0.001% chance of fatal side effects? Sounds like a slam dunk, but that means one in twenty general physicians has just condemned a patient to death for that treatment (estimating about 5000 patients per doctor in the US, which is likely low for the career of an established physician). Was there a test which might have revealed 30% of those in the 0.001% that the doctor didn't order? Oh, that's a big lawsuit indeed - even worse if the patient didn't die but was severely damaged. Ignore the fact that to cover all of the possibilities, there may have needed to be 20 or more tests for all the options to be considered and there STILL would be a small percentage that would have a reaction not previously attributed to the treatment.
The problem is that doctors aren't omniscient, but we expect them to be. Some of them are downright careless, or just incompetent. Unfortunately, regulatory means never works except in the most egregious cases, and law suits foul the issues with very large paydays for the lawyers involved, making it less about what's right and more about meeting payroll (and the new boat payment).
Some doctors will argue that by allowing the patient full access to the notes in the system, a doctor may be less frank about the mental condition of the patient or be reluctant to place information in the record which reflects poorly on the patient's demeanor, such as cooperativeness, a tenancy toward hypochondria, or just plan belligerence. In their defense, this honesty could lead to lawsuits (in the worst cases). Even in the instance where it's a simple difference of opinion, some patients are going to be fairly vocal about having the records changed or modified to suit their version of reality (correctly or not), resulting in more time spent by the doctor and administrative staff on uncompensated work.
Now, the best way to combat this is to allow comments on the records by patients. It will keep some of the sillyness out of records (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Last-Page-UBI-in-the-Knife-and-Gun-Club.html) and will allow legitimate differences of opinions. A chart which is riddled with patient comments contradicting past providers will be just as valuable to a future provider as a note that the patient is difficult or uncooperative in treatment decisions.
Another item of concern is from the insurer's side. There will be people who attempt to expunge their records of items which decrease their insurability or increase their rates (and this will only get worse with mandatory insurance without cost caps or guaranteed rates). The way the questions were worded wasn't mentioned in the fine article, so if write/erase access was included in "full access," then continuity of care may be jeopardized by those seeking to minimize the impact of previous conditions on current health care rates - or simple embarrassment.
That will fix those pesky ragged bit edges.
I don't think I've ever seen a hockey stick used in a violent act. I'm surprised they banned them in the first place.
How about shoot down a civilian plane with a suspected attacker on board?
"rogue tank drivers were killed by police without military being involved"
"we do NOT have a constitutional basis for killing U.S. citizens without due process"
Those two statements are completely at odds. The rouge tank drivers were killed (presumably by law enforcement) WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. There was no hearing, there was no judge, there was no jury. They were summarily executed based on the mere supposition that they intended to cause harm, without a trial.
Drones have nothing to do with it. Whether it's a man with a rifle pulling a trigger or a man with a drone-mounted rifle pushing a trigger button is really just semantics from a legal standpoint. It is currently allowed on American citizens who pose a viable threat to their surroundings and are otherwise unable to be restricted in their actions.
Please, don't bring logic to the argument. It only infuriates the nut case groups and makes them double down on the bat-shit insane rhetoric.
To your point - there is no difference. The strikes are ordered based on a simple value judgement which puts the life of a number of Americans not yet identified to be in the "victim" class against the life of a suspect which poses, through action or actionable rhetoric, a significant and viable risk. A citizen who has sent threatening letters to another citizen, and who has obtained a means to carry out a threat and is actively engaged in the process of planning or executing an attack and does not respond to law enforcement demands to surrender may be considered "armed and dangerous" and the only way to subdue the individual is with deadly force.
Here's the question you have to ask Rand: given the knowledge that he had obtained and prepared the necessary explosives, would a law enforcement officer been justified in using deadly force to stop him from delivering the payload to Oklahoma City, knowing what we know today? If the answer is yes, would a remotely fired round that stopped Timothy McVeigh on the morning of April 19, 1995 been less justified?
Even better: How about the 9/11 hijackers? Fighter jets had been scrambled and, as I understand it, authorized to shoot down the plane headed for the White house. Would it have been different if they had scrambled remotely piloted vehicles (drones)?
If you're getting paid more than that, you should be expected to do more than just show up and expect them to give you a shovel, a hammer, or a keyboard and to train you to do every single task you're asked.
I'm going to give your co-worker a hint: that voluntary training is increasing your worth in the marketplace. It's not just an advantage to your current employer. Put another way - imagine you are a small employer and your employee wants you to pay for their training. Would you offer them an hour a day to study, plus costs of books? That's 12% of their total compensation package, 12% loss of revenue (or an increase in 12% effort spread over the rest of the "team") that you have no guarantee of ever recouping. Before you ask an employer for money, take a good hard look at whether that money is going to provide a guaranteed, tangible benefit to the bottom line of the business. If you can't find a way that it either saves or increases revenue by 20% of the investment*, it's going to be a hard sell.
*when counting costs, take the actual materials and course cost, then add your hourly rate x 2.0-2.5 x total work hours you'll spend. That will give you the actual cost to the business.
At the top of the article is a slide show of 12 photos of drones - none of which operate with four propellers. Journalism at it's finest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xlObdXF8VE
~2:00 mark, 5.5lb bird impact with turbine.
...become their permanent identities.
I'll agree that this may not be the drive we're looking for, but to expect that SSDs don't offer much benefit day to day because of RAM caching is false. Yes, initial startup is faster (in my case *minutes* faster), but even loading and unloading frequently used applications is markedly better. The performance increase on startup and access of local files was an order of magnitude - every time I switch applications or projects - and I have 24GB of RAM.
Speeding up access to my on-disc document library, or my current 20+/- project folders, would actually be a help if I couldn't afford a SSD. Still, 8GB is pretty paltry imho.
That is a profound piece of prose, and you didn't even mean it that way.
You do realize that political correctness WAS labeling a heretic of Galileo or Copernicus and dismissing their works simply because their points of view differ from the pervading mob consciousness. That Rosa Parks was a troublemaker and an uppity nigger by the mob consciousness of the time. That witches were the cause of all ills in the puritan north in our past.
All of these things you revile and feel offended by are simply an alternate reality. You happen to be in a dwindling - but still plurally superior - market segment, and there will be a time when we have to "put up" with all the sillyness that the white male Christians seem to spew. And we'll have to be politically correct and call them Christians instead of Jesus-nutcakes, or Cross Dorks, just as you are currently chided for calling Muslims towel-heads, and Africans Porch monkeys, and Jews Kikes. And we'll hate you for wanting us to respect you, even though your are - or should be - second class citizens.
It is my hope that someday everyone will learn empathy, but based on how I see people raise their children to hate and denigrate those who are different I think it will never happen.
Mainstream appears to depend entirely on your frame of reference.
When you write, do you form and choose your prose based on the dictionary on your desk (or online)? Of course not. A dictionary is the ultimate reference for words in your language, though. If you have a word, you can look up its part of speech, spelling, definition, pronunciation, even sample usage in some cases. But if you're writing an essay, or a book, or a brief, or a memo, a dictionary is very close to unusable. If you want to describe the action of a bipedal animal moving swiftly over land by means of propulsive contact with the ground, you're not going to find what word to use in a dictionary. If you don't know what the word run means, or how to use it, a dictionary is ideal.
Sometimes - no, often - the official documentation is exactly the *wrong* reference to use when creating from scratch. I'm not a programmer, but anyone who has ever even used software to do anything - from Autocad to Wordperfect - knows that the official documentation is almost never going to give you a useful answer to a problem you are having. You have to know the command to use before you can look it up. I still have programs whose documentation is a list of definitions, in order, of every menu and submenu command. And when I get stuck, I know that the answer I'm looking for is never going to be in that "help" file.
It's actually close. It wouldn't be the end of the world to get a partial victory. I'm not sure it it's the nuances they don't understand* or this is big telco making sure to keep their thumb on top of subscribers, but it's better than the alternative. I'd like to see this as the first crack in the DMCA dam.
*The people who work at the top of the administration are not, in any way, intellectual midgets - they either know what they've written or they simply haven't put much thought into it. I'm betting on the former.
That's one more than we got out of the last two presidents combined. (I won't go further back, since the internet didn't exist in any meaningful way for the public before 1992).
FTFR: "neither criminal law nor technological locks should prevent consumers from switching carriers when they are no longer bound by a service agreement or other obligation."
Emphasis mine. It doesn't matter what service agreement you have, it should not be illegal to unlock the phone. If you have an agreement (aka a contract), then the contract language states what you may do with your device to remain within the bounds of the contract, and if you choose to violate that agreement what the injured party is allowed to recover as a result of your default. It's basic contract law - and it's straight forward. The carriers don't really give a rat's ass what you do with your subsidized phone, as long as you fulfill your 24 months of minimum service. If you buy your device, unlock it, and go buy service with another company they really don't care - just as long as your check clears every month for the next two years. Hell, I'll bet AT&T would sell unlocked iPhones for $2000 with no commitment at all ($200+$75/mo for 24 months) if they though they could sell enough of them.
Point is - this should not be a criminal statute. It's contract law; civil stuff - plain and simple.
...lame?
I can see a market for these, but in this case it's not me. It would have to replace my phone to be "worth it". I wear a watch - it's a time piece, not quite jewelry. I'm particular about how my watch looks as a reflection of my style, but not in a way that is statusy. Quite the same for my phone - which does happen to be an iPhone - which I got because at the time I bought it it was easy to use, comfortable to hold and store, and had the apps I needed when other phones did not.
It seems like a solution looking for a problem. Most of the things I can imagine it being useful for require a second component. Except for basic time, weather, fb status updates, text messages, maybe a bezel mounted camera, it lacks enough screen real estate for very intensive information or touch interaction. It also lacks an elegant way to communicate via voice without a headset. I could see it as part of a suite of components - a core watch with wireless internet and connectivity, a super-slim screen linked over a wireless connection, an intra-aureal transducer (like a hearing aid) with both speaker and conduction microphone with a "release" to allow outside sounds in without removing the unit. It could be your communication hub, with the peripherals added to subtracted as you had space/desire to carry them. But that's a lot of wireless transmission for a battery which is going have to weigh no more than a few grams.
The iDevices are more and more tethered to internet based services, which means data all the time. That seems at direct odds to the cost of data in power consumption. Maybe they've found a need I just don't know about yet (aside from cool factor...for which you can already pay $500-$50,000 to put something cool on your wrist).
I watched the jaw of a physicist hit the table in a design meeting where I claimed that I was confident in my engineering model to "single digit percent" errors. The director of engineering was pleased with the answer, and my friend asked me afterwards what I meant and how that could possibly be good. I told her that we only have a certain level of confidence in the materials and fabrication capability, and that the environmental loads were really just a guide - anything closer then 5-10% was probably wasting effort for no actual increase in performance.
This is an appropriate place for this quote:
"Structural engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess in such a way that the public at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance." -Dr. A. R. Dykes
It depends on who you let in. When I attend Virginia Tech in the 80s they'd let just about anyone into the engineering program, but very few actually graduated with engineering degrees. Today a far higher percentage who enter graduate, but the admissions standards (for engineering, at least) are quite a bit higher.
Everyone who drives a car pays a "road tax," though that is not it's official name. Most automotive fuel taxes are used to offset the costs of road maintenance. It's why "green diesel" (undyed) is sold with a tax and "red diesel" (dyed red) is sold without one. If you get caught with red diesel in an on-road vehicle there are stiff penalties. It's meant for off road usage such as generators and tractors.
If you base the actual costs on wear and tear on the road bicycles will/should have a tax of near zero, as the effects of a bicycle per mile (due to the weight), and the fraction of miles normally ridden in a year on an average bike (vs the average car) makes the effects negligible or nearly so.
If you're tied down by your phone, then you're doing it wrong. Get a second number if you have to (i.e. GVoice) and dump everybody in there if you hate getting calls. Turn of alerts if you find them distracting.
I am the master of my phone, not the other way around. The only alerts I get are incoming calls (you know, the prime purpose) and text messages from about 6 people, all of whom I want to hear from immediately if anything important comes up (Parents, wife, daughter, two friends). Everything else is passive. If I need to look something up - it's right there. If I'm running late or have to reschedule - it's right there. If I'm stuck because someone without a phone didn't tell me hey'd be late (that inconsiderate bastard), or I just have 10 minutes to kill, I can either entertain myself or weed out my inbox so when I get back home or to work I don't have to waste more time there. I use it to jot notes down, take pictures of opportunity, and store a myriad of information that - while not critical - is convenient to have - like a running list of things to pick up when out on errands. Saves me time and gas money.
Two reasons:
First, I like to remember my life the way I remember it - not from some video recording. It just seems cold and impersonal - nothing can capture what I was thinking and feeling at those moments.
Second, oh my God it would be boring. There is so much down time, so much wasted space, so much mundane. Have you ever heard someone singing with headphones on - live? Have you ever compared that to the final, fully produced version? I don't care how good a singer you are (and I know some very, very good singers) - there is no may it will measure up.
The best and brightest will find other employment, and the rest will move to HQ and be mediocre in person rather than from home. When given an option like this, everyone looks for another position, and the ones who have marketable skills get hired away, leaving the dead weight on board.