Everything I've heard about Silicon Valley suggests that it is a complete zoo traffic-wise, with most having to live an hour away due to costs/etc.
That sounds about like what I've heard and seen. The rents are ridiculous, so lots of people live far away, and the traffic is bad during rush hour because there's no decent public transit. From what I saw, all the companies are in office parks, so the density is very poor, and you have to drive everywhere.
If anything it seems worse than a city, like half of New Jersey.
I assume you're talking about north NJ; I actually live there. It's not "worse than a city", it's just different. NJ's main problem is high property taxes and high rents, but nothing like Silicon Valley-area rents. There's a reason so many people live in NJ and commute by train or bus to Manhattan: NYC is so ridiculously expensive that it's cheaper to live in NJ, plus you can afford a much larger place, maybe even sitting next to some woods; there's lots of parks and greenery all over the place on this side of the Hudson. The other thing that's not so great about NJ is the driving time; all the roads were probably designed by animals (literally: I think all the roads were laid out along colonial-era horse roads, which of course were probably previously trails used by Indians, which were probably previously animal trails), and generally quite small; there's some highways of course, but for the most part between all the narrow spaghetti-like roads and traffic lights, it takes a while to get anywhere compared to a west coast city.
By suburb I mean someplace where you don't have to drive more than 10min to get to a fully operational farm, but where residences and medium-sized businesses are plentiful.
That's not a suburb, that's your own personal definition for something you seem to prefer. Lots of American cities are mostly suburban, and don't have any farms anywhere around. Atlanta for instance is famous for its sprawl.
Maybe you've never been to Vegas, but in my experience most things are either fairly cheap or quite reasonably-priced, if it's owned by a casino. Their objective is to get you there with good prices, and get you down to the casino floor to gamble your money away. They're not interested in jacking you with bullshit nickel-and-dime charges that piss you off.
They already did. Silicon Valley is basically one giant suburb. There's no skyscrapers there. The only urban Google location I know of is the one in NYC across the street from the Chelsea Market.
Well that's really regardless because a lot of those imported people have become Americans themselves. Despite the importation of these people, engineers, whether foreign-born or native, are still, as I said, a tiny, tiny subset of the population. They just happen to be marvelously productive. Bringing in tens of thousands of well-educated engineers doesn't even come close to counterbalancing the hundreds of millions of uneducated morons who can't answer simple math questions.
I'm not worried personally about homeless people; they never hurt anyone, they're just a sign that our country is failing miserably at taking care of its own. What I'm worried about is violent criminals, as well as police-state tactics. For instance, here in NYC, we have armed soldiers being used as regular police now, and Boston is now famous for having gangs of cops running around searching everyone's house with no warrant. I never heard about violent motorcycle gangs in Portland or Seattle, nor do they seem to do much police-state stuff over there (instead, they've legalized marijuana, something the northeast seems very disinclined to do, despite its hollow claims of being a group of liberal Blue states).
Well yes, but as I said to another responder, this guy came to do a postdoc degree, so he's probably in some kind of profession that's going to require him to live near a city, like almost all professions these days. Not many people get to make good money (~6 figures) and live in a rural area; there just aren't many high-paying jobs in such areas, unless you're a doctor or lawyer (every small town needs these; but still these aren't things you do a postdoc for, they have their own special schools), and even there your salary will be much lower and your professional opportunities much more limited. So the big-city experience is really all that's important to him (and probably most people on Slashdot) because that's where he'd have to live if he took a job here.
Albany isn't a small town however, but still the job opportunities are much more limited there. As a software engineer, I'd probably have a hard time finding work there, and the salaries would probably be much smaller.
Yes, like it's sooo comfortable to have a gag wrapped tightly around your neck. Or wear super-thin shitty pants that offer no warmth whatsoever. Why don't you get a clue, you fucking moron? Fuck off. And take your shitty "business casual" clothes with you.
and blur the line between work time and leisure time enough that a call at 10pm usually starts with "oh good, I see you're still logged in..."
This happened to me at my last job (a telecommute position); I was still logged into Skype a little after midnight and my boss called me up (he lived in the UK). What a PITA. I was careful to sign out of Skype much earlier after that.
The UK wouldn't extradite Assange to the US. They'd extradite him to Sweden. Then, Sweden would extradite him to the US. Sweden's government has been acting as a lapdog for the US government for years now, allowing extraordinary rendition (kidnapping) even for people they took to be tortured at CIA facilities. If Sweden is already guilty of being complicit in kidnapping and torture, what makes people think they won't do it for Assange?
Most of the immigration in the US is from Latin America, and consists of dirt-poor people looking for a place better than where they are now. The US is conveniently located (they can't walk to Europe), and is generally better than the shitholes they come from, so this is where they go. That doesn't mean it's a great place, just not at the very bottom.
Also, many immigrants have no idea what it's like here. If a post-doc student from Europe (someone with access to information) was shocked by the crappy conditions here, it should be obvious that a bunch of dirt-poor rural Latin Americans would have no clue other than what orally-spread rumors have told them.
The OP was doing a post-doctorate. Chances are, he's in some kind of career where all the jobs are in or near large cities. Small rural towns are generally safe, as long as you're not gay (or black or some other minority, depending on the region the town is in), because there's no one there: they've all moved out for jobs in the cities. If you stay in a small rural town, it's because you're retired and on a pension or social security, or you live in a trailer and work at the local feed store.
He said northeast, which probably means someplace like NYC or Boston. I live in the NYC area, and despite it being America's financial capital and a giant tourist destination, it's chock-full of hobos just like the OP said, and the streets aren't safe in the daytime, let alone nighttime, since highly-paid tech company executives are being attacked in the streets by biker gangs and the authorities do little about it; in fact, said biker gang had a couple of off-duty NYPD cops in it who helped attack the guy! This nation is a cesspool, and the northeast isn't really one of the good parts; it's better than the southeast and southwest in most ways, but that's not saying much. I'm hoping to move to the northwest (Portland or Seattle) before too long.
So they're showing that Americans aren't particularly good at math, yet by and large we succeed well beyond everybody else in most respects. Especially given that we design most of the technology that the rest of the world uses (even manufacture most of it as well - though assembly is another matter,) which in itself necessitates mathematics as well as physics. So who are the ones ultimately doing poorly in all of this?
Most Americans scored poorly on the tests; those same Americans aren't the ones who designs all that technology. America's engineers are a tiny subset of the population, and most likely scored quite well on the test. The vast majority of Americans don't work as engineers or scientists or anything of the sort, they work in service jobs.
Placing a gun to someone's head is illegal, for good reason.
Shutting down the government is perfectly legal; it's part of the way the government works and is designed. Therefore, it's a valid tactic. The whole idea is to prevent the majority from running roughshod over the minority; if the minority gets pissed off enough, they can throw a wrench into the works and shut everything down to force a negotiation.
It IS a valid negotiation tactic. When you want something, and need to negotiate with someone to get it, anything that's in your power is fair game. Shutting down the government is available, since it's part of the broken way our system of government is set up, so as long as that's the case, it's perfectly valid to use it. It's not just the Republicans; the Democrats did the exact same thing 8 times during Reagan's term IIRC. If you don't like it, then maybe you should fix the government (probably through a Constitutional Amendment) so it isn't possible any more. Other nations don't have this problem.
The thing that has yet to be seen is how this negotiation tactic works out for the Dems and the Reps at the next election. It could go either way; each side is trying to spin it to their advantage. Obama is doing everything he can to piss off American voters (shutting down memorials, shutting down the ocean, etc.), hoping they'll blame it all the Republicans, using the excuse "the Republicans made me do it!!", which seems to be his usual excuse for everything. The Republicans are using Obama's actions to show how horrible Obama is, even though they forced the shutdown. If more Americans believe Obama and blame the Reps, then Dems might take over the House. However, if they get pissed off about all the truly unnecessary closures which Obama has really done just to piss everyone off, then the Dems will lose seats, maybe lose control of the Senate, and probably (if people don't forget fast enough) the 2016 election too.
So what we need to do, then, is to create a guild to monopolize IT services and programming. We'll call it the "Coding Guild". Then members of this guild can have different titles, such as "Guild Programmer", "Guild Administrator", "Guild Architect", "Guild Tester" (sometimes called "Guild Testsman"), etc. And we can even have a handy slogan: "He who controls the code, controls life."
0F is where brine freezes, so that's when you can expect that salty slush on the road to become dangerous. As for ice on the road at 0, that's wrong too (as you pointed out); roads may be colder than the air which your thermometer is reading, which is why ice alarms built into cars equipped with them are set to trigger a few degrees warmer than that.
All the weather forecasts I ever see have two significant digits, in Fahrenheit, and they don't round to the nearest even number. That means that you'd need three significant digits in Celsius to get the same level of accuracy (or at least, you'd have to round to the nearest 0.5 degree).
For you maybe. I lived way too many summers with temperatures of 115 and up, and I'll never do it again. I've also lived in the humid south. I'll take 95 and humid any time over 115. I think Phoenix residents have had their brains boiled too long and don't realize how bad it is any more. Finally, it isn't that dry in Phoenix anyway, not with everyone constantly watering their lawn in the middle of the day and having swimming pools and water features. It's actually pretty humid.
This is really quite useless to 99.999% of the population. Who ever does that? Maybe a few scientists, and they're surely doing many other much more complex calculations in their work than a simple degF->K conversion, which you can do on Google.
I can't think of any others, and honestly neither of those outweighs the cost of trying to switch.
Exactly. I agree completely.
for instance, where I live, the range of 30-120 F
Lemme guess, you either live in Phoenix or Vegas. I stand by my previous statement: if it's over 100F, it's way too hot. I got the hell out of Phoenix last year and hope I never experience 100+ temperatures again in my life. Humans have no place in that environment.
Yeah, so what? When was the last time someone read the temperature off the local weather report and converted it to Kelvins? Anyone who would have an interest in doing that for some reason would surely have the intelligence to do an accurate unit conversion between degF and K (it's not hard, you can just type it into Google).
Slashdot Mirror
Everything I've heard about Silicon Valley suggests that it is a complete zoo traffic-wise, with most having to live an hour away due to costs/etc.
That sounds about like what I've heard and seen. The rents are ridiculous, so lots of people live far away, and the traffic is bad during rush hour because there's no decent public transit. From what I saw, all the companies are in office parks, so the density is very poor, and you have to drive everywhere.
If anything it seems worse than a city, like half of New Jersey.
I assume you're talking about north NJ; I actually live there. It's not "worse than a city", it's just different. NJ's main problem is high property taxes and high rents, but nothing like Silicon Valley-area rents. There's a reason so many people live in NJ and commute by train or bus to Manhattan: NYC is so ridiculously expensive that it's cheaper to live in NJ, plus you can afford a much larger place, maybe even sitting next to some woods; there's lots of parks and greenery all over the place on this side of the Hudson. The other thing that's not so great about NJ is the driving time; all the roads were probably designed by animals (literally: I think all the roads were laid out along colonial-era horse roads, which of course were probably previously trails used by Indians, which were probably previously animal trails), and generally quite small; there's some highways of course, but for the most part between all the narrow spaghetti-like roads and traffic lights, it takes a while to get anywhere compared to a west coast city.
By suburb I mean someplace where you don't have to drive more than 10min to get to a fully operational farm, but where residences and medium-sized businesses are plentiful.
That's not a suburb, that's your own personal definition for something you seem to prefer. Lots of American cities are mostly suburban, and don't have any farms anywhere around. Atlanta for instance is famous for its sprawl.
Maybe you've never been to Vegas, but in my experience most things are either fairly cheap or quite reasonably-priced, if it's owned by a casino. Their objective is to get you there with good prices, and get you down to the casino floor to gamble your money away. They're not interested in jacking you with bullshit nickel-and-dime charges that piss you off.
They already did. Silicon Valley is basically one giant suburb. There's no skyscrapers there. The only urban Google location I know of is the one in NYC across the street from the Chelsea Market.
Well that's really regardless because a lot of those imported people have become Americans themselves. Despite the importation of these people, engineers, whether foreign-born or native, are still, as I said, a tiny, tiny subset of the population. They just happen to be marvelously productive. Bringing in tens of thousands of well-educated engineers doesn't even come close to counterbalancing the hundreds of millions of uneducated morons who can't answer simple math questions.
I'm not worried personally about homeless people; they never hurt anyone, they're just a sign that our country is failing miserably at taking care of its own. What I'm worried about is violent criminals, as well as police-state tactics. For instance, here in NYC, we have armed soldiers being used as regular police now, and Boston is now famous for having gangs of cops running around searching everyone's house with no warrant. I never heard about violent motorcycle gangs in Portland or Seattle, nor do they seem to do much police-state stuff over there (instead, they've legalized marijuana, something the northeast seems very disinclined to do, despite its hollow claims of being a group of liberal Blue states).
Well yes, but as I said to another responder, this guy came to do a postdoc degree, so he's probably in some kind of profession that's going to require him to live near a city, like almost all professions these days. Not many people get to make good money (~6 figures) and live in a rural area; there just aren't many high-paying jobs in such areas, unless you're a doctor or lawyer (every small town needs these; but still these aren't things you do a postdoc for, they have their own special schools), and even there your salary will be much lower and your professional opportunities much more limited. So the big-city experience is really all that's important to him (and probably most people on Slashdot) because that's where he'd have to live if he took a job here.
Albany isn't a small town however, but still the job opportunities are much more limited there. As a software engineer, I'd probably have a hard time finding work there, and the salaries would probably be much smaller.
Yes, like it's sooo comfortable to have a gag wrapped tightly around your neck. Or wear super-thin shitty pants that offer no warmth whatsoever. Why don't you get a clue, you fucking moron? Fuck off. And take your shitty "business casual" clothes with you.
and blur the line between work time and leisure time enough that a call at 10pm usually starts with "oh good, I see you're still logged in..."
This happened to me at my last job (a telecommute position); I was still logged into Skype a little after midnight and my boss called me up (he lived in the UK). What a PITA. I was careful to sign out of Skype much earlier after that.
So wearing something that's horribly uncomfortable will make you more "professional" and more productive? This sounds rather dubious to me.
The UK wouldn't extradite Assange to the US. They'd extradite him to Sweden. Then, Sweden would extradite him to the US. Sweden's government has been acting as a lapdog for the US government for years now, allowing extraordinary rendition (kidnapping) even for people they took to be tortured at CIA facilities. If Sweden is already guilty of being complicit in kidnapping and torture, what makes people think they won't do it for Assange?
Most of the immigration in the US is from Latin America, and consists of dirt-poor people looking for a place better than where they are now. The US is conveniently located (they can't walk to Europe), and is generally better than the shitholes they come from, so this is where they go. That doesn't mean it's a great place, just not at the very bottom.
Also, many immigrants have no idea what it's like here. If a post-doc student from Europe (someone with access to information) was shocked by the crappy conditions here, it should be obvious that a bunch of dirt-poor rural Latin Americans would have no clue other than what orally-spread rumors have told them.
The OP was doing a post-doctorate. Chances are, he's in some kind of career where all the jobs are in or near large cities. Small rural towns are generally safe, as long as you're not gay (or black or some other minority, depending on the region the town is in), because there's no one there: they've all moved out for jobs in the cities. If you stay in a small rural town, it's because you're retired and on a pension or social security, or you live in a trailer and work at the local feed store.
He said northeast, which probably means someplace like NYC or Boston. I live in the NYC area, and despite it being America's financial capital and a giant tourist destination, it's chock-full of hobos just like the OP said, and the streets aren't safe in the daytime, let alone nighttime, since highly-paid tech company executives are being attacked in the streets by biker gangs and the authorities do little about it; in fact, said biker gang had a couple of off-duty NYPD cops in it who helped attack the guy! This nation is a cesspool, and the northeast isn't really one of the good parts; it's better than the southeast and southwest in most ways, but that's not saying much. I'm hoping to move to the northwest (Portland or Seattle) before too long.
So they're showing that Americans aren't particularly good at math, yet by and large we succeed well beyond everybody else in most respects. Especially given that we design most of the technology that the rest of the world uses (even manufacture most of it as well - though assembly is another matter,) which in itself necessitates mathematics as well as physics. So who are the ones ultimately doing poorly in all of this?
Most Americans scored poorly on the tests; those same Americans aren't the ones who designs all that technology. America's engineers are a tiny subset of the population, and most likely scored quite well on the test. The vast majority of Americans don't work as engineers or scientists or anything of the sort, they work in service jobs.
Wow, what an utterly stupid analogy.
Placing a gun to someone's head is illegal, for good reason.
Shutting down the government is perfectly legal; it's part of the way the government works and is designed. Therefore, it's a valid tactic. The whole idea is to prevent the majority from running roughshod over the minority; if the minority gets pissed off enough, they can throw a wrench into the works and shut everything down to force a negotiation.
It IS a valid negotiation tactic. When you want something, and need to negotiate with someone to get it, anything that's in your power is fair game. Shutting down the government is available, since it's part of the broken way our system of government is set up, so as long as that's the case, it's perfectly valid to use it. It's not just the Republicans; the Democrats did the exact same thing 8 times during Reagan's term IIRC. If you don't like it, then maybe you should fix the government (probably through a Constitutional Amendment) so it isn't possible any more. Other nations don't have this problem.
The thing that has yet to be seen is how this negotiation tactic works out for the Dems and the Reps at the next election. It could go either way; each side is trying to spin it to their advantage. Obama is doing everything he can to piss off American voters (shutting down memorials, shutting down the ocean, etc.), hoping they'll blame it all the Republicans, using the excuse "the Republicans made me do it!!", which seems to be his usual excuse for everything. The Republicans are using Obama's actions to show how horrible Obama is, even though they forced the shutdown. If more Americans believe Obama and blame the Reps, then Dems might take over the House. However, if they get pissed off about all the truly unnecessary closures which Obama has really done just to piss everyone off, then the Dems will lose seats, maybe lose control of the Senate, and probably (if people don't forget fast enough) the 2016 election too.
Maybe old mercury-bulb thermometers, but modern electronic temperature sensors are all easily accurate to 1 degree or less.
This is yet more proof that Obama is utterly corrupt. He vetoes a ban on Apple's products but not on Samsung's. How much more blatant can you get?
So what we need to do, then, is to create a guild to monopolize IT services and programming. We'll call it the "Coding Guild". Then members of this guild can have different titles, such as "Guild Programmer", "Guild Administrator", "Guild Architect", "Guild Tester" (sometimes called "Guild Testsman"), etc. And we can even have a handy slogan: "He who controls the code, controls life."
0F is where brine freezes, so that's when you can expect that salty slush on the road to become dangerous. As for ice on the road at 0, that's wrong too (as you pointed out); roads may be colder than the air which your thermometer is reading, which is why ice alarms built into cars equipped with them are set to trigger a few degrees warmer than that.
All the weather forecasts I ever see have two significant digits, in Fahrenheit, and they don't round to the nearest even number. That means that you'd need three significant digits in Celsius to get the same level of accuracy (or at least, you'd have to round to the nearest 0.5 degree).
For you maybe. I lived way too many summers with temperatures of 115 and up, and I'll never do it again. I've also lived in the humid south. I'll take 95 and humid any time over 115. I think Phoenix residents have had their brains boiled too long and don't realize how bad it is any more. Finally, it isn't that dry in Phoenix anyway, not with everyone constantly watering their lawn in the middle of the day and having swimming pools and water features. It's actually pretty humid.
ease of conversion to K is one
This is really quite useless to 99.999% of the population. Who ever does that? Maybe a few scientists, and they're surely doing many other much more complex calculations in their work than a simple degF->K conversion, which you can do on Google.
I can't think of any others, and honestly neither of those outweighs the cost of trying to switch.
Exactly. I agree completely.
for instance, where I live, the range of 30-120 F
Lemme guess, you either live in Phoenix or Vegas. I stand by my previous statement: if it's over 100F, it's way too hot. I got the hell out of Phoenix last year and hope I never experience 100+ temperatures again in my life. Humans have no place in that environment.
Yeah, so what? When was the last time someone read the temperature off the local weather report and converted it to Kelvins? Anyone who would have an interest in doing that for some reason would surely have the intelligence to do an accurate unit conversion between degF and K (it's not hard, you can just type it into Google).
How long does it take to say "25.5" versus "78"? The extra decimal place is extremely awkward in colloquial speech.