If we had intelligent inspections in this country, it shouldn't be a problem: an amateur builder should be able to get a DMV inspection of his/her car and that should be one of the rules for EVs or home-built hybrids. In many states, they already have special inspections for home-built cars, where a DMV person will do a basic safety check. Considering how few people actually make home-built cars of any kind, it really shouldn't be that hard to have one competent DMV person in every metro area able to do such an inspection with an appointment. Note that I'm talking about a one-time road-worthiness inspection, when the amateur builder is applying for a license plate and registration for his vehicle, not the annual safety inspection that some states require and is usually done at independent businesses.
I thought the hybrid cars usually had any high-voltage wires encased in a specially-colored jacket. It should be simple enough for amateur builders to do the same.
It's been a while since I was involved in electric motors, but can't you design the low-speed motor to be highly efficient by simply adding more poles?
No, it's a $100 project and that's it. The saw doesn't count, because it can be reused on other projects. It affects the economics of the whole operation, sure, but not the cost of that one project. Besides, if you want to really be cheap, you can go buy a used saw on Craigslist, use that to do your project, then if you don't need the saw any more, resell it on Craigslist for the same amount you paid for it.
We have tests, but they're a complete joke. My driving test was: pull out of parking space in corner strip mall, take right turn onto public road, take right turn at traffic light 100 feet away, take another right turn in 100 feet back into the strip mall parking lot, park.
And that's just for people who bother to get a license. There's tons of unlicensed and uninsured drivers. There's little penalty for being an unlicensed driver. I have a mentally disabled cousin who's never had a license, and he drives.
That's weird, I've never had trouble leaving my helmet out in public here in the USA. And we can buy our helmets in frickin' Walmart of all places. This is in a country where it's absolutely dangerous to ride a bike on public roads because the drivers are so bad.
Do you really have that much of a problem with petty theft in Sweden that you can't leave anything unchained without some hooligan stealing it? How do you leave your bike out without worrying about it being stolen in that case? It's easy to cut through a bike chain.
Why don't you just leave the helmet with the bike? You can buy helmets for $20-30 these days. And who on earth would steal one? That's like stealing someone's hat; it's gross. If you're worried about it, get a Sharpie and write: "WARNING: HEAD LICE" on it.
Interestingly, my girlfriend in college had her bicycle stolen. It was some crappy bike, and she had left her helmet (a new model) on it. They took the bike, but the threw the helmet on the ground. There's no money in used bike helmets.
Could it be those people are actually smarter or better at driving,
Yes, absolutely. What makes you think this isn't the case?
In the US, everyone drives. There are no exclusions for lack of ability or aptitude or even intelligence. I have a cousin who's mentally retarded and drives. No, he doesn't have a license, never did. He still drives; there's no law enforcement to stop him. Whenever he gets caught, there's a slap on the wrist and he keeps driving. Everyone in the US drives because there's little viable public transit, and tons of sprawl, so for many jobs there's no choice.
In Europe, this isn't the case. Gas is incredibly expensive there, and cities are denser and people use public transit a lot more (and in Denmark apparently, 1/3 of commuters use bicycles). So people don't absolutely need to drive in many places in Europe; it's perfectly feasible to not own a car there and still have a good career. This means the idiots and others who can't handle driving simply don't. This isn't the case here in the USA; even the people who can't get a job more challenging than being a Walmart greeter have to drive themselves to work.
It's just like wearing a seatbelt. What kind of moron doesn't wear a seatbelt these days while riding in a car? Bicycling, like driving, involves speeds and (in the case of accident) impact forces the human body was never designed to withstand, so safety equipment is important.
Oh, I realize the irony. I wouldn't want to live in those places, are you kidding? But despite the corruption problems, having a server there would surely be safer than having it America. The US government, under request of the MAFIAA, can easily and quickly shut down any server it doesn't like within its own borders, but doing so in Russia is a lot harder (and apparently involves some bribery).
The other poster here was right: you want your servers to be located in some country different from your own country, and different from the country you're pissing off (most likely the US), and for best safety you want to be living in a separate country than those two as well.
Mod up! This is a big part of it. Americans are assholes by nature; it's part of our culture.
Also, don't forget that in America (except a few places like NYC), everyone has a car, even if they're mentally disabled. In Japan, lots of people don't have cars, and just use public transit. People who are too dumb to drive don't have to drive there.
Being on the road isn't safe. Drivers are morons; that's what we get by allowing anyone and everyone to pilot a car, without any regard to skill or aptitude.
Of course, I forgot to reply to the more-important point in your post; I agree entirely about spreading things out between countries: stay out of the country you're pissing off, and keep the servers in a different country from that country and the one you're in. That seems like the safest way.
I'm American, but I wouldn't have thought my reaction typical for my countrymen. This place is full of highly reactionary people; if someone asked me "which country has the most laid-back people", America is definitely not the first to come to mind. We're not nearly as bad as, for instance, Egypt or Libya or Pakistan by any means, but definitely not as level-headed as Canadians. Of course, people seem to get upset easily about something anywhere you go. In the middle east, you just have to draw a picture of Mohammed and people are rioting and burning things. In Europe, you just need to have a soccer match. In Canada, you just need a hockey game. In America, you just need to have a gay rights parade or pass a law forbidding parents from sending their gay kids to brainwashing camps.
Ok, if not Russia, who then? How about China? They're not as totally corrupt as Russia, and probably aren't too keen on western companies poking around with their legal system.
Seems like Iran should be a better place to host such sites (than it is; they're not very open with their internet connections). They'd be happy to thumb their noses at the US authorities and copyright holders.
Don't forget, the other thing you have to take into account is the level of enforcement. China, for instance, professes strong protections for IP. But everyone knows that's a total joke. So IP laws don't necessarily equate to actual IP enforcement (particularly in response to claims by foreign copyright holders).
What I want to know is why sites like this keep trying to locate in unfriendly countries. Why not put them in someplace safe, like Russia? Is the bandwidth there a big problem or something?
And yes I know, Russia isn't exactly a big fan of free speech either, but they don't give two shits about IP laws and certainly not about protecting American IP. If you put something on your servers that criticizes Putin, sure you'll get shut down. But if you put up tons of pirated American media for people to download (let alone simply torrents), they're not going to care, instead they'd welcome the business.
I think he was suggesting blowjobs for the employees. However, if he's talking about having management provide them, that's a big no-go. I doubt many people here would be interested in getting serviced like that by their manager. What a horrible thought.
There's nothing sexist about his non-serious off-color comment. There are escort services for women, you know (which provide well-muscled men for them to spend time with). There's lots of older women that use these services, probably because their husbands have gotten fat and bald and aren't interested in sex any more or depend on Viagra to get it up.
If his job is anything like the last job I had, there's no place to put a door that locks, because he's in an "open work area", which upper management has decreed because it "improves collaboration". Basically, the OP needs to stop complaining about his situation, and spin it to his bosses in a new way: that he's spending 4 hours a day "collaborating" with other teams about work to be done, and then spending 1 hour/day actually working. They'll probably give him a giant raise when they see this.
Well higher salary at least is often not a good long term incentive.
Sure it is. But it isn't an incentive by itself; it's useful when you combine it with using that high salary to attract more-productive people, and have some kind of process for weeding out the less-productive people. A higher salary won't automatically turn a less-productive person into a star performer, however, if you only pay crappy salaries, you're not going to attract the star performers, and any that you do have are going to ditch your job for a better one that pays better.
American houses are generally built with VERY sound-conducting walls. Which also have approximately zero thermal insulation effectiveness.
Newer houses, made of timer framing (preferably 2x6, for thicker walls) and high R-value insulation, actually do quite well, along with double- or triple-pane windows. Many of these are also rather quiet inside, since the properties for thermal and acoustical insulation overlap a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of older houses (only a few decades old in fact) are much more poorly made as far as insulating value; back in the 60s and before, they didn't have any real insulation at all, and windows were just cheap single-pane windows with little or no insulating ability or weatherproofing. People laud the craftsmanship of much older houses (100+ years), and in fact those houses were made well, but they didn't know the first thing about making a house energy-efficient back in those days so these days they have to be extensively renovated to be livable.
I've lived in Russia where all houses have thick walls (because of these pesky -40C winters)
We have temperatures that cold too, in the midwest/central states like Minnesota and North Dakota.
You can't block all the noise (especially low-frequency road noise), of course.
Yep, so no matter what you do, big diesel trucks are still going to be annoying.
And you also need to get rid of assholes.
How are we supposed to do that? The term "ugly American" exists for a reason.
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If we had intelligent inspections in this country, it shouldn't be a problem: an amateur builder should be able to get a DMV inspection of his/her car and that should be one of the rules for EVs or home-built hybrids. In many states, they already have special inspections for home-built cars, where a DMV person will do a basic safety check. Considering how few people actually make home-built cars of any kind, it really shouldn't be that hard to have one competent DMV person in every metro area able to do such an inspection with an appointment. Note that I'm talking about a one-time road-worthiness inspection, when the amateur builder is applying for a license plate and registration for his vehicle, not the annual safety inspection that some states require and is usually done at independent businesses.
I thought the hybrid cars usually had any high-voltage wires encased in a specially-colored jacket. It should be simple enough for amateur builders to do the same.
It's been a while since I was involved in electric motors, but can't you design the low-speed motor to be highly efficient by simply adding more poles?
No, it's a $100 project and that's it. The saw doesn't count, because it can be reused on other projects. It affects the economics of the whole operation, sure, but not the cost of that one project. Besides, if you want to really be cheap, you can go buy a used saw on Craigslist, use that to do your project, then if you don't need the saw any more, resell it on Craigslist for the same amount you paid for it.
Exactly, it is a shame. It'd be nice if we did.
We have tests, but they're a complete joke. My driving test was: pull out of parking space in corner strip mall, take right turn onto public road, take right turn at traffic light 100 feet away, take another right turn in 100 feet back into the strip mall parking lot, park.
And that's just for people who bother to get a license. There's tons of unlicensed and uninsured drivers. There's little penalty for being an unlicensed driver. I have a mentally disabled cousin who's never had a license, and he drives.
That's weird, I've never had trouble leaving my helmet out in public here in the USA. And we can buy our helmets in frickin' Walmart of all places. This is in a country where it's absolutely dangerous to ride a bike on public roads because the drivers are so bad.
Do you really have that much of a problem with petty theft in Sweden that you can't leave anything unchained without some hooligan stealing it? How do you leave your bike out without worrying about it being stolen in that case? It's easy to cut through a bike chain.
Why don't you just leave the helmet with the bike? You can buy helmets for $20-30 these days. And who on earth would steal one? That's like stealing someone's hat; it's gross. If you're worried about it, get a Sharpie and write: "WARNING: HEAD LICE" on it.
Interestingly, my girlfriend in college had her bicycle stolen. It was some crappy bike, and she had left her helmet (a new model) on it. They took the bike, but the threw the helmet on the ground. There's no money in used bike helmets.
Could it be those people are actually smarter or better at driving,
Yes, absolutely. What makes you think this isn't the case?
In the US, everyone drives. There are no exclusions for lack of ability or aptitude or even intelligence. I have a cousin who's mentally retarded and drives. No, he doesn't have a license, never did. He still drives; there's no law enforcement to stop him. Whenever he gets caught, there's a slap on the wrist and he keeps driving. Everyone in the US drives because there's little viable public transit, and tons of sprawl, so for many jobs there's no choice.
In Europe, this isn't the case. Gas is incredibly expensive there, and cities are denser and people use public transit a lot more (and in Denmark apparently, 1/3 of commuters use bicycles). So people don't absolutely need to drive in many places in Europe; it's perfectly feasible to not own a car there and still have a good career. This means the idiots and others who can't handle driving simply don't. This isn't the case here in the USA; even the people who can't get a job more challenging than being a Walmart greeter have to drive themselves to work.
It's just like wearing a seatbelt. What kind of moron doesn't wear a seatbelt these days while riding in a car? Bicycling, like driving, involves speeds and (in the case of accident) impact forces the human body was never designed to withstand, so safety equipment is important.
Oh, I realize the irony. I wouldn't want to live in those places, are you kidding? But despite the corruption problems, having a server there would surely be safer than having it America. The US government, under request of the MAFIAA, can easily and quickly shut down any server it doesn't like within its own borders, but doing so in Russia is a lot harder (and apparently involves some bribery).
The other poster here was right: you want your servers to be located in some country different from your own country, and different from the country you're pissing off (most likely the US), and for best safety you want to be living in a separate country than those two as well.
Mod up! This is a big part of it. Americans are assholes by nature; it's part of our culture.
Also, don't forget that in America (except a few places like NYC), everyone has a car, even if they're mentally disabled. In Japan, lots of people don't have cars, and just use public transit. People who are too dumb to drive don't have to drive there.
Being on the road isn't safe. Drivers are morons; that's what we get by allowing anyone and everyone to pilot a car, without any regard to skill or aptitude.
Of course, I forgot to reply to the more-important point in your post; I agree entirely about spreading things out between countries: stay out of the country you're pissing off, and keep the servers in a different country from that country and the one you're in. That seems like the safest way.
I'm American, but I wouldn't have thought my reaction typical for my countrymen. This place is full of highly reactionary people; if someone asked me "which country has the most laid-back people", America is definitely not the first to come to mind. We're not nearly as bad as, for instance, Egypt or Libya or Pakistan by any means, but definitely not as level-headed as Canadians. Of course, people seem to get upset easily about something anywhere you go. In the middle east, you just have to draw a picture of Mohammed and people are rioting and burning things. In Europe, you just need to have a soccer match. In Canada, you just need a hockey game. In America, you just need to have a gay rights parade or pass a law forbidding parents from sending their gay kids to brainwashing camps.
Ok, if not Russia, who then? How about China? They're not as totally corrupt as Russia, and probably aren't too keen on western companies poking around with their legal system.
My big question here is: if you're hosting who-knows-what, how much disk space does this end up using on your machine, to be part of Tor?
Seems like Iran should be a better place to host such sites (than it is; they're not very open with their internet connections). They'd be happy to thumb their noses at the US authorities and copyright holders.
Don't forget, the other thing you have to take into account is the level of enforcement. China, for instance, professes strong protections for IP. But everyone knows that's a total joke. So IP laws don't necessarily equate to actual IP enforcement (particularly in response to claims by foreign copyright holders).
What I want to know is why sites like this keep trying to locate in unfriendly countries. Why not put them in someplace safe, like Russia? Is the bandwidth there a big problem or something?
And yes I know, Russia isn't exactly a big fan of free speech either, but they don't give two shits about IP laws and certainly not about protecting American IP. If you put something on your servers that criticizes Putin, sure you'll get shut down. But if you put up tons of pirated American media for people to download (let alone simply torrents), they're not going to care, instead they'd welcome the business.
What society in it's right mind would support the hyper sexism you're talking about?
US society is exactly like that. However, I don't think it qualifies for "in its right mind".
I think he was suggesting blowjobs for the employees. However, if he's talking about having management provide them, that's a big no-go. I doubt many people here would be interested in getting serviced like that by their manager. What a horrible thought.
There's nothing sexist about his non-serious off-color comment. There are escort services for women, you know (which provide well-muscled men for them to spend time with). There's lots of older women that use these services, probably because their husbands have gotten fat and bald and aren't interested in sex any more or depend on Viagra to get it up.
If his job is anything like the last job I had, there's no place to put a door that locks, because he's in an "open work area", which upper management has decreed because it "improves collaboration". Basically, the OP needs to stop complaining about his situation, and spin it to his bosses in a new way: that he's spending 4 hours a day "collaborating" with other teams about work to be done, and then spending 1 hour/day actually working. They'll probably give him a giant raise when they see this.
Well higher salary at least is often not a good long term incentive.
Sure it is. But it isn't an incentive by itself; it's useful when you combine it with using that high salary to attract more-productive people, and have some kind of process for weeding out the less-productive people. A higher salary won't automatically turn a less-productive person into a star performer, however, if you only pay crappy salaries, you're not going to attract the star performers, and any that you do have are going to ditch your job for a better one that pays better.
American houses are generally built with VERY sound-conducting walls. Which also have approximately zero thermal insulation effectiveness.
Newer houses, made of timer framing (preferably 2x6, for thicker walls) and high R-value insulation, actually do quite well, along with double- or triple-pane windows. Many of these are also rather quiet inside, since the properties for thermal and acoustical insulation overlap a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of older houses (only a few decades old in fact) are much more poorly made as far as insulating value; back in the 60s and before, they didn't have any real insulation at all, and windows were just cheap single-pane windows with little or no insulating ability or weatherproofing. People laud the craftsmanship of much older houses (100+ years), and in fact those houses were made well, but they didn't know the first thing about making a house energy-efficient back in those days so these days they have to be extensively renovated to be livable.
I've lived in Russia where all houses have thick walls (because of these pesky -40C winters)
We have temperatures that cold too, in the midwest/central states like Minnesota and North Dakota.
You can't block all the noise (especially low-frequency road noise), of course.
Yep, so no matter what you do, big diesel trucks are still going to be annoying.
And you also need to get rid of assholes.
How are we supposed to do that? The term "ugly American" exists for a reason.