I'm becoming more and more disappointed in home security systems. And this just makes it worse. "smart" home monitoring systems seem to provide all of the features that security systems were designed to eliminate long ago.
Did I leave the oven on?
The whole purpose of an alarm system isn't to be able to monitor my own home.
Did I leave the oven on?
The purpose of an alarm system isn't to be able to check on my posessions, children, dog, or delivery man.
Did I leave the oven on?
The purpose of an alarm system, is for someone else to monitor my home.
Did I leave the oven on?
The purpose of an alarm system is specifically to NOT worry about my home when I'm away.
Did you leave the oven on?
Constantly caring (i.e. worrying) about my home when I'm away means that I'm not really away. That's always been considered an O.C.D. disorder -- not being able to let go and relax. I have an alarm system. If someone trips it, the monitoring company will call me. So long as the monitoring company doesn't call me, I'm happy on vacation. "Piece of mind" doesn't come from checking every ten minutes. It's comes from not checking at all.
If you're going to build your own alarm system, make sure you put a sensor inside the oven.
Quite the contrary. 6'000 left ready to start their own business. They've been complaining for years that big box stores are squeezing out small business owners. They chose to work for a big company. No one ever said that the big company had any moral interest in paying them.
What a great opportunity to open their own store. Not like it's hard to start. Every business does.
I could care less about wifi radiation. In my mind, it's fine. But that's not the point here. There are plenty of things in this world, fully legal, regulation-approved, and with no proof of toxicity that are, in every sense of the word, completely toxic.
We've had bright and shiny paint based on uranium. A century later, we've had bright and shiny paint based on lead. We've had nonstick coatings with toxic fumes. We've had cigarettes that were thought to be safe for decades. Pesticides. Estrogyn-mimicking plastics. Countless drugs and treatments -- thalidimyde, blood-letting, witamins. Heck, even normal ordinary pollution. We've had all sorts of dangers unknown until they were known.
The point is that it takes time, often decades, to actually prove that something is toxic over the long term. Big surprise, you require a long term experiment to prove a long term result.
But that doesn't make the early skeptics incorrect when there wasn't proof. It actually makes them correct retroactively.
I'm not saying that these parents are correct. I'm saying that 100 years from now, they may have been correct. And because that's a possibility, and this is their own children for decades of schooling, they have every right to control that environment.
I'm in (near) a giant city -- 8 million people -- with a very well-known international airport, as you would imagine. Also as you would imagine, airport security is what it is: completely housed inside the building.
My friend used to say that from the roof of the parking garage -- outside of airport security -- you're only about 200 yards from the runway. Any number of weapons can take out a plane from that distance. But it got worse a couple of years ago, twice.
On the way to a business client meeting, at their offices, we drove past the airport. A chain-link fence, with many cameras, separates the end of the runway from the public road -- and by public, I mean a desolate side-road used to drive around the airport by six people per hour, mainly employees of the airport to get to their back-hanger parking lots. Airplanes taxi right by this fence -- so you're within about 50 yards of a full passenger plane waiting to take off.
We figured that maybe the cameras are heavily monitored, and that someone would noticed if we parked for even thirty seconds. Ok, fine.
Five minutes later, we got to the client's office. Their parking lot is within a typical commercial/industrial complex of offices and warehouses of ordinary businesses. As we readied for the meeting, we discovered that this parking lot is directly beneath the landing slope for the runway. By that I mean that every 97 seconds (during rush hour) another giant jet is landing directly overhead -- and it's landing, wheels-down, about 100 yards overhead.
Forget bottle-rockets, how about a helium baloon with some red paint? It'd be hard to miss, considering the steady stream of air traffic. And it'd be hard to be seen, surrounded by a two-storey office complex. And it'd be easy to leave, considering the three major freeways within a 30-second drive.
But I still need to show up two hours early to take off my shoes.
It's always been the case that a more advanced foe can be defeated by a much simpler foe through indirect attacks on infrastructure, acruing nothing more than a huge expense for the advanced foe. This is no different.
You can't possibly defend something like the power grids we have today. It's just not possible. They are large, they are disparate, they are expensive, they are sensitive. What's more, they are each vital and completely non-redundant. And they are also literally everywhere. You can take out a curb-side box in seconds with a pickup truck, and kill power to a neighbourhood for a day.
No one's going to build the redundancy to withstand any destruction -- it's simply far too expensive.
But that's true of all centralized systems based on distribution -- which includes gasolene, by the way. That's actually the advantage of a centralized system. No kidding it doesn't stand up to warfare.
So, start supporting neighbourhood nuclear mini-reactors -- like your neighbourhood water towers -- or a bus-load of solar panels per house. Anything less won't be redundant, and hence will be easily attacked.
Specifically, when riding the bus to and from work and grocery shopping, I'd recommend doing two things: a) absolutely nothing. call it relaxing, call it meditating, call it thinking about life, turning off, or being creative. You don't require continuous stimulation. b) talk to the many humans around you. it's friendly, it's pleasant, it'll teach you to be comfortable with people, no one's out to get you, and you'll make a friend or two.
I didn't say they have zero users. I said that those users don't read full-length articles on a 4" screen. I've tried, it's not pretty. Take a full-length, five paper-page article/essay/commentary, with two pictures, and try to read it 4" at a time. What you'll note is the intense excitement of using your phone and being able to do it, but zero excitement for the actual content of the article, if you even manage to remember what it was. It makes reading such things a task/job to complete. Reading hasn't been that difficult since grade 1.
On a 7" tablet, yes that strip is fine. With three frame across 6" (not diagonally), each frame is 2 inches wide. Smaller than my desktop, but still totally readable. Not true for a 4" phone. Also not true for a 9-frame sunday strip, which won't fit onto the 7" tablet either.
My very first computer, an AT machine, with the big red power toggle, with two big beige powder-coated metal enclosures, one for the 20MB hard drive (yes, that's twenty megs, not gigs) and one for the orange and black thirty-pound monitor that hissed most of the time, had 14" of screen -- and that was at 4:3, so it was much larger than 16:9. You're asking me to spend time reading something on a tablet that's about a quarter the size of the very first computer I used as a 6 year-old -- or a phone that's a quarter of that size again! I'm not going to read at 35 on a screen smaller than my 6 year-old self used.
Do you know how many iphone screens I can fit on my desktop screens right now? Here's a hint, it's actually more than 150! It looks really pathetic when I use it tiled as desktop wallpaper.
Look at it this way. Count the amount of time it takes you to read that full length article on the bus, and remember what it says. I promise you it'll take so much longer that you'll eventually conclude it'll be faster to just wait until I get to a desk.
That's why desks were invented. They are designed for productivity.
it is your fault. you didn't need to choose to access the web from your mobile anything at all. I have.
And the OP asked why. The b2b is why, not only for every b2b client, but also for non b2b clients hiring developers who specialize in b2b, like me. The profit value simply isn't there on either side of that equasion.
Even my non-b2b clients would prefer to spend their budgets on additional features before spending it on a slick mobile site. Again, if the phone can see the phone number, that's sufficient for most of my non-b2b clients too. I've been doing this for 21 years now, and I've only wound up building two mobile versions of sites. Two.
You may also be forgetting that some general-public sites simply can't be used from a mobile phone. Large product manuals and lengthy text documents simply can't be read by a human being on a small screen. So it doesn't matter who the user is, there's no point in giving them a slick way of accessing a document that they won't be able to read anyway.
So, by the time you're done, there's very little left. If I told you that no one buys a kitchen appliance from a tiny photo on a phone, and no one reads a newspaper article from their phone, then how many businesses are left? You'll have a hard time listing any real number of businesses that can get away with a user reading only one paragraph at a time, and seeing nothing but thumbnails. No comparison charts, no diagrams, no detailed photos. Nothing where two users are visiting together, nothing with good sound.
Congrats, I guess geocities would work nicely. I meant myspace. I meant facebook. I meant 140 characters of quips.
You can't even read a garfield comic on most phones today. So really, what's the point?
The day before you purchased your mobile device, desktop browsers were rather rich in features and real estate and speed. But your mobile device, for all sorts of legitimate and illegitimate reasons isn't anywhere near as good as a desktop browser.
So first, you're asking me to build an alternative version of a site that's lesser in quality, functionality, and features. At some level, you chose the lesser browser, you get the lesser experience. It's not my fault that you chose a tiny screen on a slow computer.
Second, 90% of my business comes from people at other businesses. That means they are working at a desk with a proper desktop browser. I know, they *could* be working not at a desk, but the desk wasn't invented for the desktop computer. It was invented for the pen and paper -- which was always mobile. It's the desk where those people are the most productive, and that's where they are when they use/purchase my services.
Third, and this might be the big one, WAP. Remember WAP? Today, it's the perfect example. Hey, look, your site can work on mobile phones, in black and white, slow, and tiny, but mobile! Yeah, that lasted a good ten minutes. Every generation of mobile device has been shorter than the one before it. My clients are really not interested in dedicating funds to something for six months of indirect benefits. These are real-world businesses (as opposed to on-line services), if it's not profitable within one year for two years, then it's simply not better than the many other ways te spend the budget. It's that simple.
So, in summary, a) lesser and smaller isn't a better corporate image than your-device-breaks-it; b) my b2b customers are at a desk; c) it'll be totally different (and likely better on its own) in a few months so the value of changing it now simply isn't there.
Most of clients find that as long as the mobile device can read the majority of the content, and the phone number, that's enough.
now I can watch, again, as people pay for nutritional supplements instead of just getting a dog. I love it when people spend hard-earned money specifically to avoid an enjoyable lifestyle. Live it up robot. Enjoy your more productive work life. Again. It's totally wasted on you.
I agree that the spying is necessary, and I agree that the crossing that line is a reasonable cost of the system.
I'm not happy about it, but I agree that the state of affairs would be much more expensive to tax payers to avoid my meta data.
But that doesn't mean you need to store it for decades. So how about this: you have ten days to accuse me of something. After that, you get to permanently destroy anything you have on me.
I'll even extend that to fingerprints and dna and blood. You want to "rule me out" as a possible suspect? No problem. But then you don't get to keep me on file such that I can come up later, by accident or otherwise.
And here's the thing. We can easily build it into your current laws under the fourth ammendment. The ten-day-old data requires a search warrant to have, the present-day data doesn't. Done. Then you can easily fight illegal search and siezure after-the-fact if you're ever accused based on old data.
Slavery was always cheaper than actually paying employees. Abusing employees' cars, destroying the batteries and wearing down the electronics in a never-ending charging loop every work day is obviously cheaper than buying your own batteries.
Cradle to grave is always a very different calculation -- one that most people never make.
Just stop begging me for money with disease-riddled children, starving, with bugs on their faces, and open wounds, on the food network. Basic farming never needed the space age. I'll give you as many seeds as you like. Grow'em, or walk until you can. It's been decades of your begging. I just don't care anymore.
calculus isn't a "basic understanding" of anything.
curriculum takes ten years to change, and acts on ten-year-old information, to teach children who won't enter society for ten years. So your children are educated thirty years behind the curve.
and still, the opportunity costs are huge for all of this. you're forgetting about the opportunity costs.
The chances are about 10% that he's entirely wrong, and about 20% that he's a little wrong, for something like this. You'd probably be surprised if you ever actually gathered the success rate of these sorts of things. That's why the headline is incorrect. It's not conclusive. It's speculative. Good speculation, but still totally non-conclusive.
"from space, we think this might be a very cold place, but we really have no freakin' clue what goes on there, since we've never been anywhere near it, and we don't intend to ever go there"
thanks for the guess. I don't care. Let me know when you discover that the standing air you said gets colder over time actually holds its heat, and that's why you didn't sense any of it from space. let me know when you discover the next in a long line of mysterious and unimaginable natural phenomena that changes every measurement you've ever made -- again.
stop reporting evidence as proof, please. the two are totally and completely independent.
chemistry, physics, calculus, algebra, geometry, statistics, computers, shop, gym, literature, english, psychology, biology, law, history, second language, philosophy, economics, geography, civilization, environmental science, government/politics, world studies, home economics, engineering, fine arts, graphic design, programming.
everything's an opportunity cost, and many skills interfere and even conflict with other skills. my question to you is this: how many of your adult friends don't know how to cook dinner for themselves? How many can't manage their own finances? How many can't build a shelf for their bedroom or a set of cubbies for their children? How many can't clean their own homes? How many can't read a weather map, understand a shakespeare play, or convert between basic units of measure? How many don't know where hawaii is, how to plug in a computer, or count the first ten prime numbers?
Everything has merit and value. That's never the point. You're not learning "everything". The question is what has relative merit and value. And what you'll find is that those people who've been taught the most, can't keep most of it straight enough to use it at all.
A simple blue-collar never-learned-anything-but-a-hammer-and-a-screw-driver can build just about anything small in his home. All by himself, on a whim, quickly. Furniture, shelves, decks, christmas decorations, you name it. The guy who spent thirty years in school, including shop classes, has far more money in his pocket, and far fewer shelves in his home. So he hires the first guy to make things. The first guy is always happy, except when he's short on money. The second guy is always stressed, despite having money.
I was the second guy. It's taken me five years, but now I'm much closer to the first guy. It'll take me another few years of "learning", but I'll get there.
You'll find that most people don't tend to have either in their home, let alone choose to mix them. Either way, the opportunity cost is incredibly high.
Basically, once again, the education system is a good 20 years behind the curve. Not surprising at all. It likes to pump out blue-collar workers. It always has.
You'd think that by 2014 this would be a very obvious requirement for any student to take. Certainly far more useful than chemistry and certainly way sooner than physics.
At the same time, I'm stunned that anyone would setup a situation where students are forced to have this as a requirement. There are many jobs/lifestyles that don't require any skills of this kind, and in which these sorts of skills are actually detrimental to those industries.
Basically, this looks a lot like 1980's algebra. Really incredibly valuable in 10% of the highest and most popular industries, and hence being pushed into schools. The moment that balance changes, we'll have another useless calculus on our hands.
That's an unfair scenario. There could be many quality differences between enterprise and consumer drives that simply don't come up in their environment. I know when I make consumer and enterprise-grade objects, of course the consumer-grade objects work -- I don't build carp -- but the enterprise-grade work better. For many values of better. Most often, that better includes things like a wider temperature range, dirtier air, and more frequent and rougher shipping. Even my packaging is wildly different as a result. Better foam, larger boxes. Also interestingly stupid things like additional electrical certifications. And then there are emergency situations like easier repair, in this case data-rescue would be a major feature, as would fire and flood resistance..
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Did I leave the oven on?
I'm becoming more and more disappointed in home security systems. And this just makes it worse. "smart" home monitoring systems seem to provide all of the features that security systems were designed to eliminate long ago.
Did I leave the oven on?
The whole purpose of an alarm system isn't to be able to monitor my own home.
Did I leave the oven on?
The purpose of an alarm system isn't to be able to check on my posessions, children, dog, or delivery man.
Did I leave the oven on?
The purpose of an alarm system, is for someone else to monitor my home.
Did I leave the oven on?
The purpose of an alarm system is specifically to NOT worry about my home when I'm away.
Did you leave the oven on?
Constantly caring (i.e. worrying) about my home when I'm away means that I'm not really away. That's always been considered an O.C.D. disorder -- not being able to let go and relax. I have an alarm system. If someone trips it, the monitoring company will call me. So long as the monitoring company doesn't call me, I'm happy on vacation. "Piece of mind" doesn't come from checking every ten minutes. It's comes from not checking at all.
If you're going to build your own alarm system, make sure you put a sensor inside the oven.
with
be
Guy Fawkes
"6'000 left jobless; yea, that's a lot".
Quite the contrary. 6'000 left ready to start their own business. They've been complaining for years that big box stores are squeezing out small business owners. They chose to work for a big company. No one ever said that the big company had any moral interest in paying them.
What a great opportunity to open their own store. Not like it's hard to start. Every business does.
I could care less about wifi radiation. In my mind, it's fine. But that's not the point here. There are plenty of things in this world, fully legal, regulation-approved, and with no proof of toxicity that are, in every sense of the word, completely toxic.
We've had bright and shiny paint based on uranium. A century later, we've had bright and shiny paint based on lead. We've had nonstick coatings with toxic fumes. We've had cigarettes that were thought to be safe for decades. Pesticides. Estrogyn-mimicking plastics. Countless drugs and treatments -- thalidimyde, blood-letting, witamins. Heck, even normal ordinary pollution. We've had all sorts of dangers unknown until they were known.
The point is that it takes time, often decades, to actually prove that something is toxic over the long term. Big surprise, you require a long term experiment to prove a long term result.
But that doesn't make the early skeptics incorrect when there wasn't proof. It actually makes them correct retroactively.
I'm not saying that these parents are correct. I'm saying that 100 years from now, they may have been correct. And because that's a possibility, and this is their own children for decades of schooling, they have every right to control that environment.
And that makes them right.
I'm in (near) a giant city -- 8 million people -- with a very well-known international airport, as you would imagine. Also as you would imagine, airport security is what it is: completely housed inside the building.
My friend used to say that from the roof of the parking garage -- outside of airport security -- you're only about 200 yards from the runway. Any number of weapons can take out a plane from that distance. But it got worse a couple of years ago, twice.
On the way to a business client meeting, at their offices, we drove past the airport. A chain-link fence, with many cameras, separates the end of the runway from the public road -- and by public, I mean a desolate side-road used to drive around the airport by six people per hour, mainly employees of the airport to get to their back-hanger parking lots. Airplanes taxi right by this fence -- so you're within about 50 yards of a full passenger plane waiting to take off.
We figured that maybe the cameras are heavily monitored, and that someone would noticed if we parked for even thirty seconds. Ok, fine.
Five minutes later, we got to the client's office. Their parking lot is within a typical commercial/industrial complex of offices and warehouses of ordinary businesses. As we readied for the meeting, we discovered that this parking lot is directly beneath the landing slope for the runway. By that I mean that every 97 seconds (during rush hour) another giant jet is landing directly overhead -- and it's landing, wheels-down, about 100 yards overhead.
Forget bottle-rockets, how about a helium baloon with some red paint? It'd be hard to miss, considering the steady stream of air traffic. And it'd be hard to be seen, surrounded by a two-storey office complex. And it'd be easy to leave, considering the three major freeways within a 30-second drive.
But I still need to show up two hours early to take off my shoes.
It's always been the case that a more advanced foe can be defeated by a much simpler foe through indirect attacks on infrastructure, acruing nothing more than a huge expense for the advanced foe. This is no different.
You can't possibly defend something like the power grids we have today. It's just not possible. They are large, they are disparate, they are expensive, they are sensitive. What's more, they are each vital and completely non-redundant. And they are also literally everywhere. You can take out a curb-side box in seconds with a pickup truck, and kill power to a neighbourhood for a day.
No one's going to build the redundancy to withstand any destruction -- it's simply far too expensive.
But that's true of all centralized systems based on distribution -- which includes gasolene, by the way. That's actually the advantage of a centralized system. No kidding it doesn't stand up to warfare.
So, start supporting neighbourhood nuclear mini-reactors -- like your neighbourhood water towers -- or a bus-load of solar panels per house. Anything less won't be redundant, and hence will be easily attacked.
Specifically, when riding the bus to and from work and grocery shopping, I'd recommend doing two things: a) absolutely nothing. call it relaxing, call it meditating, call it thinking about life, turning off, or being creative. You don't require continuous stimulation. b) talk to the many humans around you. it's friendly, it's pleasant, it'll teach you to be comfortable with people, no one's out to get you, and you'll make a friend or two.
I didn't say they have zero users. I said that those users don't read full-length articles on a 4" screen. I've tried, it's not pretty. Take a full-length, five paper-page article/essay/commentary, with two pictures, and try to read it 4" at a time. What you'll note is the intense excitement of using your phone and being able to do it, but zero excitement for the actual content of the article, if you even manage to remember what it was. It makes reading such things a task/job to complete. Reading hasn't been that difficult since grade 1.
On a 7" tablet, yes that strip is fine. With three frame across 6" (not diagonally), each frame is 2 inches wide. Smaller than my desktop, but still totally readable. Not true for a 4" phone. Also not true for a 9-frame sunday strip, which won't fit onto the 7" tablet either.
My very first computer, an AT machine, with the big red power toggle, with two big beige powder-coated metal enclosures, one for the 20MB hard drive (yes, that's twenty megs, not gigs) and one for the orange and black thirty-pound monitor that hissed most of the time, had 14" of screen -- and that was at 4:3, so it was much larger than 16:9. You're asking me to spend time reading something on a tablet that's about a quarter the size of the very first computer I used as a 6 year-old -- or a phone that's a quarter of that size again! I'm not going to read at 35 on a screen smaller than my 6 year-old self used.
Do you know how many iphone screens I can fit on my desktop screens right now? Here's a hint, it's actually more than 150! It looks really pathetic when I use it tiled as desktop wallpaper.
Look at it this way. Count the amount of time it takes you to read that full length article on the bus, and remember what it says. I promise you it'll take so much longer that you'll eventually conclude it'll be faster to just wait until I get to a desk.
That's why desks were invented. They are designed for productivity.
it is your fault. you didn't need to choose to access the web from your mobile anything at all. I have.
And the OP asked why. The b2b is why, not only for every b2b client, but also for non b2b clients hiring developers who specialize in b2b, like me. The profit value simply isn't there on either side of that equasion.
Even my non-b2b clients would prefer to spend their budgets on additional features before spending it on a slick mobile site. Again, if the phone can see the phone number, that's sufficient for most of my non-b2b clients too. I've been doing this for 21 years now, and I've only wound up building two mobile versions of sites. Two.
You may also be forgetting that some general-public sites simply can't be used from a mobile phone. Large product manuals and lengthy text documents simply can't be read by a human being on a small screen. So it doesn't matter who the user is, there's no point in giving them a slick way of accessing a document that they won't be able to read anyway.
So, by the time you're done, there's very little left. If I told you that no one buys a kitchen appliance from a tiny photo on a phone, and no one reads a newspaper article from their phone, then how many businesses are left? You'll have a hard time listing any real number of businesses that can get away with a user reading only one paragraph at a time, and seeing nothing but thumbnails. No comparison charts, no diagrams, no detailed photos. Nothing where two users are visiting together, nothing with good sound.
Congrats, I guess geocities would work nicely. I meant myspace. I meant facebook. I meant 140 characters of quips.
You can't even read a garfield comic on most phones today. So really, what's the point?
The day before you purchased your mobile device, desktop browsers were rather rich in features and real estate and speed. But your mobile device, for all sorts of legitimate and illegitimate reasons isn't anywhere near as good as a desktop browser.
So first, you're asking me to build an alternative version of a site that's lesser in quality, functionality, and features. At some level, you chose the lesser browser, you get the lesser experience. It's not my fault that you chose a tiny screen on a slow computer.
Second, 90% of my business comes from people at other businesses. That means they are working at a desk with a proper desktop browser. I know, they *could* be working not at a desk, but the desk wasn't invented for the desktop computer. It was invented for the pen and paper -- which was always mobile. It's the desk where those people are the most productive, and that's where they are when they use/purchase my services.
Third, and this might be the big one, WAP. Remember WAP? Today, it's the perfect example. Hey, look, your site can work on mobile phones, in black and white, slow, and tiny, but mobile! Yeah, that lasted a good ten minutes. Every generation of mobile device has been shorter than the one before it. My clients are really not interested in dedicating funds to something for six months of indirect benefits. These are real-world businesses (as opposed to on-line services), if it's not profitable within one year for two years, then it's simply not better than the many other ways te spend the budget. It's that simple.
So, in summary, a) lesser and smaller isn't a better corporate image than your-device-breaks-it; b) my b2b customers are at a desk; c) it'll be totally different (and likely better on its own) in a few months so the value of changing it now simply isn't there.
Most of clients find that as long as the mobile device can read the majority of the content, and the phone number, that's enough.
I'm in. Great idea. What do you need from me? A customer? An investor? A researcher? A developer?
I don't understand what that is, nor why you're asking me..
wow.
now I can watch, again, as people pay for nutritional supplements instead of just getting a dog. I love it when people spend hard-earned money specifically to avoid an enjoyable lifestyle. Live it up robot. Enjoy your more productive work life. Again. It's totally wasted on you.
I agree that the spying is necessary, and I agree that the crossing that line is a reasonable cost of the system.
I'm not happy about it, but I agree that the state of affairs would be much more expensive to tax payers to avoid my meta data.
But that doesn't mean you need to store it for decades. So how about this: you have ten days to accuse me of something. After that, you get to permanently destroy anything you have on me.
I'll even extend that to fingerprints and dna and blood. You want to "rule me out" as a possible suspect? No problem. But then you don't get to keep me on file such that I can come up later, by accident or otherwise.
And here's the thing. We can easily build it into your current laws under the fourth ammendment. The ten-day-old data requires a search warrant to have, the present-day data doesn't. Done. Then you can easily fight illegal search and siezure after-the-fact if you're ever accused based on old data.
So that's my idea. It's been my idea for a while.
Slavery was always cheaper than actually paying employees. Abusing employees' cars, destroying the batteries and wearing down the electronics in a never-ending charging loop every work day is obviously cheaper than buying your own batteries.
Cradle to grave is always a very different calculation -- one that most people never make.
Just stop begging me for money with disease-riddled children, starving, with bugs on their faces, and open wounds, on the food network. Basic farming never needed the space age. I'll give you as many seeds as you like. Grow'em, or walk until you can. It's been decades of your begging. I just don't care anymore.
high school isn't grade school.
calculus isn't a "basic understanding" of anything.
curriculum takes ten years to change, and acts on ten-year-old information, to teach children who won't enter society for ten years. So your children are educated thirty years behind the curve.
and still, the opportunity costs are huge for all of this. you're forgetting about the opportunity costs.
The chances are about 10% that he's entirely wrong, and about 20% that he's a little wrong, for something like this. You'd probably be surprised if you ever actually gathered the success rate of these sorts of things. That's why the headline is incorrect. It's not conclusive. It's speculative. Good speculation, but still totally non-conclusive.
"from space, we think this might be a very cold place, but we really have no freakin' clue what goes on there, since we've never been anywhere near it, and we don't intend to ever go there"
thanks for the guess. I don't care. Let me know when you discover that the standing air you said gets colder over time actually holds its heat, and that's why you didn't sense any of it from space. let me know when you discover the next in a long line of mysterious and unimaginable natural phenomena that changes every measurement you've ever made -- again.
stop reporting evidence as proof, please. the two are totally and completely independent.
chemistry, physics, calculus, algebra, geometry, statistics, computers, shop, gym, literature, english, psychology, biology, law, history, second language, philosophy, economics, geography, civilization, environmental science, government/politics, world studies, home economics, engineering, fine arts, graphic design, programming.
everything's an opportunity cost, and many skills interfere and even conflict with other skills. my question to you is this: how many of your adult friends don't know how to cook dinner for themselves? How many can't manage their own finances? How many can't build a shelf for their bedroom or a set of cubbies for their children? How many can't clean their own homes? How many can't read a weather map, understand a shakespeare play, or convert between basic units of measure? How many don't know where hawaii is, how to plug in a computer, or count the first ten prime numbers?
Everything has merit and value. That's never the point. You're not learning "everything". The question is what has relative merit and value. And what you'll find is that those people who've been taught the most, can't keep most of it straight enough to use it at all.
A simple blue-collar never-learned-anything-but-a-hammer-and-a-screw-driver can build just about anything small in his home. All by himself, on a whim, quickly. Furniture, shelves, decks, christmas decorations, you name it. The guy who spent thirty years in school, including shop classes, has far more money in his pocket, and far fewer shelves in his home. So he hires the first guy to make things. The first guy is always happy, except when he's short on money. The second guy is always stressed, despite having money.
I was the second guy. It's taken me five years, but now I'm much closer to the first guy. It'll take me another few years of "learning", but I'll get there.
You'll find that most people don't tend to have either in their home, let alone choose to mix them. Either way, the opportunity cost is incredibly high.
Basically, once again, the education system is a good 20 years behind the curve. Not surprising at all. It likes to pump out blue-collar workers. It always has.
You'd think that by 2014 this would be a very obvious requirement for any student to take. Certainly far more useful than chemistry and certainly way sooner than physics.
At the same time, I'm stunned that anyone would setup a situation where students are forced to have this as a requirement. There are many jobs/lifestyles that don't require any skills of this kind, and in which these sorts of skills are actually detrimental to those industries.
Basically, this looks a lot like 1980's algebra. Really incredibly valuable in 10% of the highest and most popular industries, and hence being pushed into schools. The moment that balance changes, we'll have another useless calculus on our hands.
That's an unfair scenario. There could be many quality differences between enterprise and consumer drives that simply don't come up in their environment. I know when I make consumer and enterprise-grade objects, of course the consumer-grade objects work -- I don't build carp -- but the enterprise-grade work better. For many values of better. Most often, that better includes things like a wider temperature range, dirtier air, and more frequent and rougher shipping. Even my packaging is wildly different as a result. Better foam, larger boxes. Also interestingly stupid things like additional electrical certifications. And then there are emergency situations like easier repair, in this case data-rescue would be a major feature, as would fire and flood resistance..