Depends on if your suspension sucks. Mine doesn't. I cruise over speed bumps. The ones you need to watch out for are the really aggressive bumps. Those can be a problem. But I have a solution for that too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6J-QK1lw
Exactly... and it's not the weight that's an issue... it's the possibly an increase in traffic which should be more then countered by a relative increase in gasoline tax revenue, and other road related taxes... the vast majority of which should go to building and maintaining roads. I suspect that increasingly that isn't where the money is going... which is why our roads are resembling post apocalyptic cityscapes.
Not if you do it at night which is the only time you should ever do it.
Grocery stores restock at around 2AM. If they can get 20 guys to show up in a truck every night to unload and restock the shelves in a SINGLE store... I should think the city should be able to fill some god damn pot holes in the wee hours of the night. This is not complicated. It's obvious and easy.
Businesses across the country do disruptive things at night. Most server updates don't happen during business hours. They happen at midnight or 2 am.
If practically every business does this already, why can't the city? And don't give me that it's too many people. Think about how many people it takes to restock every grocery store in the city every night? That workforce ALONE dwarfs what the city would need to take care of pot holes several times over. And bargain grocery stores find the practice entirely economical.
The problem is not the asphalt. The problem is the city, the transit unions, and people that find it acceptable to leave pot holes unfilled for months on end.
Oh like cars in the 50s were light? Have you seen what a 1956 Cadillac looks like? It's an all steel boat on wheels. Don't tell me the cars today are too heavy. That's just whining. Yes, cars in the 1980s were lighter then today. They mostly got heavier when the safety standards were changed which required more steel reinforcement. That's like the utilities saying we use too much water or use too much electricity. We use less water per capita then we did 50 years ago and apparently we're still too wasteful for the local utilities.
Funny that this wasn't a problem 50 years ago. What changed? Oh, the population doubled a few times and they didn't build any new dams or aqueducts to handle the population increase. So is the problem really that we use too much water or that there are too many people in this region for the infrastructure to handle? See, if that's their game they should either restrict new construction once they hit saturation or they should... you know... maybe build some new facilities.
Sorry if I'm coming off crazy and angry... I'm just fed up with this stupid crap.
Fill the pot holes. Offer it on commission if you must. It will probably cost less that way. Just offer construction companies a flat rate to fill each hole. Magically the streets will be free of pot holes overnight as about thousand construction companies all run of in a thousand different directions and together fill all the potholes.
I love that they'll leave a stupid pothole unfilled for months sometimes on the grounds that they're thinking about doing roadwork soon. Never mind that the pot hole shouldn't cost more then a couple hundred bucks to fill max and that the damage done to cars in that time period is magnitudes of whatever the city is saving.
1. Don't loot the road maintenance budget to fund other projects. Next time you want to add a feature, put it on the ballot and tell everyone that taxes are going up to pay for it. And then take ONLY the EXTRA funds collected by the raise to pay for your project. Leave the existing programs alone or you'll starve them and they'll fall appart.
2. The queue is long because you don't fill any of the holes. They sit there for months. If you have so many holes that you leave them there for months then clearly you need more people filling the holes. Yes, that costs money. Like maybe the money that was set aside for road maintenance in the first place before it was looted. As to closing streets, do it at night. Why is it that public officials make average citizens look like rocket scientists? This shit is obvious. Lots of businesses do disruptive activities at night. For example, grocery stores restock goods at around 2AM so they don't disrupt customers during the day. Why close a busy street in the middle of rush hour to fill a pothole? Oh that's right, because the transit union charges extra for the night shift. Which is one of many reasons we shouldn't even have a transit union in the fist place. It should just be subcontracted to construction companies that are more then competent to run around with asphalt and fill in some god damn holes. As to permission to fill the holes, you have to be kidding me. The communities are begging to get the holes filled. Recently we offered to fill them in ourselves and the city threatened us with legal action if we did it ourselves. So no. Permission is not an issue unless the permission is from the city to for it to do it's f'ing job.
3. I can't speak for every place on earth. But in my city, it's one hundred percent laziness. They could fill them on contract very easily. License a bunch of small construction companies and pay them PER pothole. Set a flat rate for pothole filling and then rather then paying someone per hour, overtime, health benifits, etc... you're just paying a flat rate for each hole. Lots of companies would jump at that.
You create jobs in the city. The city saves money. The potholes get filled. Everyone wins.
The problem with this is that it won't last. You see they put a cover over it. Why is that? Because goop would get stuck to the tires and that would erode the "fluid" away. So they have to put a cover over it. And the cover might move, or fluid might evaporate or god knows what else.
Consider the current solutions of putting sand in the pothole which works for a little while until the sand is eroded away. You could put a little mat over the sand just like they did in for the fluid to get the same result at a cheaper price. And of course, the real solution is to just fill the god damn pot hole in with some asphalt. THIS is why pot holes are so annoying. It's not because they're hard to fix. It's because they're stupid easy to fix and they're not because the transit authority is lazy.
We could say they're underpaid or underfunded or it's hard to keep track of where the problems are but there are some problems with that little theory.
1. the transit budgets are more then sufficient to handle the pot holes if they stopped looting the transit funds to build over priced mass transit systems and instead put the money to what it was for in the first place... roads, bridges, etc. If you have something left over after that... after all the pot holes are filled... then you can put what's left into little pet projects. But not a penny from the fund for anything but road maintenance until the roads have been actually maintained.
2. The notion that they can't keep track of all the pot holes would be understandable if it took them a few days to catch a pot hole. However, they often don't address a pot hole for months. That's not a question of not being able to track it. They know it's there. It's in the middle of on of the busiest streets in a city of millions of people. Probably a hundred thousand people in a week see that pot hole at a minimum. So they know it's there.
3. There aren't even that many of them. In a given square mile how many pot holes form in a given week? It only gets out of control when they're left to build up and whole street turns into potholes.
it's crap like that is that makes Americans want SUVs. The urban street is increasing turning into an off road experience between the god damn speed bumps and the god damn potholes. Try this guys... flat. Just try it.
Anarchy leads to dictatorship. Without government you'd get chaos and chaos would lead to fear and fear would lead opportunity for the power hungry and that would lead to tyranny.
You need just enough government to prevent that... and that's a complex moving target.
It's actually ignorant people like you that give westerners in general a bad name.
I read Iranian newspapers and I read the official statements of their government. That's how I know, idiot.
Does that mean everyone in Iran believes it? Of course not. And not everyone believed in Mao during the cultural revolution or all the germans the nazis during WW2... or really all of any nation at anytime anything. Simply making that argument in that context is an obvious strawman on your part.
You've failed to make an argument while casting about a bunch of childish baseless insults. And then you proclaim your natural superiority and my inferiority. Pathetic.
Ehm... not really. It would be the stance we take with nations like Cuba and North Korea. We systematically isolate these nations. Keep it up for long enough and the nation is frozen in time.
Visit Cuba... Visit North Korea... it's like going into a time machine... when the choking started... time stopped.
Hmmm... the nation building is actually what tends to be so expensive. Just killing a load of enemy soldiers is pretty damned easy actually.
In any case, we don't need to go to war with a psychopathic regime simply because we acknowledge that they're nasty pieces of work. We can just acknowledge that and do our best to limit contact. If and when they act aggressively we can respond in kind.
As to being "riled up"... not really. This is my default setting.
As to being anti Iranian... I'm fine with them if they keep their hands to themselves.
As to my views making me more or less Pro American... not really. My views are my own. Part of being American is having your own opinions and respecting the rights of other people to have their own opinions. As the Iranians are big on controlling what their people see, hear, and say... they're not big on free expression. Which means they're not big on allowing other people to have their own opinions. Isn't that obvious?
As to whether I know what American values are... do you know how to make statements or do you just know how to ask stupid leading questions? That's rhetorical.
As to your statement that I believe I'm better then everyone else. Not at all. Just better then some people. But then, don't we all? After all, the Iranians believe the Jews are descended from "pigs and apes" so clearly they think they're better then them... right? Clearly it's the fashionable view of the day to believe you're better then someone. Your asinine little post seems to suggest that you think you're better then me for example... which just renders your silly "questions" all the more absurd.
As to your gold star for identifying shit stinks... My point was that many people seem to need to stick their finger in it and taste it to make sure it's not chocolate. Where as other can just look at it and have a pretty good idea. Your derision implies you probably have to eat second helpings just to estimate.
As to your pathetic little insult at the end of your incoherent post... how exactly do you presume to claim superiority when THIS is the best you have to offer?
Make a real argument next time or at least don't post drunk.
Which bad people only wish to be left alone? If is you say Iran, then you're apparently unaware of their funding of international terrorism or obvious other aggressive actions.
The country makes official statements of their intent to commit genocide on a regular basis. So if your argument is seriously that Iran is just a misunderstood fluffy kitten then you've smoked yourself retarded.
Police states should abandon all pretenses of being anything but police states. There are too many simple people that don't know a duck even if it's quacking in front of them so long as it's wearing a little badge that says "republic". Why Iran has any credibility in the international community is owed only to greed (for the oil), ignorance, and the naive belief that psychopathic messianic dictatorships can be reformed with kind words.
I'm not saying we go to war with them. I'm just saying you treat them like what they are and always will be. If they want to dominate what little freedom remains in their nation by creating some hyper controlled internet, then all the better.
walk into a store, restaurant, or hotel and ask nicely to use the phone with reversed charges or offer to pay for the privilege in cash. Most such places will be happy to offer you the phone for local calls at no charge. And most places will be flexible enough to work something out... just buy a muffin or something.
We don't need to put phone booths all over the place. They're not even putting them in bars anymore. Think about that. there was a time when a corner of every bar had a couple coin op public phones. They're gone. Why is that? No one uses them.
If you want to help people, provide a public bathroom. That would be useful in New York. But a phone booth? A complete waste of money and total waste of time.
The solution in such communities is volunteer firefighter departments. They were once the national norm. They don't work well in large cities but they work very well in suburban or rural communities were it is unlikely that you'll have overlap between different departments. The idea is very simple. The community either through donations or taxes sets up a non-profit. They either donate or tax what is needed to buy a building and fire truck. Then local membersof the community basically join a club. The fire fighting building becomes a club house. Most of the time they sit there drinking coffee with friends and playing cards.
When a call comes in the eight most sober people in the club jump on the truck and go off to fight the fire.
This sounds haphazard but fires aren't that common in such regions. You might get one a day or one every couple days at most. So the idea is just to keep enough people in the club at all times that if a call comes in they can man the truck.
All these people have normal jobs or are retired. The expense to the local community is much more reasonable considering their needs. And the community gets a community center. The fire fighting station is 80 percent recreation center and 20 percent fire station.
After that the next more reasonable option is a company. They're just going to be a lot cheaper then a public fire fighting division. That said, the dues for the fire fighters should probably be paid through taxes if it's a private department. It will still be cheaper then a public department.
Why is this so hard? Set the whole thing up with ROM that the unit cannot change on it's own. If a hacker manually hacks their unit that is one thing but it's a really bad idea if people can "update" the firmware of the meters remotely with foreign code. Assuming they really like that idea, every unit needs a unique authentication code. By all means, have that code be centrally stored or and summoned automatically by the utility database. But compromising one unit shouldn't lead to them all being compromised. The whole thing has to be compartmentalized.
Mhhhmm... africa was vulnerable to colonization because it was screwed up. The Europeans while having advantages could only exploit places that were political basket cases.
Five hundred Spaniards didn't bring down the Inca Empire because they were military geniuses. They literally just grabbed the king which they were allowed to get near with their full strength and hold the whole kingdom hostage.
Herp derp.
Permutations on that were repeated around the world. The europeans looked for weaknesses... they were opportunists. Where they saw strength they bargained. Where they saw weakness, they attacked. And anything they were able to claim they then fortified and exploited.
They were ruthless, merciless, and ravenous.
Africa was a basket case before the europeans colonized. European colonialism in most regions of the world started by exploiting the locals in some fundamental way.
The british for example were very fond of finding an oppressed tribe or ethnic group that was being subjugated by a larger tribe or ethnic group. The british offered the weaker faction English guns, English soldiers to act as the point of the spear, English artillery, English training to turn thousands of their people into passable imperial soldiers, and of course british officers to lead them. And in return, they gained a better life for their family, ethnic group, and were able to visit doom upon their enemies under the thunder of British guns.
The Indians were the most dramatic example of this model where they were used against their Islamic overlords.
Indian society still copies many archaic British traditions inherited from that contact.
In any case, I wish none of these people ill. Quiet the opposite. I hope they advance and solve their problems. I just won't condescend to believe I or my society has the power to fix their problems in a culturally appropriate way. We don't know or care enough about their cultures to bother with that. We could show absolute contempt for their cultures and supplant every facet of their society with our own. But most people aren't willing to do that. So that being the case we should just leave these people be to work out their own issues. Ideally they do so with a minimum of bloodshed.
Many users deserve the cloud.
on
IT Calls of Shame
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· Score: 0, Troll
To a large extent the cloud is built for these people. And it solves most of the IT problems. They literally can't screw it up because they don't have the power to screw it up.
Half the time there's a problem it's the "Oh" "Ehn" switch. In about 99.9 percent of other cases the user did something to break it. Restrict users from being able to do bad things and most problems go away. Sure, there are legitimate IT problems occasionally but they're relatively rare.
this strikes me as a bad idea... a big part of going to a church service in person has to be human interactions and I'd think all the tablets would get in the way.
Why would I willingly let my cellphone tell them that?
Think about it.
The pitch is stupid. that doesn't offer the consumer an incentive to give away that sort of information. If we were getting something for it, fine. But we're not giving it away for free.
Meh... if recent events have taught us anything, nation building as it is currently understood is counter productive.
You don't fix a country by giving them stuff or even by going there and helping them. It's just exploited by the very elements in the society that have kept them poor and disorganized for all these years.
Someone we have to understand with all these countries is that there are reasons why they're poor, hungry, and primitive. It's not like we've been hording our knowledge of clean drinking water for the last 2000 years. And yes, the technology to not drink water that cows have been doing their business in has been around for at least the last 2000 years... probably a good 6000 years. And if you come upon a society that still hasn't figured that little gem out you're not dealing with a society that hasn't been exposed to or offered the technology in the past. They've simply never implemented it for "some" reason. Frequently this is political instability, corruption, or various cultural problems.
Net result, nothing you do for these people is going to help because their underlying problem isn't technological or even related to lack of food or water. It's often a problem with local warlords or a cultural that embraces fatalism. This is an alien concept to modern western thinking but most third world cultures tend to be deeply fatalistic. They have a notion of "whatever happens happens" and don't feel that their actions can have any impact on the future. That means they don't get involved with or in anyway proactive in the uplift or even maintenance of their society. Consequently, things slide down to some equilibrium point where individuals or local groups will invest just enough in the local infrastructure to keep themselves marginally comfortable but once that level is reached they'll lose all interest in the effort.
Point being, there are two ways to fix the third world in my opinion.
1. Leave them alone and allow the to organically pull themselves out. That is, wait for those cultures to fix their own problems on their own their own way. That would include letting them fight wars amongst themselves especially civil wars to sort out underlying political dysfunctions.
2. Follow the example of Rome. Go in there, establish the Pax Roma. Completely take over and colonize the area.
Short of that... I believe most of these efforts to be little more then philanthropic masturbation. The sort of meaningless feel good charity work that gets good press but ultimately accomplishes jack all.
Call that cynical... that's my understanding of the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Gas was so cheap then it didn't matter. Good times.
Depends on if your suspension sucks. Mine doesn't. I cruise over speed bumps. The ones you need to watch out for are the really aggressive bumps. Those can be a problem. But I have a solution for that too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6J-QK1lw
Exactly... and it's not the weight that's an issue... it's the possibly an increase in traffic which should be more then countered by a relative increase in gasoline tax revenue, and other road related taxes... the vast majority of which should go to building and maintaining roads. I suspect that increasingly that isn't where the money is going... which is why our roads are resembling post apocalyptic cityscapes.
Not if you do it at night which is the only time you should ever do it.
Grocery stores restock at around 2AM. If they can get 20 guys to show up in a truck every night to unload and restock the shelves in a SINGLE store... I should think the city should be able to fill some god damn pot holes in the wee hours of the night. This is not complicated. It's obvious and easy.
Businesses across the country do disruptive things at night. Most server updates don't happen during business hours. They happen at midnight or 2 am.
If practically every business does this already, why can't the city? And don't give me that it's too many people. Think about how many people it takes to restock every grocery store in the city every night? That workforce ALONE dwarfs what the city would need to take care of pot holes several times over. And bargain grocery stores find the practice entirely economical.
The problem is not the asphalt. The problem is the city, the transit unions, and people that find it acceptable to leave pot holes unfilled for months on end.
Oh like cars in the 50s were light? Have you seen what a 1956 Cadillac looks like? It's an all steel boat on wheels. Don't tell me the cars today are too heavy. That's just whining. Yes, cars in the 1980s were lighter then today. They mostly got heavier when the safety standards were changed which required more steel reinforcement. That's like the utilities saying we use too much water or use too much electricity. We use less water per capita then we did 50 years ago and apparently we're still too wasteful for the local utilities.
Funny that this wasn't a problem 50 years ago. What changed? Oh, the population doubled a few times and they didn't build any new dams or aqueducts to handle the population increase. So is the problem really that we use too much water or that there are too many people in this region for the infrastructure to handle? See, if that's their game they should either restrict new construction once they hit saturation or they should... you know... maybe build some new facilities.
Sorry if I'm coming off crazy and angry... I'm just fed up with this stupid crap.
Fill the pot holes. Offer it on commission if you must. It will probably cost less that way. Just offer construction companies a flat rate to fill each hole. Magically the streets will be free of pot holes overnight as about thousand construction companies all run of in a thousand different directions and together fill all the potholes.
I love that they'll leave a stupid pothole unfilled for months sometimes on the grounds that they're thinking about doing roadwork soon. Never mind that the pot hole shouldn't cost more then a couple hundred bucks to fill max and that the damage done to cars in that time period is magnitudes of whatever the city is saving.
1. Don't loot the road maintenance budget to fund other projects. Next time you want to add a feature, put it on the ballot and tell everyone that taxes are going up to pay for it. And then take ONLY the EXTRA funds collected by the raise to pay for your project. Leave the existing programs alone or you'll starve them and they'll fall appart.
2. The queue is long because you don't fill any of the holes. They sit there for months. If you have so many holes that you leave them there for months then clearly you need more people filling the holes. Yes, that costs money. Like maybe the money that was set aside for road maintenance in the first place before it was looted. As to closing streets, do it at night. Why is it that public officials make average citizens look like rocket scientists? This shit is obvious. Lots of businesses do disruptive activities at night. For example, grocery stores restock goods at around 2AM so they don't disrupt customers during the day. Why close a busy street in the middle of rush hour to fill a pothole? Oh that's right, because the transit union charges extra for the night shift. Which is one of many reasons we shouldn't even have a transit union in the fist place. It should just be subcontracted to construction companies that are more then competent to run around with asphalt and fill in some god damn holes. As to permission to fill the holes, you have to be kidding me. The communities are begging to get the holes filled. Recently we offered to fill them in ourselves and the city threatened us with legal action if we did it ourselves. So no. Permission is not an issue unless the permission is from the city to for it to do it's f'ing job.
3. I can't speak for every place on earth. But in my city, it's one hundred percent laziness. They could fill them on contract very easily. License a bunch of small construction companies and pay them PER pothole. Set a flat rate for pothole filling and then rather then paying someone per hour, overtime, health benifits, etc... you're just paying a flat rate for each hole. Lots of companies would jump at that.
You create jobs in the city. The city saves money. The potholes get filled. Everyone wins.
There's no counter argument to that.
The problem with this is that it won't last. You see they put a cover over it. Why is that? Because goop would get stuck to the tires and that would erode the "fluid" away. So they have to put a cover over it. And the cover might move, or fluid might evaporate or god knows what else.
Consider the current solutions of putting sand in the pothole which works for a little while until the sand is eroded away. You could put a little mat over the sand just like they did in for the fluid to get the same result at a cheaper price. And of course, the real solution is to just fill the god damn pot hole in with some asphalt. THIS is why pot holes are so annoying. It's not because they're hard to fix. It's because they're stupid easy to fix and they're not because the transit authority is lazy.
We could say they're underpaid or underfunded or it's hard to keep track of where the problems are but there are some problems with that little theory.
1. the transit budgets are more then sufficient to handle the pot holes if they stopped looting the transit funds to build over priced mass transit systems and instead put the money to what it was for in the first place... roads, bridges, etc. If you have something left over after that... after all the pot holes are filled... then you can put what's left into little pet projects. But not a penny from the fund for anything but road maintenance until the roads have been actually maintained.
2. The notion that they can't keep track of all the pot holes would be understandable if it took them a few days to catch a pot hole. However, they often don't address a pot hole for months. That's not a question of not being able to track it. They know it's there. It's in the middle of on of the busiest streets in a city of millions of people. Probably a hundred thousand people in a week see that pot hole at a minimum. So they know it's there.
3. There aren't even that many of them. In a given square mile how many pot holes form in a given week? It only gets out of control when they're left to build up and whole street turns into potholes.
it's crap like that is that makes Americans want SUVs. The urban street is increasing turning into an off road experience between the god damn speed bumps and the god damn potholes. Try this guys... flat. Just try it.
Anarchy leads to dictatorship. Without government you'd get chaos and chaos would lead to fear and fear would lead opportunity for the power hungry and that would lead to tyranny.
You need just enough government to prevent that... and that's a complex moving target.
It's actually ignorant people like you that give westerners in general a bad name.
I read Iranian newspapers and I read the official statements of their government. That's how I know, idiot.
Does that mean everyone in Iran believes it? Of course not. And not everyone believed in Mao during the cultural revolution or all the germans the nazis during WW2... or really all of any nation at anytime anything. Simply making that argument in that context is an obvious strawman on your part.
You've failed to make an argument while casting about a bunch of childish baseless insults. And then you proclaim your natural superiority and my inferiority. Pathetic.
Try again.
Ehm... not really. It would be the stance we take with nations like Cuba and North Korea. We systematically isolate these nations. Keep it up for long enough and the nation is frozen in time.
Visit Cuba... Visit North Korea... it's like going into a time machine... when the choking started... time stopped.
Hmmm... the nation building is actually what tends to be so expensive. Just killing a load of enemy soldiers is pretty damned easy actually.
In any case, we don't need to go to war with a psychopathic regime simply because we acknowledge that they're nasty pieces of work. We can just acknowledge that and do our best to limit contact. If and when they act aggressively we can respond in kind.
As to being "riled up"... not really. This is my default setting.
As to being anti Iranian... I'm fine with them if they keep their hands to themselves.
As to my views making me more or less Pro American... not really. My views are my own. Part of being American is having your own opinions and respecting the rights of other people to have their own opinions. As the Iranians are big on controlling what their people see, hear, and say... they're not big on free expression. Which means they're not big on allowing other people to have their own opinions. Isn't that obvious?
As to whether I know what American values are... do you know how to make statements or do you just know how to ask stupid leading questions? That's rhetorical.
As to your statement that I believe I'm better then everyone else. Not at all. Just better then some people. But then, don't we all? After all, the Iranians believe the Jews are descended from "pigs and apes" so clearly they think they're better then them... right? Clearly it's the fashionable view of the day to believe you're better then someone. Your asinine little post seems to suggest that you think you're better then me for example... which just renders your silly "questions" all the more absurd.
As to your gold star for identifying shit stinks... My point was that many people seem to need to stick their finger in it and taste it to make sure it's not chocolate. Where as other can just look at it and have a pretty good idea. Your derision implies you probably have to eat second helpings just to estimate.
As to your pathetic little insult at the end of your incoherent post... how exactly do you presume to claim superiority when THIS is the best you have to offer?
Make a real argument next time or at least don't post drunk.
You're quiet right, we're about .000001 percent a police state. Very apt point.
*hands out gold star for irrelevant observations*
Do you have a real argument or is that all you've got?
Which bad people only wish to be left alone? If is you say Iran, then you're apparently unaware of their funding of international terrorism or obvious other aggressive actions.
The country makes official statements of their intent to commit genocide on a regular basis. So if your argument is seriously that Iran is just a misunderstood fluffy kitten then you've smoked yourself retarded.
Police states should abandon all pretenses of being anything but police states. There are too many simple people that don't know a duck even if it's quacking in front of them so long as it's wearing a little badge that says "republic". Why Iran has any credibility in the international community is owed only to greed (for the oil), ignorance, and the naive belief that psychopathic messianic dictatorships can be reformed with kind words.
I'm not saying we go to war with them. I'm just saying you treat them like what they are and always will be. If they want to dominate what little freedom remains in their nation by creating some hyper controlled internet, then all the better.
they should be reused as soda cans. Just recycle it entirely.
walk into a store, restaurant, or hotel and ask nicely to use the phone with reversed charges or offer to pay for the privilege in cash. Most such places will be happy to offer you the phone for local calls at no charge. And most places will be flexible enough to work something out... just buy a muffin or something.
We don't need to put phone booths all over the place. They're not even putting them in bars anymore. Think about that. there was a time when a corner of every bar had a couple coin op public phones. They're gone. Why is that? No one uses them.
If you want to help people, provide a public bathroom. That would be useful in New York. But a phone booth? A complete waste of money and total waste of time.
The solution in such communities is volunteer firefighter departments. They were once the national norm. They don't work well in large cities but they work very well in suburban or rural communities were it is unlikely that you'll have overlap between different departments. The idea is very simple. The community either through donations or taxes sets up a non-profit. They either donate or tax what is needed to buy a building and fire truck. Then local membersof the community basically join a club. The fire fighting building becomes a club house. Most of the time they sit there drinking coffee with friends and playing cards.
When a call comes in the eight most sober people in the club jump on the truck and go off to fight the fire.
This sounds haphazard but fires aren't that common in such regions. You might get one a day or one every couple days at most. So the idea is just to keep enough people in the club at all times that if a call comes in they can man the truck.
All these people have normal jobs or are retired. The expense to the local community is much more reasonable considering their needs. And the community gets a community center. The fire fighting station is 80 percent recreation center and 20 percent fire station.
After that the next more reasonable option is a company. They're just going to be a lot cheaper then a public fire fighting division. That said, the dues for the fire fighters should probably be paid through taxes if it's a private department. It will still be cheaper then a public department.
We live in the age of 20 dollar disposable cellphones. Enough with the anachronisms. Let the phone booth die.
Why is this so hard? Set the whole thing up with ROM that the unit cannot change on it's own. If a hacker manually hacks their unit that is one thing but it's a really bad idea if people can "update" the firmware of the meters remotely with foreign code. Assuming they really like that idea, every unit needs a unique authentication code. By all means, have that code be centrally stored or and summoned automatically by the utility database. But compromising one unit shouldn't lead to them all being compromised. The whole thing has to be compartmentalized.
Mhhhmm... africa was vulnerable to colonization because it was screwed up. The Europeans while having advantages could only exploit places that were political basket cases.
Five hundred Spaniards didn't bring down the Inca Empire because they were military geniuses. They literally just grabbed the king which they were allowed to get near with their full strength and hold the whole kingdom hostage.
Herp derp.
Permutations on that were repeated around the world. The europeans looked for weaknesses... they were opportunists. Where they saw strength they bargained. Where they saw weakness, they attacked. And anything they were able to claim they then fortified and exploited.
They were ruthless, merciless, and ravenous.
Africa was a basket case before the europeans colonized. European colonialism in most regions of the world started by exploiting the locals in some fundamental way.
The british for example were very fond of finding an oppressed tribe or ethnic group that was being subjugated by a larger tribe or ethnic group. The british offered the weaker faction English guns, English soldiers to act as the point of the spear, English artillery, English training to turn thousands of their people into passable imperial soldiers, and of course british officers to lead them. And in return, they gained a better life for their family, ethnic group, and were able to visit doom upon their enemies under the thunder of British guns.
The Indians were the most dramatic example of this model where they were used against their Islamic overlords.
Indian society still copies many archaic British traditions inherited from that contact.
In any case, I wish none of these people ill. Quiet the opposite. I hope they advance and solve their problems. I just won't condescend to believe I or my society has the power to fix their problems in a culturally appropriate way. We don't know or care enough about their cultures to bother with that. We could show absolute contempt for their cultures and supplant every facet of their society with our own. But most people aren't willing to do that. So that being the case we should just leave these people be to work out their own issues. Ideally they do so with a minimum of bloodshed.
To a large extent the cloud is built for these people. And it solves most of the IT problems. They literally can't screw it up because they don't have the power to screw it up.
Half the time there's a problem it's the "Oh" "Ehn" switch. In about 99.9 percent of other cases the user did something to break it. Restrict users from being able to do bad things and most problems go away. Sure, there are legitimate IT problems occasionally but they're relatively rare.
this strikes me as a bad idea... a big part of going to a church service in person has to be human interactions and I'd think all the tablets would get in the way.
Why would I willingly let my cellphone tell them that?
Think about it.
The pitch is stupid. that doesn't offer the consumer an incentive to give away that sort of information. If we were getting something for it, fine. But we're not giving it away for free.
Meh... if recent events have taught us anything, nation building as it is currently understood is counter productive.
You don't fix a country by giving them stuff or even by going there and helping them. It's just exploited by the very elements in the society that have kept them poor and disorganized for all these years.
Someone we have to understand with all these countries is that there are reasons why they're poor, hungry, and primitive. It's not like we've been hording our knowledge of clean drinking water for the last 2000 years. And yes, the technology to not drink water that cows have been doing their business in has been around for at least the last 2000 years... probably a good 6000 years. And if you come upon a society that still hasn't figured that little gem out you're not dealing with a society that hasn't been exposed to or offered the technology in the past. They've simply never implemented it for "some" reason. Frequently this is political instability, corruption, or various cultural problems.
Net result, nothing you do for these people is going to help because their underlying problem isn't technological or even related to lack of food or water. It's often a problem with local warlords or a cultural that embraces fatalism. This is an alien concept to modern western thinking but most third world cultures tend to be deeply fatalistic. They have a notion of "whatever happens happens" and don't feel that their actions can have any impact on the future. That means they don't get involved with or in anyway proactive in the uplift or even maintenance of their society. Consequently, things slide down to some equilibrium point where individuals or local groups will invest just enough in the local infrastructure to keep themselves marginally comfortable but once that level is reached they'll lose all interest in the effort.
Point being, there are two ways to fix the third world in my opinion.
1. Leave them alone and allow the to organically pull themselves out. That is, wait for those cultures to fix their own problems on their own their own way. That would include letting them fight wars amongst themselves especially civil wars to sort out underlying political dysfunctions.
2. Follow the example of Rome. Go in there, establish the Pax Roma. Completely take over and colonize the area.
Short of that... I believe most of these efforts to be little more then philanthropic masturbation. The sort of meaningless feel good charity work that gets good press but ultimately accomplishes jack all.
Call that cynical... that's my understanding of the situation.