We just have to realize that it won't stop at that. From the what the article says it seems like that technology could be used for any image. At the very least I expect we'll see general copyright enforcement from this. Worst case we will see things like various regimes being able to use this to suppress images they don't like. Oh you have pictures of us slaughtering our opponents well we better put those on the bad list.
No purpose at all? China attacked India in 1962. There have been border incursions, by Chinese forces, as recently as May of this year. They have fought several wars over disputed borders with Pakistan. Both China and Pakistan are nuclear powers. Before any government can do anything else, such as providing the plumbing mentioned in your post, they have to maintain the territorial integrity of the nation and assure the survival of the state. Frankly of all the recent nations that have gone for nuclear weapons India has the best argument for why they need them.
If you weren't making it up, you could link to the exact part of the law.
That is an unreasonably high standard. I think murder is illegal but I can't link the "exact part of the law". Actually having tried to read the law on a few matters, without a law degree I doubt you can even identify what the "exact part" is. In part because laws are written in extremely technical language and in part because most laws, at least the ones I have looked at, are basically a bit of new verbiage with some statements like "change code section whatever to read X". Most non-lawyers are totally dependent upon lawyers to tell us what the law really is. Another reason it is often difficult to find a piece of the law is congress has become prone to writing laws that instead of saying specifics will actually say Agency X will regulate Y to achieve Z. So the details you are looking for aren't in the law at all they are contained in administrative regulation that may or may not have been written yet.
In this case I do not know whether they will get access to our medical records. What has been widely reported in the media is that you will have to prove compliance with the affordable care act. The IRS has been charged with enforcement and will be collecting "enforcement related data". Which will likely be at least medically related. It isn't clear to me just how far that goes. If I was a betting man I'd say that the IRS has not determined what will be collected yet. Whatever they are collecting there is going to be a lot of it because they have requested 16,000 additional workers specifically for this purpose.
You were never able to work your way through school in the way you describe.
The way you work your way through school, and I did this at about minimum wage for the first part, is you go to an inexpensive school, typically a community college. You take your courses at the rate you can afford. Then you get your associates degree and use it to get a job that pays a bit more. If you are lucky you will get in at a company that has a tuition assistance program. You then go to a reasonably priced state school part time taking as many courses as you can manage and afford. Can you work your way through college as a full time student without loans, grants or scholar ships? Probably not. Can you get a college education and all the benefits of that? Sure you can it will just take a huge amount of work and a lot of sacrifice. It took me just shy of 11 years. On the other hand I came out of it without a cent in student debt.
This isn't new either. My father went to school in late 50's and he had to do pretty much the same thing. My father worked full time a during the week, attended classes during the week and then worked as a contractor laying tile in office buildings during the weekends. College is more expensive now but it was never cheap. If you aren't born rich or lucky odds are you are going to have to take longer and put in a lot more work than the other guy. Still it is possible. It just a matter of how bad you want it.
Cash is only worth what people are willing to trade for it, I fail to see how Bitcoin is inherently any different.
I do not think it is inherently different. I think the volatility comes in because Bitcoin is a tiny market compared to say the US dollar or the Euro. So transactions that wouldn't impact those larger currencies at all can have a major impact on the value of Bitcoin. Things like currency sell offs happen all the time in the world market. The major government currencies are so large that we hardly notice them. Smaller currencies, those from smaller economies and Bitcoin, get hit with things like that and it has a large impact on the value of those currencies. So people have to realize if they are dealing in Bitcoins it is a smaller more volatile market than say the one for dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't, assuming we haven't already, start seeing things like currency speculators operating in the Bitcoin market. The danger will be is if those speculators find ways to artificially manipulate that market.
If memory serves, the STASI eventually had about 1/3 of the population involved in informing on someone or something and never came close to be able to analyze all the data they got.
At the point you get that many people involved the data is actually an after thought. What you have done there is create a culture where everyone knows that a huge chunk of the population is working for the security apparatus. Which makes everyone self censure and behave as if they are under total surveillance all the time. Not because they are but because they could be. The perception of an all knowing security apparatus is almost as useful as actually having an all knowing security apparatus and a whole lot cheaper and easier to build.
I have to wonder if this is really a changer of much of anything. He is using a 3D printer that is $8,000 used and if my understanding is correct the media is going to cost him a couple of hundred bucks per gun. For that kind of money I suspect he could have gone to a pawn shop and bought some metal working tools and gone to his local community college and taken some courses on how to use them. My suspicion is that using traditional techniques he could turn out a lot more reliable, and less likely to blow your hand off, weapon of at least similar utility.
I don't think there is anything wrong with using fertilizer. In fact human civilization as we know it would not exist without it. The problem has been that in much of the world over use of inexpensive, easily applied, chemical fertilizers has become a substitute for good farming practices. Things like crop rotation, leaving fields fallow for a season, putting grazing animals onto your fallow fields to naturally enrich the soil etc have fallen out of use. In their place they just put ever more fertilizer on the land to compensate for burning up its natural fertility and polluting the ground water and oceans.
This is standard operating procedure for any governmental body. When you must take cuts you put them toward the thing that causes the most pain to the public. The public will then scream and 99 out of 100 times the politicians trying to make cuts will back down.
As far as whether this party or that party ever intended to cut or to work with the other party I am not sure it really matters. The core problem is that there is no national consensus on what we should be spending our money on, how we should spend it or what we should cut. There isn't even consensus on whether we should cut or whether we should simply monetize the debt by printing money and devaluing the currency. As long as the US is as divided as it is politically I wouldn't expect that to change.
That makes a lot of sense. You could represent that as a scale. With say education (representing general studies like the traditional Liberal Arts Degree) on end and Training (representing studies directly focused on whatever discipline you are looking to master) on the other end. It seems like a lot of schools, and often specific majors, are tending more and more toward the "training" end of that scale.
I suspect that a big part of that is how people rate their college experience. Just look at the press reports for an example. People don't rate their education on whether they are a well rounded educated person who can function in society. They rate it on whether it helped them find a job after graduation and whether that job was sufficiently better than what they could have gotten without the degree to justify the cost.
It could be that people are less willing to take a more general course load due to the costs involved. Education has become fabulously expensive. I can see where students make a value judgement and say "you know I wouldn't mind knowing more about history or being a better writer but the cost is just to high". After all if you are actually taking on debt to pay for your education every semester extra you spend at school equals a deeper hole you are going to have to excavate yourself from once you graduate. Under that paradigm is isn't surprising to me that there is ever greater pressure to focus the curriculum so as to get me the training I need and get me out working and paying down my debt as rapidly as possible.
What might begin to provide some pressure the other way is that so many graduates now basically can't effectively communicate their ideas in writing. I know where I am they have started making new applicants, mostly engineers and various scientists, present writing samples as part of their interview. Actually they also make them present in front of a group of people as well. Just to make sure that they have the skills to communicate what they know to others. It has been a big enough problem that for the existing staff they actually taught a writing course for the existing staff last year. Basically just to help those whose writing wasn't up to snuff improve. Assuming we aren't the only company that cares about this it could provide a bit of push back toward people taking more general education type courses. If only enough that they learn to write properly.
Throughout history, every generation has believed their kids were dumber than they were. If you read editorial pages from ten, twenty, fifty years ago, you see the same rants about the world going to hell. Yet all the empirical evidence points to the opposite. Kids are getting smarter. Engineering GRE and EIT scores are rising. There is no evidence that engineering graduates are getting worse, and plenty of evidence that they are getting better.
My theory as to what is happening is that most Universities are becoming less generalized in their education and are instead becoming more narrowly focused. So if you judge whether a newly graduated engineer is "better" or "worse" based on general knowledge over a wide section of the discipline they might seem worse. If on the other hand you judge them based on their knowledge of whatever their specific area of study is they may seem better.
I do think there is some truth to the idea that Universities are just easier now. I know that I have compared notes with various relatives about what we studied in college. My sister's husband, just to pick an example, was a liberal arts major in the early 70's. Graduated 71 or 72. At my school Liberal Arts was a bunch of fluff courses for people who couldn't decide upon "a real major". Back when he took it Liberal Arts wasn't like that. As part of that degree he had to learn Latin, Ancient Greek, a modern foreign language, a surprising amount of mathematics, logic, rhetoric, history, economics, chemistry, biology, physics and various literature courses in English as well in his chosen foreign language. Frankly I am not at all sure I could have graduated from his Liberal Arts program.
Now where I don't know the answer is which is better? Are we better off with much harder schools that turn out fewer students, after all hardness of the program is essentially a barrier to entry, or easier schools that turn out more students? Are we better off with graduates who have broad general knowledge of their area of study or narrower more focused knowledge? I can see arguments both ways and it isn't clear to me what the right answers are.
People are still just as stupid as they've always been...
In general I agree. In this case the cynical part of me kicks in. After all if they all start complaining of a mystery illness there is a good chance that eventually they will be able to sue and get a settlement. After all even if the thing is totally bogus, which this would seem to indicate, the wind farm company either has to settle with them or risk having a disastrous precedent set. With that in mind it doesn't surprise me that if some group comes around describing a mystery illness with vague symptoms that all sorts of people suddenly feel both illness and the need for a settlement check.
The father of a friend of mine growing up had a job in garbage collection. First it paid a hell of a lot better than I expected. The other thing about it is back then they would take virtually anything you put at the curb. His route went through a relatively affluent part of town. People threw out an incredible amount of good stuff. He was the first person I knew who had a big screen TV and a surround sound system. Somebody had spilled paint on the cabinet and just thrown the whole thing out. He picked it up, brought it home, cleaned it up and had a fairly new TV that was a couple of grand for the cost of dragging it home. He brought so much of this sort of stuff home that he had to build a second shed in his back yard to house it all. Every quarter or so he and his buddies from work would take all the stuff they had gathered up out and sell it at a flea market. The first year he did it he claimed that he made enough money scavenging stuff from the garbage to buy a new pickup truck.
Video games tend to be fairly cheap entertainment on a per hour basis. Most of these companies are looking at it as if I can get you to part with an average of a few cents per hour played I make many millions of dollars. I don't necessarily have a problem with them making additional profit as long as it doesn't force me buy stuff to play the game competitively. So if they offer me a variety of vanity gear for my character or cooler looking versions of some weapons for a nominal fee fine. If on the other hand they start charging me for ammo or the special widget that unlocks the 2nd half of the game or something then I have a real issue. My pattern so far is if I can play the game just fine without spending money I might occasionally fork out for something. If I can't be competitive without paying I just go find another game. Unfortunately EA has a rather poor record when it comes to doing the right thing for their customers. So in their specific case my plan is to just wait until there are real reviews out before I buy any of their games.
There is an, unwritten, rule in Government that whenever you get cut you cut the thing that hurts the public the most. Sounds cynical but the logic is the quicker the pain for the public becomes unbearable they quicker they will accept a tax hike. I had a friend that worked at the DMV here. The state government cut their budget. What did the heads of DMV do they cut the front desk staff to the bone. So that people had hours long lines, even more than normal, and started complaining to the state government about. What they didn't do was anything to the behind the scenes people who were mostly just sitting there because their jobs were to process transactions entered by the front desk people. If they had cut those people proportionally the lines would have been much shorter and the place would have mostly just worked. The way they did it the state was able to justify a tax hike to restore the funding within a few months. You will see the same thing happen here. The same thing happens whenever you try to cut government budgets. After all from the point of view of the people making these decisions the choice is tax you more or pay me less. If you were given that choice which would you choose? So to some degree having congress micromanage the cuts is almost a necessity. Because if you don't the agencies will structure the cuts with an eye to protecting their budget allocations rather than an eye toward maintaining service with less.
Sony has made it very clear that they aren't a customer focused company for at least the last 20 years. So just expect that they are going to do what benefits them no matter what it does to their customers and you won't be surprised. My personal answer has been to stop buying Sony products. The PS2 was the last thing I bought from them and I bought that at release so it has been 10+ years since I bought anything Sony. I considered buying a PS3 but then I read about all the shenanigans with PS2 support and bluray players started dropping in price. Unless the next Microsoft console is just totally unacceptable I won't be buying a PS4. You are doing something seriously wrong when Microsoft seems consumer friendly and customer focused by comparison.
Sad truth is that whether we like it or not everyone is, or should be, a businessman. Even if your business is just managing your own affairs you would be well served to make sure you do it in at least a semi-professional manner. Failure to do so can have dire consequences as this man is, unfortunately, finding out. He is losing everything because the company he started and then sold has changed the design to avoid his patent. It sounds like his failure to really manage the business side of his life is what is destroying him. In the modern world you can't get away with that. Especially if you are an inventor or creator of value. There are just to many people looking to prey upon you for you to not learn the business side of it.
Failure to properly manage your affairs can have wreck your life. I know people who have suffered great losses because they didn't do simple "businessman" type things. Just a few examples, control your spending with a budget; have a lawyer look over legal documents before you sign them; do a return on investment (ROI) assessment of things like specific college majors before you embark on them and taking on debt to get them. It seems simple but I have seen so many people I know quite literally wreck their lives from failing to do these things. If you don't want to suffer that fate then you are whatever else you do / businessman. That or you are liable to end up as whatever / victim. Personally I am going to stick with businessman if it at all possible.
There's a lot of domestic fake maple syrup, which is nothing but maple syrup-flavored corn syrup. So, don't get too nationalistic in criticizing the crap the Chinese are sending us.
BTW, I heard a year or so a go there was an effort to make a law banning selling anything not pure maple syrup as such.
The real answer here is that anytime there is a commodity that has significant value and a possible way to cheat somebody will do it. Whether it be substituting fake honey, fake maple syrup, or lasagne with horse meat rather than beef. Most developed countries have inspectors to try and minimize that behavior. The problem is regulation and testing regimes make the end product more expensive. So there is always a trade off where they try to have enough testing to minimize the abuse of the consumer while not driving up costs to the point that the consumer can't afford it.
My suspicion here is that this whole fight is about getting Apple to buy out their trademark. Odds are this phone being released with this name is more about forcing them to the negotiating table than a serious attempt to use the name. In the article the head of the Brazilian company pretty much says he wants settlement talks. All of this appears to be about setting the stage to see who has the best bargaining position when it comes time to talk money. Which is really what this is about.
It looks like Apple's position is that Gradiente didn't produce their phone within the time frame legally required to protect their trademark. Since I am not a Brazilian lawyer, or another other kind of lawyer, I can't begin to say whether that is a claim that is valid or even passes the laugh test. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I don't see this being that big of a deal. Depending upon what happens in appeal, Apple will either win and Gradiente will rename their phone. They will both end up with competing and valid claims so you'll see Gradiente selling the "iPhone" and Apple selling the "Apple iPhone" or something along those lines. The third possibility is that Apple pays them off or just buys them out. With the kind of cash Apple has laying around my guess is there is some sort of economic accommodation to be had here. What I don't see is Apple not being able to sell the product in Brazil.
I'm currently 58 years old, working as an industrial electrician in a maintenance department setting
You know what kind of prints electricians need, you know if you're getting BSed, you can look at see if they are doing a good job rather than relying on a paid inspector as the only QA/QC. You're gonna save them fat stacks of cash.
I think you are dead on with this. The company I work for did a facility build out a few years ago. We were fortunate that we had a guy on staff who was knowledgeable about the very sorts of things you are describing. He was a huge help in a number of ways. One is he was able to pick up design items that would end up being problems and got them fixed while they were just items on a blue print. Which is a very cheap time to fix things. Second he was able to make daily visits to the construction site and inspect what they were doing. He was able to nip a lot of problems in the bud just by being available and knowing what to look for. A third thing that was also helpful is he knew the terminology and was able to talk to the various trades in the terms that they understood. The net impact of all of this, according to my management, was that we ended up saving approximately $500,000.
The Department of Education will be staffed at policy and implementation level by people who believe in the value of education and teachers actually like children!
Yeah, maybe in Australia that is the case. In the US the Department of education doesn't really educate kids. Actually running schools, hiring teacher etc is actually a state and local responsibly. The Department of Education gathers statistics about education, gives grants for various things, advocates for educational change, regulates schools and enforces civil rights laws in the areas of education. There have been a lot of complaints over the last few decades that the department is actually an impediment to good education. Basically because it forces schools to spend a large amount of time and money complying with its various regulations. Most of which have little do with education and a lot to do with politics.
I agree with all of that. Guerrilla wars are usually long and bloody. Just look at a few of the countries where it has occurred recently and it isn't at all uncommon to see death tolls in the 50,000 to 200,000+ range. Most of the people who die aren't in the army or even rebels. They tend to be civilians who get caught in the cross fire. People, in any country, should think long and hard before embarking on such a thing. Even if you win, which is far from assured, the cost in lives and destruction is going to horrific and it can go on for decades.
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Removing child pornogragphy is a laudable goal.
We just have to realize that it won't stop at that. From the what the article says it seems like that technology could be used for any image. At the very least I expect we'll see general copyright enforcement from this. Worst case we will see things like various regimes being able to use this to suppress images they don't like. Oh you have pictures of us slaughtering our opponents well we better put those on the bad list.
No purpose at all? China attacked India in 1962. There have been border incursions, by Chinese forces, as recently as May of this year. They have fought several wars over disputed borders with Pakistan. Both China and Pakistan are nuclear powers. Before any government can do anything else, such as providing the plumbing mentioned in your post, they have to maintain the territorial integrity of the nation and assure the survival of the state. Frankly of all the recent nations that have gone for nuclear weapons India has the best argument for why they need them.
If you weren't making it up, you could link to the exact part of the law.
That is an unreasonably high standard. I think murder is illegal but I can't link the "exact part of the law". Actually having tried to read the law on a few matters, without a law degree I doubt you can even identify what the "exact part" is. In part because laws are written in extremely technical language and in part because most laws, at least the ones I have looked at, are basically a bit of new verbiage with some statements like "change code section whatever to read X". Most non-lawyers are totally dependent upon lawyers to tell us what the law really is. Another reason it is often difficult to find a piece of the law is congress has become prone to writing laws that instead of saying specifics will actually say Agency X will regulate Y to achieve Z. So the details you are looking for aren't in the law at all they are contained in administrative regulation that may or may not have been written yet.
In this case I do not know whether they will get access to our medical records. What has been widely reported in the media is that you will have to prove compliance with the affordable care act. The IRS has been charged with enforcement and will be collecting "enforcement related data". Which will likely be at least medically related. It isn't clear to me just how far that goes. If I was a betting man I'd say that the IRS has not determined what will be collected yet. Whatever they are collecting there is going to be a lot of it because they have requested 16,000 additional workers specifically for this purpose.
You were never able to work your way through school in the way you describe.
The way you work your way through school, and I did this at about minimum wage for the first part, is you go to an inexpensive school, typically a community college. You take your courses at the rate you can afford. Then you get your associates degree and use it to get a job that pays a bit more. If you are lucky you will get in at a company that has a tuition assistance program. You then go to a reasonably priced state school part time taking as many courses as you can manage and afford. Can you work your way through college as a full time student without loans, grants or scholar ships? Probably not. Can you get a college education and all the benefits of that? Sure you can it will just take a huge amount of work and a lot of sacrifice. It took me just shy of 11 years. On the other hand I came out of it without a cent in student debt.
This isn't new either. My father went to school in late 50's and he had to do pretty much the same thing. My father worked full time a during the week, attended classes during the week and then worked as a contractor laying tile in office buildings during the weekends. College is more expensive now but it was never cheap. If you aren't born rich or lucky odds are you are going to have to take longer and put in a lot more work than the other guy. Still it is possible. It just a matter of how bad you want it.
Cash is only worth what people are willing to trade for it, I fail to see how Bitcoin is inherently any different.
I do not think it is inherently different. I think the volatility comes in because Bitcoin is a tiny market compared to say the US dollar or the Euro. So transactions that wouldn't impact those larger currencies at all can have a major impact on the value of Bitcoin. Things like currency sell offs happen all the time in the world market. The major government currencies are so large that we hardly notice them. Smaller currencies, those from smaller economies and Bitcoin, get hit with things like that and it has a large impact on the value of those currencies. So people have to realize if they are dealing in Bitcoins it is a smaller more volatile market than say the one for dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't, assuming we haven't already, start seeing things like currency speculators operating in the Bitcoin market. The danger will be is if those speculators find ways to artificially manipulate that market.
If memory serves, the STASI eventually had about 1/3 of the population involved in informing on someone or something and never came close to be able to analyze all the data they got.
At the point you get that many people involved the data is actually an after thought. What you have done there is create a culture where everyone knows that a huge chunk of the population is working for the security apparatus. Which makes everyone self censure and behave as if they are under total surveillance all the time. Not because they are but because they could be. The perception of an all knowing security apparatus is almost as useful as actually having an all knowing security apparatus and a whole lot cheaper and easier to build.
I have to wonder if this is really a changer of much of anything. He is using a 3D printer that is $8,000 used and if my understanding is correct the media is going to cost him a couple of hundred bucks per gun. For that kind of money I suspect he could have gone to a pawn shop and bought some metal working tools and gone to his local community college and taken some courses on how to use them. My suspicion is that using traditional techniques he could turn out a lot more reliable, and less likely to blow your hand off, weapon of at least similar utility.
I don't think there is anything wrong with using fertilizer. In fact human civilization as we know it would not exist without it. The problem has been that in much of the world over use of inexpensive, easily applied, chemical fertilizers has become a substitute for good farming practices. Things like crop rotation, leaving fields fallow for a season, putting grazing animals onto your fallow fields to naturally enrich the soil etc have fallen out of use. In their place they just put ever more fertilizer on the land to compensate for burning up its natural fertility and polluting the ground water and oceans.
This is standard operating procedure for any governmental body. When you must take cuts you put them toward the thing that causes the most pain to the public. The public will then scream and 99 out of 100 times the politicians trying to make cuts will back down.
As far as whether this party or that party ever intended to cut or to work with the other party I am not sure it really matters. The core problem is that there is no national consensus on what we should be spending our money on, how we should spend it or what we should cut. There isn't even consensus on whether we should cut or whether we should simply monetize the debt by printing money and devaluing the currency. As long as the US is as divided as it is politically I wouldn't expect that to change.
I am leaning toward the 50,000 people in the area all trying to call home at once.
That makes a lot of sense. You could represent that as a scale. With say education (representing general studies like the traditional Liberal Arts Degree) on end and Training (representing studies directly focused on whatever discipline you are looking to master) on the other end. It seems like a lot of schools, and often specific majors, are tending more and more toward the "training" end of that scale.
I suspect that a big part of that is how people rate their college experience. Just look at the press reports for an example. People don't rate their education on whether they are a well rounded educated person who can function in society. They rate it on whether it helped them find a job after graduation and whether that job was sufficiently better than what they could have gotten without the degree to justify the cost.
It could be that people are less willing to take a more general course load due to the costs involved. Education has become fabulously expensive. I can see where students make a value judgement and say "you know I wouldn't mind knowing more about history or being a better writer but the cost is just to high". After all if you are actually taking on debt to pay for your education every semester extra you spend at school equals a deeper hole you are going to have to excavate yourself from once you graduate. Under that paradigm is isn't surprising to me that there is ever greater pressure to focus the curriculum so as to get me the training I need and get me out working and paying down my debt as rapidly as possible.
What might begin to provide some pressure the other way is that so many graduates now basically can't effectively communicate their ideas in writing. I know where I am they have started making new applicants, mostly engineers and various scientists, present writing samples as part of their interview. Actually they also make them present in front of a group of people as well. Just to make sure that they have the skills to communicate what they know to others. It has been a big enough problem that for the existing staff they actually taught a writing course for the existing staff last year. Basically just to help those whose writing wasn't up to snuff improve. Assuming we aren't the only company that cares about this it could provide a bit of push back toward people taking more general education type courses. If only enough that they learn to write properly.
Throughout history, every generation has believed their kids were dumber than they were. If you read editorial pages from ten, twenty, fifty years ago, you see the same rants about the world going to hell. Yet all the empirical evidence points to the opposite. Kids are getting smarter. Engineering GRE and EIT scores are rising. There is no evidence that engineering graduates are getting worse, and plenty of evidence that they are getting better.
My theory as to what is happening is that most Universities are becoming less generalized in their education and are instead becoming more narrowly focused. So if you judge whether a newly graduated engineer is "better" or "worse" based on general knowledge over a wide section of the discipline they might seem worse. If on the other hand you judge them based on their knowledge of whatever their specific area of study is they may seem better.
I do think there is some truth to the idea that Universities are just easier now. I know that I have compared notes with various relatives about what we studied in college. My sister's husband, just to pick an example, was a liberal arts major in the early 70's. Graduated 71 or 72. At my school Liberal Arts was a bunch of fluff courses for people who couldn't decide upon "a real major". Back when he took it Liberal Arts wasn't like that. As part of that degree he had to learn Latin, Ancient Greek, a modern foreign language, a surprising amount of mathematics, logic, rhetoric, history, economics, chemistry, biology, physics and various literature courses in English as well in his chosen foreign language. Frankly I am not at all sure I could have graduated from his Liberal Arts program.
Now where I don't know the answer is which is better? Are we better off with much harder schools that turn out fewer students, after all hardness of the program is essentially a barrier to entry, or easier schools that turn out more students? Are we better off with graduates who have broad general knowledge of their area of study or narrower more focused knowledge? I can see arguments both ways and it isn't clear to me what the right answers are.
People are still just as stupid as they've always been...
In general I agree. In this case the cynical part of me kicks in. After all if they all start complaining of a mystery illness there is a good chance that eventually they will be able to sue and get a settlement. After all even if the thing is totally bogus, which this would seem to indicate, the wind farm company either has to settle with them or risk having a disastrous precedent set. With that in mind it doesn't surprise me that if some group comes around describing a mystery illness with vague symptoms that all sorts of people suddenly feel both illness and the need for a settlement check.
The father of a friend of mine growing up had a job in garbage collection. First it paid a hell of a lot better than I expected. The other thing about it is back then they would take virtually anything you put at the curb. His route went through a relatively affluent part of town. People threw out an incredible amount of good stuff. He was the first person I knew who had a big screen TV and a surround sound system. Somebody had spilled paint on the cabinet and just thrown the whole thing out. He picked it up, brought it home, cleaned it up and had a fairly new TV that was a couple of grand for the cost of dragging it home. He brought so much of this sort of stuff home that he had to build a second shed in his back yard to house it all. Every quarter or so he and his buddies from work would take all the stuff they had gathered up out and sell it at a flea market. The first year he did it he claimed that he made enough money scavenging stuff from the garbage to buy a new pickup truck.
Video games tend to be fairly cheap entertainment on a per hour basis. Most of these companies are looking at it as if I can get you to part with an average of a few cents per hour played I make many millions of dollars. I don't necessarily have a problem with them making additional profit as long as it doesn't force me buy stuff to play the game competitively. So if they offer me a variety of vanity gear for my character or cooler looking versions of some weapons for a nominal fee fine. If on the other hand they start charging me for ammo or the special widget that unlocks the 2nd half of the game or something then I have a real issue. My pattern so far is if I can play the game just fine without spending money I might occasionally fork out for something. If I can't be competitive without paying I just go find another game. Unfortunately EA has a rather poor record when it comes to doing the right thing for their customers. So in their specific case my plan is to just wait until there are real reviews out before I buy any of their games.
There is an, unwritten, rule in Government that whenever you get cut you cut the thing that hurts the public the most. Sounds cynical but the logic is the quicker the pain for the public becomes unbearable they quicker they will accept a tax hike. I had a friend that worked at the DMV here. The state government cut their budget. What did the heads of DMV do they cut the front desk staff to the bone. So that people had hours long lines, even more than normal, and started complaining to the state government about. What they didn't do was anything to the behind the scenes people who were mostly just sitting there because their jobs were to process transactions entered by the front desk people. If they had cut those people proportionally the lines would have been much shorter and the place would have mostly just worked. The way they did it the state was able to justify a tax hike to restore the funding within a few months. You will see the same thing happen here. The same thing happens whenever you try to cut government budgets. After all from the point of view of the people making these decisions the choice is tax you more or pay me less. If you were given that choice which would you choose? So to some degree having congress micromanage the cuts is almost a necessity. Because if you don't the agencies will structure the cuts with an eye to protecting their budget allocations rather than an eye toward maintaining service with less.
Sony has made it very clear that they aren't a customer focused company for at least the last 20 years. So just expect that they are going to do what benefits them no matter what it does to their customers and you won't be surprised. My personal answer has been to stop buying Sony products. The PS2 was the last thing I bought from them and I bought that at release so it has been 10+ years since I bought anything Sony. I considered buying a PS3 but then I read about all the shenanigans with PS2 support and bluray players started dropping in price. Unless the next Microsoft console is just totally unacceptable I won't be buying a PS4. You are doing something seriously wrong when Microsoft seems consumer friendly and customer focused by comparison.
He is an inventor, not a businessman ...
Sad truth is that whether we like it or not everyone is, or should be, a businessman. Even if your business is just managing your own affairs you would be well served to make sure you do it in at least a semi-professional manner. Failure to do so can have dire consequences as this man is, unfortunately, finding out. He is losing everything because the company he started and then sold has changed the design to avoid his patent. It sounds like his failure to really manage the business side of his life is what is destroying him. In the modern world you can't get away with that. Especially if you are an inventor or creator of value. There are just to many people looking to prey upon you for you to not learn the business side of it.
Failure to properly manage your affairs can have wreck your life. I know people who have suffered great losses because they didn't do simple "businessman" type things. Just a few examples, control your spending with a budget; have a lawyer look over legal documents before you sign them; do a return on investment (ROI) assessment of things like specific college majors before you embark on them and taking on debt to get them. It seems simple but I have seen so many people I know quite literally wreck their lives from failing to do these things. If you don't want to suffer that fate then you are whatever else you do / businessman. That or you are liable to end up as whatever / victim. Personally I am going to stick with businessman if it at all possible.
There's a lot of domestic fake maple syrup, which is nothing but maple syrup-flavored corn syrup. So, don't get too nationalistic in criticizing the crap the Chinese are sending us.
BTW, I heard a year or so a go there was an effort to make a law banning selling anything not pure maple syrup as such.
The real answer here is that anytime there is a commodity that has significant value and a possible way to cheat somebody will do it. Whether it be substituting fake honey, fake maple syrup, or lasagne with horse meat rather than beef. Most developed countries have inspectors to try and minimize that behavior. The problem is regulation and testing regimes make the end product more expensive. So there is always a trade off where they try to have enough testing to minimize the abuse of the consumer while not driving up costs to the point that the consumer can't afford it.
My suspicion here is that this whole fight is about getting Apple to buy out their trademark. Odds are this phone being released with this name is more about forcing them to the negotiating table than a serious attempt to use the name. In the article the head of the Brazilian company pretty much says he wants settlement talks. All of this appears to be about setting the stage to see who has the best bargaining position when it comes time to talk money. Which is really what this is about.
It looks like Apple's position is that Gradiente didn't produce their phone within the time frame legally required to protect their trademark. Since I am not a Brazilian lawyer, or another other kind of lawyer, I can't begin to say whether that is a claim that is valid or even passes the laugh test. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I don't see this being that big of a deal. Depending upon what happens in appeal, Apple will either win and Gradiente will rename their phone. They will both end up with competing and valid claims so you'll see Gradiente selling the "iPhone" and Apple selling the "Apple iPhone" or something along those lines. The third possibility is that Apple pays them off or just buys them out. With the kind of cash Apple has laying around my guess is there is some sort of economic accommodation to be had here. What I don't see is Apple not being able to sell the product in Brazil.
I'm currently 58 years old, working as an industrial electrician in a maintenance department setting
You know what kind of prints electricians need, you know if you're getting BSed, you can look at see if they are doing a good job rather than relying on a paid inspector as the only QA/QC. You're gonna save them fat stacks of cash.
I think you are dead on with this. The company I work for did a facility build out a few years ago. We were fortunate that we had a guy on staff who was knowledgeable about the very sorts of things you are describing. He was a huge help in a number of ways. One is he was able to pick up design items that would end up being problems and got them fixed while they were just items on a blue print. Which is a very cheap time to fix things. Second he was able to make daily visits to the construction site and inspect what they were doing. He was able to nip a lot of problems in the bud just by being available and knowing what to look for. A third thing that was also helpful is he knew the terminology and was able to talk to the various trades in the terms that they understood. The net impact of all of this, according to my management, was that we ended up saving approximately $500,000.
Is it just me or does merging with a content company pretty much guarantee mediocrity in whatever product you used to sell before doing that?
The Department of Education will be staffed at policy and implementation level by people who believe in the value of education and teachers actually like children!
Yeah, maybe in Australia that is the case. In the US the Department of education doesn't really educate kids. Actually running schools, hiring teacher etc is actually a state and local responsibly. The Department of Education gathers statistics about education, gives grants for various things, advocates for educational change, regulates schools and enforces civil rights laws in the areas of education. There have been a lot of complaints over the last few decades that the department is actually an impediment to good education. Basically because it forces schools to spend a large amount of time and money complying with its various regulations. Most of which have little do with education and a lot to do with politics.
I agree with all of that. Guerrilla wars are usually long and bloody. Just look at a few of the countries where it has occurred recently and it isn't at all uncommon to see death tolls in the 50,000 to 200,000+ range. Most of the people who die aren't in the army or even rebels. They tend to be civilians who get caught in the cross fire. People, in any country, should think long and hard before embarking on such a thing. Even if you win, which is far from assured, the cost in lives and destruction is going to horrific and it can go on for decades.