An old boy scout leader friend once called himself a ponderosa pine: a big tree, offering shelter and somewhere to lean. As a type-A nerd, it's one of my toughest lessons, to step back and make the kids do all the work. To ask good leading questions, or explain an engineering concept succinctly in a tangent. To keep them from hurting themselves. To praise good hacker insights, or doggedness.
Check my prior comment. FIRST Lego is: limited # of sensors/motors, fully autonomous, and designed by kids (5th and 6th graders). Hit the 'net, do some research, and you'll see just how full of s**t your imagined description of the FIRST leagues is.
Better yet, attend a competition (the whole day... listen to the opening/closing ceremonies, sit in on presentations). You'll see they're pushing for engineering prowess MORE than for robotics solutions. As for 'learning something about robotics', even when a system is remotely-controlled, servo feedback and calibration become a big damn deal. When things break, or during co-op rounds, kids have to know what they're doing. These kids learn WHY robotics is tough, and begin to create compensation techniques, even if they don't master robotics enough to do full-autonomy on new hardware on a strange challenge in a few weeks on a few-thousand-dollar budget... or, in my kids' case, on a few-hundred-dollar budget.
Yes, having good sponsors, team members or parents is crucial to some aspects of the competitions. But coming from mentoring a huge team (nobody is turned away) in a disadvantaged neighborhood, I'll personally attest that your post couldn't be more wrong. Or more insulting.
You're reporting what you remembered from your ear to the ground? WTF, doesn't google and wikipedia work where you are?! Did you attend a single FIRST contest? What about the junior or Lego FIRST leagues?
Thanks for admitting you were doing the usual slashdot thing of just spouting off random unsubstantiated b.s., but please... your rant is what is being discussed. You somewhat pwned the conversation with your imagined warrior killer-bot claims.
I'm still reading the thread, but haven't seen mention of FIRST's younger levels yet. And from experience, I can vouch that FIRST Lego are diametrically opposite what you imagine:
The earliest tiers of FIRST are done using Lego. The tier I'm involved in (with a large team of 5th and sixth grade kids) is fully autonomous, involves 'flip switch', 'move object', 'select/gather and return to base' type goals, has a ridiculously-short 3-minute round for nearly a dozen goals (forces prioritiziation), and that part of the competition is sandwiched in with challenges geared toward demonstrating teamwork, public presentation, and learning about and solving some problems geared to some contemporary theme (this year is challenges old people/seniors face, last year was food safety). All of this is wrapped up with a loud, steady mantra of 'graceful professionalism'. I'm mentoring kids in a very-poor neighborhood whose school is working to become a small-city science/tech magnet school (my 2nd year), and was dumbstruck when our team qualified for state (barely; 12th out of 40+ teams in our regional competition).
The senior-high-school FIRST competitors often are judges and support staff for our competitions. This year's emcee was a geeky/charismatic local high-school math-olympics coach. Last year, I saw one of the high-school FIRST team's robots: they had a dozen interesting bits of good-prototyping best practices I never got close to being taught until college: an adjustable chassis (L-channel with holes, like giant erector set parts), deep-cycle batteries and tires and servo-driven motors, a data bus and carefully-built wiring looms for each mechanism, design for field-service/redundancy/spares, onboard and remote diagnostic frameworks, feedback mechanisms, etc. They used an inverted wifi home router (a modded wrt54g or similar) on the robot to talk to their laptop for data/communicatiojn. The chassis was bigger and weighed more than I expected (about 75kg, a meter per side, more than a meter tall). I forget the goal: collect and bin many balls on the playfield, maybe? Gather, scoop, lift, dump, plus motion and detection.
Full disclosure: IANA First representative/spokesperson. For the record, I loved battlebots. My team's kids geek out when they see 'em on youtube. But I can completely see how shifting to combat-competition would drown out or destroy attention on many of the fundamentals being sought here. There's competition in FIRST, because adversarial competition is motivational/educational crack. It's that once you introduce combative sorts of competition, it seems damn hard to not lose ALL of the attention on the other harder-to-teach ideals FIRST is after.
1 - Weapons are a basic human right? So we're guilty of human rights violations by preventing Iran and North Korea from getting nukes? And we should let people buy landmines and grenades? Does this apply to landmines and gas weapons? What about tactical armor and/or rockets and/or nukes? What is the logic that allows each of these distinctions between which is or isn't a human right? 2 - Since when is a rifle a standard weapon of the time now? By quantity, landmines are are almost as plentiful as military rifles (400 million deployed since WWII, 65 million in the last 20 years according to one source 100 million deployed and 100 million in reserves by another). Landmines are definitely cheaper and more cost-effective defensive weapons ($3-30 apiece, remain lethal for decades without attention). By killing efficiency, machine guns win. By force multiplication value and deterence, laser-guided missiles let the afghanis beat USSR. Compared to rocket and grenade launchers, rifles against armor are about as worthless as slingshots. 3 - Tautologies like 'only a government afraid' pretend the entire world is just as you believe it to be. In fact, democratic/republic governments often decide that certain things are unacceptably hazardous. We ban porn, drugs, weapons, religious beliefs, books because the citizens and/or government (they are often the same thing) choose to. This happens less because of fear of citizens than fear of the hazards associated with that item. Yeah, it can be repressive. But that's a shades of grey decision: many very enlightened and safe and progressive nation restricts gun ownership for reasons other than fear.
Reality check: how exactly did this week's small/weak guy improve the pain quotient of the world by resorting to gunfire, vs. the absurd gedankenexperiment of him trying to strangle 26 consecutive people with his bare hands. IOW, your sentence 2 contradicts 3, 4 and 5.
Also: No end is merciful when the alternative was/is not dying in the first damn place.
Interesting theory. But the US already has lax gun laws, yet has more deaths by gun per capita than any other nation.
We can wish for this 'more guns make us safer' claim to be the case, but it just isn't so. Any argument consistently disproved by empirical evidence is just sophistry (that's greek for handwavy bullshit).
Full disclosure: I own several guns. I respect the US 2nd amendment. Where exactly do these disasters involve 'a well-regulated militia'? Where do gun shops selling out this week on AR's and 30-round clips involve a well-regulated militia? I don't see modern-day minutemen. I see fear, paranoia and so many n00bs with guns that there's nonstop mayhem.
Yeah, between GE and IBM, half a dozen colleges, countless telecommuters that figured out how to get the hell out of metro Boston/NYC/etc, and the metro BTV area alone having well over a hundred thousand people, I'd say that your guessing there are ** 5 ** twitter users seems about the douchiest uninformed remark of my day.
Full disclosure: writing this from a conservative flyover state that gets this sort of mocking on a regular basis, not Vermont. Coastal provincialism is a plague -- y'all really don't seem to be aware how snark like that makes you sound like dimwitted, uninformed cretins.
A chaotic system works fine; just add the restrictions capability. For example, the programmers/operations engineers involved get told: Foodstuffs can't be next to potential toxins. A flag is added (let's call it FDA1) across the board to all foodstuffs, another to the things they can't be near (FDA2). Then, the chaotic system declares a region of the warehouse FDA1-ok and another FDA2-ok. Takes a split-second more to allocate a new bin, including having built-in 'grow region FDA1-ok' functionality. Buffering distances or anything else just fall into the above decision tree.
Wanna envision this without all the programming? Food on the left rows, pharm on the right. A row for chemicals and cleaners and detergents far from produce. Just like your supermarket. The difference would be that, in a chaotic system, each new case of cheerios to come off the truck could be placed anywhere within the food section where there's space, rather than staff spending hours fronting/rearranging/stocking carefully.
I think it's TOAD the line. Origin either from battletoads or Toad The Wet Sprocket's unreleased next album, together with a TARDIS mishap innoculating 18th century culture with the phrase and underlying pop culture context enough to sustain it.
(Yeah, mine may be wrong, but it's not utterly backwards like thinking to toe the line is to challenge authority. Oopsie.)
Huh. I'm getting old, but the first and last time I had a chance to get a pension was decades ago. A retirement date with a pension is no longer offered at most companies. Given the whipsaw of the economy, I've seen people's lives upended by crashes of their ESOP or 401k's -- so defined-contribution hasn't panned out as promised, either.
Banksters raided those funds with impunity; some got rich, nobody got prosecuted for screwing some old machinist out of his pension. The few remaining pension mechanisms are raided or underfunded until pensioners can go 20+ years without ever seeing a cost of living increase as big as inflation, meaning they're spiralling downward annually.
Healthcare in the US is the number one bankrupter of people. Not so over there.
Here, we obsess with saving our jobs. There, life balance is better whenever it's measured.
We skip vacations, work thru lunch. They do neither. And get more holidays and vacation time. Some have shorter work weeks.
How exactly do you measure that it sucks to be them, because from what I'm seeing, it's not too shabby.
No, union GROWTH isn't happening in government. They're just the big obvious target because SO MUCH OF EVERYTHING ELSE HAS BEEN GUTTED.
By the way, SEIU is the fastest growing union. They're service workers: hotel housekeepers, commercial bldg janitors and etc. No, they're not governmental.
Because doing everything yourself is inherently inefficient. And it's contrary to the crux benefit of society: efficiencies of specialization.
I **CAN** do all these things. I really don't want to, and it wastes time I could spend focusing on my strengths and enjoying my life outside of work.
First, renegotiating my pay rarely (at best, once a year) puts me at a disadvantage to my employer who hires someone who focuses on negotiation nonstop. I'm also weakened because they can lie / leverage me against other employees or contractors. They know what everyone makes, I may not. They can be experts at the communication aspects of pay negotiation -- a colleague who is mildly autistic ends up getting screwed as a result.
Making good healthcare decisions? Nice sideline, but I don't want to need an MD to dig into the deep nuances of whether my specific medical condition means I need a CAT scan or an MRI or just a few minutes with a doctor listening to me breathe. I want a regulated agent acting on my behalf.
This whole thing is doublespeak: when people stand together, employees benefit at the expense of shareholders. There is no people vs. union dichotomy here, there's just intense value to winning the debate over splitting the profits among the interested parties: a company has a professional staff paid incredibly well to focus on profits to shareholders. Employees need the same, whether it is a guild, a union, or your hinted-at ideas on protections for individuals (who will hopefully get this information out of their employer so that their rights are better protected).
I'm getting really tired of reading of how a social worker or teacher or factory employee is overpaid, but investment bankers make 1000x as much 'but it's earned'. Ditto on big bad union rants. I don't see it as coincidence that union-busting parallels the downturn in inflation-adjusted incomes in the USA.
Bravo. No modpoints, but that's about how I feel every time I get sucked into political debates nowadays. Especially my temporary frustration when someone goes godwin or pops the 'love it or leave it' cliche. Why can't I love my country enough to stage an intervention and get its sorry ass into rehab?!
Education: Educate women to the 6th grade, and populations go down, infant mortality goes down, etc. Well, etc a **lot**. Everything improves as women get educated. It's the mother of all correlative humanitarian acts.
Infrastructure: not so universally awesome, but potable water, roads, communications all help more than they destroy economies.
I'm sure more exist. My point was simply that your last several words were hasty and seem incorrect.
What's your counter-theory? God drops by regularly and plants a few new species? Hardly seems like a conventional creation myth.
Do you believe the timeline that includes dinosaurs? Where'd they come from, etc?
See... it all comes back to deadbeat skydaddy, or to us continuing to examine and study and use the scientific method. You have fun over there with your flavor of crazy; I'll be over here with curious skeptics and a nice sharp occam's razor.
OK, let's stipulate for a moment that the thought that a rock created life is superficially absurd.
Equally absurd is inventing a belief system predicated on an unseen sky-daddy that created it (out of what and from where?), sans any evidence.
OK, so now I'm done stipulating anything except that the universe exists and lacking evidence to the contrary, we're going to have to figure it's origin out without skydaddy, who's a deadbeat of epic proportions.
A scientist doesn't get insulted by either of these prospects. We just go to work piecing together the cosmic data and trying to see what that data and our understanding of the rules can tell us.
The funny thing is, the earth is so freaking young compared to universal age, it's 3 generations plus some slack just counting stars like itself. Throw in hot/short-lived stars, and the estimates go up to double-digit estimates of the number of stellar generations possible in the 10+ billion years before Sol was ignited.
From these earlier generations, supernovae create rarer elements. Give them literally hundreds of millions of years to a billion years to spread around and recoalesce and form another star system.
In each new star system, collect that stuff into planets. If the planet has fluids, things'll mix nonstop. With very little time on a planet with fluid components, all sorts of compounds form. Oxides. Carbonates and Nitrates. Tons of other molecules. Small organics (hydrocarbons, mostly). Let them group up via natural sorting mechanisms (erosion, siltation, wind-wash, crystalization, freeze/thaw cycles). Bombard these with the occasional external burst of energy (fire, lightning, or that sort of decay of adjacent material).
There's an old saying: nature abhors a vacuum. In the case of thermodynamic economics (how much energy in, how much energy out), this is applicable because any time a reaction can either release a lot more energy or happen more efficiently than another and trigger at a lower potential energy, it will. Stuff that burns, will. Stuff that oxidizes, will. Etc. So, about the time that some complicated compounds form that don't have an easy release (don't burn, don't oxidize, don't dissolve), they'll accumulate. And when something comes along capable of exploiting that energy, it will.
More complex mechanisms? Same gradual increase in complexity. When an organic compound forms that rips apart secondary compounds for energy and similar organic compounds as residue/waste, the process becomes self-sustaining. Let it fizz and expand for even a few years and it'll spread until it consumes every such resource on the planet and then 'dies off' (no input, no output... but not technically dead since the limiting factor is a lack of inputs. Every time something generates a few more tasty molecules, they are short-lived, being ripped apart by our fizzy proto-life compound. When a few such fizzy protolifes exist and happen to overlap in a way that fizzy 1 eats 2, generates 3 which eats 4 and 2 and generates 1, you've now got mechanisms that cycle. Let them cycle for decades or generations. New cycles form. After a few thousand years (not much needed), there are literally hundreds of these cycles, and the number of complex compounds is growing.
The first 'life' would have been this sort of cycle, accomplishing little more than molecular dissolution of something. Something simpler than an enzyme acting on a bunch of hydrocarbons, maybe. I'm not a biologist: ask one what they'd consider the lowest example of life.... get what I'm saying? It ain't a ROCK that creates life. It's statistical improbabilities that boggle your mind being bested by the sheer quantity of material and time: 10^50 atoms and time for them to undergo 10^20 reactions apiece (former # googled, latter one is an ass-pull: a possible reaction every few seconds).
Yeah, there's gaps in our model. Again, I'm not a biologist so I'm not sure where the gaps are. I've always been curious about them, but
Um, that word 'FACT". I do not think it means what you think it means. Anecdote !=fact. Ditto for anything you expect us to believe 'just 'cuz I said so'.
Liberal economists aren't Keynesians (Krugman, for a moderate liberal; socialists for the opposite extreme), there most certainly are valid nonAustrian economic models. IANAE, but it sure seems to me that we're seeing another demonstration of how Austrian pure-play capitalism is as bad an economic model as pure socialism/communism. I prefer social engineering via regulated capitalism: Balance wins handily over either extreme.
That paragraph about gun control is a bread-n-circuses distraction to left/right economic positions, and as such matters as little as abortion (and is certainly not a litmus test for either part).
Everyone pays taxes (so of **course** you are affected by them despite not being a 1%er), but most of us in the US are paying less than we would have during the 50's, 60's, 70's. The social safety net is alive and well in Germany, despite it being the healthiest economy in the developed/1st world. But they're aggressively taxing businesses, then using the proceeds to keep manufacturing in-country.
Giving money to the poor is loaded language. The depression was **solved** by handouts and governmental borrowing/deficit spending (the government giving poor people money and jobs when nobody else would hire due to illiquidity of finances and markets).
Well, that and Hitler.
Likewise, the stimulus worked this time around, although Krugman and other economists are building up plenty of evidence that more would have been better. The US House's Republican plan of Austerity economics aren't helping and seem to be pushing toward rekindling another Recession.
Grants and other 'given' money helps the weak/infirm/old survive with dignity and helps the children of the poor and helps people bootstrap themselves out of poverty. Tax breaks for the wealthy, OTOH don't trickle down nearly as well as Reagan and the Heritage Foundation pretend.
Government inefficiency is a bogus meme: Social Security has repeatedly been analyzed and scored better than private pensions for their operational efficiency. Ditto many other government programs -- you've fallen for a conservative talking point there. As for them being the least efficient means of putting money into an economy, nothing could be further from the truth: A $1 tax increase diminishes your personal spending less than a buck, since you (as a healthy middle-class wonk) were investing/saving part of it. OTOH, a buck in the hand of anyone near the poverty line gets spent that week. All of it. Every time. By the time that welfare buck cycles twice through local economies (once if it went to WalMart or other corporations that suck the profits out while they pay their staff less than a living wage), it's usually kicking the ass off the fractional buck given to you or me.
As for that founding fathers quote: it's one great man's opinion, taken out of context and across 200+ years. Relying on it as gospel is your most absurd prose of all. I honestly can't imagine a quorum of flaming liberals like our founding fathers liking Washington or Wall Street or most of your other claims.
Ya wanna fix the economy? Change international trade regulations, reinstate a steeper progressive tax structure, and stop spending half our taxes on war. Then, maybe we could stop pretending like the only options for healthcare are the extremes being debated and start emulating nations whose healthcare laws are working better than ours (Frontline did a nice show a few years ago comparing US, Germany, the UK, Japan and another nation's, for reference). Then let's talk seriously about the long term -- we can adjust retirement rules and tax rates (raise the ceiling, set different rules for knowledge workers and blue-collar jobs that literally physically wear out the people doing them by 55 -- the number of unemployable old construction workers at your local homeless shelter sho
Yaaay, Libertarians: can't sway enough percentage points to be mentioned let alone win most elections, but think everyone else (including all those people whose safety they'd infringe upon or whose livelihoods they'd crush in their oversimplified socioeconomic experiments) should just concede anyway. The hubris is astounding.
My favorite SQL Prima donna was a guy that sr mgmt thought was a prodigy; they overrode our objections and put him solo on a project. Not knowing basic shit like normalization, his app hinged on queries that make my eyes to water just thinking about them a decade later: if QueryName matches name1 or name 2 or name 3 or name4, then again for every other advanced search field. The pinnacle was the advanced search query. It went on for a dozen pages, several just querying 8 wildcardable keywords against almost all columns. Since everything was one huge flat file of redundant columns, indexing couldn't save it. 'Find me commercial plumbers in zipcode X' often timed out after 10+ minutes and would peg one of 2 cpu's on the E450 we were using.
Two encounters like that bozo convinced me that Prima donnas are a project-killer sort of risk, even if (like code-smell) you sense the problem long before you can articulate the specifics. (NOTE: primadonna != smart or brilliant or savant).
I'm dumbfounded at how much overlap there is between the 'gospel of wealth' and rand sects.
FTFY. And seriously, WTF, christians? Camel? Eye of Needle? Seven deadly sins? Moneychangers? Which part of the bible implies this selfish greedheadedness?
Slashdot Mirror
An old boy scout leader friend once called himself a ponderosa pine: a big tree, offering shelter and somewhere to lean. As a type-A nerd, it's one of my toughest lessons, to step back and make the kids do all the work. To ask good leading questions, or explain an engineering concept succinctly in a tangent. To keep them from hurting themselves. To praise good hacker insights, or doggedness.
Second year of mentoring a team, same impression. The science/engineering attractive power of this low-budget league amazes me.
Check my prior comment. FIRST Lego is: limited # of sensors/motors, fully autonomous, and designed by kids (5th and 6th graders). Hit the 'net, do some research, and you'll see just how full of s**t your imagined description of the FIRST leagues is.
Better yet, attend a competition (the whole day... listen to the opening/closing ceremonies, sit in on presentations). You'll see they're pushing for engineering prowess MORE than for robotics solutions. As for 'learning something about robotics', even when a system is remotely-controlled, servo feedback and calibration become a big damn deal. When things break, or during co-op rounds, kids have to know what they're doing. These kids learn WHY robotics is tough, and begin to create compensation techniques, even if they don't master robotics enough to do full-autonomy on new hardware on a strange challenge in a few weeks on a few-thousand-dollar budget... or, in my kids' case, on a few-hundred-dollar budget.
Yes, having good sponsors, team members or parents is crucial to some aspects of the competitions. But coming from mentoring a huge team (nobody is turned away) in a disadvantaged neighborhood, I'll personally attest that your post couldn't be more wrong. Or more insulting.
You're reporting what you remembered from your ear to the ground? WTF, doesn't google and wikipedia work where you are?! Did you attend a single FIRST contest? What about the junior or Lego FIRST leagues?
Thanks for admitting you were doing the usual slashdot thing of just spouting off random unsubstantiated b.s., but please... your rant is what is being discussed. You somewhat pwned the conversation with your imagined warrior killer-bot claims.
I'm still reading the thread, but haven't seen mention of FIRST's younger levels yet. And from experience, I can vouch that FIRST Lego are diametrically opposite what you imagine:
The earliest tiers of FIRST are done using Lego. The tier I'm involved in (with a large team of 5th and sixth grade kids) is fully autonomous, involves 'flip switch', 'move object', 'select/gather and return to base' type goals, has a ridiculously-short 3-minute round for nearly a dozen goals (forces prioritiziation), and that part of the competition is sandwiched in with challenges geared toward demonstrating teamwork, public presentation, and learning about and solving some problems geared to some contemporary theme (this year is challenges old people/seniors face, last year was food safety). All of this is wrapped up with a loud, steady mantra of 'graceful professionalism'. I'm mentoring kids in a very-poor neighborhood whose school is working to become a small-city science/tech magnet school (my 2nd year), and was dumbstruck when our team qualified for state (barely; 12th out of 40+ teams in our regional competition).
The senior-high-school FIRST competitors often are judges and support staff for our competitions. This year's emcee was a geeky/charismatic local high-school math-olympics coach. Last year, I saw one of the high-school FIRST team's robots: they had a dozen interesting bits of good-prototyping best practices I never got close to being taught until college: an adjustable chassis (L-channel with holes, like giant erector set parts), deep-cycle batteries and tires and servo-driven motors, a data bus and carefully-built wiring looms for each mechanism, design for field-service/redundancy/spares, onboard and remote diagnostic frameworks, feedback mechanisms, etc. They used an inverted wifi home router (a modded wrt54g or similar) on the robot to talk to their laptop for data/communicatiojn. The chassis was bigger and weighed more than I expected (about 75kg, a meter per side, more than a meter tall). I forget the goal: collect and bin many balls on the playfield, maybe? Gather, scoop, lift, dump, plus motion and detection.
Full disclosure: IANA First representative/spokesperson. For the record, I loved battlebots. My team's kids geek out when they see 'em on youtube. But I can completely see how shifting to combat-competition would drown out or destroy attention on many of the fundamentals being sought here. There's competition in FIRST, because adversarial competition is motivational/educational crack. It's that once you introduce combative sorts of competition, it seems damn hard to not lose ALL of the attention on the other harder-to-teach ideals FIRST is after.
1 - Weapons are a basic human right? So we're guilty of human rights violations by preventing Iran and North Korea from getting nukes? And we should let people buy landmines and grenades? Does this apply to landmines and gas weapons? What about tactical armor and/or rockets and/or nukes? What is the logic that allows each of these distinctions between which is or isn't a human right?
2 - Since when is a rifle a standard weapon of the time now? By quantity, landmines are are almost as plentiful as military rifles (400 million deployed since WWII, 65 million in the last 20 years according to one source 100 million deployed and 100 million in reserves by another). Landmines are definitely cheaper and more cost-effective defensive weapons ($3-30 apiece, remain lethal for decades without attention). By killing efficiency, machine guns win. By force multiplication value and deterence, laser-guided missiles let the afghanis beat USSR. Compared to rocket and grenade launchers, rifles against armor are about as worthless as slingshots.
3 - Tautologies like 'only a government afraid' pretend the entire world is just as you believe it to be. In fact, democratic/republic governments often decide that certain things are unacceptably hazardous. We ban porn, drugs, weapons, religious beliefs, books because the citizens and/or government (they are often the same thing) choose to. This happens less because of fear of citizens than fear of the hazards associated with that item. Yeah, it can be repressive. But that's a shades of grey decision: many very enlightened and safe and progressive nation restricts gun ownership for reasons other than fear.
Reality check: how exactly did this week's small/weak guy improve the pain quotient of the world by resorting to gunfire, vs. the absurd gedankenexperiment of him trying to strangle 26 consecutive people with his bare hands. IOW, your sentence 2 contradicts 3, 4 and 5.
Also: No end is merciful when the alternative was/is not dying in the first damn place.
Interesting theory. But the US already has lax gun laws, yet has more deaths by gun per capita than any other nation.
We can wish for this 'more guns make us safer' claim to be the case, but it just isn't so. Any argument consistently disproved by empirical evidence is just sophistry (that's greek for handwavy bullshit).
Full disclosure: I own several guns. I respect the US 2nd amendment. Where exactly do these disasters involve 'a well-regulated militia'? Where do gun shops selling out this week on AR's and 30-round clips involve a well-regulated militia? I don't see modern-day minutemen. I see fear, paranoia and so many n00bs with guns that there's nonstop mayhem.
Yeah, between GE and IBM, half a dozen colleges, countless telecommuters that figured out how to get the hell out of metro Boston/NYC/etc, and the metro BTV area alone having well over a hundred thousand people, I'd say that your guessing there are ** 5 ** twitter users seems about the douchiest uninformed remark of my day.
Full disclosure: writing this from a conservative flyover state that gets this sort of mocking on a regular basis, not Vermont. Coastal provincialism is a plague -- y'all really don't seem to be aware how snark like that makes you sound like dimwitted, uninformed cretins.
No, that's not really that hard.
A chaotic system works fine; just add the restrictions capability. For example, the programmers/operations engineers involved get told: Foodstuffs can't be next to potential toxins. A flag is added (let's call it FDA1) across the board to all foodstuffs, another to the things they can't be near (FDA2). Then, the chaotic system declares a region of the warehouse FDA1-ok and another FDA2-ok. Takes a split-second more to allocate a new bin, including having built-in 'grow region FDA1-ok' functionality. Buffering distances or anything else just fall into the above decision tree.
Wanna envision this without all the programming? Food on the left rows, pharm on the right. A row for chemicals and cleaners and detergents far from produce. Just like your supermarket. The difference would be that, in a chaotic system, each new case of cheerios to come off the truck could be placed anywhere within the food section where there's space, rather than staff spending hours fronting/rearranging/stocking carefully.
Technically, calling 'ad hominem' is like calling 'godwin'. You're diverting away from $$ and the DDoS happening by a spurious appeal to authority.
I'm hearing similar rumblings for a high end LG fridge. Think we're going to be seeing more of this as time goes by...
I think it's TOAD the line. Origin either from battletoads or Toad The Wet Sprocket's unreleased next album, together with a TARDIS mishap innoculating 18th century culture with the phrase and underlying pop culture context enough to sustain it.
(Yeah, mine may be wrong, but it's not utterly backwards like thinking to toe the line is to challenge authority. Oopsie.)
Fact-checking myself: SEIU has 1.2M healthcare, 1M public sector (mostly government) and a few hundred thousand property mgmt staff. http://www.seiu.org/a/ourunion/fast-facts.php#en
Huh. I'm getting old, but the first and last time I had a chance to get a pension was decades ago. A retirement date with a pension is no longer offered at most companies. Given the whipsaw of the economy, I've seen people's lives upended by crashes of their ESOP or 401k's -- so defined-contribution hasn't panned out as promised, either.
Banksters raided those funds with impunity; some got rich, nobody got prosecuted for screwing some old machinist out of his pension. The few remaining pension mechanisms are raided or underfunded until pensioners can go 20+ years without ever seeing a cost of living increase as big as inflation, meaning they're spiralling downward annually.
Healthcare in the US is the number one bankrupter of people. Not so over there.
Here, we obsess with saving our jobs. There, life balance is better whenever it's measured.
We skip vacations, work thru lunch. They do neither. And get more holidays and vacation time. Some have shorter work weeks.
How exactly do you measure that it sucks to be them, because from what I'm seeing, it's not too shabby.
No, union GROWTH isn't happening in government. They're just the big obvious target because SO MUCH OF EVERYTHING ELSE HAS BEEN GUTTED.
By the way, SEIU is the fastest growing union. They're service workers: hotel housekeepers, commercial bldg janitors and etc. No, they're not governmental.
Bullshit. Choosing to stick with a job in an abusive environment is a person sucking it up and enduring a shitty tradeoff, not 'ceasing to be abuse'.
We all make tradeoffs. Abuse is a spectrum. Your absurd Randian hyperlibertarianism is showing.
Because doing everything yourself is inherently inefficient. And it's contrary to the crux benefit of society: efficiencies of specialization.
I **CAN** do all these things. I really don't want to, and it wastes time I could spend focusing on my strengths and enjoying my life outside of work.
First, renegotiating my pay rarely (at best, once a year) puts me at a disadvantage to my employer who hires someone who focuses on negotiation nonstop. I'm also weakened because they can lie / leverage me against other employees or contractors. They know what everyone makes, I may not. They can be experts at the communication aspects of pay negotiation -- a colleague who is mildly autistic ends up getting screwed as a result.
Making good healthcare decisions? Nice sideline, but I don't want to need an MD to dig into the deep nuances of whether my specific medical condition means I need a CAT scan or an MRI or just a few minutes with a doctor listening to me breathe. I want a regulated agent acting on my behalf.
This whole thing is doublespeak: when people stand together, employees benefit at the expense of shareholders. There is no people vs. union dichotomy here, there's just intense value to winning the debate over splitting the profits among the interested parties: a company has a professional staff paid incredibly well to focus on profits to shareholders. Employees need the same, whether it is a guild, a union, or your hinted-at ideas on protections for individuals (who will hopefully get this information out of their employer so that their rights are better protected).
I'm getting really tired of reading of how a social worker or teacher or factory employee is overpaid, but investment bankers make 1000x as much 'but it's earned'. Ditto on big bad union rants. I don't see it as coincidence that union-busting parallels the downturn in inflation-adjusted incomes in the USA.
Bravo. No modpoints, but that's about how I feel every time I get sucked into political debates nowadays. Especially my temporary frustration when someone goes godwin or pops the 'love it or leave it' cliche. Why can't I love my country enough to stage an intervention and get its sorry ass into rehab?!
baby, bathwater.
A couple good perpetual humanitarian programs:
Education: Educate women to the 6th grade, and populations go down, infant mortality goes down, etc. Well, etc a **lot**. Everything improves as women get educated. It's the mother of all correlative humanitarian acts.
Infrastructure: not so universally awesome, but potable water, roads, communications all help more than they destroy economies.
I'm sure more exist. My point was simply that your last several words were hasty and seem incorrect.
So you're frustrated with evolution.
What's your counter-theory? God drops by regularly and plants a few new species? Hardly seems like a conventional creation myth.
Do you believe the timeline that includes dinosaurs? Where'd they come from, etc?
See... it all comes back to deadbeat skydaddy, or to us continuing to examine and study and use the scientific method. You have fun over there with your flavor of crazy; I'll be over here with curious skeptics and a nice sharp occam's razor.
OK, let's stipulate for a moment that the thought that a rock created life is superficially absurd.
Equally absurd is inventing a belief system predicated on an unseen sky-daddy that created it (out of what and from where?), sans any evidence.
OK, so now I'm done stipulating anything except that the universe exists and lacking evidence to the contrary, we're going to have to figure it's origin out without skydaddy, who's a deadbeat of epic proportions.
A scientist doesn't get insulted by either of these prospects. We just go to work piecing together the cosmic data and trying to see what that data and our understanding of the rules can tell us.
The funny thing is, the earth is so freaking young compared to universal age, it's 3 generations plus some slack just counting stars like itself. Throw in hot/short-lived stars, and the estimates go up to double-digit estimates of the number of stellar generations possible in the 10+ billion years before Sol was ignited.
From these earlier generations, supernovae create rarer elements. Give them literally hundreds of millions of years to a billion years to spread around and recoalesce and form another star system.
In each new star system, collect that stuff into planets. If the planet has fluids, things'll mix nonstop. With very little time on a planet with fluid components, all sorts of compounds form. Oxides. Carbonates and Nitrates. Tons of other molecules. Small organics (hydrocarbons, mostly). Let them group up via natural sorting mechanisms (erosion, siltation, wind-wash, crystalization, freeze/thaw cycles). Bombard these with the occasional external burst of energy (fire, lightning, or that sort of decay of adjacent material).
There's an old saying: nature abhors a vacuum. In the case of thermodynamic economics (how much energy in, how much energy out), this is applicable because any time a reaction can either release a lot more energy or happen more efficiently than another and trigger at a lower potential energy, it will. Stuff that burns, will. Stuff that oxidizes, will. Etc. So, about the time that some complicated compounds form that don't have an easy release (don't burn, don't oxidize, don't dissolve), they'll accumulate. And when something comes along capable of exploiting that energy, it will.
More complex mechanisms? Same gradual increase in complexity. When an organic compound forms that rips apart secondary compounds for energy and similar organic compounds as residue/waste, the process becomes self-sustaining. Let it fizz and expand for even a few years and it'll spread until it consumes every such resource on the planet and then 'dies off' (no input, no output... but not technically dead since the limiting factor is a lack of inputs. Every time something generates a few more tasty molecules, they are short-lived, being ripped apart by our fizzy proto-life compound. When a few such fizzy protolifes exist and happen to overlap in a way that fizzy 1 eats 2, generates 3 which eats 4 and 2 and generates 1, you've now got mechanisms that cycle. Let them cycle for decades or generations. New cycles form. After a few thousand years (not much needed), there are literally hundreds of these cycles, and the number of complex compounds is growing.
The first 'life' would have been this sort of cycle, accomplishing little more than molecular dissolution of something. Something simpler than an enzyme acting on a bunch of hydrocarbons, maybe. I'm not a biologist: ask one what they'd consider the lowest example of life. ... get what I'm saying? It ain't a ROCK that creates life. It's statistical improbabilities that boggle your mind being bested by the sheer quantity of material and time: 10^50 atoms and time for them to undergo 10^20 reactions apiece (former # googled, latter one is an ass-pull: a possible reaction every few seconds).
Yeah, there's gaps in our model. Again, I'm not a biologist so I'm not sure where the gaps are. I've always been curious about them, but
Um, that word 'FACT". I do not think it means what you think it means. Anecdote !=fact. Ditto for anything you expect us to believe 'just 'cuz I said so'.
Liberal economists aren't Keynesians (Krugman, for a moderate liberal; socialists for the opposite extreme), there most certainly are valid nonAustrian economic models. IANAE, but it sure seems to me that we're seeing another demonstration of how Austrian pure-play capitalism is as bad an economic model as pure socialism/communism. I prefer social engineering via regulated capitalism: Balance wins handily over either extreme.
That paragraph about gun control is a bread-n-circuses distraction to left/right economic positions, and as such matters as little as abortion (and is certainly not a litmus test for either part).
Everyone pays taxes (so of **course** you are affected by them despite not being a 1%er), but most of us in the US are paying less than we would have during the 50's, 60's, 70's. The social safety net is alive and well in Germany, despite it being the healthiest economy in the developed/1st world. But they're aggressively taxing businesses, then using the proceeds to keep manufacturing in-country.
Giving money to the poor is loaded language. The depression was **solved** by handouts and governmental borrowing/deficit spending (the government giving poor people money and jobs when nobody else would hire due to illiquidity of finances and markets).
Well, that and Hitler.
Likewise, the stimulus worked this time around, although Krugman and other economists are building up plenty of evidence that more would have been better. The US House's Republican plan of Austerity economics aren't helping and seem to be pushing toward rekindling another Recession.
Grants and other 'given' money helps the weak/infirm/old survive with dignity and helps the children of the poor and helps people bootstrap themselves out of poverty. Tax breaks for the wealthy, OTOH don't trickle down nearly as well as Reagan and the Heritage Foundation pretend.
Government inefficiency is a bogus meme: Social Security has repeatedly been analyzed and scored better than private pensions for their operational efficiency. Ditto many other government programs -- you've fallen for a conservative talking point there. As for them being the least efficient means of putting money into an economy, nothing could be further from the truth: A $1 tax increase diminishes your personal spending less than a buck, since you (as a healthy middle-class wonk) were investing/saving part of it. OTOH, a buck in the hand of anyone near the poverty line gets spent that week. All of it. Every time. By the time that welfare buck cycles twice through local economies (once if it went to WalMart or other corporations that suck the profits out while they pay their staff less than a living wage), it's usually kicking the ass off the fractional buck given to you or me.
As for that founding fathers quote: it's one great man's opinion, taken out of context and across 200+ years. Relying on it as gospel is your most absurd prose of all. I honestly can't imagine a quorum of flaming liberals like our founding fathers liking Washington or Wall Street or most of your other claims.
Ya wanna fix the economy? Change international trade regulations, reinstate a steeper progressive tax structure, and stop spending half our taxes on war. Then, maybe we could stop pretending like the only options for healthcare are the extremes being debated and start emulating nations whose healthcare laws are working better than ours (Frontline did a nice show a few years ago comparing US, Germany, the UK, Japan and another nation's, for reference). Then let's talk seriously about the long term -- we can adjust retirement rules and tax rates (raise the ceiling, set different rules for knowledge workers and blue-collar jobs that literally physically wear out the people doing them by 55 -- the number of unemployable old construction workers at your local homeless shelter sho
Yaaay, Libertarians: can't sway enough percentage points to be mentioned let alone win most elections, but think everyone else (including all those people whose safety they'd infringe upon or whose livelihoods they'd crush in their oversimplified socioeconomic experiments) should just concede anyway. The hubris is astounding.
Testify, brother!
My favorite SQL Prima donna was a guy that sr mgmt thought was a prodigy; they overrode our objections and put him solo on a project. Not knowing basic shit like normalization, his app hinged on queries that make my eyes to water just thinking about them a decade later: if QueryName matches name1 or name 2 or name 3 or name4, then again for every other advanced search field. The pinnacle was the advanced search query. It went on for a dozen pages, several just querying 8 wildcardable keywords against almost all columns. Since everything was one huge flat file of redundant columns, indexing couldn't save it. 'Find me commercial plumbers in zipcode X' often timed out after 10+ minutes and would peg one of 2 cpu's on the E450 we were using.
Two encounters like that bozo convinced me that Prima donnas are a project-killer sort of risk, even if (like code-smell) you sense the problem long before you can articulate the specifics. (NOTE: primadonna != smart or brilliant or savant).
I'm dumbfounded at how much overlap there is between the 'gospel of wealth' and rand sects.
FTFY. And seriously, WTF, christians? Camel? Eye of Needle? Seven deadly sins? Moneychangers? Which part of the bible implies this selfish greedheadedness?