Actually, I long ago got the impression that the sole reason for the existence of the post-2008 Republican party is to ensure that every thing Obama ever did is completely and permanently erased forever as though they had never been.
Obama certainly has a lot to answer for and no few things that richly deserve erasing, but they started even before he took the oath of office.
Here's the facts. I am a resident of British Columbia. I pay about $127 per month in Medical Services Premiums. For that I won't be given a bill at any hospital or any doctor if I have a medical issue. If I need a scan or some other diagnostic test, I will not be billed. Furthermore, if I end up needing healthcare in Prince Edward Island, I will still be protected.
Shoot, that sounds fantastic! Why can't we get something like that here in the U.S.?
I actually personally think global warming is happening just I doubt the insurance companies care one way or another other than the direction and magnitude of expected adverse events.
And that's basically the short term direction. According to TFA, they don't really care if there's long term global warming or not, because they usually sell policies one year at a time. They just want to know how variable the next year might be so they can set the rates to offset the risk.
Most insurance policies have a lifespan far longer than one year. They merely renew each year. If people let policies lapse or cancel them, then an insurance agent has to go out and actively solicit for business instead of simply soliciting for new business. And there's a lot of risk that one-shot customers would bounce around rather than remain loyal. As it is, Y2K was a relatively small issue for a lot of insurance data. When I worked in the business, there were customers with active policies born in the 1800's, and possibly even some policies dating back to then.
It's not a zero-cost thing to insure someone. Quite a bit of work has to be done to determine the risks and therefore the necessary rates. Insurance companies also have to be able to project future possibilities as much as possible, whether it's global warming or likelihood of a smoker for dying from cancer before age 45.
Although it has become the fashion for just about every company to look to the short term, insurance companies can only do that in certain ways, since the industry itself is based on spreading risk over not only breadth of customer base, but over time. In fact, a lot of the problems that they've experience in recent years can be attributed to their attempts to narrow this base in the hopes of maximizing profits by "cherry picking" and "lemon dropping", since such practices are more sensitive to wider statistical swings than less focused tranching is.
What restriction of choice has there been so far? Without having to jump through any hoops other than installing them through the app center, I can log in to Unity, KDE, Fluxbox and XBMC on my laptop. All of them are fully functional desktops (or in the case of XBMC, functional for its specific narrow usage). That looks like more choice to me, not less.
And without having to jump through any hoops except visiting mozilla's website, I can install Firefox. But IE is what comes with the OS. So why is the EU so upset?
Ack! I've been poisoned! "The OS". PLEASE don't tell me that the OS in question was Linux. I was referring to a certain other OS.
What restriction of choice has there been so far? Without having to jump through any hoops other than installing them through the app center, I can log in to Unity, KDE, Fluxbox and XBMC on my laptop. All of them are fully functional desktops (or in the case of XBMC, functional for its specific narrow usage). That looks like more choice to me, not less.
And without having to jump through any hoops except visiting mozilla's website, I can install Firefox. But IE is what comes with the OS. So why is the EU so upset?
They're making incredibly unpopular design changes without giving people any real option to do things their own way and driving their own userbase away. Unity and other ass backwardsness pissed me off SO MUCH that I learned to use Arch Linux just to get away from it.
Its the "we're going our own way" decisions - like Mir instead of Wayland, etc. This leaves you thinking - If I keep with Ubuntu I will be out on a limb, forced to use Unity, etc.
The problem is that if people really wanted stuff rammed down their throats willy-nilly, they'd be running Windows 8. Linux is an operating system that people choose, so restricting choices goes against the nature of the demographic.
When you can't crank out 100+ hours/week at max capacity, you're too old for the job. Step aside and let us younger and more capable guys show you how it's done.
If you have to crank out 100+ hours a week on a regular basis you can't do your job.
I used to work for someone who thought that spending less than 100 hours on the job was slacking off. She kept a mat in the closet to take naps on the floor so she didn't have to go home. What she actually did to keep busy during those 100+ hours, however, was instructive. She'd butt in on phone calls with clients. Clients respected her business skills, but privately begged us not to bring her in on routine matters. She'd spend hours re-arranging icons on the desktop or fiddling with the file managers. It was a lot of sound and fury, but it didn't really mean that much.
I spent a "72-hour Friday" attempting to get a massive data download via 56KB modem, sanitize the data, run it through the mainframe and ship out a tape. The data came down with horrible errors. The sanitizing took many long hours. We were strictly on our own, as the 9-to-5 infrastructure was already gone for the weekend. And when all was said and done, it was all for naught, because the last flight out had come and gone and it was going to have to go out with the normal workload anyway. And there we were, tired out before the new week had ever begun.
I already knew my limitations. I can do about 6 hours of really productive work in a day. More, if I take a long rest in the middle, but that doesn't work well with commuter jobs. The other 2 hours are make-work. If someone needs brain-dead support, I can do that. Just don't ask me to think.
I refuse to feel guilty about my "lack of productivity". Recent studies have been pretty uniform in concluding that once you pass a certain point, you stop moving forwards and start moving backwards, and that for most jobs "multi-tasking" is less productive than taking one thing at a time.
A major problem with the "more is more" management mindset is that they think people are like machines. Run a machine longer, you can get more out of it. Run it faster and you can get more out of it. But that doesn't even always work with machines. Run the hamburger grinders too fast and you get cooked hamburger out of them instead of raw ground meat. People are not designed to run at full throttle all the time. Any management that cannot take that into account is not good management.
So tests to that faith must be avoided at all costs. Better to be a philosophical coward than a theological failure.'"
Avoiding tests to your faith is more than merely philosophical cowardice. It isn't going to work. Consider what happened with Jonah.
I don't actually care, however, if someone is a theological coward. That's between them and their God(s) - assuming for the sake of argument that said God(s) exist.
On the other hand, forcing their theological cowardice onto others is in my book a sin, as God will test them anyhow, and in the mean time, you (as the coward) are stunting the development of innocents.
I think the fact that people (myself) actually don't care is that most of us (99.99%) wouldn't have a problem, since we're not doing anything illegal. I know that it is still wrong, but i just don't care
No, you only think that you're not doing anything illegal. You have no concept of just how many laws cover every single thing you do. Or, for that matter, don't do. Legal experts know better. So do the people who monitor the street cameras when you step off the curb prematurely.
THAT is the problem. If someone for whatever reason decides that they don't like you, they can pull that data and metadata and use it as supporting evidence for whatever transgressions they deem suitable to nail you for. At a minimum they can make your life difficult in a thousand ways (no-fly lists, for example). In extreme cases, you could be labelled an "Enemy Combatant" and wake up in Gitmo. Especially if someone "accidentally" tagged the data with aggravating information.
The problem with "Innocent People Have Nothing To Hide", as I've said before, is that you aren't the one that gets to decide what makes people "innocent".
The check on a democratically-elected government to stop them from doing silly things is for the people to find out about it and vote the fuckers out.
Nice idea. But democracies specialize in creating majorities with different (divergent) interests, and thus no consensus on any single issue, which means that (a) issues fights are perpetual and (b) there's less actual oversight of government.
On the other hand, when pluralities are fighting it out, there's less opportunity for a government to ram through extreme measures. You have to form a coalition first.
This old "people won't find work and will starve" horse is trotted out and whipped every time there is one of these 'robots now doing x' stories comes up. History says something else will happen, but this doesn't stop the doomsayers. Meanwhile, bring on the massive prosperity, robots!
History also says that computing power will also double every few years (Moore's Law). And so far, that has been true, even past the anticipated limits. But past performance is no predictor of future results.
In the case of labor, the trend over the last few years for people to move down to non-specialized jobs is not an encouraging sign. In past recessions, displaced people have either managed to stay in their old professions or move up to a more specialized one once the recession ended.
well the reason they don't want the scanners is that then they can't as easily sell their job when they move on - or have their cousin cover for them on a sick day.
Possibly, but another very good reason they don't want scanners is that it's demeaning and insulting.
Unless there are significant problems (and not just "significant bending of the rules", but "significant extra expense or reduction in quality"), there is no reason to treat people like criminals.
And if there are significant problems, there's a better solution: Hire people you trust, and then trust the people you hire; and don't judge them by stupid metrics like "has been physically present exactly N hours?", but by metrics like, "Is the area they were responsible for clean?" If it would take an average person working at a reasonable rate 8 hours to clean a certain area, and because of me the area is now clean, then pay me for 8 hours worth of work, whether it took me 8 hours or three hours.
This is the 21st Century. OF COURSE we treat employees (and customers) like criminals.
I worked in a bank with fingerprint scanners. They were horrible. Unreliable, with both false negative and positives. And extremely finicky.
Texas - home of the no-gummit regulation for hazardous factories?
They're bit, and slow
They're BIG, and slow. And I see you have the same precise typing skills that I do!
Yes, if you visit a food truck in my town - and that includes the ones at the county fair - there WILL - by State Law - be a certificate displayed in a prominent location. And you can't just roll up to a street corner and open up. Within 15 minutes a cop will be by, not merely to check the certificate, but to determine that you have the proper permits to be on that particular street corner.
That's odd, I'd long thought there was still a difference between career and careen.
Well, that's alright. As English contracts, a smaller vocabulary is easier to carry around; I've lost thousands of words since the 70's and I feel lighter.
Got a chuckle from your comment, thanks for that.
There is. To "careen" you tilt. To "career", you speed up. Since the rocket's already careering, what you're more concerned about is the careening.
1. To obtain the goods and services that make life at least sustainable, and preferably enjoyable.
2. To satisfy the inherent human need to feel valued.
#2 will be replaced by "To satisfy the need for the next fix."
There is any amount of literature where one of the hallmarks of a decadent society is one where most of its members exist purely for sensation. Whether it's "Bread and Circuses", Huxley's Brave New World (there are workers, but the the Beta class exists almost entirely to play with the products of the workers and factories), the impotent video-addicted Arkanoid race of Perry Rhodan, and so forth and so on.
Some people have apparently no higher aspiration in life than to lie back, toke, and watch the Kardashians, but they are not valued, probably never will be valued. Not that almost all of us don't have "dead periods", but that's not a condition that people are generally comfortable with.
Then again, work solely for work's sake isn't valued either. We despise featherbed jobs and sinecures. Marx may be most infamous for Communism, but he based the concept on the assumption that workers really wanted to work and be productive, just not be exploited for doing so.
So what we really need is something new to occupy us, and something that advances us. Simply lying around in a stupor doesn't do that.
I've always thought that the current presumption that a job is required and inherently a good thing was an artifact of scarcity of labor. Remove the latter, and the former may well radically change.
Change to what? That having a job is not a good thing?
There are two reasons why people have jobs
1. To obtain the goods and services that make life at least sustainable, and preferably enjoyable.
2. To satisfy the inherent human need to feel valued.
We have been reducing the effort required for item #1 at an accelerating rate for centuries. That's the mirror side of productivity.
For most people, item #2 has been their job simply because they needed to fulfil item#1 and historically people without jobs are not valued. To be valued, you must either exert significant physical exertion or be capable of showing a waiver in the form of a large paycheck.
As we approach the point where full-time work is no longer required to satisfy item #1, our first response has been to jettison enough people to keep the remaining workers fully-occupied, and along with that, instill enough fear into them that they have to work even harder/longer. But we are by all accounts reaching a tipping point where the number of unemployed and underemployed are rising to levels that cannot ignored and the number of people who truly need to be employed is shrinking.
We have not yet come up with suitable alternatives for item #2. That, I think, is the real challenge. When George Jetson really can work grueling 3-hour workdays and still be considered as a valued member of society.
No way in any shape or form is Doohan doing an Aberdeen accent. Most scots have some problems with aberdonian accents. Doohan doesn't sound in any way scottish, even if he was supposed to come from Linlithow. central Scotland. A long way from Aberdeen.
RJG.
And how many 23d-Century Aberdonians do you know? That's like expecting 20th-Century naval engineers to sound like someone out of Shakespeare!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I long ago got the impression that the sole reason for the existence of the post-2008 Republican party is to ensure that every thing Obama ever did is completely and permanently erased forever as though they had never been.
Obama certainly has a lot to answer for and no few things that richly deserve erasing, but they started even before he took the oath of office.
Here's the facts. I am a resident of British Columbia. I pay about $127 per month in Medical Services Premiums. For that I won't be given a bill at any hospital or any doctor if I have a medical issue. If I need a scan or some other diagnostic test, I will not be billed. Furthermore, if I end up needing healthcare in Prince Edward Island, I will still be protected.
Shoot, that sounds fantastic! Why can't we get something like that here in the U.S.?
Because we got FREEDOMS!!!!
I actually personally think global warming is happening just I doubt the insurance companies care one way or another other than the direction and magnitude of expected adverse events.
And that's basically the short term direction. According to TFA, they don't really care if there's long term global warming or not, because they usually sell policies one year at a time. They just want to know how variable the next year might be so they can set the rates to offset the risk.
Most insurance policies have a lifespan far longer than one year. They merely renew each year. If people let policies lapse or cancel them, then an insurance agent has to go out and actively solicit for business instead of simply soliciting for new business. And there's a lot of risk that one-shot customers would bounce around rather than remain loyal. As it is, Y2K was a relatively small issue for a lot of insurance data. When I worked in the business, there were customers with active policies born in the 1800's, and possibly even some policies dating back to then.
It's not a zero-cost thing to insure someone. Quite a bit of work has to be done to determine the risks and therefore the necessary rates. Insurance companies also have to be able to project future possibilities as much as possible, whether it's global warming or likelihood of a smoker for dying from cancer before age 45.
Although it has become the fashion for just about every company to look to the short term, insurance companies can only do that in certain ways, since the industry itself is based on spreading risk over not only breadth of customer base, but over time. In fact, a lot of the problems that they've experience in recent years can be attributed to their attempts to narrow this base in the hopes of maximizing profits by "cherry picking" and "lemon dropping", since such practices are more sensitive to wider statistical swings than less focused tranching is.
Yep. He was great friends with Patrick Moore and knows the program well.
How about Sir Patrick Stewart? I hear he knows something about stars.
The fragile self esteem of network executives intimidated by science.
Got to be careful with that science stuff. It sets off the politicians.
I don't know if I have to mod this "Funny" or "Insightful"... So, I'll just leave a comment.
Sometimes I feel the lack of a "Sad-but-True" category.
That's a really strange thing for the DEA to do, because in so doing, they're creating incentive for doctors to write anonymous prescriptions.
Never mind that. It would appear to be flagrant violation of HIPAA. If the DEA isn't careful, the Federal Government will come after them!
What restriction of choice has there been so far? Without having to jump through any hoops other than installing them through the app center, I can log in to Unity, KDE, Fluxbox and XBMC on my laptop. All of them are fully functional desktops (or in the case of XBMC, functional for its specific narrow usage). That looks like more choice to me, not less.
And without having to jump through any hoops except visiting mozilla's website, I can install Firefox. But IE is what comes with the OS. So why is the EU so upset?
Ack! I've been poisoned! "The OS". PLEASE don't tell me that the OS in question was Linux. I was referring to a certain other OS.
What restriction of choice has there been so far? Without having to jump through any hoops other than installing them through the app center, I can log in to Unity, KDE, Fluxbox and XBMC on my laptop. All of them are fully functional desktops (or in the case of XBMC, functional for its specific narrow usage). That looks like more choice to me, not less.
And without having to jump through any hoops except visiting mozilla's website, I can install Firefox. But IE is what comes with the OS. So why is the EU so upset?
They're making incredibly unpopular design changes without giving people any real option to do things their own way and driving their own userbase away. Unity and other ass backwardsness pissed me off SO MUCH that I learned to use Arch Linux just to get away from it.
Its the "we're going our own way" decisions - like Mir instead of Wayland, etc. This leaves you thinking - If I keep with Ubuntu I will be out on a limb, forced to use Unity, etc.
The problem is that if people really wanted stuff rammed down their throats willy-nilly, they'd be running Windows 8. Linux is an operating system that people choose, so restricting choices goes against the nature of the demographic.
South Carolina.
Jesse Helms.
When you can't crank out 100+ hours/week at max capacity, you're too old for the job. Step aside and let us younger and more capable guys show you how it's done.
If you have to crank out 100+ hours a week on a regular basis you can't do your job.
I used to work for someone who thought that spending less than 100 hours on the job was slacking off. She kept a mat in the closet to take naps on the floor so she didn't have to go home. What she actually did to keep busy during those 100+ hours, however, was instructive. She'd butt in on phone calls with clients. Clients respected her business skills, but privately begged us not to bring her in on routine matters. She'd spend hours re-arranging icons on the desktop or fiddling with the file managers. It was a lot of sound and fury, but it didn't really mean that much.
I spent a "72-hour Friday" attempting to get a massive data download via 56KB modem, sanitize the data, run it through the mainframe and ship out a tape. The data came down with horrible errors. The sanitizing took many long hours. We were strictly on our own, as the 9-to-5 infrastructure was already gone for the weekend. And when all was said and done, it was all for naught, because the last flight out had come and gone and it was going to have to go out with the normal workload anyway. And there we were, tired out before the new week had ever begun.
I already knew my limitations. I can do about 6 hours of really productive work in a day. More, if I take a long rest in the middle, but that doesn't work well with commuter jobs. The other 2 hours are make-work. If someone needs brain-dead support, I can do that. Just don't ask me to think.
I refuse to feel guilty about my "lack of productivity". Recent studies have been pretty uniform in concluding that once you pass a certain point, you stop moving forwards and start moving backwards, and that for most jobs "multi-tasking" is less productive than taking one thing at a time.
A major problem with the "more is more" management mindset is that they think people are like machines. Run a machine longer, you can get more out of it. Run it faster and you can get more out of it. But that doesn't even always work with machines. Run the hamburger grinders too fast and you get cooked hamburger out of them instead of raw ground meat. People are not designed to run at full throttle all the time. Any management that cannot take that into account is not good management.
So tests to that faith must be avoided at all costs. Better to be a philosophical coward than a theological failure.'"
Avoiding tests to your faith is more than merely philosophical cowardice. It isn't going to work. Consider what happened with Jonah.
I don't actually care, however, if someone is a theological coward. That's between them and their God(s) - assuming for the sake of argument that said God(s) exist.
On the other hand, forcing their theological cowardice onto others is in my book a sin, as God will test them anyhow, and in the mean time, you (as the coward) are stunting the development of innocents.
I'm not in Gitmo yet
I think the fact that people (myself) actually don't care is that most of us (99.99%) wouldn't have a problem, since we're not doing anything illegal. I know that it is still wrong, but i just don't care
No, you only think that you're not doing anything illegal. You have no concept of just how many laws cover every single thing you do. Or, for that matter, don't do. Legal experts know better. So do the people who monitor the street cameras when you step off the curb prematurely.
THAT is the problem. If someone for whatever reason decides that they don't like you, they can pull that data and metadata and use it as supporting evidence for whatever transgressions they deem suitable to nail you for. At a minimum they can make your life difficult in a thousand ways (no-fly lists, for example). In extreme cases, you could be labelled an "Enemy Combatant" and wake up in Gitmo. Especially if someone "accidentally" tagged the data with aggravating information.
The problem with "Innocent People Have Nothing To Hide", as I've said before, is that you aren't the one that gets to decide what makes people "innocent".
Nice idea. But democracies specialize in creating majorities with different (divergent) interests, and thus no consensus on any single issue, which means that (a) issues fights are perpetual and (b) there's less actual oversight of government.
On the other hand, when pluralities are fighting it out, there's less opportunity for a government to ram through extreme measures. You have to form a coalition first.
This old "people won't find work and will starve" horse is trotted out and whipped every time there is one of these 'robots now doing x' stories comes up. History says something else will happen, but this doesn't stop the doomsayers. Meanwhile, bring on the massive prosperity, robots!
History also says that computing power will also double every few years (Moore's Law). And so far, that has been true, even past the anticipated limits. But past performance is no predictor of future results.
In the case of labor, the trend over the last few years for people to move down to non-specialized jobs is not an encouraging sign. In past recessions, displaced people have either managed to stay in their old professions or move up to a more specialized one once the recession ended.
Possibly, but another very good reason they don't want scanners is that it's demeaning and insulting.
Unless there are significant problems (and not just "significant bending of the rules", but "significant extra expense or reduction in quality"), there is no reason to treat people like criminals.
And if there are significant problems, there's a better solution: Hire people you trust, and then trust the people you hire; and don't judge them by stupid metrics like "has been physically present exactly N hours?", but by metrics like, "Is the area they were responsible for clean?" If it would take an average person working at a reasonable rate 8 hours to clean a certain area, and because of me the area is now clean, then pay me for 8 hours worth of work, whether it took me 8 hours or three hours.
This is the 21st Century. OF COURSE we treat employees (and customers) like criminals.
I worked in a bank with fingerprint scanners. They were horrible. Unreliable, with both false negative and positives. And extremely finicky.
We got rid of them.
natural cork corks are just a gimmick in this day and age.
They're biodegradable. Except for the plastic corks (ugh!). But I agree. Screw tops are quite adequate, if less showy.
Maybe you live in a weird place
Texas - home of the no-gummit regulation for hazardous factories?
They're bit, and slow
They're BIG, and slow. And I see you have the same precise typing skills that I do!
Yes, if you visit a food truck in my town - and that includes the ones at the county fair - there WILL - by State Law - be a certificate displayed in a prominent location. And you can't just roll up to a street corner and open up. Within 15 minutes a cop will be by, not merely to check the certificate, but to determine that you have the proper permits to be on that particular street corner.
That's odd, I'd long thought there was still a difference between career and careen.
Well, that's alright. As English contracts, a smaller vocabulary is easier to carry around; I've lost thousands of words since the 70's and I feel lighter.
Got a chuckle from your comment, thanks for that.
There is. To "careen" you tilt. To "career", you speed up. Since the rocket's already careering, what you're more concerned about is the careening.
#2 will be replaced by "To satisfy the need for the next fix."
There is any amount of literature where one of the hallmarks of a decadent society is one where most of its members exist purely for sensation. Whether it's "Bread and Circuses", Huxley's Brave New World (there are workers, but the the Beta class exists almost entirely to play with the products of the workers and factories), the impotent video-addicted Arkanoid race of Perry Rhodan, and so forth and so on.
Some people have apparently no higher aspiration in life than to lie back, toke, and watch the Kardashians, but they are not valued, probably never will be valued. Not that almost all of us don't have "dead periods", but that's not a condition that people are generally comfortable with.
Then again, work solely for work's sake isn't valued either. We despise featherbed jobs and sinecures. Marx may be most infamous for Communism, but he based the concept on the assumption that workers really wanted to work and be productive, just not be exploited for doing so.
So what we really need is something new to occupy us, and something that advances us. Simply lying around in a stupor doesn't do that.
It now takes less people to launch a Japanese rocket than to maintain a Windows server in the data center....
That's because the rocket is less likely to careen off-course and explode.
I've always thought that the current presumption that a job is required and inherently a good thing was an artifact of scarcity of labor. Remove the latter, and the former may well radically change.
Change to what? That having a job is not a good thing?
There are two reasons why people have jobs
1. To obtain the goods and services that make life at least sustainable, and preferably enjoyable.
2. To satisfy the inherent human need to feel valued.
We have been reducing the effort required for item #1 at an accelerating rate for centuries. That's the mirror side of productivity.
For most people, item #2 has been their job simply because they needed to fulfil item#1 and historically people without jobs are not valued. To be valued, you must either exert significant physical exertion or be capable of showing a waiver in the form of a large paycheck.
As we approach the point where full-time work is no longer required to satisfy item #1, our first response has been to jettison enough people to keep the remaining workers fully-occupied, and along with that, instill enough fear into them that they have to work even harder/longer. But we are by all accounts reaching a tipping point where the number of unemployed and underemployed are rising to levels that cannot ignored and the number of people who truly need to be employed is shrinking.
We have not yet come up with suitable alternatives for item #2. That, I think, is the real challenge. When George Jetson really can work grueling 3-hour workdays and still be considered as a valued member of society.
No way in any shape or form is Doohan doing an Aberdeen accent.
Most scots have some problems with aberdonian accents.
Doohan doesn't sound in any way scottish, even if he was supposed to come from Linlithow.
central Scotland. A long way from Aberdeen.
RJG.
And how many 23d-Century Aberdonians do you know? That's like expecting 20th-Century naval engineers to sound like someone out of Shakespeare!