OK, here's your purpose: find a purpose. Make a full-time job out of it.
Look around. What interests you? people, things? animals? making stuff?
If you like dealing with people, consider some of the old standbys. Toastmasters, the various "Loyal order of Water Buffalo" organizations, food banks, Habitat for Humanity, check out Meetup for local groups and see if any of them are doing things that interest you. Maybe join a local amateur sports team.
If you like things, how do you like them? making them? collecting them? both? Here again, there are places you can go and/or stuff you can buy and play with - since you apparently aren't entirely lacking in funds.
Same with animals. Work on/buy a farm or ranch, consider raising alpacas, volunteer at an animal shelter, whatever.
Or travel, explore. Even if your budget is limited, you can travel virtually for free these days.
Grow things, even if it's just a balcony garden. Draw, craft, become an Internet curmudgeon - there's no expertise required beyond what you claim for yourself. Since you're already cooking, tune into some of the cooking shows on TV/Internet and learn how to cook like a pro from the pro's.
Become an artist - people will think you're unemployed anyway. Buy a 3d printer and play with it. Sculpt, paint, bend wire, draw, make art using chainsaws and/or explosives.
If you're depressed, and can't explore, then you can spend your time and money talking to mental health professionals. It's good for the economy.
It's a big world and there are plenty of things to do. Finding a direction and getting started is the hard part.
The common employee lives a more comfortable, relatively worry-free, sheltered life without having to worry whether his labor will bring in a salary.
Wrong century. The common employee these days is more apt to be worrying about whether they'll still be an employee six months from now.
To be fair, the same is true of the executive ranks, but when you can take a couple of million with you when you go - even if you wrecked the company - then your worries are of a different nature.
This is kind of the reason we dont like hiring people with family money. They have no commitment to the job. We need to be able to plan on the person being around to do their job when the going gets tough.
In other words, we want them desperate, not invested!
How old? $500k is enough to retire at 75 but not at 30.
If you hope to see 95, that would be $25K a year if simply spent and not invested.
If you invest it and get a 5% annual return, you'd have an indefinite (depending on inflation) income of $25K a year. Ideally, you want a rate of return that allows for inflation, though, or alternatively, take less and re-invest the remainder.
A lot of people would certainly like to be bringing in $25K, but it's not exactly going to be high living.
One thing microprocessor technology was done is vastly simplified mechanical construction. Stuff that used to involve racks of gears and cams got replaced by simple servo-motor mechanism. Stuff that can be sealed permanently because it doesn't have many wear parts and when it goes, you just replace the whole sealed module. Because mass manufacture is cheap, but diagnostics and repair are not.
Arguably food-preparation equipment can be designed to require minimal cleaning effort by automated cleaning robots and undoubtedly do a better job that most restaurants do by hand.
So don't hold out hope on that account.
I'm just waiting for the day when self-driving trucks arrive at the back doors of Wal-Mart and pre-packed display pallets are off-loaded, moved into place and unwrapped by robots, no human intervention required. They'll probably even send sweeper robots through the store to collect any merchandise or small children that are found on the floor because the bean-counters computed that it's cheaper to sweep up and incinerate rather than pay for the more complicated robots that would re-fold items and replace them on shelves. Much less pay humans for that.
Remember shoppers - it's ALWAYS the Low Price at Wal-Mart!
Not much news, though. Just make racks to hold the dishes the same way you stack food baskets as you leave and make the racks deployable direct-to-dishwasher.
Not that it matters. Fast food doesn't wash dishes anyway. It's disposable.
No one has to eat at a place that makes food with robots.
Frankly, I prefer a hand-smashed burger and a baked on the spot bun.
I do business with these places because they produce a superior product.
That's nice, but the only fast-food place that I know of around here that claims to bake buns on the spot (or at least on-premises) is Subway, and I've always thought that Subway buns are horrible. Besides which, they may be baked locally, but the bulk of production is done elsewhere.
I'd rather have a sub made on the supermarket buns at Firehouse.
Even the ethnic restaurants don't generally produce their own bread - there are a handful of Arabic bakeries in town and they supply the fast-food trade, and tortillas are probably coming in from out of state.
As with software, Fast, Quality and Inexpensive are mostly exclusive options. These days, however, we're not given enough lunchtime to avoid Fast, and we're conditioned to expect The Low Price Always in 21st Century USA, so guess where that leaves Quality?
We're not all going to be the robot owners. Robots are capital, and the trend of the last 30 years has been to push more and more of the capital upwards and away from the 99%.
Yes, robots will get cheaper, too, but cheap isn't free and if we continue laying off people faster than they can amass capital to buy their own robots, then the magic isn't going to happen.
Nor are a lot of us suited for the limited set of jobs that are expected to remain - and I should note that Japan has expended considerable effort on robotic care for the elderly (thanks to a shrinking lower-age population), that IBM's Watson is considered a first-class medical expert in its own right, and that robot surgery has been out of the realm of Science Fiction and part of everyday reality for some years now. So that wasn't the ideal example of where the newly-unemployed can retrain for a new source of capital.
Historically, new occupations have been spawned when older occupations died, but we're simply not seeing anything new open up on a major scale this time. What? You think that Robot Repair is going to be a growing field? We ALREADY have technology sufficient for a simple robot to roll up to a more complex one, unbolt a failed component and attach a new one, then roll over to the dumpster with the old one. Nobody's going to be tinkering with fine-grained repairs any more than they repair the electronics on a digital watch or TV. It's simply more cost-effective to get a new unit from the factory and scrap the old one.
Cheaper doesn't mean shit if you don't have any money. It's no more useful than giving income tax cuts to people who have no income.
The brutal truth of it is that if you want people to buy your products, you're going to have to ensure that they have money to buy them with, If you're not going to hire them and pay them, then you're going to have for provide them with money some other way or simply stop using the exchange of money (or equivalents) for product.
It's like the old-time Dark Satanic Mills. One factory belching pollution is a local nuisance, but when you have thousands of factories, it's a menace. So also with one employer laying people off versus EVERY employer laying people off.
No, it's not just for those of you who touch type.
It's for people who have RSI, or any other sort of limited mobility, or for those of us who think that constantly dancing between mouse and keyboard is annoying.
When Microsoft Windows was first developed, it came with a set of standard key functions that made it possible to do almost any GUI function short of drawing in 2 dimensions using just the 104-key keyboard. Web browsers doubly offend me in that the browser itself steals many of my favorite shortcut keys, then webapps have limited support for the remaining ones.
I personally find the scroll wheel and related functions to be awkward on the fingers and tend to forget about the side buttons on the mouse entirely (not that all my mice have them).
Make no mistake - I love my mouse. But modern mousy webapps deny me the freedom to keep my physical flailing to a minimum and thus have mercy on my back, upper and lower arm muscles and my carpals.
And don't even get me started on pages where they don't pre-calculate image sizes so that the page content bounces around under the mouse pointer as the secondary components load and format. Or the auto-playing multi-media. Or the self-refreshing crap that sends me back to the top every few seconds right in the middle of reading the middle.
Apple may have "solved" the problem, but write your leading/trailing space filenames down on a piece of paper and hand them to a person and see what happens.
Forget about the "I'm in charge, not the computer" attitude, about the only real excuse for supporting this sort of thing is a weak "security by obscurity" - making it difficult for another human to access the file by its quirky name.
Indeed. In fact at one point there was a possibility that despite being democratically chosen, that Donald Trump could have been replaced by the power brokers at the Republican National Convention in favor of someone that they felt more comfortable with.
Because it, too is a republican construct. Not because it's the "Republican" party, but because in the USA, when you vote republic-style, you're not really voting for the candidate, you're voting for the representative. And hoping that the representative, once elected, then votes for your candidate.
I can't say I've ever read Knuth in the literary sense. It's more of the ultimate reference.
Thankfully, I no longer have to construct sorts, searches, random number generators, etc. every time I write a program, since modern-day language systems come pre-supplied. However, someone has to implement those pre-supplied algorithms, and that someone almost certainly referenced Knuth. He has provided a concise, well-explained collection of analyses, discussions and sample implementations of many of the most important functions needed by almost everyone in the software development field.
The downside of it is MIX. I understand the reason Knuth created MIX, but MIX is an assembly language and not even a commonly-used one (and intentionally so). I know that there are many who think that the purpose of computers is to run machine (assembly) language, but they're wrong.
The purpose of computers is to run software. How it runs the software is secondary. You can see this in the fact that some machines include in their instruction set specialized functions related to specific abstract features. The Prime Computer instruction set had machine-language implementations of the FORTRAN 3-way branch. I think it was Honeywell that had an OS task dispatcher function implemented as a machine-language instruction. The Inter iAPX432 was designed to run Ada, the IBM System/360 had the Translate instructions, and the IBM zSeries has a major subset of the Unix stdlib implemented as CISC instructions, including a few of the Knuth algorithms.
Keeping software as a set of bits corresponding to primitive functions is convenient for implementing von Neumann machines, but it should be realized that it's the means and not the end, and when scaled, tends to lose the abstract picture in the minutae. If minutae were the end of it, one should be programming microcode and manually switching gates - on many machines, the "machine language" is itself an abstraction interpreted via microcode.
I've often complained that one of the biggest annoyances in IT is that you can pop out a prototype GUI in a day or 2 and everybody thinks it should go to full production next Thursday, where no one in their right mind would ever expect a scale cardboard model of a building or bridge to be ready for use in such time. But there's a similar break in education in that in most cases CIS courses use a "practical" language instead of an abstract one.
While assembly language was very common when Knuth wrote Volumes I-III, he was aware that there was no universal high-level language any more that there was a universal low-level one, which was another reason he invented MIX. Even academically-inclined languages such as Modula ultimately detoured into practical use, warping their abstraction. And, although ideological purity makes me projectile-vomit, when you're dealing with abstract concepts, I prefer to keep things truly abstract. Otherwise it warps one's approach to later solutions.
Djisktra did. in fact attempt an abstract high-level language in his "A Discipline of Programming", although it has some odd warts of its own. Personally, I'd vote for Ada, because while the last time I actually ran Ada, it nearly burned out the bearings on a mid-line IBM mainframe, it is the only common language I know where values and functions are assigned ranges and domains - an essential concept that is taught at the very beginning of differential calculus classes, but not nearly well-stressed enough in most CIS curricula. Were it otherwise, perhaps fewer satellites would have been destroyer.
Ada, incidentally, is part of the gcc/gnat toolset available on almost any Linux development system and modern-day PCs are considerably more powerful than a 1990 mid-level IBM mainframe (but then again, probably so are most cellphones), so anyone who's curious can explore.
What people are finding so insufferable about you is that you think that the worst-case cannot happen to you and you're smug about it.
Even people who have a safety cushion can lose it, and it's really, really hard to get it back if you do so. I know. I've had to rebuild my assets several times and I'll bet I keep a larger cushion than you do when I can. In large part because I do pass on a lot of job offers.
I very much doubt that would happen to an extent where I couldn't do anything to adjust.
The Greeks called statements like that "tempting Fate" or, if you prefer, hubris. Nothing makes you believe in spiteful Gods like saying "Nothing could possibly go wrong" and shortly thereafter having it humiliatingly thrown in your face.
The one thing you can depend on in life is that the best laid plans o' Mice and Men gang aft agley.
Usually you find that the survivor hit deep snow. Although IIRC, in one case a skydiver whose chute failed survived (with a lot of broken bones) by falling into a sewage pond.
Even water isn't soft when you hit it at terminal velocity.
Actually, I see it running in the opposite direction. Reagan, IIRC reversed himself on some of his tax cuts.
George W Bush, on the other hand, was rather infamous for a stay-the-course-no-matter-what approach. In fact, I don't recall hearing the term "double down" in common usage until his last 4 years or so and it wasn't just him that went that route. Basically any time Republicans lost on something they didn't talk altering strategy, they talked "double down". Or "we need to educate" - meaning that the fault wasn't with them, it was with the electorate.
Bush, in fact, was infamous for refusing to accept data that contradicted his position. It was noteworthy when very late in his tenure, he said, somewhat grudgingly that "IF mistakes were made, they are my responsibility".
Apparently - in America competence and experience is now actually a disqualifier for holding office. Nobody wants to vote for the "washington insiders"... an odd sentiment you do not find in any other field. Seriously when did you ever hear anybody say "I am having a heart attack -please get me anybody who is NOT a doctor !"
Well, you also have a large group of people who say "Government is useless. They can't do anything right." And we routinely elect - and re-elect - those people to government positions.
A cynic would have to wonder if you can truly expect success from someone who has a vested interest in failure.
He as the attention span of gnat. That will get the U.S. in trouble when he starts changing policy every year. Sooner or later, no one will trust any of his policies because they cannot be sure how long they'll last.
It's true. Trump is No True Republican. He's willing to change his mind. A True Republican takes a position and runs it right off the cliff. And while the nation is falling, doubles down, Stay the Course is the watchword, and damn the consequences, because the Republican position, once set is the only Right position, and all it takes to ensure success is to persevere. That, and perhaps the complete annihilation of those sabotaging Democrats.
For years, one of the greatest terrors of being a Republican was being labeled a "flip-flopper".
Trump doesn't care. Although up to now, all he's had to change was words. It remains to be seen how he deals with hard real issues as policy. Whether he's truly a gnat, or just more willing to learn from experience. I hope for the latter, but it's still too early to tell.
The hurricane machine is remarkably sensitive to many different factors. Because of this, it's a lousy predictor for global warming. Although long-term statistical effects in terms of location and intensity may eventually correlate.
On the other hand, thermometers all over the globe have been crawling up at a virtually linear pace for all those years you mentioned. I "enjoyed" some of it myself this year, in January, where I came within an inch of switching on the air conditioning when it should have been closer to freezing and in June, when triple-digit temperatures persisted day after day in a region where breaking 100 is something that used to happen one day in every 5 years or so,
Even a lot of record-breaking cold was traceable to overheating of frigid resources that would have usually been locked in for the winter somewhere further north. Kind of like how you get "snowfall" when it starts melting from the roof.
I have been very disappointed in the response of the losing side over this election. This is the kind of behavior I feared that would flare up on the other side when Trump lost the "rigged" election and the faithful rose up in revolt. It's not what I would expect from the allegedly rational side of the fence. They don't even have the excuse that Hillary egged them on.
In fact, the only excuse they could possibly make is that "this is how Trump would do it". So tell us again how you're better than he is?
Slashdot Mirror
OK, here's your purpose: find a purpose. Make a full-time job out of it.
Look around. What interests you? people, things? animals? making stuff?
If you like dealing with people, consider some of the old standbys. Toastmasters, the various "Loyal order of Water Buffalo" organizations, food banks, Habitat for Humanity, check out Meetup for local groups and see if any of them are doing things that interest you. Maybe join a local amateur sports team.
If you like things, how do you like them? making them? collecting them? both? Here again, there are places you can go and/or stuff you can buy and play with - since you apparently aren't entirely lacking in funds.
Same with animals. Work on/buy a farm or ranch, consider raising alpacas, volunteer at an animal shelter, whatever.
Or travel, explore. Even if your budget is limited, you can travel virtually for free these days.
Grow things, even if it's just a balcony garden. Draw, craft, become an Internet curmudgeon - there's no expertise required beyond what you claim for yourself. Since you're already cooking, tune into some of the cooking shows on TV/Internet and learn how to cook like a pro from the pro's.
Become an artist - people will think you're unemployed anyway. Buy a 3d printer and play with it. Sculpt, paint, bend wire, draw, make art using chainsaws and/or explosives.
If you're depressed, and can't explore, then you can spend your time and money talking to mental health professionals. It's good for the economy.
It's a big world and there are plenty of things to do. Finding a direction and getting started is the hard part.
The common employee lives a more comfortable, relatively worry-free, sheltered life without having to worry whether his labor will bring in a salary.
Wrong century. The common employee these days is more apt to be worrying about whether they'll still be an employee six months from now.
To be fair, the same is true of the executive ranks, but when you can take a couple of million with you when you go - even if you wrecked the company - then your worries are of a different nature.
This is kind of the reason we dont like hiring people with family money. They have no commitment to the job. We need to be able to plan on the person being around to do their job when the going gets tough.
In other words, we want them desperate, not invested!
I don't think you can retire on $500k
How old? $500k is enough to retire at 75 but not at 30.
If you hope to see 95, that would be $25K a year if simply spent and not invested.
If you invest it and get a 5% annual return, you'd have an indefinite (depending on inflation) income of $25K a year. Ideally, you want a rate of return that allows for inflation, though, or alternatively, take less and re-invest the remainder.
A lot of people would certainly like to be bringing in $25K, but it's not exactly going to be high living.
One thing microprocessor technology was done is vastly simplified mechanical construction. Stuff that used to involve racks of gears and cams got replaced by simple servo-motor mechanism. Stuff that can be sealed permanently because it doesn't have many wear parts and when it goes, you just replace the whole sealed module. Because mass manufacture is cheap, but diagnostics and repair are not.
Arguably food-preparation equipment can be designed to require minimal cleaning effort by automated cleaning robots and undoubtedly do a better job that most restaurants do by hand.
So don't hold out hope on that account.
I'm just waiting for the day when self-driving trucks arrive at the back doors of Wal-Mart and pre-packed display pallets are off-loaded, moved into place and unwrapped by robots, no human intervention required. They'll probably even send sweeper robots through the store to collect any merchandise or small children that are found on the floor because the bean-counters computed that it's cheaper to sweep up and incinerate rather than pay for the more complicated robots that would re-fold items and replace them on shelves. Much less pay humans for that.
Remember shoppers - it's ALWAYS the Low Price at Wal-Mart!
Not much news, though. Just make racks to hold the dishes the same way you stack food baskets as you leave and make the racks deployable direct-to-dishwasher.
Not that it matters. Fast food doesn't wash dishes anyway. It's disposable.
No one has to eat at a place that makes food with robots.
Frankly, I prefer a hand-smashed burger and a baked on the spot bun.
I do business with these places because they produce a superior product.
That's nice, but the only fast-food place that I know of around here that claims to bake buns on the spot (or at least on-premises) is Subway, and I've always thought that Subway buns are horrible. Besides which, they may be baked locally, but the bulk of production is done elsewhere.
I'd rather have a sub made on the supermarket buns at Firehouse.
Even the ethnic restaurants don't generally produce their own bread - there are a handful of Arabic bakeries in town and they supply the fast-food trade, and tortillas are probably coming in from out of state.
As with software, Fast, Quality and Inexpensive are mostly exclusive options. These days, however, we're not given enough lunchtime to avoid Fast, and we're conditioned to expect The Low Price Always in 21st Century USA, so guess where that leaves Quality?
We're not all going to be the robot owners. Robots are capital, and the trend of the last 30 years has been to push more and more of the capital upwards and away from the 99%.
Yes, robots will get cheaper, too, but cheap isn't free and if we continue laying off people faster than they can amass capital to buy their own robots, then the magic isn't going to happen.
Nor are a lot of us suited for the limited set of jobs that are expected to remain - and I should note that Japan has expended considerable effort on robotic care for the elderly (thanks to a shrinking lower-age population), that IBM's Watson is considered a first-class medical expert in its own right, and that robot surgery has been out of the realm of Science Fiction and part of everyday reality for some years now. So that wasn't the ideal example of where the newly-unemployed can retrain for a new source of capital.
Historically, new occupations have been spawned when older occupations died, but we're simply not seeing anything new open up on a major scale this time. What? You think that Robot Repair is going to be a growing field? We ALREADY have technology sufficient for a simple robot to roll up to a more complex one, unbolt a failed component and attach a new one, then roll over to the dumpster with the old one. Nobody's going to be tinkering with fine-grained repairs any more than they repair the electronics on a digital watch or TV. It's simply more cost-effective to get a new unit from the factory and scrap the old one.
Cheaper doesn't mean shit if you don't have any money. It's no more useful than giving income tax cuts to people who have no income.
The brutal truth of it is that if you want people to buy your products, you're going to have to ensure that they have money to buy them with, If you're not going to hire them and pay them, then you're going to have for provide them with money some other way or simply stop using the exchange of money (or equivalents) for product.
It's like the old-time Dark Satanic Mills. One factory belching pollution is a local nuisance, but when you have thousands of factories, it's a menace. So also with one employer laying people off versus EVERY employer laying people off.
No, it's not just for those of you who touch type.
It's for people who have RSI, or any other sort of limited mobility, or for those of us who think that constantly dancing between mouse and keyboard is annoying.
When Microsoft Windows was first developed, it came with a set of standard key functions that made it possible to do almost any GUI function short of drawing in 2 dimensions using just the 104-key keyboard. Web browsers doubly offend me in that the browser itself steals many of my favorite shortcut keys, then webapps have limited support for the remaining ones.
I personally find the scroll wheel and related functions to be awkward on the fingers and tend to forget about the side buttons on the mouse entirely (not that all my mice have them).
Make no mistake - I love my mouse. But modern mousy webapps deny me the freedom to keep my physical flailing to a minimum and thus have mercy on my back, upper and lower arm muscles and my carpals.
And don't even get me started on pages where they don't pre-calculate image sizes so that the page content bounces around under the mouse pointer as the secondary components load and format. Or the auto-playing multi-media. Or the self-refreshing crap that sends me back to the top every few seconds right in the middle of reading the middle.
Apple may have "solved" the problem, but write your leading/trailing space filenames down on a piece of paper and hand them to a person and see what happens.
Forget about the "I'm in charge, not the computer" attitude, about the only real excuse for supporting this sort of thing is a weak "security by obscurity" - making it difficult for another human to access the file by its quirky name.
Indeed. In fact at one point there was a possibility that despite being democratically chosen, that Donald Trump could have been replaced by the power brokers at the Republican National Convention in favor of someone that they felt more comfortable with.
Because it, too is a republican construct. Not because it's the "Republican" party, but because in the USA, when you vote republic-style, you're not really voting for the candidate, you're voting for the representative. And hoping that the representative, once elected, then votes for your candidate.
I can't say I've ever read Knuth in the literary sense. It's more of the ultimate reference.
Thankfully, I no longer have to construct sorts, searches, random number generators, etc. every time I write a program, since modern-day language systems come pre-supplied. However, someone has to implement those pre-supplied algorithms, and that someone almost certainly referenced Knuth. He has provided a concise, well-explained collection of analyses, discussions and sample implementations of many of the most important functions needed by almost everyone in the software development field.
The downside of it is MIX. I understand the reason Knuth created MIX, but MIX is an assembly language and not even a commonly-used one (and intentionally so). I know that there are many who think that the purpose of computers is to run machine (assembly) language, but they're wrong.
The purpose of computers is to run software. How it runs the software is secondary. You can see this in the fact that some machines include in their instruction set specialized functions related to specific abstract features. The Prime Computer instruction set had machine-language implementations of the FORTRAN 3-way branch. I think it was Honeywell that had an OS task dispatcher function implemented as a machine-language instruction. The Inter iAPX432 was designed to run Ada, the IBM System/360 had the Translate instructions, and the IBM zSeries has a major subset of the Unix stdlib implemented as CISC instructions, including a few of the Knuth algorithms.
Keeping software as a set of bits corresponding to primitive functions is convenient for implementing von Neumann machines, but it should be realized that it's the means and not the end, and when scaled, tends to lose the abstract picture in the minutae. If minutae were the end of it, one should be programming microcode and manually switching gates - on many machines, the "machine language" is itself an abstraction interpreted via microcode.
I've often complained that one of the biggest annoyances in IT is that you can pop out a prototype GUI in a day or 2 and everybody thinks it should go to full production next Thursday, where no one in their right mind would ever expect a scale cardboard model of a building or bridge to be ready for use in such time.
But there's a similar break in education in that in most cases CIS courses use a "practical" language instead of an abstract one.
While assembly language was very common when Knuth wrote Volumes I-III, he was aware that there was no universal high-level language any more that there was a universal low-level one, which was another reason he invented MIX. Even academically-inclined languages such as Modula ultimately detoured into practical use, warping their abstraction. And, although ideological purity makes me projectile-vomit, when you're dealing with abstract concepts, I prefer to keep things truly abstract. Otherwise it warps one's approach to later solutions.
Djisktra did. in fact attempt an abstract high-level language in his "A Discipline of Programming", although it has some odd warts of its own. Personally, I'd vote for Ada, because while the last time I actually ran Ada, it nearly burned out the bearings on a mid-line IBM mainframe, it is the only common language I know where values and functions are assigned ranges and domains - an essential concept that is taught at the very beginning of differential calculus classes, but not nearly well-stressed enough in most CIS curricula. Were it otherwise, perhaps fewer satellites would have been destroyer.
Ada, incidentally, is part of the gcc/gnat toolset available on almost any Linux development system and modern-day PCs are considerably more powerful than a 1990 mid-level IBM mainframe (but then again, probably so are most cellphones), so anyone who's curious can explore.
The operative word there is minimize.
What people are finding so insufferable about you is that you think that the worst-case cannot happen to you and you're smug about it.
Even people who have a safety cushion can lose it, and it's really, really hard to get it back if you do so. I know. I've had to rebuild my assets several times and I'll bet I keep a larger cushion than you do when I can. In large part because I do pass on a lot of job offers.
Absolutely. Coal has no maintenance costs. No fuel costs, No boiler scale, no generator wear, no waste clean-out. It's all magic free energy!
I very much doubt that would happen to an extent where I couldn't do anything to adjust.
The Greeks called statements like that "tempting Fate" or, if you prefer, hubris. Nothing makes you believe in spiteful Gods like saying "Nothing could possibly go wrong" and shortly thereafter having it humiliatingly thrown in your face.
The one thing you can depend on in life is that the best laid plans o' Mice and Men gang aft agley.
swarm of piranhas
What kind? Sales or Legal?
Usually you find that the survivor hit deep snow. Although IIRC, in one case a skydiver whose chute failed survived (with a lot of broken bones) by falling into a sewage pond.
Even water isn't soft when you hit it at terminal velocity.
And then one day, you find your large savings has become a small savings. And it's dwindling fast.
There's this thing that many people do when their large savings has truly become large enough to live on indefinitely. It's called "retire".
Now that I think of it, I remember an old cartoon of about 8 panels with Reagan rightside up then upside down repeated.
But Reagan was the Teflon President and no Republican would ever speak ill of him.
Actually, I see it running in the opposite direction. Reagan, IIRC reversed himself on some of his tax cuts.
George W Bush, on the other hand, was rather infamous for a stay-the-course-no-matter-what approach. In fact, I don't recall hearing the term "double down" in common usage until his last 4 years or so and it wasn't just him that went that route. Basically any time Republicans lost on something they didn't talk altering strategy, they talked "double down". Or "we need to educate" - meaning that the fault wasn't with them, it was with the electorate.
Bush, in fact, was infamous for refusing to accept data that contradicted his position. It was noteworthy when very late in his tenure, he said, somewhat grudgingly that "IF mistakes were made, they are my responsibility".
Apparently - in America competence and experience is now actually a disqualifier for holding office. Nobody wants to vote for the "washington insiders"... an odd sentiment you do not find in any other field. Seriously when did you ever hear anybody say "I am having a heart attack -please get me anybody who is NOT a doctor !"
Well, you also have a large group of people who say "Government is useless. They can't do anything right." And we routinely elect - and re-elect - those people to government positions.
A cynic would have to wonder if you can truly expect success from someone who has a vested interest in failure.
He as the attention span of gnat. That will get the U.S. in trouble when he starts changing policy every year. Sooner or later, no one will trust any of his policies because they cannot be sure how long they'll last.
It's true. Trump is No True Republican. He's willing to change his mind. A True Republican takes a position and runs it right off the cliff. And while the nation is falling, doubles down, Stay the Course is the watchword, and damn the consequences, because the Republican position, once set is the only Right position, and all it takes to ensure success is to persevere. That, and perhaps the complete annihilation of those sabotaging Democrats.
For years, one of the greatest terrors of being a Republican was being labeled a "flip-flopper".
Trump doesn't care. Although up to now, all he's had to change was words. It remains to be seen how he deals with hard real issues as policy. Whether he's truly a gnat, or just more willing to learn from experience. I hope for the latter, but it's still too early to tell.
The hurricane machine is remarkably sensitive to many different factors. Because of this, it's a lousy predictor for global warming. Although long-term statistical effects in terms of location and intensity may eventually correlate.
On the other hand, thermometers all over the globe have been crawling up at a virtually linear pace for all those years you mentioned. I "enjoyed" some of it myself this year, in January, where I came within an inch of switching on the air conditioning when it should have been closer to freezing and in June, when triple-digit temperatures persisted day after day in a region where breaking 100 is something that used to happen one day in every 5 years or so,
Even a lot of record-breaking cold was traceable to overheating of frigid resources that would have usually been locked in for the winter somewhere further north. Kind of like how you get "snowfall" when it starts melting from the roof.
I have been very disappointed in the response of the losing side over this election. This is the kind of behavior I feared that would flare up on the other side when Trump lost the "rigged" election and the faithful rose up in revolt. It's not what I would expect from the allegedly rational side of the fence. They don't even have the excuse that Hillary egged them on.
In fact, the only excuse they could possibly make is that "this is how Trump would do it". So tell us again how you're better than he is?