If the Endowment is large enough they can give every student free tuition. If there is no endowment, everybody pays. In the middle, they need enough people paying full-boat to subsidize the kids who need a full ride. Look at the economics before you assume ill intent. There is no magic money and locking kids into thirty years of debt is no magnanimous gesture.
The Endowment at most of these "elite" schools is enough to give every student free tuition. The reason they don't do it is that charging tuition (even if few pay the full amount) sets the "value" of the education in the minds of people. If say the local state university charges say $40K/year (e.g, UC-berkeley out-of state), a nearby university that want people to consider themselves "elite" will of course need to charge more (e.g., $47K/year Stanford), even though the "elite" university gives many people hefty discounts (e.g., Stanford waives 100% of tuition for students if their parents make less than $125K/year). Of course if *nobody* paid the full amount, then the tuition would be false advertising.
AFAIK, schools like MIT (or my alma mater Caltech), are the exceptions that proves the rule. Single dimensional focus on academics (e.g., STEM) might be *one* way to get into an "elite" school that has a narrow focus, but isn't really going to get you very far in an admissions pool at Harvard, or Stanford.
Poor parents, single parents, parents that end up with stressors that prevent them from committing the time and attention to their child's upbringing will, on average, harm that child's educational performance and will lead to reduced opportunities simply because the student does not have the academic basis in order to attend these schools.
Although "academic-basis" is one way to generalize and dismiss, there are so many more "poor" families that 1%-ers that doesn't fully explain the issue. I spent quite a bit of time working and researching college admissions (during and after my time in university) and perhaps one of the big problems qualified students from "poor" families have getting admitted to "elite" schools is that even if they are qualified, they don't actually apply (which makes it really, really hard to attend).
The reasons are numerous, but often are attributable to fear and low-expectations (e.g., of getting rejected, figuring out how to pay, distance from family and support systems, etc). Unfortunately, this behavior is ultimately self-defeating in many ways as it sets a lower internal "baseline" for themselves to judge their future success. Some of these were outlined in the infamous 1999 Dale-Kruger research report summarized below...
There are many estimates of the effect of college quality on students' subsequent earnings. One difficulty interpreting past estimates, however, is that elite colleges admit students, in part, based on characteristics that are related to their earnings capacity. Since some of these characteristics are unobserved by researchers who later estimate wage equations, it is difficult to parse out the effect of attending a selective college from the students' pre-college characteristics. This paper uses information on the set of colleges at which students were accepted and rejected to remove the effect of unobserved characteristics that influence college admission. Specifically, we match students in the newly colleted College and Beyond (C&B) Data Set who were admitted to and rejected from a similar set of institutions, and estimate fixed effects models. As another approach to adjust for selection bias, we control for the average SAT score of the schools to which students applied using both the C&B and National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972. We find that students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges. However, the average tuition charged by the school is significantly related to the students' subsequent earnings. Indeed, we find a substantial internal rate of return from attending a more costly college. Lastly, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.
Indecisive, partial solutions like this are typical of the Japanese management style, and are a big reason why Toshiba is in trouble in the first place.
Aren't they in trouble because they overstated profits by about $2B in a giant corporate accounting scandal spanning 7 years and purging their CEO and board members?
I mean, despite popular belief rational people did not wake up one morning and decide "I HATE FREEDOM!! RAWWW".
Popular or not, Sharia law is a belief system that is like many other common belief systems in that there is no concept of "freedom" per-se. Nearly all religious belief systems teach some level of subjugation to some type of diety or code. Just because "western" secular belief systems have evolved to favor some sort of "freedom" doesn't mean that is universal.
You can argue if it is rational or not to follow such a belief system, but arguing rationality for human behavior is probably a losing battle.
There is a history here that lead to where we are now, and while (sans time machine) we cannot take back what has already been done and mistakes that were made if we don't go back and look at how we got here today and start to address those issues we are never going to be rid of the problem. Certainly repeating the same mistakes is not going to lead to different results.
Of course if you are advocating assuming the so-called white-man's burden, well, I would argue that's one of the mistakes that got us to where we are today... It is a somewhat of a fools errand to think that we can do something in all cases, sometimes, the best action is inaction. Maybe they hate us for their own reasons? Maybe it is impossible to "get-along"? Why is should they see things our way when we dismiss seeing thing their way?
WTF am I saying? Why address issues when you can nuke them! (sigh..)
Are you suggesting we address ISIL's problem with the Iraqi Security Forces? If I'm not mistaken ISIL has a problem with non-sharia governments and wants to carve out part of the land in Iraq (and Syria) to establish a Caliphate. How would you propose we address ISIL's problem?
Not that nuking them would solve any problem, but some problems aren't for us to solve...
The U.S's continuing failure to provide affordable healthcare to a growing portion of it's population will turn our cities into breeding grounds for all manner of new and exciting infectious bacteria.
If "affordable" healthcare includes distributing antibiotics like tic-tacs to people whenever they whine about an infection, maybe we are avoiding the creation of new and exciting infectious bacteria by continuing to fail to provide access to anti-biotics...
Just food for thought...
OF course there are other aspects of failure to provide care to the population that causes serious health problems and increased mortality rates and we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water, but anti-biotic overuse is a serious problem that won't get fixed simply by providing more people access to the same flawed medicine that we seem to be practicing today.
In the Portland Oregon area, housing prices rose 20% last year. The poor and disabled in Beaverton and Hillsboro are getting squeezed out of the housing market. I have seen a HCL employee work 5 months on a L2 visa, then goes back to India for a month, come back to work for an other 5 months on a L2 visa.
L2 is for the spouse/child of an L1 visa holder. You can probably assume the L1 visa holder is some hot-shot on an ex-pat gig for a foreign national company.
FWIW, the L2 is part of the country-based L1 reciprocity "perk" to allow a two-income ex-pat family to live in the US (in exchange for that country allowing US ex-pats to work in their country and allowing their spouse to work).
Also, give holders more flexibility in changing jobs without losing the visa, make the system a path to citizenship, and prevent new visas from being created if previous holders are unemployed. Essentially prevent jobs from using the visa to control workers while suppressing wages or constantly churning through new candidates.
Technically, H1b is already a dual-intent visa (you can apply** for a green card/permanent resident status while in the country on an H1b). Also a recent change in the law allows H1b visa holder to change jobs (a feature of the AC21 act). It apparently takes about 4-8 weeks if the new employer follows all the rules (employee must be continuously employed, e.g., can't lapse into H4 status) and once the H1b transfer is approved, it's up to the employee if he/she actually wants to go to the new company. In any case, the H1b transfer petitions happens outside the H1b lottery, so the employee doesn't need to re-entry the lottery to get the H1b with the new company (but the previous employer would needs to apply for a new H1b to replace the worker that left and that would have to go through the lottery).
That's how the situation is today. I get the feeling mostly/.-ers don't really understand the *current* H1b situation and keep recycling old memes about H1b.
The big loopholes are the lottery, the fact that offering a $60K salary is enough to avoid doing a labor certification for the open position, and allowing a company to use a single anonymous labor certification to apply to multiple future candidates. These loopholes allows the H1b slots to be easily dominated by 2 Indian contracting companies.
Eliminating these H1b program loopholes seems like it would probably be enough to make most reasonable, well-informed, non-xenophobic people happy. Unfortunately that means it probably won't make everyone happy.
** the per-country caps on employment based green cards is generally what is preventing many H1b's their path to citizenship because there is no per-country based limit on H1b, this impedance mismatch causes a bottleneck only for over-represented H1b countries like India and China...
half the people in the world have an IQ of less than 100
No. This assumes no one at all has an IQ of 100. 100 is the peak of the bell curve. IQ 100 has the highest number of people, and 95-105 has a large portion of the population, and I defy you to tell the difference between a 95 and a 105 after even knowing the people for several years. Perhaps you meant the mentally retarded? They're as rare as geniuses, and in many cases are given "jobs" that are created as feel good busy work. Welcome to Walmart.
FWIW, IQ 100 is generally defined as the median so by definition 1/2 of the people are above and 1/2 are below... Each 15-points of IQ correspond to 1 standard deviation.
What country before ever existed a century and half without rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure. -- Thomas Jefferson
Yeah. She was in charge of search, and we all know how much Google search sucks. Maybe instead of "Altaba," they should call the new company "Alta Vista."
Altaba - [Ahl-tah-bah]
noun 1. a contraction between Alta-vista (Yahoo bought AltaVista in 2003) and Alibaba (aka "RemainCo" part of Yahoo that holds $37billion of Alibaba stock). . 2. a generic term for a used-to-be-search-company-that-still-owns-lots-of-Alibaba stock
Example: "Altaba is a stupid but totally appropriate name for that company."
verb 1. to complete the process of running a business into the ground divesting all operations and turning it into a zombie company that will never die because it owns too much stock in a company that cannot/willnot buy the stock back without suffering a huge tax bill.
Example: "Wow, that CEO totally Altaba-ed that company!"
I don't know of any material with a density suitable for behaving properly as a projectile that doesn't contain toxic metals. The high-gravity-compound plastics have metal filler.
Ecomass is apparently a tungsten/polymer composite that was designed to meet current U.S. Army specs for nontoxic training ammunition. It of course has Tungsten powder in it which is somewhat toxic, however it is bound with a polymer, and is not nearly as environmentally toxic as lead. About the only compounds that you could use that would be less toxic would probably be Bismuth (which is used as a lead replacement). Of course you could also use silver, gold, and platinum, but that would be some mighty expensive bullets (of course even tungsten is very expensive compared to lead ~15x).
Although this modular arithmetic (e.g., base-3) angle they are working at might be theoretically interesting, there probably aren't enough killer applications to make it worthwhile to make a special ram that runs modular arithmetic configurations. Just like historical so-called Graphics ram (which didn't really do graphics, but optimized bit-planes clears/masks, simple blends and window operations) eventually didn't survive the march of DRAM economics which greatly favors standard products over niche products.
I think that the most intriguing part of multi-state ReRAM would be to take advantage of the fact that neural network like computation is becoming interesting enough to potentially break out the niche product category. ReRAM has the potential to be implemented in a way that enables a so-called Neuromorphic ReRAM. This would not only take advantage of the continuous spectrum of storage (not just the binary/ternary representation), but also some of the other properties of ReRAM.
This of course won't replace traditional computing, (just like quantum computing won't replace traditional computing), but might be some use for ReRAM other than yet another storage device (which just happens to be multi-level under the hood).
Maybe they did cause harm to this person. I don't know. But even so, there's no way they caused 3.8 billion dollars of harm. What is this idiot smoking?
Basically, the lawyer is suing on behalf of everyone. According to the lawsuit (paragraph 98 and 99)
98. Under the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), the penalty for a violation of Labor Code S1102.5 is both $10,000 per violation and "one hundred dollars ($100) for each aggrieved employee per period for the initial violation and two hundred ($200) for each aggrieved employee per pay period for each subsequent violation."
99. Plaintiff seeks, on behalf of himself, the state of California, and all of Google's aggrieved employees, PAGA penalties as set forth above for each employee per pay period within the statutory time frame,
So when you multiply that by 65K employees, that's about $3.8B (according to statutory laws). It took the law firm of Baker Curtis & Schwartz to come up with a lawsuit that "yuge"...
The thing is that it isn't illegal, yet I highly doubt that it's a covered peril by your insurance. There is literally no wording in the law and probably not in your insurance policy either that you are not allowed to put a motor on your steering wheel and pedals and make a computer control them. That does mean it IS legal (by definition, in the US at least**, laws can only restrict you from doing things, you're free to do anything else that's not directly infringing on other people's rights) to have a computer drive your car unless there is a law that says otherwise, your insurance however probably covers you as the driver as a peril and the occasional user of your car, a computer is neither so you'd either have to cover it with your insurance like you do your significant other, children or friends that regularly use your car.
Insurance or not, reckless endangerment is illegal. You cannot legally let your trained dog drive the car even though there is literally no wording in the law that says this. Also, at this point in time, it might be difficult to prove a trained dog wouldn't be as good a driver as current self-driving computers.
If your car computer suddenly decided to take over driving for you maybe you have a case, but if you put the keys in the car and "told" the car computer to drive for you and it couldn't do so until you told it, legally, it doesn't seem to be much different than you telling your dog to do the driving for you, even if you are not behind the wheel controlling the car. No actual damage has to occur for reckless endangerment as people who let their 8-yo kids walk to the park unescorted will tell you. In the event that something actually happens, you perhaps could get into criminal negligence territory.
** and legally, driving is a privilege in the US, not a right. Basically since States built, maintained, and enforced road laws, States are able to determine who should be allowed on their roads, not the federal government. If you have your own private road on private property, you can make your own licencing rules.
The thing is that it isn't illegal, yet I highly doubt that it's a covered peril by your insurance. There is literally no wording in the law and probably not in your insurance policy either that you are not allowed to put a motor on your steering wheel and pedals and make a computer control them. That does mean it IS legal (by definition, in the US at least, laws can only restrict you from doing things, you're free to do anything else that's not directly infringing on other people's rights) to have a computer drive your car unless there is a law that says otherwise, your insurance however probably covers you as the driver as a peril and the occasional user of your car, a computer is neither so you'd either have to cover it with your insurance like you do your significant other, children or friends that regularly use your car.
Insurance or not, reckless endangerment is illegal. You cannot legally let your trained dog drive the car even though there is literally no wording in the law that says this. Also, at this point in time, it might be difficult to prove a trained dog wouldn't be as good a driver as current self-driving computers.
If your car computer suddenly decided to take over driving for you maybe you have a case, but if you put the keys in the car and "told" the car computer to drive for you and it couldn't do so until you told it, legally, it doesn't seem to be much different than you telling your dog to do the driving for you, even if you are not behind the wheel controlling the car. No actual damage has to occur for reckless endangerment as people who let their 8-yo kids walk to the park unescorted will tell you. In the event that something actually happens, you perhaps could get into criminal negligence territory.
A lot of states have tort limits for personal injuries, so this will vary by state. It is unlikely to ever be more than 75% of any states' tort limit. If you sue and win, the attorney fees would actually make you win less than settling.
IANAL, but my understanding in nearly all cases the tort-caps only affect non-economic damages (e.g., pain suffering). If you have actual economic damages (e.g., doctor's bills, lost wages, loss of future employability etc), you can nearly always sue for 100% of established economic damages.
Government statements, or governmental body statements are usually not actually law. Law is set down in legislation and published rules. This does not usually have the codicil 'or whatever we decide on the day'.
Governmental agencies often make statements that reflect what they would like the law to mean. This is often clearly and unambiguously accurate. Sometimes however, it's taking the published law, and torturing it to say things it really doesn't, with the knowledge it doesn't really say that, but the hope people will comply because it's an agency saying it.
It can be reasonable to have a very skilled team of lawyers look at what the law actually says, and consider if all the costs of publicaly disagreeing with what is said about the law by the government is reasonable.
It may be, for example, that they are confident enough about the legal driver being the person sitting in the 'backup' driver seat, and the insurance covering all risks.
Insurance doesn't cover all the risks. I don't know what kind of insurance Uber is providing to the 'backup' driver. But if someone dies (either the passenger or a someone outside the car) there's really no insurance or indemnity that can stop a district attorney from charging the 'backup' driver with reckless endangerment, or from someone from suing the 'backup' driver for a civil action like wrongful death. Even a $5-million insurance policy (currently required by the DMV for autonomous vehicle operation) is going to do jackshit against that kind of legal "risk" of willfully disobeying (not just public disagreement). Such willful disobedience will certainly work against the 'backup' driver in such court cases (can't just say my boss made me do it). Then OSHA or some other agency can come in and simply put Uber out of business for failing to protect their workers (aka 'backup' drivers). At least if they acquiesced to the DMV, they could at least mute some of those legal consequences. Remember, from your driver's ed classes, "driving is a privilege, not a right".
I genuinely feel sorry for the guinea-pigs/pawns (aka 'backup' drivers) that Uber is using in this stare-down with authorities. Unless they are actually directors and vice presidents or other principle employees of Uber, they are being taken advantage of far more than any of their current actual drivers.
Everybody is GETTING WRONG why the USA has an Electoral College instead of direct vote. The reason is because in order to get all states to ratify the Constitution, they had to throw a sop to the southern slave states to inflate their representation by counting each slave as three fifths of a person. Now, since slaves were totally owned by their masters, they weren't going to let them vote for themselves. Thus, the Electoral College was needed where a group of white men vote for you. THINK, people, it's not that complicated.
If this was true, the US could simply have the house and senate jointly pick the president (by construction has the exact same vote biases as the electoral college as they are 1:1). The house representation already had the "3/5 person" stuff burned in and the senate is used to protect small states. I don't think anyone was worried about slaves being elected to the house or senate. This would make it similar to most other parliamentary systems in the world (which also don't have a direct vote for prime minister or equivalent post and have legislator vote for the post indirectly). For example, there wasn't a popular vote for Theresa May (UK) or Angela Merkel (Germany). They were simply chosen by their legislative body, not direct vote (e.g., house of commons or bundestag).
Or you could study the federalist papers and actually discover the actual reason for the Electoral College. Or just continue to wallow in your ignorance. Your choice.
As a counterpoint, if you read the federalist papers (specifically those written by Alexander Hamilton), one of the many reasons given for the electoral college (vs just having the house of representatives pick the president), was to limit the problem of institutional corruption. Electors were to be chosen only for the task of electing a president and no other purpose and weren't allowed to be holding office in the House or Senate to minimize any institutional influence and corruption. Since electors were only chosen to pick the president (and vice president), you couldn't easily say trade a future vote on a specific policy for an electoral vote nor would it be too easy for a foreign power attempt to corrupt or install rogue electors all over the united states if they aren't a standing body. Also an electoral college style of vote side-steps the issue of stuffing the ballot box in one area of the country and allows for geographic diversity considerations to be "burned-into" the system.
But the Englishfolk are welcome to keep their current scheme which brought them Theresa May (who advocated for "remain" instead of "brexit" even though "brexit" seemed to be the majority sentiment). No system is "perfect", but no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Endowment is large enough they can give every student free tuition. If there is no endowment, everybody pays. In the middle, they need enough people paying full-boat to subsidize the kids who need a full ride. Look at the economics before you assume ill intent. There is no magic money and locking kids into thirty years of debt is no magnanimous gesture.
The Endowment at most of these "elite" schools is enough to give every student free tuition. The reason they don't do it is that charging tuition (even if few pay the full amount) sets the "value" of the education in the minds of people. If say the local state university charges say $40K/year (e.g, UC-berkeley out-of state), a nearby university that want people to consider themselves "elite" will of course need to charge more (e.g., $47K/year Stanford), even though the "elite" university gives many people hefty discounts (e.g., Stanford waives 100% of tuition for students if their parents make less than $125K/year). Of course if *nobody* paid the full amount, then the tuition would be false advertising.
AFAIK, schools like MIT (or my alma mater Caltech), are the exceptions that proves the rule. Single dimensional focus on academics (e.g., STEM) might be *one* way to get into an "elite" school that has a narrow focus, but isn't really going to get you very far in an admissions pool at Harvard, or Stanford.
Poor parents, single parents, parents that end up with stressors that prevent them from committing the time and attention to their child's upbringing will, on average, harm that child's educational performance and will lead to reduced opportunities simply because the student does not have the academic basis in order to attend these schools.
Although "academic-basis" is one way to generalize and dismiss, there are so many more "poor" families that 1%-ers that doesn't fully explain the issue. I spent quite a bit of time working and researching college admissions (during and after my time in university) and perhaps one of the big problems qualified students from "poor" families have getting admitted to "elite" schools is that even if they are qualified, they don't actually apply (which makes it really, really hard to attend).
The reasons are numerous, but often are attributable to fear and low-expectations (e.g., of getting rejected, figuring out how to pay, distance from family and support systems, etc). Unfortunately, this behavior is ultimately self-defeating in many ways as it sets a lower internal "baseline" for themselves to judge their future success. Some of these were outlined in the infamous 1999 Dale-Kruger research report summarized below...
There are many estimates of the effect of college quality on students' subsequent earnings. One difficulty interpreting past estimates, however, is that elite colleges admit students, in part, based on characteristics that are related to their earnings capacity. Since some of these characteristics are unobserved by researchers who later estimate wage equations, it is difficult to parse out the effect of attending a selective college from the students' pre-college characteristics. This paper uses information on the set of colleges at which students were accepted and rejected to remove the effect of unobserved characteristics that influence college admission. Specifically, we match students in the newly colleted College and Beyond (C&B) Data Set who were admitted to and rejected from a similar set of institutions, and estimate fixed effects models. As another approach to adjust for selection bias, we control for the average SAT score of the schools to which students applied using both the C&B and National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972. We find that students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges. However, the average tuition charged by the school is significantly related to the students' subsequent earnings. Indeed, we find a substantial internal rate of return from attending a more costly college. Lastly, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.
Nuclear is the other big chunk of their business.
If you define "business" as potentially being profitable (3 out of 5 years like their IRS), Nuclear is their new hobby, not their business...
Indecisive, partial solutions like this are typical of the Japanese management style, and are a big reason why Toshiba is in trouble in the first place.
Aren't they in trouble because they overstated profits by about $2B in a giant corporate accounting scandal spanning 7 years and purging their CEO and board members?
I mean, despite popular belief rational people did not wake up one morning and decide "I HATE FREEDOM!! RAWWW".
Popular or not, Sharia law is a belief system that is like many other common belief systems in that there is no concept of "freedom" per-se. Nearly all religious belief systems teach some level of subjugation to some type of diety or code. Just because "western" secular belief systems have evolved to favor some sort of "freedom" doesn't mean that is universal.
You can argue if it is rational or not to follow such a belief system, but arguing rationality for human behavior is probably a losing battle.
There is a history here that lead to where we are now, and while (sans time machine) we cannot take back what has already been done and mistakes that were made if we don't go back and look at how we got here today and start to address those issues we are never going to be rid of the problem. Certainly repeating the same mistakes is not going to lead to different results.
Of course if you are advocating assuming the so-called white-man's burden, well, I would argue that's one of the mistakes that got us to where we are today... It is a somewhat of a fools errand to think that we can do something in all cases, sometimes, the best action is inaction. Maybe they hate us for their own reasons? Maybe it is impossible to "get-along"? Why is should they see things our way when we dismiss seeing thing their way?
Or you could address the problem....
WTF am I saying? Why address issues when you can nuke them! (sigh..)
Are you suggesting we address ISIL's problem with the Iraqi Security Forces? If I'm not mistaken ISIL has a problem with non-sharia governments and wants to carve out part of the land in Iraq (and Syria) to establish a Caliphate. How would you propose we address ISIL's problem?
Not that nuking them would solve any problem, but some problems aren't for us to solve...
The U.S's continuing failure to provide affordable healthcare to a growing portion of it's population will turn our cities into breeding grounds for all manner of new and exciting infectious bacteria.
If "affordable" healthcare includes distributing antibiotics like tic-tacs to people whenever they whine about an infection, maybe we are avoiding the creation of new and exciting infectious bacteria by continuing to fail to provide access to anti-biotics...
Just food for thought...
OF course there are other aspects of failure to provide care to the population that causes serious health problems and increased mortality rates and we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water, but anti-biotic overuse is a serious problem that won't get fixed simply by providing more people access to the same flawed medicine that we seem to be practicing today.
In the Portland Oregon area, housing prices rose 20% last year. The poor and disabled in Beaverton and Hillsboro are getting squeezed out of the housing market.
I have seen a HCL employee work 5 months on a L2 visa, then goes back to India for a month, come back to work for an other 5 months on a L2 visa.
L2 is for the spouse/child of an L1 visa holder. You can probably assume the L1 visa holder is some hot-shot on an ex-pat gig for a foreign national company.
FWIW, the L2 is part of the country-based L1 reciprocity "perk" to allow a two-income ex-pat family to live in the US (in exchange for that country allowing US ex-pats to work in their country and allowing their spouse to work).
Also, give holders more flexibility in changing jobs without losing the visa, make the system a path to citizenship, and prevent new visas from being created if previous holders are unemployed. Essentially prevent jobs from using the visa to control workers while suppressing wages or constantly churning through new candidates.
Technically, H1b is already a dual-intent visa (you can apply** for a green card/permanent resident status while in the country on an H1b). Also a recent change in the law allows H1b visa holder to change jobs (a feature of the AC21 act). It apparently takes about 4-8 weeks if the new employer follows all the rules (employee must be continuously employed, e.g., can't lapse into H4 status) and once the H1b transfer is approved, it's up to the employee if he/she actually wants to go to the new company. In any case, the H1b transfer petitions happens outside the H1b lottery, so the employee doesn't need to re-entry the lottery to get the H1b with the new company (but the previous employer would needs to apply for a new H1b to replace the worker that left and that would have to go through the lottery).
That's how the situation is today. I get the feeling mostly /.-ers don't really understand the *current* H1b situation and keep recycling old memes about H1b.
The big loopholes are the lottery, the fact that offering a $60K salary is enough to avoid doing a labor certification for the open position, and allowing a company to use a single anonymous labor certification to apply to multiple future candidates. These loopholes allows the H1b slots to be easily dominated by 2 Indian contracting companies.
Eliminating these H1b program loopholes seems like it would probably be enough to make most reasonable, well-informed, non-xenophobic people happy. Unfortunately that means it probably won't make everyone happy.
** the per-country caps on employment based green cards is generally what is preventing many H1b's their path to citizenship because there is no per-country based limit on H1b, this impedance mismatch causes a bottleneck only for over-represented H1b countries like India and China...
half the people in the world have an IQ of less than 100
No. This assumes no one at all has an IQ of 100. 100 is the peak of the bell curve. IQ 100 has the highest number of people, and 95-105 has a large portion of the population, and I defy you to tell the difference between a 95 and a 105 after even knowing the people for several years. Perhaps you meant the mentally retarded? They're as rare as geniuses, and in many cases are given "jobs" that are created as feel good busy work. Welcome to Walmart.
FWIW, IQ 100 is generally defined as the median so by definition 1/2 of the people are above and 1/2 are below... Each 15-points of IQ correspond to 1 standard deviation.
What country before ever existed a century and half without rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them . What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Have you seen British teeth in recent decades? Theirs are nicer than those of us who live in the US, now.
Maybe nicer, but only if can pay out of pocket, or you can find an NHS dentist...
Brexit may exasperate this probably as many dentist in the UK come from EU countries...
"She failed at Google"
Yeah. She was in charge of search, and we all know how much Google search sucks. Maybe instead of "Altaba," they should call the new company "Alta Vista."
Altaba - [Ahl-tah-bah]
noun
1. a contraction between Alta-vista (Yahoo bought AltaVista in 2003) and Alibaba (aka "RemainCo" part of Yahoo that holds $37billion of Alibaba stock). .
2. a generic term for a used-to-be-search-company-that-still-owns-lots-of-Alibaba stock
Example: "Altaba is a stupid but totally appropriate name for that company."
verb
1. to complete the process of running a business into the ground divesting all operations and turning it into a zombie company that will never die because it owns too much stock in a company that cannot/willnot buy the stock back without suffering a huge tax bill.
Example: "Wow, that CEO totally Altaba-ed that company!"
I don't know of any material with a density suitable for behaving properly as a projectile that doesn't contain toxic metals. The high-gravity-compound plastics have metal filler.
Ecomass is apparently a tungsten/polymer composite that was designed to meet current U.S. Army specs for nontoxic training ammunition. It of course has Tungsten powder in it which is somewhat toxic, however it is bound with a polymer, and is not nearly as environmentally toxic as lead. About the only compounds that you could use that would be less toxic would probably be Bismuth (which is used as a lead replacement). Of course you could also use silver, gold, and platinum, but that would be some mighty expensive bullets (of course even tungsten is very expensive compared to lead ~15x).
All Samsung TVs use edge LED lit LCD panels. If they've switched to QLED they haven't made it public yet.
FYI, the KS9800 is a QLED tv (which apparently also does full-array local dimming)...
Although this modular arithmetic (e.g., base-3) angle they are working at might be theoretically interesting, there probably aren't enough killer applications to make it worthwhile to make a special ram that runs modular arithmetic configurations. Just like historical so-called Graphics ram (which didn't really do graphics, but optimized bit-planes clears/masks, simple blends and window operations) eventually didn't survive the march of DRAM economics which greatly favors standard products over niche products.
I think that the most intriguing part of multi-state ReRAM would be to take advantage of the fact that neural network like computation is becoming interesting enough to potentially break out the niche product category. ReRAM has the potential to be implemented in a way that enables a so-called Neuromorphic ReRAM. This would not only take advantage of the continuous spectrum of storage (not just the binary/ternary representation), but also some of the other properties of ReRAM.
Check out this paper as an example...
This of course won't replace traditional computing, (just like quantum computing won't replace traditional computing), but might be some use for ReRAM other than yet another storage device (which just happens to be multi-level under the hood).
Time for new textbooks that will be $250 each!
Yet only $195.27 on amazon ;^)
Of course the infamous Gray's Anatomy is published by the "respected" Elsevier company...
All editors quit top linguistics journal to protest Elsevier pricing
Elsevier going after authors sharing their own papers
More fake journals from Elsevier
How about the Casimir effect? Which of Newton's laws explains that?
Maybe they did cause harm to this person. I don't know. But even so, there's no way they caused 3.8 billion dollars of harm. What is this idiot smoking?
Basically, the lawyer is suing on behalf of everyone. According to the lawsuit (paragraph 98 and 99)
98. Under the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), the penalty for a violation of Labor Code S1102.5 is both $10,000 per violation and "one hundred dollars ($100) for each aggrieved employee per period for the initial violation and two hundred ($200) for each aggrieved employee per pay period for each subsequent violation."
99. Plaintiff seeks, on behalf of himself, the state of California, and all of Google's aggrieved employees, PAGA penalties as set forth above for each employee per pay period within the statutory time frame,
So when you multiply that by 65K employees, that's about $3.8B (according to statutory laws). It took the law firm of Baker Curtis & Schwartz to come up with a lawsuit that "yuge"...
The thing is that it isn't illegal, yet I highly doubt that it's a covered peril by your insurance. There is literally no wording in the law and probably not in your insurance policy either that you are not allowed to put a motor on your steering wheel and pedals and make a computer control them. That does mean it IS legal (by definition, in the US at least**, laws can only restrict you from doing things, you're free to do anything else that's not directly infringing on other people's rights) to have a computer drive your car unless there is a law that says otherwise, your insurance however probably covers you as the driver as a peril and the occasional user of your car, a computer is neither so you'd either have to cover it with your insurance like you do your significant other, children or friends that regularly use your car.
Insurance or not, reckless endangerment is illegal. You cannot legally let your trained dog drive the car even though there is literally no wording in the law that says this. Also, at this point in time, it might be difficult to prove a trained dog wouldn't be as good a driver as current self-driving computers.
If your car computer suddenly decided to take over driving for you maybe you have a case, but if you put the keys in the car and "told" the car computer to drive for you and it couldn't do so until you told it, legally, it doesn't seem to be much different than you telling your dog to do the driving for you, even if you are not behind the wheel controlling the car. No actual damage has to occur for reckless endangerment as people who let their 8-yo kids walk to the park unescorted will tell you. In the event that something actually happens, you perhaps could get into criminal negligence territory.
** and legally, driving is a privilege in the US, not a right. Basically since States built, maintained, and enforced road laws, States are able to determine who should be allowed on their roads, not the federal government. If you have your own private road on private property, you can make your own licencing rules.
The thing is that it isn't illegal, yet I highly doubt that it's a covered peril by your insurance. There is literally no wording in the law and probably not in your insurance policy either that you are not allowed to put a motor on your steering wheel and pedals and make a computer control them. That does mean it IS legal (by definition, in the US at least, laws can only restrict you from doing things, you're free to do anything else that's not directly infringing on other people's rights) to have a computer drive your car unless there is a law that says otherwise, your insurance however probably covers you as the driver as a peril and the occasional user of your car, a computer is neither so you'd either have to cover it with your insurance like you do your significant other, children or friends that regularly use your car.
Insurance or not, reckless endangerment is illegal. You cannot legally let your trained dog drive the car even though there is literally no wording in the law that says this. Also, at this point in time, it might be difficult to prove a trained dog wouldn't be as good a driver as current self-driving computers.
If your car computer suddenly decided to take over driving for you maybe you have a case, but if you put the keys in the car and "told" the car computer to drive for you and it couldn't do so until you told it, legally, it doesn't seem to be much different than you telling your dog to do the driving for you, even if you are not behind the wheel controlling the car. No actual damage has to occur for reckless endangerment as people who let their 8-yo kids walk to the park unescorted will tell you. In the event that something actually happens, you perhaps could get into criminal negligence territory.
A lot of states have tort limits for personal injuries, so this will vary by state. It is unlikely to ever be more than 75% of any states' tort limit. If you sue and win, the attorney fees would actually make you win less than settling.
IANAL, but my understanding in nearly all cases the tort-caps only affect non-economic damages (e.g., pain suffering). If you have actual economic damages (e.g., doctor's bills, lost wages, loss of future employability etc), you can nearly always sue for 100% of established economic damages.
Government statements, or governmental body statements are usually not actually law.
Law is set down in legislation and published rules.
This does not usually have the codicil 'or whatever we decide on the day'.
Governmental agencies often make statements that reflect what they would like the law to mean.
This is often clearly and unambiguously accurate.
Sometimes however, it's taking the published law, and torturing it to say things it really doesn't, with the knowledge it doesn't really say that, but the hope people will comply because it's an agency saying it.
It can be reasonable to have a very skilled team of lawyers look at what the law actually says, and consider if all the costs of publicaly disagreeing with what is said about the law by the government is reasonable.
It may be, for example, that they are confident enough about the legal driver being the person sitting in the 'backup' driver seat, and the insurance covering all risks.
Insurance doesn't cover all the risks. I don't know what kind of insurance Uber is providing to the 'backup' driver. But if someone dies (either the passenger or a someone outside the car) there's really no insurance or indemnity that can stop a district attorney from charging the 'backup' driver with reckless endangerment, or from someone from suing the 'backup' driver for a civil action like wrongful death. Even a $5-million insurance policy (currently required by the DMV for autonomous vehicle operation) is going to do jackshit against that kind of legal "risk" of willfully disobeying (not just public disagreement). Such willful disobedience will certainly work against the 'backup' driver in such court cases (can't just say my boss made me do it). Then OSHA or some other agency can come in and simply put Uber out of business for failing to protect their workers (aka 'backup' drivers). At least if they acquiesced to the DMV, they could at least mute some of those legal consequences. Remember, from your driver's ed classes, "driving is a privilege, not a right".
I genuinely feel sorry for the guinea-pigs/pawns (aka 'backup' drivers) that Uber is using in this stare-down with authorities. Unless they are actually directors and vice presidents or other principle employees of Uber, they are being taken advantage of far more than any of their current actual drivers.
Everybody is GETTING WRONG why the USA has an Electoral College instead of direct vote. The reason is because in order to get all states to ratify the Constitution, they had to throw a sop to the southern slave states to inflate their representation by counting each slave as three fifths of a person. Now, since slaves were totally owned by their masters, they weren't going to let them vote for themselves. Thus, the Electoral College was needed where a group of white men vote for you. THINK, people, it's not that complicated.
If this was true, the US could simply have the house and senate jointly pick the president (by construction has the exact same vote biases as the electoral college as they are 1:1). The house representation already had the "3/5 person" stuff burned in and the senate is used to protect small states. I don't think anyone was worried about slaves being elected to the house or senate. This would make it similar to most other parliamentary systems in the world (which also don't have a direct vote for prime minister or equivalent post and have legislator vote for the post indirectly). For example, there wasn't a popular vote for Theresa May (UK) or Angela Merkel (Germany). They were simply chosen by their legislative body, not direct vote (e.g., house of commons or bundestag).
Or you could study the federalist papers and actually discover the actual reason for the Electoral College. Or just continue to wallow in your ignorance. Your choice.
As a counterpoint, if you read the federalist papers (specifically those written by Alexander Hamilton), one of the many reasons given for the electoral college (vs just having the house of representatives pick the president), was to limit the problem of institutional corruption. Electors were to be chosen only for the task of electing a president and no other purpose and weren't allowed to be holding office in the House or Senate to minimize any institutional influence and corruption. Since electors were only chosen to pick the president (and vice president), you couldn't easily say trade a future vote on a specific policy for an electoral vote nor would it be too easy for a foreign power attempt to corrupt or install rogue electors all over the united states if they aren't a standing body. Also an electoral college style of vote side-steps the issue of stuffing the ballot box in one area of the country and allows for geographic diversity considerations to be "burned-into" the system.
But the Englishfolk are welcome to keep their current scheme which brought them Theresa May (who advocated for "remain" instead of "brexit" even though "brexit" seemed to be the majority sentiment). No system is "perfect", but no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.