There's a bigger picture here. The U.S. anti-terrorist groups aren't just interested in preventing a terrorist taking down the plane they're flying on. They want to catch them on the way into the country, and while they're traveling the country, on their way to non-aircraft internal terror attacks. The major nightmare for federal anti-terrorist forces is a terror attack at someplace like Mall of the Americas or Disney World.
Such an attack has never happened, but the big fear is an attack in such a venue will cause people to stop frequenting such places, which would result in major losses for the corporations that own them.
It's why the TSA security theater exists in the first place. The airlines were terrified that people would stop flying, so the government set up TSA, not to make it safer to fly, because statistically terror attacks are an insignificant danger to any specific passenger, but to make people think it was safer to fly, so they would keep flying.
Like most things the government does they've ham handed it up and are now actually driving people away from flying. Luckily for the airlines they have more than enough business because some people have to fly or just cancel their trip entirely. Also now there is a whole generation who has never experienced reasonable airline security practices, so don't actually realize how bad it is.
When the terror groups eventually fizzle out, like the anarchists of the late 19th/early 20th century did, the U.S. government won't know how to respond to it. Of course they will fizzle out. Terrorism in the middle east is pay-rolled by petrodollars. When that finally runs out Islamic terrorism will go the way of the Paris Commune.
That is obviously the voters' problem, no? They decide who gets on the ballot. They decide who wins. The initiative to seek out the right person is theirs to take. If they don't, and simply take what's spoon fed by mass media, they have no one else to blame.
You obviously weren't paying attention during the last U.S. presidential election. The DNC did everything in it's power to ensure it's candidate got the nomination and ended up on the ballot, no matter what its voting party members wanted.
You obvious are unaware of the kinds of barriers that the two main parties have put up. It's almost impossible for a third party candidate to make the ballot in every state. Even in local elections the bar is so high that just getting on the ballot if you aren't an R or a D is close to impossible.
At this point short of armed rebellion I don't see what could every pry the levers of power out of the hands of the Democrats and Republicans.
Sure do all that. Just don't expect to get on a plane afterwards. Because flying is not a constitutionally protected right. No one has to fly on an airplane. It's entirely voluntary.
Personally I avoid it when ever possible. At work I tell them I have the Mississippi rule. If they want me to travel for work and the destination is east of the Mississippi then I expect to be paid mileage or get a rental car and drive. The time comes out of my normal salaried hours and they can pad a day on each end. Never been a problem for them. I expect most times a plane ticket would be just as expensive.
I can't always avoid flying for work, but I certainly avoid it for non-work activities, and do. Pretty much no where I need to go that I can't drive. I realize everyone isn't in this position, but I am and I won't deal with TSA's security theater any more than I absolutely have to.
AC means non-salary overhead associated with a worker. In the US that means benefits like health and dental insurance, but also includes things like the employers portion of social security, pension matching, workman's compensation contributions, tax and vacation and sicktime costs (most businesses track and fund vacation and sicktime from different buckets than salary, since they don't have to pay you for vacation and sicktime you don't take.)
It's more complicated than that, and it's not always about profits. I work in a non-profit industry, which is under contract the the U.S. Government. Things like benefits and such are contractually set, and sometimes so is manpower, not costs but number, because different rules apply for companies with different numbers of employees.
Also as stated before its always cheaper to pay two individuals time and a half than to hire a third person and pay three individuals the same amount in salary, because there is overhead associated with each hire. In a company that pays good benefits it can be double the salary, not to mention recruitment and training costs. It is particular important when "crunch time" only fills nine months a year. You can work two employees overtime three quarters of a year or pay to have an extra employee underutilized three months a year. Including overhead the incentive is not to hire an additional person.
Worked at a power plant once where we had a piece of German equipment fail. Actually it was two pieces. Repairs would take a couple of weeks and it was under warranty. It was decided by the German company that they would send two teams. One from Germany and the other from their U.S. subsidiary. The equipment was in a radioloically contaminated area and required dress out to access.
Every day both groups would arrive on time and dress out to work the job. Lunch was at none. At 11:45 every one of the U.S. workers was in the dress out area getting ready to go to lunch. The Germans worked until 12 and then entered the dress out area. At 12:45 the Germans were dressing out to reenter the work area. The U.S. workers entered the dress out area at 13:00.
Is anyone surprised the German crew finished on time and the U.S. one was late?
So yes there is a good reason it wouldn't work in the U.S. The German workers have a work ethic to go along with their stringently protected jobs and the U.S. workers, not so much.
At a local shipyard the trades are union and hourly and get overtime. Some of the engineers, particularly those who do not directly supervise others, are salary, but are paid straight time overtime, unlike the trades, which get time and a half. They should not be confused with managers who are salary and get no overtime. Just to make the point that there are indeed places where salaried people get overtime pay. Where I work we get no overtime, but do get holiday pay if we work a holiday, giving use double time for the day. Hourly get double time and a half for working a holiday.
In the absence of specific laws a company can pay however it wishes. Policy where I work is that salaried are expected to work at least 36 hours a week. No upper limit is set, which is probably a good idea since it's typical for the PhD's to put in way more if they're involved in a project.
The reason management doesn't want to hire more people is because it's not a zero sum game. Working one person excess hours, even if you have to pay overtime is still cheaper than hiring two. If an hourly person works 80 hours in a week even if you're paying time and a half for anything over 40 it's still cheaper than hiring another worker, because of non-salary overhead, like pensions, stock matching, etc. In any industry where potential employees are easily available, like game software companies, where there are people begging to get into the business companies have a lot of leverage over workers. Higher management definitely know it's going on and in almost every state I've ever worked in laws only require that you pay overtime to hourly workers. To put it another way workers are slit into exempt and non-exempt. Non-exempt workers (hourly workers) are covered by laws which set hours per workweek, when overtime must be paid and so on. Exempts are so-called because they are exempt from the laws.
The Obama administration tried to force businesses to classify more workers as non-exempt. They mostly failed, because such action was detrimental to the economy, and because most exempt workers like the flexibility of being able to stay to complete a project and then taking a few days off without burning vacation when they complete it.
In many ways people going into these high overtime or high working hour jobs know it when they take the job. They take them because they expect stock options or first crack at the IPO or a star on their CV or just because they like the project. When they get sick of working those hours, if the stock option doesn't pay off or the company fails to go public or they've got the star or the project loses it's luster, they move on.
On the other hand nearly 100% of businesses have landlines, and are likely to in the foreseeable future. I pretty much guarantee those business customers will get their phone service working.
This is a prime example of government doing it wrong. To start with government should not be telling companies what kind of technology they should be using. If what is wanted is universal coverage then say that and let the company decide how to meet that universal coverage requirement. Set standards for bandwidth, cost, etc. and require the companies to meet them, but leave the how to them.
And make it a law, not a regulation so that political appointees can't change them with the political wind.
The difference is that unless the people you want to connect to are also on the same platform it's useless.
That's exactly what Google found out with Google+. No one uses Google+ because none of the people they want to connect with are on Google+. Businesses don't have Google+ pages because most of the customers they want to attract aren't on Google+. No one goes to Google+ to view a business page because the chances are the business they are interested in isn't on Google+.
Critical social mass is everything. It's the reason that, with all the problems insecure email has no one has been able to replace it.
Without agnostic cross-platform and cross application standards there will never be competitive social media. What will most likely happen to Facebook is that it will age out. I already see this as it's already two cohorts behind. The young people now in college didn't use Facebook when they were in High School and they aren't using it now. Likewise those now in High School aren't using it. The Facebook generation is in their 30's now. Grandma has a Facebook page, but her grandchildren don't (or if they do it's only so they can post pics for grandma.) They don't read their newsfeed and they don't see the ads (Which is Facebook's real business.)
Google's business is not search. Google's business is advertising. Everything that Google does, from giving away free GSP Maps to letting people upload videos to search is to get money from advertisers.
Facebook is in the same business. The only reason Facebook lets anybody post for free on a page they provide is to support their advertising business.
So are Facebook and Google colluding together? If they are then we something to talk about. If they are not, and it appears they are competitors. then we don't.
My mother in law way back in the 1990's had an answering machine. You want to talk to her? Leave a message. Once she heard your voice she might pick up. Or she'd call you back.
My policy is the same. If you're in my contact list you'll get through. Else you go straight to voicemail. If you're a real person and don't want to leave a message you must not really want to talk to me. If you leave a BS message that makes it sound like you're a sales person and I don't know you, good luck on getting a call back.
As for having a working phone. I do business with small business owners all the time. Lots of them have you leave a message on voicemail and get back to you. If I expect them to call me back I throw them in my contacts list so the call goes through, and then take them out once I'm done with them. So unless you're doing real time support, most of the time even businesses will understand and leave a message.
It's like email span. Obviously someone is actually giving the Nigerian Prince their bank account number or the spammers wouldn't keep sending out the email
Obviously someone is actually buying the stuff the robocalls are selling or their customers wouldn't keep paying them.
On Android you can have any phone call not in your contacts list go directly to voice mail. It can be set to vibrate anyway, if you want to actually know when you get one of these calls.
I've found that legitimate calls: doctor's office, kid's school, old friend from collage, whose number you no long have; will leave a message and you can get back to them.
Robocallers drop the call as soon as it get transferred.
Just don't deliver a number. Caller ID gets an "UNKNOWN" tag and the customer can decide if it want's to answer "UNKNOWN" or not. Phone company must, for free, allow customers to block "UNKNOWN".
Businesses will probably accept "UNKNOWN" most other people likely not.
The place to make this happen is congress, so the present or next FCC commissioner can't kill it.
The phone companies make too much money from spammers. It will never happen.
It's a bad idea to talk to these people at all. A new trick is to ask you if you are interested. When you say "yes" they record it. Then they sign up up and charge you a large amount.
The merely slimey ones use your "yes" integrated into a fake conversation to eventually take you to courts for breaking a contract, and get the court to make you pay.
The outright criminal ones already have your account information before they call you and yank the money right then, using the recorded "yes" as a get out of jail card if they're caught.
Plastics have been used for less than one hundred years and their concentrations in the environment have exponentially increased over the last 50 years.
How long did it take to figure out that radiation exposure was bad? How long did it take to figure out smoking was bad?
We don't know the long term health effect of ingesting microplastics. Depending on what they are it might take decades more before some specific health problem is traced to exposure to microplastics.
In 2006 they did a study in the UK which found that 137 more lives per 100,000 patients were saved due to cell phones.
More than 291,000 calls are made to 911 in the U.S. daily.
In 2010 after the Haitian earthquake cell phones were the only method of communication still working, as landlines were inoperable.
So yeah, cell phone save lives and are more than just a convenience.
Mr. Schneier let me help you with you inability to understand about safety and industry. The National Electrical Code which fundamentally improved safety in the electrical industry is part of the National Fires Code, which fundamentally improved safety in the building industry is published by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) a private trade association. It was not imposed by the government.
Unlike what some people would like you to believe, it is not necessary or usually even advisable for government to impose solutions. The best ones (see NEC and NFC) can be developed outside of government. It does require will and interest on the part of industry to do so.
Actually CA has a direct exemption in the law on emissions and absolutely imposes its own standards on cars sold in CA. And since they are such a big part of the market most auto manufacturers make their cars to meet CA's standards, rather than make cars to differing standards.
A similar thing happens with TX and school text books.
As for the FCC they have said they don't have the authority, and they are right. The move by Obama in the previous administration was illegal and would eventually have been struck down by the courts.
It really doesn't matter whether you or I believe that its better for congress to create laws or not. The constitution states that congress is where laws get created.
Executive agencies, like the FCC are only empowered to create regulations to enforce already created laws. they are not empowered to create laws of their own.
In actuality its not that easy to create laws, especially contentious ones. Nor is it easy to repeal them.
Generally speaking regulatory capture is a bad thing and explains why this situation has even come up. In the Obama administration the FCC was under the control of industries that wanted net neutrality, because it served them. Now it is under the control of industries who don't want net neutrality, because that position serves them.
In no case is anyone asking what serves the electorate or the consumer.
The FCC can only exert regulatory control. Only congress can pass laws. And there in lies the problem. Congress has shown little incentive to pass laws ensuring net neutrality, so the last administration, as it did whenever it was thwarted by congress ignored the limits of its constitutional power and tried to create authority where it had none.
I tend to agree that the situation should be addressed by congress. I also agree that since the FCC has no authority to enforce net neutrality it has no authority to prevent the states from enacting any laws controlling net neutrality.
The agency can't have it both ways. It either has authority to enforce (which I don't believe it has) or it doesn't. If it doesn't it also doesn't have the authority to stop states from enforcing within their own borders.
I seem to recall/. covering the problems with liberal arts majors not having to take real STEM courses while STEM students are forced to take the same liberal arts courses as liberal art majors.
Rants aside (I'm looking at you Mr. Hammer) soft sciences like psychology seem incapable of producing reproducible research. Why anyone would think they should have a bigger role in fields based on real reproducible science is beyond me.
Ethics will continue to be a problem in a culture where right and wrong continue to be treated as relative. I've taken numerous ethics courses. None of them would admit the existence of the concept of 'wrong' behavior or explain why, other than going to jail or getting sued one should not engage in it. As long as that paradigm exists ethics will be a problem.
Yep Trump had nothing to do with the economy recovering. It's just a coincidence that the recovery started the day after he was elected.
Or it could be that the economy often runs on a combination of the reality of the economic engine and the hopes and aspirations of all those involved in the economy, from consumers to business owners to stock owners, and all of those people suddenly became hopeful now that they knew the economy crushing policies of the Democratic party were at an end.
So you're right Trump alone did not cause the economy to recover. The ouster of Obama. The failure to elect Clinton. The loss of both houses of congress by the Democrats. These are what caused the economy to initially recover. The subsequent loosening of regulations by Trump appointees are what sustained most of the recovery.
Had Clinton been elected and the Democrats controlled Congress I have no doubt the economy would still be in a malaise and unemployment among all groups, particularly minorities would still be at an all time high.
Anybody with any sense at all doesn't want the Feds nosing around their business. It's not an accident that the system is set up so that you commit at least 3 felonies a day.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a bigger picture here. The U.S. anti-terrorist groups aren't just interested in preventing a terrorist taking down the plane they're flying on. They want to catch them on the way into the country, and while they're traveling the country, on their way to non-aircraft internal terror attacks. The major nightmare for federal anti-terrorist forces is a terror attack at someplace like Mall of the Americas or Disney World.
Such an attack has never happened, but the big fear is an attack in such a venue will cause people to stop frequenting such places, which would result in major losses for the corporations that own them.
It's why the TSA security theater exists in the first place. The airlines were terrified that people would stop flying, so the government set up TSA, not to make it safer to fly, because statistically terror attacks are an insignificant danger to any specific passenger, but to make people think it was safer to fly, so they would keep flying.
Like most things the government does they've ham handed it up and are now actually driving people away from flying. Luckily for the airlines they have more than enough business because some people have to fly or just cancel their trip entirely. Also now there is a whole generation who has never experienced reasonable airline security practices, so don't actually realize how bad it is.
When the terror groups eventually fizzle out, like the anarchists of the late 19th/early 20th century did, the U.S. government won't know how to respond to it. Of course they will fizzle out. Terrorism in the middle east is pay-rolled by petrodollars. When that finally runs out Islamic terrorism will go the way of the Paris Commune.
That is obviously the voters' problem, no? They decide who gets on the ballot. They decide who wins. The initiative to seek out the right person is theirs to take. If they don't, and simply take what's spoon fed by mass media, they have no one else to blame.
You obviously weren't paying attention during the last U.S. presidential election. The DNC did everything in it's power to ensure it's candidate got the nomination and ended up on the ballot, no matter what its voting party members wanted.
You obvious are unaware of the kinds of barriers that the two main parties have put up. It's almost impossible for a third party candidate to make the ballot in every state. Even in local elections the bar is so high that just getting on the ballot if you aren't an R or a D is close to impossible.
At this point short of armed rebellion I don't see what could every pry the levers of power out of the hands of the Democrats and Republicans.
Sure do all that. Just don't expect to get on a plane afterwards. Because flying is not a constitutionally protected right. No one has to fly on an airplane. It's entirely voluntary.
Personally I avoid it when ever possible. At work I tell them I have the Mississippi rule. If they want me to travel for work and the destination is east of the Mississippi then I expect to be paid mileage or get a rental car and drive. The time comes out of my normal salaried hours and they can pad a day on each end. Never been a problem for them. I expect most times a plane ticket would be just as expensive.
I can't always avoid flying for work, but I certainly avoid it for non-work activities, and do. Pretty much no where I need to go that I can't drive. I realize everyone isn't in this position, but I am and I won't deal with TSA's security theater any more than I absolutely have to.
AC means non-salary overhead associated with a worker. In the US that means benefits like health and dental insurance, but also includes things like the employers portion of social security, pension matching, workman's compensation contributions, tax and vacation and sicktime costs (most businesses track and fund vacation and sicktime from different buckets than salary, since they don't have to pay you for vacation and sicktime you don't take.)
It's more complicated than that, and it's not always about profits. I work in a non-profit industry, which is under contract the the U.S. Government. Things like benefits and such are contractually set, and sometimes so is manpower, not costs but number, because different rules apply for companies with different numbers of employees.
Also as stated before its always cheaper to pay two individuals time and a half than to hire a third person and pay three individuals the same amount in salary, because there is overhead associated with each hire. In a company that pays good benefits it can be double the salary, not to mention recruitment and training costs. It is particular important when "crunch time" only fills nine months a year. You can work two employees overtime three quarters of a year or pay to have an extra employee underutilized three months a year. Including overhead the incentive is not to hire an additional person.
I beg to differ. Here's why
Worked at a power plant once where we had a piece of German equipment fail. Actually it was two pieces. Repairs would take a couple of weeks and it was under warranty. It was decided by the German company that they would send two teams. One from Germany and the other from their U.S. subsidiary. The equipment was in a radioloically contaminated area and required dress out to access.
Every day both groups would arrive on time and dress out to work the job. Lunch was at none. At 11:45 every one of the U.S. workers was in the dress out area getting ready to go to lunch. The Germans worked until 12 and then entered the dress out area. At 12:45 the Germans were dressing out to reenter the work area. The U.S. workers entered the dress out area at 13:00.
Is anyone surprised the German crew finished on time and the U.S. one was late?
So yes there is a good reason it wouldn't work in the U.S. The German workers have a work ethic to go along with their stringently protected jobs and the U.S. workers, not so much.
I'm in Virginia, a right to work state.
At a local shipyard the trades are union and hourly and get overtime. Some of the engineers, particularly those who do not directly supervise others, are salary, but are paid straight time overtime, unlike the trades, which get time and a half. They should not be confused with managers who are salary and get no overtime. Just to make the point that there are indeed places where salaried people get overtime pay. Where I work we get no overtime, but do get holiday pay if we work a holiday, giving use double time for the day. Hourly get double time and a half for working a holiday.
In the absence of specific laws a company can pay however it wishes. Policy where I work is that salaried are expected to work at least 36 hours a week. No upper limit is set, which is probably a good idea since it's typical for the PhD's to put in way more if they're involved in a project.
The reason management doesn't want to hire more people is because it's not a zero sum game. Working one person excess hours, even if you have to pay overtime is still cheaper than hiring two. If an hourly person works 80 hours in a week even if you're paying time and a half for anything over 40 it's still cheaper than hiring another worker, because of non-salary overhead, like pensions, stock matching, etc. In any industry where potential employees are easily available, like game software companies, where there are people begging to get into the business companies have a lot of leverage over workers. Higher management definitely know it's going on and in almost every state I've ever worked in laws only require that you pay overtime to hourly workers. To put it another way workers are slit into exempt and non-exempt. Non-exempt workers (hourly workers) are covered by laws which set hours per workweek, when overtime must be paid and so on. Exempts are so-called because they are exempt from the laws.
The Obama administration tried to force businesses to classify more workers as non-exempt. They mostly failed, because such action was detrimental to the economy, and because most exempt workers like the flexibility of being able to stay to complete a project and then taking a few days off without burning vacation when they complete it.
In many ways people going into these high overtime or high working hour jobs know it when they take the job. They take them because they expect stock options or first crack at the IPO or a star on their CV or just because they like the project. When they get sick of working those hours, if the stock option doesn't pay off or the company fails to go public or they've got the star or the project loses it's luster, they move on.
Less than 50% of consumers have landlines.
On the other hand nearly 100% of businesses have landlines, and are likely to in the foreseeable future. I pretty much guarantee those business customers will get their phone service working.
This is a prime example of government doing it wrong. To start with government should not be telling companies what kind of technology they should be using. If what is wanted is universal coverage then say that and let the company decide how to meet that universal coverage requirement. Set standards for bandwidth, cost, etc. and require the companies to meet them, but leave the how to them.
And make it a law, not a regulation so that political appointees can't change them with the political wind.
Except search isn't their business. Their business is advertising. Do they have a monopoly on advertising?
The difference is that unless the people you want to connect to are also on the same platform it's useless.
That's exactly what Google found out with Google+. No one uses Google+ because none of the people they want to connect with are on Google+. Businesses don't have Google+ pages because most of the customers they want to attract aren't on Google+. No one goes to Google+ to view a business page because the chances are the business they are interested in isn't on Google+.
Critical social mass is everything. It's the reason that, with all the problems insecure email has no one has been able to replace it.
Without agnostic cross-platform and cross application standards there will never be competitive social media. What will most likely happen to Facebook is that it will age out. I already see this as it's already two cohorts behind. The young people now in college didn't use Facebook when they were in High School and they aren't using it now. Likewise those now in High School aren't using it. The Facebook generation is in their 30's now. Grandma has a Facebook page, but her grandchildren don't (or if they do it's only so they can post pics for grandma.) They don't read their newsfeed and they don't see the ads (Which is Facebook's real business.)
Google's business is not search. Google's business is advertising. Everything that Google does, from giving away free GSP Maps to letting people upload videos to search is to get money from advertisers.
Facebook is in the same business. The only reason Facebook lets anybody post for free on a page they provide is to support their advertising business.
So are Facebook and Google colluding together? If they are then we something to talk about. If they are not, and it appears they are competitors. then we don't.
It's not like this is a new thing.
My mother in law way back in the 1990's had an answering machine. You want to talk to her? Leave a message. Once she heard your voice she might pick up. Or she'd call you back.
My policy is the same. If you're in my contact list you'll get through. Else you go straight to voicemail. If you're a real person and don't want to leave a message you must not really want to talk to me. If you leave a BS message that makes it sound like you're a sales person and I don't know you, good luck on getting a call back.
As for having a working phone. I do business with small business owners all the time. Lots of them have you leave a message on voicemail and get back to you. If I expect them to call me back I throw them in my contacts list so the call goes through, and then take them out once I'm done with them. So unless you're doing real time support, most of the time even businesses will understand and leave a message.
It's like email span. Obviously someone is actually giving the Nigerian Prince their bank account number or the spammers wouldn't keep sending out the email
Obviously someone is actually buying the stuff the robocalls are selling or their customers wouldn't keep paying them.
On Android you can have any phone call not in your contacts list go directly to voice mail. It can be set to vibrate anyway, if you want to actually know when you get one of these calls.
I've found that legitimate calls: doctor's office, kid's school, old friend from collage, whose number you no long have; will leave a message and you can get back to them.
Robocallers drop the call as soon as it get transferred.
Best feature ever.
No one needs to spoof.
Just don't deliver a number. Caller ID gets an "UNKNOWN" tag and the customer can decide if it want's to answer "UNKNOWN" or not. Phone company must, for free, allow customers to block "UNKNOWN".
Businesses will probably accept "UNKNOWN" most other people likely not.
The place to make this happen is congress, so the present or next FCC commissioner can't kill it.
The phone companies make too much money from spammers. It will never happen.
It's a bad idea to talk to these people at all. A new trick is to ask you if you are interested. When you say "yes" they record it. Then they sign up up and charge you a large amount.
The merely slimey ones use your "yes" integrated into a fake conversation to eventually take you to courts for breaking a contract, and get the court to make you pay.
The outright criminal ones already have your account information before they call you and yank the money right then, using the recorded "yes" as a get out of jail card if they're caught.
Your conclusion is premature.
Plastics have been used for less than one hundred years and their concentrations in the environment have exponentially increased over the last 50 years.
How long did it take to figure out that radiation exposure was bad? How long did it take to figure out smoking was bad?
We don't know the long term health effect of ingesting microplastics. Depending on what they are it might take decades more before some specific health problem is traced to exposure to microplastics.
In 2006 they did a study in the UK which found that 137 more lives per 100,000 patients were saved due to cell phones. More than 291,000 calls are made to 911 in the U.S. daily. In 2010 after the Haitian earthquake cell phones were the only method of communication still working, as landlines were inoperable. So yeah, cell phone save lives and are more than just a convenience.
Mr. Schneier let me help you with you inability to understand about safety and industry. The National Electrical Code which fundamentally improved safety in the electrical industry is part of the National Fires Code, which fundamentally improved safety in the building industry is published by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) a private trade association. It was not imposed by the government.
Unlike what some people would like you to believe, it is not necessary or usually even advisable for government to impose solutions. The best ones (see NEC and NFC) can be developed outside of government. It does require will and interest on the part of industry to do so.
Actually CA has a direct exemption in the law on emissions and absolutely imposes its own standards on cars sold in CA. And since they are such a big part of the market most auto manufacturers make their cars to meet CA's standards, rather than make cars to differing standards.
A similar thing happens with TX and school text books.
As for the FCC they have said they don't have the authority, and they are right. The move by Obama in the previous administration was illegal and would eventually have been struck down by the courts.
It really doesn't matter whether you or I believe that its better for congress to create laws or not. The constitution states that congress is where laws get created.
Executive agencies, like the FCC are only empowered to create regulations to enforce already created laws. they are not empowered to create laws of their own.
In actuality its not that easy to create laws, especially contentious ones. Nor is it easy to repeal them.
Generally speaking regulatory capture is a bad thing and explains why this situation has even come up. In the Obama administration the FCC was under the control of industries that wanted net neutrality, because it served them. Now it is under the control of industries who don't want net neutrality, because that position serves them.
In no case is anyone asking what serves the electorate or the consumer.
Nope.
The FCC can only exert regulatory control. Only congress can pass laws. And there in lies the problem. Congress has shown little incentive to pass laws ensuring net neutrality, so the last administration, as it did whenever it was thwarted by congress ignored the limits of its constitutional power and tried to create authority where it had none.
I tend to agree that the situation should be addressed by congress. I also agree that since the FCC has no authority to enforce net neutrality it has no authority to prevent the states from enacting any laws controlling net neutrality.
The agency can't have it both ways. It either has authority to enforce (which I don't believe it has) or it doesn't. If it doesn't it also doesn't have the authority to stop states from enforcing within their own borders.
I seem to recall /. covering the problems with liberal arts majors not having to take real STEM courses while STEM students are forced to take the same liberal arts courses as liberal art majors.
Rants aside (I'm looking at you Mr. Hammer) soft sciences like psychology seem incapable of producing reproducible research. Why anyone would think they should have a bigger role in fields based on real reproducible science is beyond me.
Ethics will continue to be a problem in a culture where right and wrong continue to be treated as relative. I've taken numerous ethics courses. None of them would admit the existence of the concept of 'wrong' behavior or explain why, other than going to jail or getting sued one should not engage in it. As long as that paradigm exists ethics will be a problem.
Yep Trump had nothing to do with the economy recovering. It's just a coincidence that the recovery started the day after he was elected.
Or it could be that the economy often runs on a combination of the reality of the economic engine and the hopes and aspirations of all those involved in the economy, from consumers to business owners to stock owners, and all of those people suddenly became hopeful now that they knew the economy crushing policies of the Democratic party were at an end.
So you're right Trump alone did not cause the economy to recover. The ouster of Obama. The failure to elect Clinton. The loss of both houses of congress by the Democrats. These are what caused the economy to initially recover. The subsequent loosening of regulations by Trump appointees are what sustained most of the recovery.
Had Clinton been elected and the Democrats controlled Congress I have no doubt the economy would still be in a malaise and unemployment among all groups, particularly minorities would still be at an all time high.
Anybody with any sense at all doesn't want the Feds nosing around their business. It's not an accident that the system is set up so that you commit at least 3 felonies a day.