Real life is that if liability is less than present liability it will happen. More so if liability can be externalized.
An autonomous driving AI doesn't need to be as good as the best drivers, it only needs to be as good as the average driver. One just needs to actually drive on the road to see that being better than the average driver is a low bar.
AI's will obey traffic and speed laws. They will not drive on the roads when conditions are too bad for them to be on the roads. Moreover for the purposes of transport companies they can legally drive a truck 24/7, something no human driver can do. In other words they can replace 3 human drivers. That alone will allow quite a bit of extra liability cost to be absorbed without negatively effecting the bottom line.
I expect to see a time when if you want to get on an interstate your vehicle will have to be using an AI or paying a huge fee only the super rich will be able to afford.
Trucks will be the first users of autonomous vehicles. There's just too much money laying on the table for them not to bankroll its development. They'll probably have to pay a teamster to be sleeping in the cab initially, just to get the unions on board, but they;ll be doing that, not driving and not "prepared to take over on seconds notice" either. They'll be a sop to the union and the truck will run 24/7.
I would say that in my experience, especially at the higher levels being in a STEM field just out right sucks. The hours are long. The appreciation is non-existent. Post-doc level jobs are one step above minimum wage in pay and respect. Science is absolutely about big tough guys fighting each other. Anybody who has ever been in an academic or large scale experiment environment knows that. It's every high level PhD collaborator fighting for their piece of the pie.
So its not about discrimination in the field. Its about a segment of people who want to get into the field without having to face the hurdles everyone else in the field is already facing.
Actually it won't, unless you live a hermit's life in a cabin in the woods.
Do you ever buy on line? Facebook knows about it. As does Amazon and Google.
Remember the equifax data breach? Does anybody with a brain actually believe that Google, Facebook, the NSA et all hasn't scraped all of that data? Purely for their own protection of course.
Do you have friends? Family? You can bet Facebook has gotten data from them on you. Plenty of recent data.
Burning Facebook's servers to the ground being impossible you're right about that.
As someone who knows history I know that when human populations were smaller and people mostly lived in villages privacy was non-existent. Faster transportation and bigger urban populations gave humans the illusion of privacy for a couple of centuries, but we're pretty much back to the everyone knows your business village now, except it's a global village.
For what possible reason are you convinced that Facebook doesn't send out bot to scrape data from not just campus directories, but everywhere on the net?
I surely expect they do. As well as any IOT devices, public records posted online, and Google's database besides.
This is their business. They collect data on individuals and sell it.
And worse than that the phone companies actually sold books of private "unlisted" numbers for a higher price to a select group. We had one when I worked at a newspaper. We also had a Reverse lookup phone book that let you look up a number and get the name and address of the customer, even if the number was unlisted. That one wasn't cheap either. Every Private Investigator office, newspaper, government office and political party office bought that one. Along with the list of license plates registrations. You know in those old '80's PI shows the private dick always needs a contact at DMV to get a trace on a plate? BS. States use to sell that stuff to anyone willing to pay the high price. (typically a couple of grand.) TV used the dodge because they were colluding with the states that didn't want people to realize that.
I've worked at union establishments. I once saw a manager and a union rep argue for three hours while workers stood around doing nothing.
There was a misting rain. Basically no rain at all. The manager needed a guy to go up a pole. The guy wanted hazard pay, which is suppose to be reserved for those situations where there is actually a hazard. Like going up a pole in a driving rain. So the union rep, who is a worker in another department gets pulled off his job to argue for the worker, who is now not working.
The manager isn't going to authorize the hazard pay because that means that every time there is a sprinkling rain he's going to have to pay hazard pay in the future, which will bust his budget.
The union guy and the worker see a see a chance to soak the company for more money so they're not backing down.
Three hours later it stops misting and the guy goes up the pole after causing 3 man hours wasted because he wouldn't go up the pole, 9 hours wasted because 3 other workers were standing around waiting for him to go up the pole. 3 man hours wasted because the supervisor was standing around arguing with the union rep and 3 man hours wasted because the union steward was there arguing instead of doing his job. Basically 18 man hours wasted because of the union.
Why would any company want their employees in a union?
And Google home is generally very capable of working in that way. It will tell you if it can't work your sprinklers or that it can. I have noticed that it sometimes fails to recognize a command for turning on devices if the word order is wrong. "(OK Google, turn the living room lights on" vs. "OK Google turn on the living room lights.") but other times it has no problem at all ("OK Google turn off the lights" and "OK Google urn the lights off" both seem to work.)
In many ways Google assistant/home is suppose to be adaptive and learn along the way based on your interactions. This is fine for home control and a search engine, not so good for running a one and a half ton machine at high speed around other machines.
The point is that autonomous cars have to be an either or proposition. Either the human is 100% in control, with minimum assistance, so they remain 100% engaged, or they are 0% involved and superfluous to the operation of the vehicle, which at that point is autonomous, and may be used to transport children and non-drivers.
I'm not a Democrat myself, but I know plenty of them, and most of the ones I know aren't happy about how Sanders was treated, and in no way shape of form believe that he was treated fairly or that the primary wasn't in the bag for Clinton, irregardless of how the primary vote came out.
Pointing at Trump doesn't improve your defense of the DNC. It just shows you still don't get why Clinton lost. Let me give you a clue. A lot of those Sanders supporters stayed home on election day. If you want them to sit out the next election just keep ignoring the elephant in the room.
In the Clinton case, in order to believe there was substantive criminal activity, one must believe that the whole of the FBI and intelligence community were in cahoots with Clinton.
That is simply not necessary. If the past years revelations of FBI political activity have shone anything it is that rank and file FBI workers are pretty much willing to allow their political leaders and upper level management to do anything they want without interfering.
Or another words, regular agents concentrate on chasing real spies and criminals and ignore their managers actions in leveraging FBI assets to spy on and attack opposition party members. They do not actively support those actions, but they also do not whistleblow, resign in protest, or legally obstruct them either. They are complaisant by inaction. Silence is consent.
The same thing goes for the intelligence community. It's like they say: We're doing real work here, and the political appointees and managers aren't hindering our investigations so we're not going to look too close to determine if what they're doing is legal or ethical.
True, but Ecuador can expel Assange at any time for no reason at all. He is not an Ecuador citizen and they have no moral, civic or legal obligation to give him refuge.
I see thins as a ploy to get Assange back to his true masters, but the UK didn't play along.
Also possible the copter was outfitted with surveillance electronics. Considering the remote location of the observatory I wouldn't be surprised if their data connection is via microwave relay rather than cable.
The copter was probably a mobile signal interception platform.
You must be a U.S. citizen. No one else in the world would think that 51% of a population should have the right to dominate the other 49% by virtue of a 2% majority.
The U.S. founding fathers were right in their fear of mob rule, based on the 2% majority.
I'd go farther than that. They could repair the software too if it wasn't illegal for them to do so.
But the problem goes farther than that. It prevents third party vendors from getting into the business. Which means that a farmer has to wait on a John Deere dealer, even if it will be days or weeks before they have a tech available.
It also means that they can't buy parts from a third party, even when the part doesn't originally come from John Deere, for example a starter or coolant valve which might be standard.
The duel income family is not a result of two parents having to work to meet needs. Its the result of two parents having to work to meet wants.
Why the hell do 2 adults and a kid need 2500 sqft of house? Is it really necessary for each kid in a family of four to have their own room? Why the hell does every member of the family need a $1000 iphone?
The difference in family incomes from 30 years ago isn't that families have half the buying power. Its that they spend twice as much. Most of the increase is for stuff they wouldn't have had 30 years ago.
Let me run down some examples. 30 years ago no one needed an ISP. Most people pay >$150 a month for internet access. No one 30 years ago had a cell phone. Unless you're on Cricket you're paying ~$80-100 a person for a smart phone date plan. You can throw in the difference in price for an 1800 sqft to a 2500 sqft house. Two new cars, vice one new car and a beater. Laptops, tablets, heck desktops, if anyone still has them, none of which a household had 30 years ago.
Now don't get me wrong. Lots of that stuff is nice to have. Some of it, like Internet access and connected devices are even pretty close to necessary today. But it is stuff in excess of what the single income household use to have 30 years ago.
Because in the vast majority of places in the U.S., i.e. everyplace that that is not New York, Chicago or Boston there is no public transportation ssytem.
In the places that do have public transportation what parent wants their kid riding public transportation? Except in the few cities mentioned above public transportation consists of buses basically going down major routes, the places no one actually lives. People even in towns and cities live in cul-de sac communities specifically designed not to be driven through. Trying to get buses in there is a nightmare, one reason school bus routes often require a hour to take a kid somewhere that would take their parents ten minutes to drive.
For people who don't know cul-de-sacs are mazes design specifically to prevent through traffic. It's home builders/developers answer to buyer's complaints about not wanting to live on a street that has lots of traffic. Typically a neighborhood has one entrance with short streets going off a common road, each having its own short streets, ending in a circle around which houses are built. They are built to only be easily traveled by car. It is common to only be half a mile geographically from a major road, but be miles away by road.
Basically education should be taken out of local purview and be shifted up to state level. Each school should serve a catchment zone the obviates the need for school buses, except for larger regional zones catchments.
So in the majority of instances no school buses what so ever, done and finished. If necessary more smaller school if catchments are too large to be done on foot, by bicycle or parents dropping off kids to school. Worried about the kids travelling, no problem, the highest possible number of police officers should be on the road patrolling at school start and finish times. Same should be done for the police, turn them from junk yard dog enforcers, to proper police officers caring about their community, drop the insane local show and go for properly managed state based policing.
We had that, then the courts decided that letting kids go to school in the areas that they lived was racist. So now we bus kids dozens of miles away from the school that is just down the block.
The real problem is the problem of busing. Get rid of that and a lot of the scheduling problem goes away. Conversely buy enough buses to serve both elementary/middle schools and high schools and the problem goes away too.
As an aside on policing. Most of the problem now is that police officers are, by and large, from the middle class. no matter their race they live in middle class neighborhoods and end up patrolling in sh*thole crime ridden neighborhoods, because no one who has an actual job lives in those neighborhoods. That's why the push for community policing, because the police officers have no idea who's suppose to be in the neighborhood and the people in the neighborhood don't trust the middle class guys who come into the neighborhood to enforce laws that the people who live there don't necessarily endorse anyway. And for laws they do, where they are the victim the police are useless anyway.
Like the old saying goes "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
,p.The "historic downtown" section of my city contains the court buildings, city hall and precious little else. Oh there's a Dunk'in Donuts and a Subway shop, but if you expect to use their bathrooms you better buy something, because they won't give you the key unless you buy something
All of the stores, restaurants and bars are spread out among a couple of score of strip malls which are neither within walking distance of each other or any of the suburban like neighborhoods which are primarily built on cul-de-sacs off of main roads, primarily to prevent cars from driving through them.
Amazingly the area I live in was in a great drought during the 1990, when the rest of the planet had a decline in temperature increases, which coincided with a skipped sunspot cycle. Right now we're experiencing an unusually wet year. I guess that means there is no climate problem.
Claiming that is as silly as claiming that you can use a period of seven years in a hundred year measurement of a six billion year timeline and draw a conclusion from it.
I've a better proposal. We're in an interglacial period, the Holocene, specifically the Meghalayan which began around 2250 BC. The world has been warming up since then and the glaciers have likewise been receding since then.
Perhaps California's wildfire problem is due to human overpopulation and the diversion of water from it's natural repositories for the purpose of growing non-native plants.
I think free college for all is a great goal, as long as we in the U.S. follow the lead of other countries that actually do it.
You start be figuring out how many positions society actually needs in each field. How many historians, librarians, engineers, etc.
Then you create student positions for those categories. If 300 engineers are need you fund 300 spots. The best 300 people go to those positions. By best it means you pick the top 300 people by their high school grades supplemented by relevant outside activities. No cutouts for race, gender or any other factor that is irrelevant to actual performance.
Once these students get into the program they must maintain the best grades. When it comes time for advanced degrees, the same. The best students get free education all the way through PhD, MD or whatever.
Those that don't make the cut are offered trade school, Free as long as they work at it.
For those who refuse to work at mastering the skills and education provided they are on their own, at least as far as education is concerned. No student loans. If you've got the money and want to go study some subject in excess of what society needs, great pay for it. Else be prepared to work
There is no free handout here. It is an investment. And the investment would go to those to whom society would get the best payback for.
Yeah the fact that everything turned around as soon as the country found out the Democrats were no longer in charge is just a coincidence.
The fact that the Atlantic endorsed Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with it's stand crediting Obama with turning around the economy, at a time (2012) when the economy hadn't actually turn around.
Why would four workers on six hour shifts have massively higher overhead than three on eight hour shifts?
First because there is always a cost levied per employee. Even discounting health insurance there is taxes, unemployment insurance, health and safety training and other particulars that accrue on a per employee basis, independent of the actual work.
Second because the whole point is that employees will be paid the same amount for working fewer hours. So any additional employees will require additional funds to pay their salaries.
Now if the hourly cost is not to change, then discounting the per employee overhead it would cost the same. I suspect you will find few employees willing to cut their hours if lower pay is part of the deal.
Yes 3 people working 8 hour shifts equals 24 hours and 4 people working 6 hour shifts equal 24 hours.
If I have a labor budget of $24 a day/hour I can pay 3 people $8 and hour to work for their 8 hour shifts and I can pay 4 people $6 an hour to work for their 6 hour shift. However if I pay each 6 hour worker $8 an Hour my budget has increased to $32 a day/hour. To maintain my overhead at the same level I'll have to increase my prices to make up the difference, because in a fractional profit business like retail I'm sure not going to eat the cost.
Of course each 8 hour worker makes $320 a week while even if I pay each 6 hour worker $8 an hour they'll still only makes $240 a week, for them to make $320 I'd have to pay them $10.60 an hour. This raises my employ budget to $42.40 a day/hour.
Of course in the real world employee cost is more than just salary. Even if a company has no individual benefits cost there is Social Security, Unemployment insurance,etc. This scales so that the more employees and the more you pay them the more this additional cost will be.
I work in such a 24/7 industry. For such a rotation you need three people fro each position plus an additional person to cover days off. If you want a schedule that actually allows workers to consistently get weekends off you need 6 workers for each position.
That assumes at least a 40 hour work week. If you only have workers work 30 hours you would need at least 2 additional workers. Unlike other types of work productivity is not linked to worker hours, because workers are monitoring equipment that has a fix productivity. So there is no way fro workers to increase productivity. By definition productivity per worker would decrease.
In the real world you can't just hire more people. Businesses (even non-profits like hospitals) have fixed budgets they must meet. If they hire more people the cost of production goes up and the charge for services must be increased. The same work for more money means lower productivity.
Naw. "Did something really stupid" means paying $80 grand for a degree in political science or library science or literature. Just so you could work as a barista at Starbucks.
"Did something really stupid" means not working during high school, during the school year and during the summers, because it cut into your ability to spend your nights and weekends drinking and screwing off, and putting all of your living cost on credit.
"Did something really stupid" means you decided to stay at the palatial dormitory, with it's access to the health club facilities at the private student gym (with it's additional fee) and it's amazing rock climbing wall, not to mention the array of gorme eating places. So much better than home, where mom would feed you for free, and you could stay in your room for no cost. But of course they bitch about your weed and prohibit those drunken orgies you engage in on weekends.
Don't have any kids young enough to be coming home from school, but if I did where I live it would have to get dark at 14:00 for them to be coming home in the dark.
Now at the present time with DST and EST they end up standing in the dark in the morning waiting fro the bus, typically at 0600.
Slashdot Mirror
Real life is that if liability is less than present liability it will happen. More so if liability can be externalized.
An autonomous driving AI doesn't need to be as good as the best drivers, it only needs to be as good as the average driver. One just needs to actually drive on the road to see that being better than the average driver is a low bar.
AI's will obey traffic and speed laws. They will not drive on the roads when conditions are too bad for them to be on the roads. Moreover for the purposes of transport companies they can legally drive a truck 24/7, something no human driver can do. In other words they can replace 3 human drivers. That alone will allow quite a bit of extra liability cost to be absorbed without negatively effecting the bottom line.
I expect to see a time when if you want to get on an interstate your vehicle will have to be using an AI or paying a huge fee only the super rich will be able to afford.
Trucks will be the first users of autonomous vehicles. There's just too much money laying on the table for them not to bankroll its development. They'll probably have to pay a teamster to be sleeping in the cab initially, just to get the unions on board, but they;ll be doing that, not driving and not "prepared to take over on seconds notice" either. They'll be a sop to the union and the truck will run 24/7.
I would say that in my experience, especially at the higher levels being in a STEM field just out right sucks. The hours are long. The appreciation is non-existent. Post-doc level jobs are one step above minimum wage in pay and respect. Science is absolutely about big tough guys fighting each other. Anybody who has ever been in an academic or large scale experiment environment knows that. It's every high level PhD collaborator fighting for their piece of the pie.
So its not about discrimination in the field. Its about a segment of people who want to get into the field without having to face the hurdles everyone else in the field is already facing.
Actually it won't, unless you live a hermit's life in a cabin in the woods.
Do you ever buy on line? Facebook knows about it. As does Amazon and Google.
Remember the equifax data breach? Does anybody with a brain actually believe that Google, Facebook, the NSA et all hasn't scraped all of that data? Purely for their own protection of course.
Do you have friends? Family? You can bet Facebook has gotten data from them on you. Plenty of recent data.
Burning Facebook's servers to the ground being impossible you're right about that.
As someone who knows history I know that when human populations were smaller and people mostly lived in villages privacy was non-existent. Faster transportation and bigger urban populations gave humans the illusion of privacy for a couple of centuries, but we're pretty much back to the everyone knows your business village now, except it's a global village.
For what possible reason are you convinced that Facebook doesn't send out bot to scrape data from not just campus directories, but everywhere on the net?
I surely expect they do. As well as any IOT devices, public records posted online, and Google's database besides.
This is their business. They collect data on individuals and sell it.
And worse than that the phone companies actually sold books of private "unlisted" numbers for a higher price to a select group. We had one when I worked at a newspaper. We also had a Reverse lookup phone book that let you look up a number and get the name and address of the customer, even if the number was unlisted. That one wasn't cheap either. Every Private Investigator office, newspaper, government office and political party office bought that one. Along with the list of license plates registrations. You know in those old '80's PI shows the private dick always needs a contact at DMV to get a trace on a plate? BS. States use to sell that stuff to anyone willing to pay the high price. (typically a couple of grand.) TV used the dodge because they were colluding with the states that didn't want people to realize that.
I've worked at union establishments. I once saw a manager and a union rep argue for three hours while workers stood around doing nothing.
There was a misting rain. Basically no rain at all. The manager needed a guy to go up a pole. The guy wanted hazard pay, which is suppose to be reserved for those situations where there is actually a hazard. Like going up a pole in a driving rain. So the union rep, who is a worker in another department gets pulled off his job to argue for the worker, who is now not working.
The manager isn't going to authorize the hazard pay because that means that every time there is a sprinkling rain he's going to have to pay hazard pay in the future, which will bust his budget.
The union guy and the worker see a see a chance to soak the company for more money so they're not backing down.
Three hours later it stops misting and the guy goes up the pole after causing 3 man hours wasted because he wouldn't go up the pole, 9 hours wasted because 3 other workers were standing around waiting for him to go up the pole. 3 man hours wasted because the supervisor was standing around arguing with the union rep and 3 man hours wasted because the union steward was there arguing instead of doing his job. Basically 18 man hours wasted because of the union.
Why would any company want their employees in a union?
And Google home is generally very capable of working in that way. It will tell you if it can't work your sprinklers or that it can. I have noticed that it sometimes fails to recognize a command for turning on devices if the word order is wrong. "(OK Google, turn the living room lights on" vs. "OK Google turn on the living room lights.") but other times it has no problem at all ("OK Google turn off the lights" and "OK Google urn the lights off" both seem to work.)
In many ways Google assistant/home is suppose to be adaptive and learn along the way based on your interactions. This is fine for home control and a search engine, not so good for running a one and a half ton machine at high speed around other machines.
The point is that autonomous cars have to be an either or proposition. Either the human is 100% in control, with minimum assistance, so they remain 100% engaged, or they are 0% involved and superfluous to the operation of the vehicle, which at that point is autonomous, and may be used to transport children and non-drivers.
In between does not work.
Great argument using whataboutism.
I'm not a Democrat myself, but I know plenty of them, and most of the ones I know aren't happy about how Sanders was treated, and in no way shape of form believe that he was treated fairly or that the primary wasn't in the bag for Clinton, irregardless of how the primary vote came out.
Pointing at Trump doesn't improve your defense of the DNC. It just shows you still don't get why Clinton lost. Let me give you a clue. A lot of those Sanders supporters stayed home on election day. If you want them to sit out the next election just keep ignoring the elephant in the room.
In the Clinton case, in order to believe there was substantive criminal activity, one must believe that the whole of the FBI and intelligence community were in cahoots with Clinton.
That is simply not necessary. If the past years revelations of FBI political activity have shone anything it is that rank and file FBI workers are pretty much willing to allow their political leaders and upper level management to do anything they want without interfering.
Or another words, regular agents concentrate on chasing real spies and criminals and ignore their managers actions in leveraging FBI assets to spy on and attack opposition party members. They do not actively support those actions, but they also do not whistleblow, resign in protest, or legally obstruct them either. They are complaisant by inaction. Silence is consent.
The same thing goes for the intelligence community. It's like they say: We're doing real work here, and the political appointees and managers aren't hindering our investigations so we're not going to look too close to determine if what they're doing is legal or ethical.
True, but Ecuador can expel Assange at any time for no reason at all. He is not an Ecuador citizen and they have no moral, civic or legal obligation to give him refuge.
I see thins as a ploy to get Assange back to his true masters, but the UK didn't play along.
Also possible the copter was outfitted with surveillance electronics. Considering the remote location of the observatory I wouldn't be surprised if their data connection is via microwave relay rather than cable.
The copter was probably a mobile signal interception platform.
You must be a U.S. citizen. No one else in the world would think that 51% of a population should have the right to dominate the other 49% by virtue of a 2% majority.
The U.S. founding fathers were right in their fear of mob rule, based on the 2% majority.
I'd go farther than that. They could repair the software too if it wasn't illegal for them to do so.
But the problem goes farther than that. It prevents third party vendors from getting into the business. Which means that a farmer has to wait on a John Deere dealer, even if it will be days or weeks before they have a tech available.
It also means that they can't buy parts from a third party, even when the part doesn't originally come from John Deere, for example a starter or coolant valve which might be standard.
I call BS.
The duel income family is not a result of two parents having to work to meet needs. Its the result of two parents having to work to meet wants.
Why the hell do 2 adults and a kid need 2500 sqft of house? Is it really necessary for each kid in a family of four to have their own room? Why the hell does every member of the family need a $1000 iphone?
The difference in family incomes from 30 years ago isn't that families have half the buying power. Its that they spend twice as much. Most of the increase is for stuff they wouldn't have had 30 years ago.
Let me run down some examples. 30 years ago no one needed an ISP. Most people pay >$150 a month for internet access. No one 30 years ago had a cell phone. Unless you're on Cricket you're paying ~$80-100 a person for a smart phone date plan. You can throw in the difference in price for an 1800 sqft to a 2500 sqft house. Two new cars, vice one new car and a beater. Laptops, tablets, heck desktops, if anyone still has them, none of which a household had 30 years ago.
Now don't get me wrong. Lots of that stuff is nice to have. Some of it, like Internet access and connected devices are even pretty close to necessary today. But it is stuff in excess of what the single income household use to have 30 years ago.
Because in the vast majority of places in the U.S., i.e. everyplace that that is not New York, Chicago or Boston there is no public transportation ssytem.
In the places that do have public transportation what parent wants their kid riding public transportation? Except in the few cities mentioned above public transportation consists of buses basically going down major routes, the places no one actually lives. People even in towns and cities live in cul-de sac communities specifically designed not to be driven through. Trying to get buses in there is a nightmare, one reason school bus routes often require a hour to take a kid somewhere that would take their parents ten minutes to drive.
For people who don't know cul-de-sacs are mazes design specifically to prevent through traffic. It's home builders/developers answer to buyer's complaints about not wanting to live on a street that has lots of traffic. Typically a neighborhood has one entrance with short streets going off a common road, each having its own short streets, ending in a circle around which houses are built. They are built to only be easily traveled by car. It is common to only be half a mile geographically from a major road, but be miles away by road.
Basically education should be taken out of local purview and be shifted up to state level. Each school should serve a catchment zone the obviates the need for school buses, except for larger regional zones catchments.
So in the majority of instances no school buses what so ever, done and finished. If necessary more smaller school if catchments are too large to be done on foot, by bicycle or parents dropping off kids to school. Worried about the kids travelling, no problem, the highest possible number of police officers should be on the road patrolling at school start and finish times. Same should be done for the police, turn them from junk yard dog enforcers, to proper police officers caring about their community, drop the insane local show and go for properly managed state based policing.
We had that, then the courts decided that letting kids go to school in the areas that they lived was racist. So now we bus kids dozens of miles away from the school that is just down the block.
The real problem is the problem of busing. Get rid of that and a lot of the scheduling problem goes away. Conversely buy enough buses to serve both elementary/middle schools and high schools and the problem goes away too.
As an aside on policing. Most of the problem now is that police officers are, by and large, from the middle class. no matter their race they live in middle class neighborhoods and end up patrolling in sh*thole crime ridden neighborhoods, because no one who has an actual job lives in those neighborhoods. That's why the push for community policing, because the police officers have no idea who's suppose to be in the neighborhood and the people in the neighborhood don't trust the middle class guys who come into the neighborhood to enforce laws that the people who live there don't necessarily endorse anyway. And for laws they do, where they are the victim the police are useless anyway.
Like the old saying goes "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
All of the stores, restaurants and bars are spread out among a couple of score of strip malls which are neither within walking distance of each other or any of the suburban like neighborhoods which are primarily built on cul-de-sacs off of main roads, primarily to prevent cars from driving through them.
Amazingly the area I live in was in a great drought during the 1990, when the rest of the planet had a decline in temperature increases, which coincided with a skipped sunspot cycle. Right now we're experiencing an unusually wet year. I guess that means there is no climate problem.
Claiming that is as silly as claiming that you can use a period of seven years in a hundred year measurement of a six billion year timeline and draw a conclusion from it.
I've a better proposal. We're in an interglacial period, the Holocene, specifically the Meghalayan which began around 2250 BC. The world has been warming up since then and the glaciers have likewise been receding since then.
Perhaps California's wildfire problem is due to human overpopulation and the diversion of water from it's natural repositories for the purpose of growing non-native plants.
I think free college for all is a great goal, as long as we in the U.S. follow the lead of other countries that actually do it.
You start be figuring out how many positions society actually needs in each field. How many historians, librarians, engineers, etc.
Then you create student positions for those categories. If 300 engineers are need you fund 300 spots. The best 300 people go to those positions. By best it means you pick the top 300 people by their high school grades supplemented by relevant outside activities. No cutouts for race, gender or any other factor that is irrelevant to actual performance.
Once these students get into the program they must maintain the best grades. When it comes time for advanced degrees, the same. The best students get free education all the way through PhD, MD or whatever.
Those that don't make the cut are offered trade school, Free as long as they work at it.
For those who refuse to work at mastering the skills and education provided they are on their own, at least as far as education is concerned. No student loans. If you've got the money and want to go study some subject in excess of what society needs, great pay for it. Else be prepared to work
There is no free handout here. It is an investment. And the investment would go to those to whom society would get the best payback for.
Yeah the fact that everything turned around as soon as the country found out the Democrats were no longer in charge is just a coincidence.
The fact that the Atlantic endorsed Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with it's stand crediting Obama with turning around the economy, at a time (2012) when the economy hadn't actually turn around.
Why would four workers on six hour shifts have massively higher overhead than three on eight hour shifts?
First because there is always a cost levied per employee. Even discounting health insurance there is taxes, unemployment insurance, health and safety training and other particulars that accrue on a per employee basis, independent of the actual work.
Second because the whole point is that employees will be paid the same amount for working fewer hours. So any additional employees will require additional funds to pay their salaries.
Now if the hourly cost is not to change, then discounting the per employee overhead it would cost the same. I suspect you will find few employees willing to cut their hours if lower pay is part of the deal.
Yes 3 people working 8 hour shifts equals 24 hours and 4 people working 6 hour shifts equal 24 hours.
If I have a labor budget of $24 a day/hour I can pay 3 people $8 and hour to work for their 8 hour shifts and I can pay 4 people $6 an hour to work for their 6 hour shift. However if I pay each 6 hour worker $8 an Hour my budget has increased to $32 a day/hour. To maintain my overhead at the same level I'll have to increase my prices to make up the difference, because in a fractional profit business like retail I'm sure not going to eat the cost.
Of course each 8 hour worker makes $320 a week while even if I pay each 6 hour worker $8 an hour they'll still only makes $240 a week, for them to make $320 I'd have to pay them $10.60 an hour. This raises my employ budget to $42.40 a day/hour.
Of course in the real world employee cost is more than just salary. Even if a company has no individual benefits cost there is Social Security, Unemployment insurance ,etc. This scales so that the more employees and the more you pay them the more this additional cost will be.
And none of it is linked to productivity.
I work in such a 24/7 industry. For such a rotation you need three people fro each position plus an additional person to cover days off. If you want a schedule that actually allows workers to consistently get weekends off you need 6 workers for each position.
That assumes at least a 40 hour work week. If you only have workers work 30 hours you would need at least 2 additional workers. Unlike other types of work productivity is not linked to worker hours, because workers are monitoring equipment that has a fix productivity. So there is no way fro workers to increase productivity. By definition productivity per worker would decrease.
In the real world you can't just hire more people. Businesses (even non-profits like hospitals) have fixed budgets they must meet. If they hire more people the cost of production goes up and the charge for services must be increased. The same work for more money means lower productivity.
Naw. "Did something really stupid" means paying $80 grand for a degree in political science or library science or literature. Just so you could work as a barista at Starbucks.
"Did something really stupid" means not working during high school, during the school year and during the summers, because it cut into your ability to spend your nights and weekends drinking and screwing off, and putting all of your living cost on credit.
"Did something really stupid" means you decided to stay at the palatial dormitory, with it's access to the health club facilities at the private student gym (with it's additional fee) and it's amazing rock climbing wall, not to mention the array of gorme eating places. So much better than home, where mom would feed you for free, and you could stay in your room for no cost. But of course they bitch about your weed and prohibit those drunken orgies you engage in on weekends.
Don't have any kids young enough to be coming home from school, but if I did where I live it would have to get dark at 14:00 for them to be coming home in the dark.
Now at the present time with DST and EST they end up standing in the dark in the morning waiting fro the bus, typically at 0600.