So as long as you keep the lead from escaping into groundwater (could bury them in a landfill with a clay or plastic lining in a big mountain), this is fine. If lead prices are so cheap that it's easier to mine new lead than it is to recycle it from CRT glass,
True, and true, with reservations. Somebody has got to pay for keeping the lead from escaping into groundwater. Should it be everyone, or the people who benefited from the use of the lead?
And if everyone pays, human nature being what it is people will pay to make the problem "go away" without looking too closely at the details, where "go away" includes "making it someone else's problem."
The thing is, if you could completely internalize all those expenses so the cost of dealing with never just "went away", the market would do a fine job of efficiently managing lead and disposal management as a resource. But that doesn't happen naturally, by itself.
Well, it's possible that he's mildly delusional, as most of us are about beliefs about ourselves that we hold dear.
It strikes me that Ayyadurai is in a legal catch-22 situation. Let's suppose for a moment he did "invent" email. That would make him a public figure, and the legal standard used to establish defamation is "actual malice. That's a difficult standard to meet.
I assume Ayyadurai's complaint are claims that he is a "fake" or a "liar". Suppose some random shmoe is interviewing for a job, and you tell the interviewer that he's a "liar". That is defamation, unless you have actual reason to believe he is a liar. But if you say the same thing about a politician running for office, it's NOT defamation unless you have actual reason to believe he is NOT a liar. That's because the politician is a public figure.
It seems to me nearly impossible to defame someone by calling him a liar in the context of his claiming to invent anything. His very demand to be recognized for his achievement makes him a public figure, whether that claim is true or not.
But that doesn't change the fact he attempted satire and failed.
ooh, please tell us more about this Objective Humor Determining Machine you've hands on.
Certainly.
Now you can take it for granted that no matter how clear the joke, there will be some people who don't get it. It always happens. Successful humor, however, is understood as funny by its target audience. Therefore when a jokester is surprised when people he expected to get the joke didn't, he has failed.
But a very carefully targeted one. The people who get ridiculed have to really deserve the dickish treatment. You can take a cheap shot, but you can never punch down.
Now I've seen the infamous video and I totally get it. It's a good point, but it totally fails as satire because he ended up screwing with, and then harming the guys in the video, who almost certainly have no idea the significance of what they're doing. How many Jews are in India? About five thousand individuals out of a billion. Zoroastrians are almost 30 times more common in the US as Jews are in India, particularly rural India.
Now he's totally right that the media is stupid, block-headed and hypocritical, and has neither the ability nor inclination to understand him. But that doesn't change the fact he attempted satire and failed. That makes him, at least in this incident, just a dick.
Don't worry. You are a special, unique snowflake. If people can't understand you, they are racist.
Actually people who don't understand me are usually idiots. Some of them are blockheads. Funnily enough racists understand me fine, they just don't like what I have to say.
Well, "free market" used this way is a glittering generality. Most people who use it aren't referring to the technical economic sense in which individual consumers and producers make consumption, production and pricing decisions autonomously. What they typically mean would be better described something in the direction of anarcho-capitalism, although many are somewhat selective in their application of that philosophy (e.g. they aren't for the free market determining the number of abortions performed, birth control pills dispensed, or marijuana grown).
I grew up in Boston, and when I go back to the old neighborhood it makes me wonder how people understand me at all. Speech recognition programs never work for me.
Years ago I developed an early mobile computer app (on palm pilots) for use in field work (exotic vegetation control, mosquito control, that kind of thing). And the supervisors would often warn me that the workers were unhappy and hostile toward the idea of a new system.
So I'd take the field guys aside and talk over their concerns. Inevitably the question would come up whether their supervisors would be tracking their movements all through day. I'd assure them that no, the system couldn't tell if you stopped to grab a cup of coffee or take a whiz, but I warned them that it would give management a very precise assessment of how much work each individual worker actually accomplished.
And here's the thing: everyone was OK with that. They didn't mind being evaluated on accomplishment, they just didn't want to be treated like children or judged by some bullshit metric.
As a manager you need data, but you shouldn't have a bias toward easily obtained data. Someone who is on top of his employees' performance doesn't need an ass-in-chair time tracker, unless an employee's actual function is simply to sit on a chair.
If you're really doing your job as boss, the people who report to you won't be worried about being tracked. They'll worry about doing a good job. Because when they do a good job, you notice, and when they do a bad job, you notice... and promptly. Nobody is going to think you're judging them on bathroom breaks.
It should be big news. There's a 15,000 acre reservoir behind that 750 foot dam; if the level of the reservoir drops 30 feet, that's 450,000 acre-feet, or a half billion cubic meters of water. Depending on the speed of the spillway failure that could well be the largest dam-related disaster in US history. For comparison the Jonestown Flood was only 18 million cubic meters. The Saint Francis Dam disaster involved a reservoir of only 47 million cubic meters.
The strange thing about politeness is that it doesn't have to be sincere, or even perceived as sincere, to be effective. You don't really think that people receiving all those old timey "Your obedient servant," closings thought they were getting tenders of free labor, do you?
I think rituals of politeness have the same kind of "signalling value" that Superbowl ads do. There's no obvious reason that a company buying a Superbowl ad should make anyone want to buy their product, but they work because the investment itself signals a kind of robustness for the brand. Likewise a polite valediction signals to the recipient that you regard him as someone who should be treated with respect -- or at least expects to be treated with respect.
A lot of those rituals of politeness disappeared in the 60s, where it was cool and hip to be informal, and treat everybody like a friend. But I think we lost a kind of dynamic range in our culture, the ability to express degrees of respect or intimacy. It sets my teeth on edge when a vendor makes a cold call and asks to talk to "Matt," as if he was a buddy of mine. I am not your buddy, I am someone whom familiarity with is something you need to earn.
Well, "necessary", "sufficient", and "useful" are all distinct concepts.
In the heyday of the print newspaper, editorial functions included a kind of curation: assigning reporters to stories or "beats", and choosing the mix stories that make up the day's edition.
Clearly, curatorial work is useful -- both in service of the truth and in the service of falsehood. And because it can be used both ways, it is clearly not sufficient for obtaining the truth. However curation (at the very least by you) of your information sources is probably necessary.
The goal of curating your information sources shouldn't be a capital T Truth, it should be to be informed. That means having enough of the Truth from enough different sources to be able to make better decisions. If you find yourself too much in agreement with the opinions of the news sources you trust, you aren't getting enough information to think for yourself. Nobody who thinks for himself can ever be entirely comfortable with the opinions of others.
It should be controversial if he exceeds his authority. And if you expect a border agent to treat a private citizen better than an another government official you're naive.
In an atmosphere of pervasive fear it is especially important to constrain officials to operating with the limit of their authority.
Technically CPB agents may need reasonable suspicion to stop you and probable cause to search you, but in practice they routinely exceed their authority, and they usually aren't challenged when they do. People just acquiesce to get it over with. That's a problem because if it remains customary long enough the courts will inevitably tend to view it more positively.
Additionally, the "Border Zone" in which CPB operates is within a hundred miles of the US border including coastlines. This means cities like Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, Sacramento and Portland are "border cities". Two thirds of Americans live where they can be stopped and searched by CPB. The ACLU has a convenient map of the "border zone" on their website.
It was the fatal consequence of blinding awesomeness: blinded arrogance. China was the wealthiest, most advanced civilization in the world for over a thousand years; at certain point it becomes natural to look at something like that as a birthright. And when that happens you stop looking forward and outward and start looking inward and backward.
When the epitaph of the United States is written, this is what it will say: "America: Killed by landing on the Moon." After that Americans simply can't believe anyone else in the world can do anything better than we can. We must have the best cell phone networks, the best healthcare system, and, even though we despise it, the best education system. We'd never look at what countries that are beating us in education are doing. If they're beating us they must be cheating; the system must be rigged.
That's the only conclusion I can draw by the way space designers keep turning to them no matter how often they bollux things up. Tethers must be the astronautical equivalent of an abusive boyfriend.
It's not what the SJW allow; it's what the management of what after all is a privately hosted service allows.
Twitter is dealing with the fact that it is long past the exponential growth phase, and it needs to hold on to users, particularly the most valuable users. And you're just not that valuable.
Women, on the other hand, control 85% of purchases made in the United States, and with that comes clout. It's more important to Twitter that women find its service congenial than some pack of alienated, juvenile blowhards.
Every security measure has to be compared to the particular threat you're worried about. A system that renders a phone non-functional would thwart local or even provincial police, but not an entiity which possesses "national means". Or an engineering school with EE labs.
So the self-destructing phone is not entirely ridiculous when looked at this way. However, you also have to compare a security measure against other means of accomplishing the same thing, and that's where the self-destructing phone looks ridiculous. Apple's approach is much more effective, but less dramatic.
Frying: cooking by immersing in hot oil. Sauteing: cooking by contact with hot oil. Roasting: cooking a solid food by contact with hot air. Baking: like roasting, but with a food that turns from a liquid to a solid. Broiling: cooking by exposure to radiation.
Radiation is, by definition, the transfer of energy through space. So yes, a sufficiently high flux will cause an electronic gizmo to fail just as surely as baking it in an oven would, provided the radiation is of a nature that is absorbed by the kind of matter you find in electronics.
Here we're concerned about neutrons.
Neutrons can penetrate deeply in to materials, and when absorbed by a nucleus can generate gamma rays. This damages materials in multiple ways, such as pitting, swelling, cracking, and microscopic crystal structure changes which are particularly bad for semiconductors. Even passive components such as wire insulation, carbon composition resistors and mylar capacitors begin to fail if you expose them to, say, 10x the neutron radiation intensity you'd use to kill a tumor.
Slashdot Mirror
So as long as you keep the lead from escaping into groundwater (could bury them in a landfill with a clay or plastic lining in a big mountain), this is fine. If lead prices are so cheap that it's easier to mine new lead than it is to recycle it from CRT glass,
True, and true, with reservations. Somebody has got to pay for keeping the lead from escaping into groundwater. Should it be everyone, or the people who benefited from the use of the lead?
And if everyone pays, human nature being what it is people will pay to make the problem "go away" without looking too closely at the details, where "go away" includes "making it someone else's problem."
The thing is, if you could completely internalize all those expenses so the cost of dealing with never just "went away", the market would do a fine job of efficiently managing lead and disposal management as a resource. But that doesn't happen naturally, by itself.
Well, it's possible that he's mildly delusional, as most of us are about beliefs about ourselves that we hold dear.
It strikes me that Ayyadurai is in a legal catch-22 situation. Let's suppose for a moment he did "invent" email. That would make him a public figure, and the legal standard used to establish defamation is "actual malice. That's a difficult standard to meet.
I assume Ayyadurai's complaint are claims that he is a "fake" or a "liar". Suppose some random shmoe is interviewing for a job, and you tell the interviewer that he's a "liar". That is defamation, unless you have actual reason to believe he is a liar. But if you say the same thing about a politician running for office, it's NOT defamation unless you have actual reason to believe he is NOT a liar. That's because the politician is a public figure.
It seems to me nearly impossible to defame someone by calling him a liar in the context of his claiming to invent anything. His very demand to be recognized for his achievement makes him a public figure, whether that claim is true or not.
I'm not saying stuff doesn't get stolen by employees. but that's not the delivery service "seeing fit" to lose anything.
Stuff gets lost in the mail... or UPS or FedEx. It's rare, but nobody's perfect.
This is unfortunate, but nobody "saw fit" to "rob" anyone.
But that doesn't change the fact he attempted satire and failed.
ooh, please tell us more about this Objective Humor Determining Machine you've hands on.
Certainly.
Now you can take it for granted that no matter how clear the joke, there will be some people who don't get it. It always happens. Successful humor, however, is understood as funny by its target audience. Therefore when a jokester is surprised when people he expected to get the joke didn't, he has failed.
Using my scrabble super powers, may I suggest the following verb infinitive forms that begin with WOR:
WORSHIP
WORSEN
WORRY
WORRIT
WORM.
That's pretty much it.
People are literally animals. And politicians are figuratively as well as literally animals.
But a very carefully targeted one. The people who get ridiculed have to really deserve the dickish treatment. You can take a cheap shot, but you can never punch down.
Now I've seen the infamous video and I totally get it. It's a good point, but it totally fails as satire because he ended up screwing with, and then harming the guys in the video, who almost certainly have no idea the significance of what they're doing. How many Jews are in India? About five thousand individuals out of a billion. Zoroastrians are almost 30 times more common in the US as Jews are in India, particularly rural India.
Now he's totally right that the media is stupid, block-headed and hypocritical, and has neither the ability nor inclination to understand him. But that doesn't change the fact he attempted satire and failed. That makes him, at least in this incident, just a dick.
Don't worry. You are a special, unique snowflake. If people can't understand you, they are racist.
Actually people who don't understand me are usually idiots. Some of them are blockheads. Funnily enough racists understand me fine, they just don't like what I have to say.
Well, "free market" used this way is a glittering generality. Most people who use it aren't referring to the technical economic sense in which individual consumers and producers make consumption, production and pricing decisions autonomously. What they typically mean would be better described something in the direction of anarcho-capitalism, although many are somewhat selective in their application of that philosophy (e.g. they aren't for the free market determining the number of abortions performed, birth control pills dispensed, or marijuana grown).
I grew up in Boston, and when I go back to the old neighborhood it makes me wonder how people understand me at all. Speech recognition programs never work for me.
Years ago I developed an early mobile computer app (on palm pilots) for use in field work (exotic vegetation control, mosquito control, that kind of thing). And the supervisors would often warn me that the workers were unhappy and hostile toward the idea of a new system.
So I'd take the field guys aside and talk over their concerns. Inevitably the question would come up whether their supervisors would be tracking their movements all through day. I'd assure them that no, the system couldn't tell if you stopped to grab a cup of coffee or take a whiz, but I warned them that it would give management a very precise assessment of how much work each individual worker actually accomplished.
And here's the thing: everyone was OK with that. They didn't mind being evaluated on accomplishment, they just didn't want to be treated like children or judged by some bullshit metric.
As a manager you need data, but you shouldn't have a bias toward easily obtained data. Someone who is on top of his employees' performance doesn't need an ass-in-chair time tracker, unless an employee's actual function is simply to sit on a chair.
If you're really doing your job as boss, the people who report to you won't be worried about being tracked. They'll worry about doing a good job. Because when they do a good job, you notice, and when they do a bad job, you notice... and promptly. Nobody is going to think you're judging them on bathroom breaks.
Of course he is. It's a thing that humans have called "grief".
It should be big news. There's a 15,000 acre reservoir behind that 750 foot dam; if the level of the reservoir drops 30 feet, that's 450,000 acre-feet, or a half billion cubic meters of water. Depending on the speed of the spillway failure that could well be the largest dam-related disaster in US history. For comparison the Jonestown Flood was only 18 million cubic meters. The Saint Francis Dam disaster involved a reservoir of only 47 million cubic meters.
The strange thing about politeness is that it doesn't have to be sincere, or even perceived as sincere, to be effective. You don't really think that people receiving all those old timey "Your obedient servant," closings thought they were getting tenders of free labor, do you?
I think rituals of politeness have the same kind of "signalling value" that Superbowl ads do. There's no obvious reason that a company buying a Superbowl ad should make anyone want to buy their product, but they work because the investment itself signals a kind of robustness for the brand. Likewise a polite valediction signals to the recipient that you regard him as someone who should be treated with respect -- or at least expects to be treated with respect.
A lot of those rituals of politeness disappeared in the 60s, where it was cool and hip to be informal, and treat everybody like a friend. But I think we lost a kind of dynamic range in our culture, the ability to express degrees of respect or intimacy. It sets my teeth on edge when a vendor makes a cold call and asks to talk to "Matt," as if he was a buddy of mine. I am not your buddy, I am someone whom familiarity with is something you need to earn.
Well, "necessary", "sufficient", and "useful" are all distinct concepts.
In the heyday of the print newspaper, editorial functions included a kind of curation: assigning reporters to stories or "beats", and choosing the mix stories that make up the day's edition.
Clearly, curatorial work is useful -- both in service of the truth and in the service of falsehood. And because it can be used both ways, it is clearly not sufficient for obtaining the truth. However curation (at the very least by you) of your information sources is probably necessary.
The goal of curating your information sources shouldn't be a capital T Truth, it should be to be informed. That means having enough of the Truth from enough different sources to be able to make better decisions. If you find yourself too much in agreement with the opinions of the news sources you trust, you aren't getting enough information to think for yourself. Nobody who thinks for himself can ever be entirely comfortable with the opinions of others.
It shows that a small group of people can make a difference.
It should be controversial if he exceeds his authority. And if you expect a border agent to treat a private citizen better than an another government official you're naive.
In an atmosphere of pervasive fear it is especially important to constrain officials to operating with the limit of their authority.
Technically CPB agents may need reasonable suspicion to stop you and probable cause to search you, but in practice they routinely exceed their authority, and they usually aren't challenged when they do. People just acquiesce to get it over with. That's a problem because if it remains customary long enough the courts will inevitably tend to view it more positively.
Additionally, the "Border Zone" in which CPB operates is within a hundred miles of the US border including coastlines. This means cities like Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, Sacramento and Portland are "border cities". Two thirds of Americans live where they can be stopped and searched by CPB. The ACLU has a convenient map of the "border zone" on their website.
It was the fatal consequence of blinding awesomeness: blinded arrogance. China was the wealthiest, most advanced civilization in the world for over a thousand years; at certain point it becomes natural to look at something like that as a birthright. And when that happens you stop looking forward and outward and start looking inward and backward.
When the epitaph of the United States is written, this is what it will say: "America: Killed by landing on the Moon." After that Americans simply can't believe anyone else in the world can do anything better than we can. We must have the best cell phone networks, the best healthcare system, and, even though we despise it, the best education system. We'd never look at what countries that are beating us in education are doing. If they're beating us they must be cheating; the system must be rigged.
That's the only conclusion I can draw by the way space designers keep turning to them no matter how often they bollux things up. Tethers must be the astronautical equivalent of an abusive boyfriend.
It's not what the SJW allow; it's what the management of what after all is a privately hosted service allows.
Twitter is dealing with the fact that it is long past the exponential growth phase, and it needs to hold on to users, particularly the most valuable users. And you're just not that valuable.
Women, on the other hand, control 85% of purchases made in the United States, and with that comes clout. It's more important to Twitter that women find its service congenial than some pack of alienated, juvenile blowhards.
Every security measure has to be compared to the particular threat you're worried about. A system that renders a phone non-functional would thwart local or even provincial police, but not an entiity which possesses "national means". Or an engineering school with EE labs.
So the self-destructing phone is not entirely ridiculous when looked at this way. However, you also have to compare a security measure against other means of accomplishing the same thing, and that's where the self-destructing phone looks ridiculous. Apple's approach is much more effective, but less dramatic.
Technically the robots were broiled
Frying: cooking by immersing in hot oil.
Sauteing: cooking by contact with hot oil.
Roasting: cooking a solid food by contact with hot air.
Baking: like roasting, but with a food that turns from a liquid to a solid.
Broiling: cooking by exposure to radiation.
Radiation is, by definition, the transfer of energy through space. So yes, a sufficiently high flux will cause an electronic gizmo to fail just as surely as baking it in an oven would, provided the radiation is of a nature that is absorbed by the kind of matter you find in electronics.
Here we're concerned about neutrons.
Neutrons can penetrate deeply in to materials, and when absorbed by a nucleus can generate gamma rays. This damages materials in multiple ways, such as pitting, swelling, cracking, and microscopic crystal structure changes which are particularly bad for semiconductors. Even passive components such as wire insulation, carbon composition resistors and mylar capacitors begin to fail if you expose them to, say, 10x the neutron radiation intensity you'd use to kill a tumor.