My rational side just can't look past the "will it really work?"
with this:
You don't get a ton of resumes and customer inquiries when you're doing the same thing everyone else is doing.
There's no danger that everyone will do it because people just can't get over their conviction that "this can't possibly work." That conviction by the way doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny. It clearly *has* worked, at least in the short term. If it were to somehow become the norm it would be extremely difficult to attract workers without adhering to that norm.
Now the thing about any business strategy is that picking one that can work is a lot simpler than actually making that strategy work. You need to exploit the strategy's advantages (e.g. happy workers) and cover its disadvantages (e.g. higher unit labor costs). In this case the critical success factor is obvious: the CEO absolutely has to get unusually high productivity from his workers. If he doesn't, he's screwed.
I have seen the "expensive, but cream of the crop employees" strategy work really well, but you have to position yourself as the best of the best, from top to bottom. If you get anything less than outstanding performance at every level it won't work. Which is another reason this strategy will never become the norm. Where the leadership is weak, bottom-feeding becomes the only viable strategy.
It's cheaper because the biggest expense any business with a lot of employees is bound to have is deadwood workers: the disaffected, the incompetent, and the ground-down-till-they-don't-care-anymore.
Saying, "oh, this is just the effect of PR effect" is like saying, "airplanes only fly because of the Bernoulli effect." It's as if the CEO being shrewd about human behavior is somehow cheating. When prospective employees view your company as a good place to work, that gives you a better shot at the best people available even at the higher compensation rate. When employees view their employer as a good place to work that allows you to make things happen in ways that are a lot harder when the employees think their being screwed over.
It's not the only way to run a successful company. There are plenty of company's that have a reputation as a hell for workers (Amazon) or predatory towards customers (Oracle) that still manage to do well for various reasons. It's a the CEO's job to pick and implement a strategy, and if it works he's done right by the shareholders at least, even if it's very different from what Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison would have done.
It's funny how quickly peoples' faith in the rationality of economic actors evaporates as soon as those actors start doing things they disagree with.
Normally purchasers of goods and services are in aggregate considered infallible when it comes to setting what prices they pay and which vendors they prefer, but when they prefer a vendor who does't hew to the party's ideological line then those purchasers are obviously all media dupes who can't decide for themselves what vendor works best for them.
I can point out so many cultures that primarily consumes a grain-based staple diet with long expectancy. I challenge you to provide me with example of a culture / subculture that lives to above-average life expectancy with low health problem that is heavily based on a meat-based diet.
Denmark has the highest meat consumption rate in the world -- some 17% higher per capita than the US -- and has a life expectancy at birth of 80 years which puts it in the top quintile. New Zealanders are the second biggest carnivores in the world, eating only 3 kg per capita less meat than Danes, and boast a life expectancy of 83 years. But of course they're both very wealthy countries (thus the high meat consumption) with socialized medicine.
No the problem with the obesity epidemic in the US isn't carbs per se or meat. I think it's time. Americans eat rushed; we eat while multitasking; and vendors offer prepared convenience foods which fit that lifestyle. These foods are usually calorie dense; if not they are engineered for easy, mindless eating which defeats any claims for low calories per serving. It's very easy for an American to eat as thousand calories at a sitting while being scarcely aware he's consumed anything at all.
Your experiences may vary from mine, but I found my answer to weight gain, diabetes and arthritis by simply slowing down. I set a timer for fifteen minutes to half an hour depending on the meal size, and make the meal last that long. The result is I experience natural satiety before I've snarfed down thousands of calories. It's by far the easiest and most effective weight loss / blood sugar control strategy I've ever tried.
Of course when you're eating much less, it pays to think a bit more about what it is you're eating. I try to have some meat for protein, some veg for fiber and minerals, and enough carbs I don't feel tired, plus essential fats from either fish or plant sources, but it's not a problem if I go over or under on some category on one day. I find how I feel is a function of several days of eating exercise and rest.
What's more prototypes per se don't necessarily have any particular historical value; it depends on the role the specific prototype played in the program that led to the actual devices used. Without the documentation of what the particular hardware was for and how it was used, a device like that is a mere curiosity.
For example 30 years ago I worked in a lab where about 10% of our floor space was taken up with a prototype manned Mars rover. It was by no means a serious essay on what would be required for an actual, practical Mars vehicle; our lab was a seismology lab and the vehicle was merely a platform for a massive spring-loaded plunger that smacked the ground, producing sound waves that could be collected and analyzed. The point was to show that such a device could successfully be used from a mobile platform; the platform itself had no real value; the only reason it had motors is, I think, that the engineers thought it would be cooler that way; it didn't really need to move on its own power. I'm sure that that particular rover has been scrapped by now and it was no loss to history.
Which is not to say that this vehicle wasn't historically valuable. But it sounds very different from the rovers that were actually sent to the moon. Without knowing why we can't say whether this vehicle was priceless or worthless.
Well, it's usually a pharmacy technician or a pharmacist's assistant (essentially a clerk) who handles the Sudafed requests at my drug store, and I doubt they make $75/hr. You only get the pharmacist if you have a question about something like drug interactions.
Overall it's quite easy to obtain pseudoephedrine; you just pick up a card from a bin located where the OTC decongestants are and take it to the pharmacy counter. You have to wait in line with people picking up their prescriptions, but the clerk will ring up your other purchases so you don't have to wait in line again at the regular checkout. The net result is that it's just a minute or so longer to make all your purchases. And you do have to show an ID and sign a register.
Given the behavioral impact of amphetamines I don't think these measures are an unreasonable burden -- if they work. That's the big question. Are we reducing the supply of amphetamines, or creating a business opportunity for drug operations that are already smuggling weed from Mexico? But assuming these measures do reduce the supply of methamphetamine, the main problem with them is that they dissuade people from buying effective medicine because they anticipate a big hassle. It's not a big hassle.
I have no doubt that it is the people who insist on Safe Spaces, that are making the threats. Their ideas are old and week [sic] and don't stand up to any refutation.
Personally I would take resorting to threats of violence as stronger evidence that a position is weak.
As for "Safe Spaces", anyone is free to set up any kind of ground rules they like for conversations they are hosting; if you don't like that then don't participate in that conversation. Set up your own conversation with rules that are more to your liking.
Of course it's possible to have a rational conversation. All it takes is two people willing to act like grownups.
What's impossible is to prevent other people from having irrational conversations. That will never change, so if "now is not the time", there never will be a time.
Rebelling against what? People expressing opinions they don't like?
Threatening people to keep them quiet isn't "rebellion". It's the other end of that stick; an insult to personal liberty. Anonymous intimidation doesn't make you some kind of Thomas Paine; it puts you in the same company as Stalin and Mussolini.
Please tell me how the FUCK that would work out to Russia's benefit.
Well, according to that mindset warfare in general doesn't make sense. Nonetheless people still do it, to their own detriment or even destruction.
The German Writer Berthold Brecht wrote in the aftermath of WW2:
Great Carthage fought three wars; After the first it was still powerful; After the second it was still inhabitable; After the third nobody could find it at all.
With PDAs. The first generation of PalmPilots ran $129-$399, which is $200-$590 in current prices. As hardware prices dropped manufacturers began to beef up features and performance -- not that most PDA users really wanted that. What really was driving creeping features was the fact that unit margins on a device that cost, say $30, couldn't sustain the industry as it had come to exist. Eventually the pressure of dropping prices drove the PDA manufacturers into the phone business.
Again, convergence really wasn't really something driven by consumer demand, even though the "carry only one device" argument was reasonable. It was pushed by manufacturers. But it didn't really take off because early converged devices were Frankenstein's monsters -- PDAs with phones built-in or vice versa. It took Apple's iPhone to make the "carry one device" argument truly compelling to users by starting with a clean sheet and building a converged device from the ground up. It's ironic that today Apple is essentially the last man standing in the non-converged handheld market with its iPod Touch line.
If prices on tablets continue to fall, I expect history will repeat itself with manufacturers trying to wring a price premium from consumers by positioning their tablets as tablet+something else. The obvious paradigm is the convertible tablet/laptop, but I suspect we'll see other stabs at convergence, like adding gaming-specific features.
That was my first reaction, but then I hadn't considered the possibility of sabotage.
The civilian economy of the US is critically dependent upon the Internet to the point where several undersea cables might well reflect single points of vulnerability unprecedented in Cold War terms.
You can't stop people from prepping for the test; the most you can do is stop people from ostensibly prepping for a test.
Any measure which is used to evaluate a social process will distort that process. Any single, high-stakes measure that is the sole yardstick by which we judge the people involved with that process will inevitably become the sole focus of those people.
Sociologist Donald Campbell crystalized this in Campbell's Law:
The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
On the other hand, if you don't measure things you can't control them. I'd propose using several diverse measures of different things we expect our schools to do, sufficiently diverse that "teaching to the test" becomes impractical. For example you could have an impartial jury judge a portfolio of creative work done by students in music, art, writing and technology. Then add other measures for how well the school serves the special needs population within its service area.
I realize this would effectively make it impossible for a school to score as entirely satisfactory, but I see that as a good thing. That would reflect an underlying truth about education itself.
I've looked into this -- to the extent of searching for papers and incidents described in the academic literature using Google Scholar, so take this with a grain of salt -- and I've concluded that there are two clear environmental concerns with fracking. The first, of course, is carbon. The lower the price of carbon-based fuel the more of it we'll use. All things being equal that would be a good thing, but the point is that all things are not equal if we emit more carbon.
The wastewater issue is complex, in that it depends on the locality and the stage of development of fracking in the area. Thus far the industry has been quite good about handling wastewater -- my concern is in some of the fracking boom areas there aren't good disposal options yet for "flowback". The industry is dealing with this by re-using flowback, but while this is great in the boom phase of fracking it's going to be hard to sustain in an area when the rate of new well drilling begins to peak. Eventually there'll be more flowback than can be re-used, and as far as I can see there is no plan for dealing with that in some places. This could potentially leave the taxpayers with the cleanup bill. You also have to factor in what practices an industry is willing to undertake in a boom situation as opposed to the eventual scenario of declining profitability.
This is not a crisis; it's something we have time to deal with if there's the political will. The problem is that there usually isn't much political will for dealing with problems that will manifest in fifteen or twenty years' time.
Groundwater contamination is also a serious concern, although it is clearly a matter of each site's local geology. It's an area that needs more research.
If I walk into the gourmet grocery store and see they stock 30+ kinds of jam, I'm happy. I know that I don't like marmalade in general, but I do like whiskey marmalade; so when I see blood orange whiskey marmalade I'll give it a try. If it proves to be a bad choice, it's no big deal.
I'd say satisfaction with choice is mostly a function of the effort you need to make what you feel is a good enough choice. If you walk into the optician and you already know you want black plastic wayfarer frames with rivets at the temple, then you're glad that they've got enough of a selection to stock the Classic Nerd line. If you have no idea what you want on your face then you'd be happier with a store that offered you a choice of two or three frames. In fact if you study what a successful clerk in an optical megastore does, she (usually) steers you toward only two or three frames out of the scores of styles they offer.
Contrast selecting from 30+ jams with selecting from 30+ health plans, where the best choice depends on the unknowable (how unlucky will I be this year?), the difficult to know (what is my likelihood of using each of these particular healthcare services?) and the need-an-expert-to-know-for-you (what do all these provisos in the small print mean?).
Years ago I worked as lead developer for a small company developing a vertical market app in an industry that had never been automated before (then a very common scenario). The boss had a simple and seemingly fool-proof marketing scheme, based on commonsense psychology: to maximize sales volume he'd keep prices surprisingly low and to entice buyers he'd give them lots of options for how to configure the system exactly for their needs. Since this was a small company I often went to industry meetings to help out at the vendor booth, and I quickly realized that that commonsense psychology was at variance with actual psychology. People who were used to spending tens of thousands of dollars of equipment would find out that they could, in theory, get started with our software for as little as $200 and lose interest. People who didn't lose interest were quickly overwhelmed with the complexity of figuring out which items they needed to buy from the al la carte menu.
So I proposed this change: combine all those choices into a single entry-level package that would cost a typical customer $10K - $20K, including all the options they'd be likely to use and all the services they'd need to get up and running. It took a year of financial struggle for the boss to decide he was willing to take a cut in sales volume for a boost in profit margins. But when we made the change sales volumes actually went up. People who used to walk by our $200 offering would ask why it was suddenly more expensive, and then I'd show them what they got for $10K but the decision would be simple: is this a good deal or not? And since it was a good deal a lot of them bought, and became good long-term customers for training, consulting services and data.
Oh it makes a difference. Not as much as it should, but it does. Or do you seriously think that Obama is just like George W, or that it will make no difference whether we have Hillary Clinton as President or Carly Fiorina?
In general politicians of opposing stripes tend to be most like each other on issues that their respective bases don't pay attention to -- like intellectual property rights and fair use.
Well, it's more complicated than $$$car >> $$$transit. You have to factor in your time as well, and this is where mobile devices alter the equation dramatically. Whereas people (at least non-readers at least) used to view time spent on the train or bus as wasted, they can now be playing a game or catching up on social media.
On the flip side is the unproductive nature of time spent plugged into a mobile device -- social media especially. It's not that socializing on facebook or gaming is completely wasted time, it's a matter of marginal return; I question the value of being plugged in all the time over checking in a few times a day. Downtime has its value too.
Well, you have to work with the programmers that there are; not the programmers you wish there were.
I learned C in 1980; it was a thing of beauty, a work of genius that transformed the industry. That doesn't mean it has to be all things to all people. In fact that's C's great strength; it's just enough of the very most useful things to enough people to make important systems programs like interpreters for other languages portable across many environments. The flip side of that is that for certain scenarios there's bound to be languages that are a better fit than C.
So if C's reliance on pointers or programmer managed memory allocation creates problems with the pool of programmers you have ready access to, the answer isn't to stamp your foot and wish all programmers were like they were back into the good old days of Unix 7; it's to use something else.
And just as in the lighter vs. bow drill case, self-driving cars perform better and more consistently than most drivers. In six years and 1.8 million miles of testing Google's autonomous cars have been in twelve minor accidents, all of which were caused by human drivers.
As for degraded skills, you can see this on the road with human driven cars every day; it comes from lazy habits creeping in; people stop using their turn signals; they cut through the wrong side of the road when they make a left turn; they roll past stop lines into an intersection and then look for cross traffic.
Probably some but not necessarily enough. It depends on how much energy the device packs. I'm guessing not much, because it uses tiny, high voltage capacitors to store energy; they're not going to be able to deliver much current.
In principle the discharge could travel through the damaged circuits of the hub, up the host cable to the computer, but damaging the hub is work and takes energy so you might luck out, although I wouldn't count on it. Instead I'd get a USB hub with electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection; they're a lot more expensive but a good idea if you live in a lightning prone area.
Littlefuse makes a small PPTC array specifically designed to provide lightning protection for high speed interconnects like HDMI and USB 3. It's based on PPTC technology so it acts like a self-resetting fuse. I haven't seen it built into cables, but that would be a good idea. The app sheet has a sample PCB layout for a small inline adapter.
Well, protein quality is something they'll have to engineer into the product, but the process would have to be pretty inefficient to take more land area than actual meat. This is basic ecology: you put food into an animal, and after you've deducted what the animal needs to grow and survive 90% of that is lost before the next animal in the food chain eats that one. So for one lion to grow to full size it has to consume ten lion masses of gazelle; those ten lion masses of gazelle in turn have to eat 100 lion masses of grass. Aquatic animals are considerably more efficient because they don't have to expend energy counteracting gravity, but the same principles apply.
Of course one of the insights the classical economists had is that it's not just the *amount* of land that matters, it's the *quality* of land. You can grow grass-fed beef on land that's not suitable for growing feed corn at all; you need a lot *more* land, but it's not land as useful for as many things the kind you'd choose to grow corn or soybeans on.
Depends on what exactly the nature of their concern is.
I find the vegetarian arguments about the health dangers of meat in general to be specious; but I do find the arguments about the environmental and animal welfare impacts of concentrated animal feeding operations compelling. It makes me look at grass fed beef and pasture raised pork from local family farms and think, maybe paying more per pound for meat and eating a little less of it wouldn't be so bad.
If this veggie meat stuff is any good and if it costs roughly the same price as supermarket meat, I can easily see myself replacing half my CAFO fattened meat with it, and the other half with locally sourced meat.
a href="http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/NAP/overviews/suffocation.html">http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/N... "Unintentional suffocation - which also includes strangulation and choking on food or other objects - killed 1,176 U.S. children in 2010."
So what's your point -- that we should ban food and other objects?
I agree we don't have the data to suggest that insecure guns are a big public health problem for kids, although to be fair "43" isn't the number of people killed by insecure guns; it's just the ones we know about. Since the CDC is banned from collecting statistics on gun accidents we don't really have any good data on it -- although the ban itself is evidence that *somebody* expects better data to be less favorable than the data we have now.
Still, I suspect toddlers with unsecured guns is unlikely to be a major public health issue. I'm not prepared to speculate on what the overall impact of unsecured guns are though. I think we should collect that data.
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Compare this:
My rational side just can't look past the "will it really work?"
with this:
You don't get a ton of resumes and customer inquiries when you're doing the same thing everyone else is doing.
There's no danger that everyone will do it because people just can't get over their conviction that "this can't possibly work." That conviction by the way doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny. It clearly *has* worked, at least in the short term. If it were to somehow become the norm it would be extremely difficult to attract workers without adhering to that norm.
Now the thing about any business strategy is that picking one that can work is a lot simpler than actually making that strategy work. You need to exploit the strategy's advantages (e.g. happy workers) and cover its disadvantages (e.g. higher unit labor costs). In this case the critical success factor is obvious: the CEO absolutely has to get unusually high productivity from his workers. If he doesn't, he's screwed.
I have seen the "expensive, but cream of the crop employees" strategy work really well, but you have to position yourself as the best of the best, from top to bottom. If you get anything less than outstanding performance at every level it won't work. Which is another reason this strategy will never become the norm. Where the leadership is weak, bottom-feeding becomes the only viable strategy.
It's cheaper because the biggest expense any business with a lot of employees is bound to have is deadwood workers: the disaffected, the incompetent, and the ground-down-till-they-don't-care-anymore.
Saying, "oh, this is just the effect of PR effect" is like saying, "airplanes only fly because of the Bernoulli effect." It's as if the CEO being shrewd about human behavior is somehow cheating. When prospective employees view your company as a good place to work, that gives you a better shot at the best people available even at the higher compensation rate. When employees view their employer as a good place to work that allows you to make things happen in ways that are a lot harder when the employees think their being screwed over.
It's not the only way to run a successful company. There are plenty of company's that have a reputation as a hell for workers (Amazon) or predatory towards customers (Oracle) that still manage to do well for various reasons. It's a the CEO's job to pick and implement a strategy, and if it works he's done right by the shareholders at least, even if it's very different from what Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison would have done.
It's funny how quickly peoples' faith in the rationality of economic actors evaporates as soon as those actors start doing things they disagree with.
Normally purchasers of goods and services are in aggregate considered infallible when it comes to setting what prices they pay and which vendors they prefer, but when they prefer a vendor who does't hew to the party's ideological line then those purchasers are obviously all media dupes who can't decide for themselves what vendor works best for them.
Even if it's just scaling up a F-35, I don't see it happening.
Even if it's delivering an operational F-35 without fudging the definition of "operational", I don't see it happening either.
I can point out so many cultures that primarily consumes a grain-based staple diet with long expectancy. I challenge you to provide me with example of a culture / subculture that lives to above-average life expectancy with low health problem that is heavily based on a meat-based diet.
Denmark has the highest meat consumption rate in the world -- some 17% higher per capita than the US -- and has a life expectancy at birth of 80 years which puts it in the top quintile. New Zealanders are the second biggest carnivores in the world, eating only 3 kg per capita less meat than Danes, and boast a life expectancy of 83 years. But of course they're both very wealthy countries (thus the high meat consumption) with socialized medicine.
No the problem with the obesity epidemic in the US isn't carbs per se or meat. I think it's time. Americans eat rushed; we eat while multitasking; and vendors offer prepared convenience foods which fit that lifestyle. These foods are usually calorie dense; if not they are engineered for easy, mindless eating which defeats any claims for low calories per serving. It's very easy for an American to eat as thousand calories at a sitting while being scarcely aware he's consumed anything at all.
Your experiences may vary from mine, but I found my answer to weight gain, diabetes and arthritis by simply slowing down. I set a timer for fifteen minutes to half an hour depending on the meal size, and make the meal last that long. The result is I experience natural satiety before I've snarfed down thousands of calories. It's by far the easiest and most effective weight loss / blood sugar control strategy I've ever tried.
Of course when you're eating much less, it pays to think a bit more about what it is you're eating. I try to have some meat for protein, some veg for fiber and minerals, and enough carbs I don't feel tired, plus essential fats from either fish or plant sources, but it's not a problem if I go over or under on some category on one day. I find how I feel is a function of several days of eating exercise and rest.
What's more prototypes per se don't necessarily have any particular historical value; it depends on the role the specific prototype played in the program that led to the actual devices used. Without the documentation of what the particular hardware was for and how it was used, a device like that is a mere curiosity.
For example 30 years ago I worked in a lab where about 10% of our floor space was taken up with a prototype manned Mars rover. It was by no means a serious essay on what would be required for an actual, practical Mars vehicle; our lab was a seismology lab and the vehicle was merely a platform for a massive spring-loaded plunger that smacked the ground, producing sound waves that could be collected and analyzed. The point was to show that such a device could successfully be used from a mobile platform; the platform itself had no real value; the only reason it had motors is, I think, that the engineers thought it would be cooler that way; it didn't really need to move on its own power. I'm sure that that particular rover has been scrapped by now and it was no loss to history.
Which is not to say that this vehicle wasn't historically valuable. But it sounds very different from the rovers that were actually sent to the moon. Without knowing why we can't say whether this vehicle was priceless or worthless.
Well, it's usually a pharmacy technician or a pharmacist's assistant (essentially a clerk) who handles the Sudafed requests at my drug store, and I doubt they make $75/hr. You only get the pharmacist if you have a question about something like drug interactions.
Overall it's quite easy to obtain pseudoephedrine; you just pick up a card from a bin located where the OTC decongestants are and take it to the pharmacy counter. You have to wait in line with people picking up their prescriptions, but the clerk will ring up your other purchases so you don't have to wait in line again at the regular checkout. The net result is that it's just a minute or so longer to make all your purchases. And you do have to show an ID and sign a register.
Given the behavioral impact of amphetamines I don't think these measures are an unreasonable burden -- if they work. That's the big question. Are we reducing the supply of amphetamines, or creating a business opportunity for drug operations that are already smuggling weed from Mexico? But assuming these measures do reduce the supply of methamphetamine, the main problem with them is that they dissuade people from buying effective medicine because they anticipate a big hassle. It's not a big hassle.
I have no doubt that it is the people who insist on Safe Spaces, that are making the threats. Their ideas are old and week [sic] and don't stand up to any refutation.
Personally I would take resorting to threats of violence as stronger evidence that a position is weak.
As for "Safe Spaces", anyone is free to set up any kind of ground rules they like for conversations they are hosting; if you don't like that then don't participate in that conversation. Set up your own conversation with rules that are more to your liking.
Of course it's possible to have a rational conversation. All it takes is two people willing to act like grownups.
What's impossible is to prevent other people from having irrational conversations. That will never change, so if "now is not the time", there never will be a time.
Rebelling against what? People expressing opinions they don't like?
Threatening people to keep them quiet isn't "rebellion". It's the other end of that stick; an insult to personal liberty. Anonymous intimidation doesn't make you some kind of Thomas Paine; it puts you in the same company as Stalin and Mussolini.
Please tell me how the FUCK that would work out to Russia's benefit.
Well, according to that mindset warfare in general doesn't make sense. Nonetheless people still do it, to their own detriment or even destruction.
The German Writer Berthold Brecht wrote in the aftermath of WW2:
Great Carthage fought three wars;
After the first it was still powerful;
After the second it was still inhabitable;
After the third nobody could find it at all.
With PDAs. The first generation of PalmPilots ran $129-$399, which is $200-$590 in current prices. As hardware prices dropped manufacturers began to beef up features and performance -- not that most PDA users really wanted that. What really was driving creeping features was the fact that unit margins on a device that cost, say $30, couldn't sustain the industry as it had come to exist. Eventually the pressure of dropping prices drove the PDA manufacturers into the phone business.
Again, convergence really wasn't really something driven by consumer demand, even though the "carry only one device" argument was reasonable. It was pushed by manufacturers. But it didn't really take off because early converged devices were Frankenstein's monsters -- PDAs with phones built-in or vice versa. It took Apple's iPhone to make the "carry one device" argument truly compelling to users by starting with a clean sheet and building a converged device from the ground up. It's ironic that today Apple is essentially the last man standing in the non-converged handheld market with its iPod Touch line.
If prices on tablets continue to fall, I expect history will repeat itself with manufacturers trying to wring a price premium from consumers by positioning their tablets as tablet+something else. The obvious paradigm is the convertible tablet/laptop, but I suspect we'll see other stabs at convergence, like adding gaming-specific features.
That was my first reaction, but then I hadn't considered the possibility of sabotage.
The civilian economy of the US is critically dependent upon the Internet to the point where several undersea cables might well reflect single points of vulnerability unprecedented in Cold War terms.
You can't stop people from prepping for the test; the most you can do is stop people from ostensibly prepping for a test.
Any measure which is used to evaluate a social process will distort that process. Any single, high-stakes measure that is the sole yardstick by which we judge the people involved with that process will inevitably become the sole focus of those people.
Sociologist Donald Campbell crystalized this in Campbell's Law:
On the other hand, if you don't measure things you can't control them. I'd propose using several diverse measures of different things we expect our schools to do, sufficiently diverse that "teaching to the test" becomes impractical. For example you could have an impartial jury judge a portfolio of creative work done by students in music, art, writing and technology. Then add other measures for how well the school serves the special needs population within its service area.
I realize this would effectively make it impossible for a school to score as entirely satisfactory, but I see that as a good thing. That would reflect an underlying truth about education itself.
I've looked into this -- to the extent of searching for papers and incidents described in the academic literature using Google Scholar, so take this with a grain of salt -- and I've concluded that there are two clear environmental concerns with fracking. The first, of course, is carbon. The lower the price of carbon-based fuel the more of it we'll use. All things being equal that would be a good thing, but the point is that all things are not equal if we emit more carbon.
The wastewater issue is complex, in that it depends on the locality and the stage of development of fracking in the area. Thus far the industry has been quite good about handling wastewater -- my concern is in some of the fracking boom areas there aren't good disposal options yet for "flowback". The industry is dealing with this by re-using flowback, but while this is great in the boom phase of fracking it's going to be hard to sustain in an area when the rate of new well drilling begins to peak. Eventually there'll be more flowback than can be re-used, and as far as I can see there is no plan for dealing with that in some places. This could potentially leave the taxpayers with the cleanup bill. You also have to factor in what practices an industry is willing to undertake in a boom situation as opposed to the eventual scenario of declining profitability.
This is not a crisis; it's something we have time to deal with if there's the political will. The problem is that there usually isn't much political will for dealing with problems that will manifest in fifteen or twenty years' time.
Groundwater contamination is also a serious concern, although it is clearly a matter of each site's local geology. It's an area that needs more research.
Curse you, you beat me to it.
If I walk into the gourmet grocery store and see they stock 30+ kinds of jam, I'm happy. I know that I don't like marmalade in general, but I do like whiskey marmalade; so when I see blood orange whiskey marmalade I'll give it a try. If it proves to be a bad choice, it's no big deal.
I'd say satisfaction with choice is mostly a function of the effort you need to make what you feel is a good enough choice. If you walk into the optician and you already know you want black plastic wayfarer frames with rivets at the temple, then you're glad that they've got enough of a selection to stock the Classic Nerd line. If you have no idea what you want on your face then you'd be happier with a store that offered you a choice of two or three frames. In fact if you study what a successful clerk in an optical megastore does, she (usually) steers you toward only two or three frames out of the scores of styles they offer.
Contrast selecting from 30+ jams with selecting from 30+ health plans, where the best choice depends on the unknowable (how unlucky will I be this year?), the difficult to know (what is my likelihood of using each of these particular healthcare services?) and the need-an-expert-to-know-for-you (what do all these provisos in the small print mean?).
Years ago I worked as lead developer for a small company developing a vertical market app in an industry that had never been automated before (then a very common scenario). The boss had a simple and seemingly fool-proof marketing scheme, based on commonsense psychology: to maximize sales volume he'd keep prices surprisingly low and to entice buyers he'd give them lots of options for how to configure the system exactly for their needs. Since this was a small company I often went to industry meetings to help out at the vendor booth, and I quickly realized that that commonsense psychology was at variance with actual psychology. People who were used to spending tens of thousands of dollars of equipment would find out that they could, in theory, get started with our software for as little as $200 and lose interest. People who didn't lose interest were quickly overwhelmed with the complexity of figuring out which items they needed to buy from the al la carte menu.
So I proposed this change: combine all those choices into a single entry-level package that would cost a typical customer $10K - $20K, including all the options they'd be likely to use and all the services they'd need to get up and running. It took a year of financial struggle for the boss to decide he was willing to take a cut in sales volume for a boost in profit margins. But when we made the change sales volumes actually went up. People who used to walk by our $200 offering would ask why it was suddenly more expensive, and then I'd show them what they got for $10K but the decision would be simple: is this a good deal or not? And since it was a good deal a lot of them bought, and became good long-term customers for training, consulting services and data.
Oh it makes a difference. Not as much as it should, but it does. Or do you seriously think that Obama is just like George W, or that it will make no difference whether we have Hillary Clinton as President or Carly Fiorina?
In general politicians of opposing stripes tend to be most like each other on issues that their respective bases don't pay attention to -- like intellectual property rights and fair use.
Well, it's more complicated than $$$car >> $$$transit. You have to factor in your time as well, and this is where mobile devices alter the equation dramatically. Whereas people (at least non-readers at least) used to view time spent on the train or bus as wasted, they can now be playing a game or catching up on social media.
On the flip side is the unproductive nature of time spent plugged into a mobile device -- social media especially. It's not that socializing on facebook or gaming is completely wasted time, it's a matter of marginal return; I question the value of being plugged in all the time over checking in a few times a day. Downtime has its value too.
Well, you have to work with the programmers that there are; not the programmers you wish there were.
I learned C in 1980; it was a thing of beauty, a work of genius that transformed the industry. That doesn't mean it has to be all things to all people. In fact that's C's great strength; it's just enough of the very most useful things to enough people to make important systems programs like interpreters for other languages portable across many environments. The flip side of that is that for certain scenarios there's bound to be languages that are a better fit than C.
So if C's reliance on pointers or programmer managed memory allocation creates problems with the pool of programmers you have ready access to, the answer isn't to stamp your foot and wish all programmers were like they were back into the good old days of Unix 7; it's to use something else.
And just as in the lighter vs. bow drill case, self-driving cars perform better and more consistently than most drivers. In six years and 1.8 million miles of testing Google's autonomous cars have been in twelve minor accidents, all of which were caused by human drivers.
As for degraded skills, you can see this on the road with human driven cars every day; it comes from lazy habits creeping in; people stop using their turn signals; they cut through the wrong side of the road when they make a left turn; they roll past stop lines into an intersection and then look for cross traffic.
Probably some but not necessarily enough. It depends on how much energy the device packs. I'm guessing not much, because it uses tiny, high voltage capacitors to store energy; they're not going to be able to deliver much current.
In principle the discharge could travel through the damaged circuits of the hub, up the host cable to the computer, but damaging the hub is work and takes energy so you might luck out, although I wouldn't count on it. Instead I'd get a USB hub with electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection; they're a lot more expensive but a good idea if you live in a lightning prone area.
Littlefuse makes a small PPTC array specifically designed to provide lightning protection for high speed interconnects like HDMI and USB 3. It's based on PPTC technology so it acts like a self-resetting fuse. I haven't seen it built into cables, but that would be a good idea. The app sheet has a sample PCB layout for a small inline adapter.
Well, protein quality is something they'll have to engineer into the product, but the process would have to be pretty inefficient to take more land area than actual meat. This is basic ecology: you put food into an animal, and after you've deducted what the animal needs to grow and survive 90% of that is lost before the next animal in the food chain eats that one. So for one lion to grow to full size it has to consume ten lion masses of gazelle; those ten lion masses of gazelle in turn have to eat 100 lion masses of grass. Aquatic animals are considerably more efficient because they don't have to expend energy counteracting gravity, but the same principles apply.
Of course one of the insights the classical economists had is that it's not just the *amount* of land that matters, it's the *quality* of land. You can grow grass-fed beef on land that's not suitable for growing feed corn at all; you need a lot *more* land, but it's not land as useful for as many things the kind you'd choose to grow corn or soybeans on.
Depends on what exactly the nature of their concern is.
I find the vegetarian arguments about the health dangers of meat in general to be specious; but I do find the arguments about the environmental and animal welfare impacts of concentrated animal feeding operations compelling. It makes me look at grass fed beef and pasture raised pork from local family farms and think, maybe paying more per pound for meat and eating a little less of it wouldn't be so bad.
If this veggie meat stuff is any good and if it costs roughly the same price as supermarket meat, I can easily see myself replacing half my CAFO fattened meat with it, and the other half with locally sourced meat.
a href="http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/NAP/overviews/suffocation.html">http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/N...
"Unintentional suffocation - which also includes strangulation and choking on food or other objects - killed 1,176 U.S. children in 2010."
So what's your point -- that we should ban food and other objects?
I agree we don't have the data to suggest that insecure guns are a big public health problem for kids, although to be fair "43" isn't the number of people killed by insecure guns; it's just the ones we know about. Since the CDC is banned from collecting statistics on gun accidents we don't really have any good data on it -- although the ban itself is evidence that *somebody* expects better data to be less favorable than the data we have now.
Still, I suspect toddlers with unsecured guns is unlikely to be a major public health issue. I'm not prepared to speculate on what the overall impact of unsecured guns are though. I think we should collect that data.