I've been in the IT industry for somewhere around 15 years. I've worked on help desks. I've done vertical systems support. I've done software testing. I've been a developer. Presently I'm working part time on a help desk while putting myself through grad school.
Smart people generally need less help and the help they need is generally along the lines of being pushed in the right direction rather than being hand-held through the process.
But perhaps you're conflating being highly educated with being smart. It is true that there are quite a few highly educated people that aren't much smarter than a box of rocks.
1. government is not always the answer to all of society's problems, education least of all.
2. Parents need to take an interest in their children's educations.
3. It's pretty much a local issue, anyway,
Therefore,
4. start going to PTA meetings and lobby your town selectmen or mayor. Heck, run for your local school board.
The first premise seems intended to be a contrary to the conclusion that one should get involved with government. The second premise has nothing to do with the conclusion at so far as I can tell.
The third premise, if combined with the unstated premise that government actually has quite a bit to do with the quality of education, might serve to get to the conclusion. But then we have to throw out (1).
Granted, an argument could be made that the PTA is not a governmental organization. But, in my experience, it tends to be more of an extension of the school that the administration leverages to raise funds and attract volunteers than an independent organization that has anything to do with the quality of education. But even if I concede the PTA, that's just one third of the conclusion, the other two thirds are all about leveraging government.
Postgres (in its SQL and non-SQL forms), Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Nonstop SQL, and Ingres all lay claim to the same heritage that began with the Ingres project.
I've been in the industry since 1995. I started as a glorified secretary that knew how to do a mail merge. (That was a rare skill in 1995.) After a year, I managed to get into helpdesk work. Then I did software testing. Then I got into client/server development. I took 18 months off to finish my BA. Then I went back to helpdesk work in a vertical market. These days, I'm splitting my time three ways between classic helpdesk work, business analysis, and development (mostly in SQL).
But it depends on what sort of company you end up working for. Some companies have very rigid requirements for job experience. Others, not so much. I prefer working for small companies. (My present employer has about 20.) They tend to like people that can wear multiple hats. If I wanted to do closer to something in pure development, my boss would support that.
To be fair, Apple has had supply side limits prior to getting law suit happy. Suing Samsung doesn't seem like a good way to expand in a world of limited production capacity, but that's not the root of the problem.
When people stop paying their mortgages, the escrow which goes towards their property taxes stops being paid. Property taxes might dip less than incomes taxes during economic troubles, but state governments all across the US are very aware that during a severe recession with millions of mortgages going TU, less revenue will come in from property taxes.
Moreover, according to the Census bureau, NH has fewer persons per household than CA (2.54 v. 2.91) which suggests more people own property (hence, more payers of a property tax), a higher median household income (60k v. 59k), and proportionately fewer people living below the poverty line (8.6% v. 14.2%). So there is good reason to believe that even/if/ a pure property tax system is better, it is doubtful as to whether CA could raise as much money as NH because on a per capita basis, CA has fewer property owners and the property owners it does have make less money and are more likely to be living in poverty.
Lastly, you're forgetting the problem of scale. California has 37 million households. New Hampshire has 500 thousand households. A system that works well for a few hundreds of thousands of parcels of land is not necessarily going to scale up to a state with tens of millions of parcels.
This is not to say that a good argument can't be made that California might not benefit from reducing non-property taxes and increasing property taxes. It is only to say that the situation is not as simple as you appear to be suggesting. There are factors at play that suggest that California would not be likely to be able to duplicate New Hampshire's success with property taxes. But there is certainly room to argue that California might be able to do better than it is currently doing if it repealed proposition 13 and moved to make property taxes its main source of income.
OTOH, doing so might make the proposition of owning property in CA higher than it already is and send people out of the state in droves.
Hearing aids cost so much for a single reason: it's the price that the market is willing to pay. That article mentions an interesting fact, only 22% of people that buy hearing aids have a health insurance policy that helps with the purchase in any way. In other words, over three-quarters of the people buying hearing aids are buying them entirely out of their own pocket. So what you've got is the market equilibrium price.
Note something else about the above linked article. Those low cost hearing aids (the $300 to $800 dollar ones) are only good for people with mild to moderately severe hearing loss. I'd be more than willing to wager $100 that the Voxom aid is only good for people with a mildly severe hearing loss, if that.
That is an interesting article. But I'll note two things. Even this budget aid/starts/ at $300, TFA states at the end that he sells at a range of $295 to $895. And his aid is only good for mild to moderately severe hearing loss. This is great for many people. But it leaves out a very significant niche of people who need to shell out thousands because they have what is considered a profound hearing loss.
Hearing aids are inexpensive in most of the world because they're subsidized by the government.
In the US, very few classes of people (say, Congressmen and veterans) have their hearing aids subsidized by the government (or insurance for that matter) and pay out of pocket.
It costs $70 because it's not a serious hearing aid for people that need hearing aids.
To start with, most people don't lose hearing evenly across the sound spectrum. Someone may have lost 80% of their hearing in the high range while retaining most of their hearing in the low range. Devices like that amplify across the board aren't really comparable to a device designed to only amplify those areas where there is a loss.
Secondly, if it amplifies enough to help people with a profound hearing loss, odds are good enough that it amplifies enough to damage other people's hearing. My suspicion is that it doesn't amplify enough to help most people with a serious hearing loss.
These things don't mean that there isn't a place for something like this. Just like there is a place for the rack of cheap reading glasses at the drug store there is a place for this sort of inexpensive device for people with a mild loss.
1. plenty of competition, there are quite a few hearing aid manufacturers and a veritable legion of audiologists, most of whom work with multiple venders.
2. insurance seldom covers hearing aids, even the big group plans have in their fine print language that excludes them from covering hearing aids except in unusual situations.
They're a joke. They aren't likely to be of use to anyone who actually needs a hearing aid. They might help people who have a touch of hearing loss, the sort of people whom a trained audiologist would not recommend buy a hearing aid because their loss is so mild.
First, in the ear hearing aids are the cheap ones, generally speaking. the real expensive ones are generally the over-the-ear ones.
Second, your "custom fit" solution is nowhere near custom enough. someone with a "mildly profound" hear loss will have the sound jacked up so high that the sound bleeding out of their ear canal can potentially cause feedback with the microphone. Moreover, the ear mold is one of the least expensive parts of the hearing aid. And, if you're really hard up, you can find similar services from shops that make custom ear molds for audio applications or ear plugs.
Third, your smartphone would be luck to run all day acting as a hearing aid and not run out of juice. Hearing aid batteries tend to last for weeks at a time.
Fourth, your solution is a great leap backwards. You lose stereo inputs (and, consequently, an sense of direction of sound sources) and have to wear a clunky box around your neck or some other prominent position like people back in the fifties and sixties.
Fifth, the software is more difficult than you might think. It's not just a DSP amplification problem. It's that and a noise cancellation problem and having a ceiling on the amplification so that you don't further destroy a person's hearing. That last part might get any potential app maker in court.
Sixth, I would surprised if many smartphones (a) offered enough amplification or (b) if they did offer enough amplification, to not have a cap on how much they can amplify to shield the manufacturer from lawsuits.
Criticism aside, I think it shows a healthy DIY attitude and, if more people were willing to do this sort of thing, prices in general might be lower because people would have serious alternatives.
(1) doesn't control for inflation (2) doesn't control for the transition from analog to digital that spiked prices in the late nineties/early 2000's (3) barely touches on the tremendous increase in sophistication in hearing aid technology between then and now
As evidence of point (2), I bought a pair of digital hearing aids in 2001. They were $1,700 apiece. They were also the "low end" of the digital aids. Analog aids would have set me back half the price. Yet the "low end" digital aids from 2001 would be in the middle of the price spectrum TFA mentions.
Moreover, the digital aids now do quite a bit that my 10 year old hearing aids can't do. For example, most new hearing aids allow for multiple settings to get the best mix of uni-directional and omni-directional microphone input for various situations: concert halls, crowded restaurants, lecture halls, etc.
The other thing the article doesn't mention is that I can get my hearing aids "repaired" which basically means they're rebuilt from the ground up for $250 a pop these days. Prices have fallen, considerably for the same technology. What keeps pushing the prices up is new technology that, in most but not all cases, is definitely worth it.
Unless you lose your hearing in an accident caused by an insured party, odds are good that you're paying for hearing aids out of pocket. Most health insurance, even group plans for large companies, will not pay for hearing aids.
I just bought a Sidekick 4g from T-Mobile. It came with the warning that some features would not work unless I called customer care and bought a data plan. I would have simply stuck to using Wi-Fi and the like to access the Android marketplace but for one thing, T-Mobile locks the GPS functionality to the data plan.
Apps like the linked are great. But they only work with HTTP. Other 'net functionality won't work.
The only time the region flooded to the point where my house would have been under water (had it been built then) was 1913.
I think you underestimate just how much of US geography is in a flood plain and the social and financial costs of relocating all the residents that are in said flood plains.
Do you make the line of demarcation consistently annual floods, five year floods, fifty year floods, hundred year floods?
Moreover, what if the feds build a new levy and create a new floodplain? Or what it isn't the feds but mother nature? After all, the Mississippi would have an entirely different course to the Gulf if the feds hadn't intervened. Imagine that they didn't. Now you've got a very large new floodplain that was previously not a floodplain.
And what about economics? Perhaps the only places that large sectors of the population can afford to build houses is in a floodplain because such real estate is dirt cheap. If you make such real estate off limits, you not only create other problems but also make other real estate artificially more expensive because now there will be more people competing for less space.
Federal agencies have two types of positions, career and appointed. The appointed positions generally set the tone and direction for the career positions. So, it could be the same zombies but more likely than not a different witch is the one holding the staff of power that directs their actions.
You seem to be ignorant of how relationships like this work.
DT gets the cash. Most likely they will use it to fund other subsidiaries, pay dividends to shareholders, or the like. What they will not do with it is sink it back into T-Mobile. Which means T-Mobile will not be able to use it to expand infrastructure, acquire more subscribers, etc.
Think of it like a guy that owns 5 convenience stores. He decides that one is unprofitable and he's unwilling to invest any more money into it. He tentatively agrees to sell it to a woman who agrees to pay him a sum of money if the deal falls through. The deal falls through. The woman pays the guy the money. The unprofitable store is still unprofitable, is no better off, and will likely close shortly. But the guy that owns the store walks away with a nice spot of cash to offset his losses.
Or perhaps just using landfill to raise agricultural zones above sea level.
Or, like many countries do, import food. Despite living the US, I have to go out of my way to get fresh fruit that wasn't grown in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, etc.
The NFIP was created because people were already building houses (and businesses) in floodplains and no insurer was willing to insure them. Moreover, it was the same 1968 legislation that created the NFIP that mandated flood insurance if a mortgage was to be issued for a property in a floodplain. So your guess that banks would not be willing to lend money without homeowners having flood insurance is factually incorrect unless you presume that the legislation requiring flood insurance was passed but the accompanying federal insurance program was not.
Moreover, since many of the floodplains in question were/created/ by the federal government through its river management policies, it was thought at the time to be sensible to make the feds responsible for insuring households built in the floodplains. Were it not for the US Army Corps of Engineers, after all, the Mississippi would no longer go through New Orleans to get the Gulf of Mexico. Dredging rivers, digging channels, installing locks, building levies and flood walls have all altered the natural floodplains of virtually every major river in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the opposite to be true.
I've been in the IT industry for somewhere around 15 years. I've worked on help desks. I've done vertical systems support. I've done software testing. I've been a developer. Presently I'm working part time on a help desk while putting myself through grad school.
Smart people generally need less help and the help they need is generally along the lines of being pushed in the right direction rather than being hand-held through the process.
But perhaps you're conflating being highly educated with being smart. It is true that there are quite a few highly educated people that aren't much smarter than a box of rocks.
How is the question biased?
The image of being a cowboy is an image that both Reagan and GW intentionally perpetuated.
Does your average ten year old with a three megapixel camera live in the US or in a remote region of Russia?
1. government is not always the answer to all of society's problems, education least of all.
2. Parents need to take an interest in their children's educations.
3. It's pretty much a local issue, anyway,
Therefore,
4. start going to PTA meetings and lobby your town selectmen or mayor. Heck, run for your local school board.
The first premise seems intended to be a contrary to the conclusion that one should get involved with government. The second premise has nothing to do with the conclusion at so far as I can tell.
The third premise, if combined with the unstated premise that government actually has quite a bit to do with the quality of education, might serve to get to the conclusion. But then we have to throw out (1).
Granted, an argument could be made that the PTA is not a governmental organization. But, in my experience, it tends to be more of an extension of the school that the administration leverages to raise funds and attract volunteers than an independent organization that has anything to do with the quality of education. But even if I concede the PTA, that's just one third of the conclusion, the other two thirds are all about leveraging government.
Not just PostgreSQL.
Postgres (in its SQL and non-SQL forms), Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Nonstop SQL, and Ingres all lay claim to the same heritage that began with the Ingres project.
I've been in the industry since 1995. I started as a glorified secretary that knew how to do a mail merge. (That was a rare skill in 1995.) After a year, I managed to get into helpdesk work. Then I did software testing. Then I got into client/server development. I took 18 months off to finish my BA. Then I went back to helpdesk work in a vertical market. These days, I'm splitting my time three ways between classic helpdesk work, business analysis, and development (mostly in SQL).
But it depends on what sort of company you end up working for. Some companies have very rigid requirements for job experience. Others, not so much. I prefer working for small companies. (My present employer has about 20.) They tend to like people that can wear multiple hats. If I wanted to do closer to something in pure development, my boss would support that.
To be fair, Apple has had supply side limits prior to getting law suit happy. Suing Samsung doesn't seem like a good way to expand in a world of limited production capacity, but that's not the root of the problem.
I take it NH didn't have a housing bust.
When people stop paying their mortgages, the escrow which goes towards their property taxes stops being paid. Property taxes might dip less than incomes taxes during economic troubles, but state governments all across the US are very aware that during a severe recession with millions of mortgages going TU, less revenue will come in from property taxes.
Moreover, according to the Census bureau, NH has fewer persons per household than CA (2.54 v. 2.91) which suggests more people own property (hence, more payers of a property tax), a higher median household income (60k v. 59k), and proportionately fewer people living below the poverty line (8.6% v. 14.2%). So there is good reason to believe that even /if/ a pure property tax system is better, it is doubtful as to whether CA could raise as much money as NH because on a per capita basis, CA has fewer property owners and the property owners it does have make less money and are more likely to be living in poverty.
Lastly, you're forgetting the problem of scale. California has 37 million households. New Hampshire has 500 thousand households. A system that works well for a few hundreds of thousands of parcels of land is not necessarily going to scale up to a state with tens of millions of parcels.
This is not to say that a good argument can't be made that California might not benefit from reducing non-property taxes and increasing property taxes. It is only to say that the situation is not as simple as you appear to be suggesting. There are factors at play that suggest that California would not be likely to be able to duplicate New Hampshire's success with property taxes. But there is certainly room to argue that California might be able to do better than it is currently doing if it repealed proposition 13 and moved to make property taxes its main source of income.
OTOH, doing so might make the proposition of owning property in CA higher than it already is and send people out of the state in droves.
In fact, someone else in this thread posted a link to a site for FDA approved hearing aids that start at $300: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-03-09/health/sc-health-0309-hearing-aid-20110309_1_hearing-aid-hearing-loss-hearing-loss-association
Hearing aids cost so much for a single reason: it's the price that the market is willing to pay. That article mentions an interesting fact, only 22% of people that buy hearing aids have a health insurance policy that helps with the purchase in any way. In other words, over three-quarters of the people buying hearing aids are buying them entirely out of their own pocket. So what you've got is the market equilibrium price.
Note something else about the above linked article. Those low cost hearing aids (the $300 to $800 dollar ones) are only good for people with mild to moderately severe hearing loss. I'd be more than willing to wager $100 that the Voxom aid is only good for people with a mildly severe hearing loss, if that.
That is an interesting article. But I'll note two things. Even this budget aid /starts/ at $300, TFA states at the end that he sells at a range of $295 to $895. And his aid is only good for mild to moderately severe hearing loss. This is great for many people. But it leaves out a very significant niche of people who need to shell out thousands because they have what is considered a profound hearing loss.
Nevertheless, it's a step in the right direction.
I think you've got that backwards.
Hearing aids are inexpensive in most of the world because they're subsidized by the government.
In the US, very few classes of people (say, Congressmen and veterans) have their hearing aids subsidized by the government (or insurance for that matter) and pay out of pocket.
It costs $70 because it's not a serious hearing aid for people that need hearing aids.
To start with, most people don't lose hearing evenly across the sound spectrum. Someone may have lost 80% of their hearing in the high range while retaining most of their hearing in the low range. Devices like that amplify across the board aren't really comparable to a device designed to only amplify those areas where there is a loss.
Secondly, if it amplifies enough to help people with a profound hearing loss, odds are good enough that it amplifies enough to damage other people's hearing. My suspicion is that it doesn't amplify enough to help most people with a serious hearing loss.
These things don't mean that there isn't a place for something like this. Just like there is a place for the rack of cheap reading glasses at the drug store there is a place for this sort of inexpensive device for people with a mild loss.
1. plenty of competition, there are quite a few hearing aid manufacturers and a veritable legion of audiologists, most of whom work with multiple venders.
2. insurance seldom covers hearing aids, even the big group plans have in their fine print language that excludes them from covering hearing aids except in unusual situations.
They're a joke. They aren't likely to be of use to anyone who actually needs a hearing aid. They might help people who have a touch of hearing loss, the sort of people whom a trained audiologist would not recommend buy a hearing aid because their loss is so mild.
First, in the ear hearing aids are the cheap ones, generally speaking. the real expensive ones are generally the over-the-ear ones.
Second, your "custom fit" solution is nowhere near custom enough. someone with a "mildly profound" hear loss will have the sound jacked up so high that the sound bleeding out of their ear canal can potentially cause feedback with the microphone. Moreover, the ear mold is one of the least expensive parts of the hearing aid. And, if you're really hard up, you can find similar services from shops that make custom ear molds for audio applications or ear plugs.
Third, your smartphone would be luck to run all day acting as a hearing aid and not run out of juice. Hearing aid batteries tend to last for weeks at a time.
Fourth, your solution is a great leap backwards. You lose stereo inputs (and, consequently, an sense of direction of sound sources) and have to wear a clunky box around your neck or some other prominent position like people back in the fifties and sixties.
Fifth, the software is more difficult than you might think. It's not just a DSP amplification problem. It's that and a noise cancellation problem and having a ceiling on the amplification so that you don't further destroy a person's hearing. That last part might get any potential app maker in court.
Sixth, I would surprised if many smartphones (a) offered enough amplification or (b) if they did offer enough amplification, to not have a cap on how much they can amplify to shield the manufacturer from lawsuits.
Criticism aside, I think it shows a healthy DIY attitude and, if more people were willing to do this sort of thing, prices in general might be lower because people would have serious alternatives.
(1) doesn't control for inflation
(2) doesn't control for the transition from analog to digital that spiked prices in the late nineties/early 2000's
(3) barely touches on the tremendous increase in sophistication in hearing aid technology between then and now
As evidence of point (2), I bought a pair of digital hearing aids in 2001. They were $1,700 apiece. They were also the "low end" of the digital aids. Analog aids would have set me back half the price. Yet the "low end" digital aids from 2001 would be in the middle of the price spectrum TFA mentions.
Moreover, the digital aids now do quite a bit that my 10 year old hearing aids can't do. For example, most new hearing aids allow for multiple settings to get the best mix of uni-directional and omni-directional microphone input for various situations: concert halls, crowded restaurants, lecture halls, etc.
The other thing the article doesn't mention is that I can get my hearing aids "repaired" which basically means they're rebuilt from the ground up for $250 a pop these days. Prices have fallen, considerably for the same technology. What keeps pushing the prices up is new technology that, in most but not all cases, is definitely worth it.
Unless you lose your hearing in an accident caused by an insured party, odds are good that you're paying for hearing aids out of pocket. Most health insurance, even group plans for large companies, will not pay for hearing aids.
I just bought a Sidekick 4g from T-Mobile. It came with the warning that some features would not work unless I called customer care and bought a data plan. I would have simply stuck to using Wi-Fi and the like to access the Android marketplace but for one thing, T-Mobile locks the GPS functionality to the data plan.
Apps like the linked are great. But they only work with HTTP. Other 'net functionality won't work.
The only time the region flooded to the point where my house would have been under water (had it been built then) was 1913.
I think you underestimate just how much of US geography is in a flood plain and the social and financial costs of relocating all the residents that are in said flood plains.
Do you make the line of demarcation consistently annual floods, five year floods, fifty year floods, hundred year floods?
Moreover, what if the feds build a new levy and create a new floodplain? Or what it isn't the feds but mother nature? After all, the Mississippi would have an entirely different course to the Gulf if the feds hadn't intervened. Imagine that they didn't. Now you've got a very large new floodplain that was previously not a floodplain.
And what about economics? Perhaps the only places that large sectors of the population can afford to build houses is in a floodplain because such real estate is dirt cheap. If you make such real estate off limits, you not only create other problems but also make other real estate artificially more expensive because now there will be more people competing for less space.
Federal agencies have two types of positions, career and appointed. The appointed positions generally set the tone and direction for the career positions. So, it could be the same zombies but more likely than not a different witch is the one holding the staff of power that directs their actions.
You seem to be ignorant of how relationships like this work.
DT gets the cash. Most likely they will use it to fund other subsidiaries, pay dividends to shareholders, or the like. What they will not do with it is sink it back into T-Mobile. Which means T-Mobile will not be able to use it to expand infrastructure, acquire more subscribers, etc.
Think of it like a guy that owns 5 convenience stores. He decides that one is unprofitable and he's unwilling to invest any more money into it. He tentatively agrees to sell it to a woman who agrees to pay him a sum of money if the deal falls through. The deal falls through. The woman pays the guy the money. The unprofitable store is still unprofitable, is no better off, and will likely close shortly. But the guy that owns the store walks away with a nice spot of cash to offset his losses.
Or perhaps just using landfill to raise agricultural zones above sea level.
Or, like many countries do, import food. Despite living the US, I have to go out of my way to get fresh fruit that wasn't grown in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, etc.
The NFIP was created because people were already building houses (and businesses) in floodplains and no insurer was willing to insure them. Moreover, it was the same 1968 legislation that created the NFIP that mandated flood insurance if a mortgage was to be issued for a property in a floodplain. So your guess that banks would not be willing to lend money without homeowners having flood insurance is factually incorrect unless you presume that the legislation requiring flood insurance was passed but the accompanying federal insurance program was not.
Moreover, since many of the floodplains in question were /created/ by the federal government through its river management policies, it was thought at the time to be sensible to make the feds responsible for insuring households built in the floodplains. Were it not for the US Army Corps of Engineers, after all, the Mississippi would no longer go through New Orleans to get the Gulf of Mexico. Dredging rivers, digging channels, installing locks, building levies and flood walls have all altered the natural floodplains of virtually every major river in the US.
Roku supports both subtitles and closed captioning.
Apparently, Netflix doesn't support either on the Roku.
Just because a device supports feature x does not mean that a third party service supports feature x on that device.