My reaction was, really? I haven't seen my electric bill go down by half...
That's because you almost certianly don't get all your electricity from Natural Gas.
Where I live (Oklahoma) we get a rather large percentage (suprisingly) from renewables, particularly hydro, and another large amount from coal. The price of generating electricity from those has not dropped by half. So if NG is responsible for 1/3 of my power, and its cost drops by half, the best I could expect to see is a 17% reduction, right? And even that assumes they all cost the same to start with (very bad assumption)
If you are exeedingly unlucky, you may live somewhere that gets a lot of electricity from Nuclear power. That is about the most expensive source available, and of course its cost has not dropped one jot. If that's your situation, I doubt you noticed a blip in rates.
However, I did notice last winter that my Gas bill was almost negligable. I suspect its even cheaper in rural fracking areas, where they can now light their taps for heat.:-)
Politicians and traffic engineers purposefully make the law difficult to not break (IE low speed limits) and gives the officer the ability to pretty much pull anyone over at any time. They don't because they're only after bad guys like dark-skinned young men, so soccer moms get warnings or officer discretion all day long.
About 20 years ago I was rear-ended by a person "driving along looking at their lap instead of where they're driving" as they tried to read a map. So should we outlaw those too?
Actually, most states have laws against "distracted driving". So you could be pulled over for all that too.
So why did many states feel the need to make extra special laws regulating cellphones, if you could already be pulled over for allowing them to distract you? Beats me. Ask a legislator. Or better yet, ask yourself who beneifits from such laws. (Hint: almost all such laws have special exceptions for Garmin's line of products. Go check yours out to see).
A couple of years ago when I happened to be the first in line stopped at a red light during rush hour, out of curiousity I thought I'd count how many of the long line of SUV's and minivans turning left in front of me on the way to a rich neighborhood were actually on the phone. I stopped counting at 14 out of 17.
A veritable crime wave of rich folks there. Quick, somebody call the cops!
I still think the cop is correct in enforcing the law. The law is wrong in my opinion, but cops should not go out there and decide which laws to enforce and which ones not.
I'm sorry, but this is complete hooey. There are thousands upon thousands of minor (and major) laws being broken in any sizable city at any moment. Jaywalking, slighly off parking, meters running out, turn signals not being used, lights newly burnt out, customers being misled, etc. Picking and chosing which laws to enforce is not only something every single Cop does every single day on the job, but its a practical nessecity. Simply pulling over everyone who doesn't properly signal a turn would fully occupy any US police force I've ever seen. Like it or not, deciding which laws to enforce and which ones not to is exactly a cop's job.
I'm sorry to go off on you, but this is the exact kind of attitude that leads people to argue for the most unjust, heartless things imaginable because "its the law", and "they are lawbreakers", and I think that attitude merits a full-out attack.
I know we like to be all asburgers about rules here on./, but laws are not like computer code! They are written by very imperfect humans, followed imperfectly by other imperfect humans, and enforced by imperfect humans. If you don't take that into accout, well, you aren't being very human yourself. Please go back to software coding, where you know what you are doing and leave politics to those who are capable of dealing with fuzzy concepts like "justice", "deterrence", and most of all, "humanity".
The author wrote an "epic" of his own, all word-wrapped in the column space from 73 to 132 (the width of common teletype paper and long Hollerith punch cards). What a waste of his time, you might think. But it was also a huge impediment to maintenance; you see, people in the lab LIKED his story (for a while), so they had to figure out how to patch the logic without breaking the flow of the story.
I've been a professional software developer for nearly 25 years now, and did it for fun for about 10 years prior to that. I'm old and jaded, and before this morning I thought I had come across every way in which a well-meaning person can make a computer program difficult to maintain.
Thank you more than words can express for restoring my sense of wonder in the universe today.
"Cetacean" does not mean or imply "Dolphin". Sperm Whales, (for example, the whale in Moby Dick) are also Ceateans.
I don't really mind someone like the GP getting a smidge sloppy with terminology in the interests of brevity, clarity, or wit. What I do mind is someone leaping all over them over a technicality, when they in fact don't have their details down right either.
That's true. However, this is now a much more densely populated world than we had in WWI. We now have about 7 billion people, as opposed to 1910's 800 million. More than 50% of that population is now packed into our cities, where in 1910 it was about 20%. Whereas borders and oceans used to be barriers to transmission, air travel has essentially erased all such barriers. So in many ways we are much more succeptible now than ever to communicable diseases we may not happen to have vaccienes or cures for, for whatever reason.
Ironicaly, the 1918 pandemic hit hardest amongst young folks with healthy immune systems, not the old and/or infirm. The current prevaling theory is that that strain had a way of inducing an over-reaction out of human immune systems. If yours happened to be more robust than average, it would kill you.
So in this one case, trying to "factor in people with compromised immune systems" would not significantly affect things.
For reference, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 is estimated to have killed anywhere from 3 to 6 percent of world population. It presumably would have been worse in more densly populated areas.
You'd like to to think we've gotten a bit better at treating the flu in the last century or so. However, I don't think you could seriously argue that 2% is too high for a worst-case scenario. It might be too low.
the code that is "greek" to the rest of the team, but which works.
We experienced developers (27 years in the industry here) have a word for that kind of code: "crap". Unless you are working at a place where the product that code runs is getting thrown out in 3 months, then I suppose it would be ok (because the product is essentially throwaway). Code that nobody else can understand might as well never had been written at all. Sooner or later there's gonna need to be either a bug fix or a product improvement. Well-written understandable code can be fixed or improved quickly. Code which nobody understands simply cannot be safely modified.
Its like a Hotel having a maid that pushes all the trash and dirt out into the hall for the other maids to clean up bragging about how much more efficent she is than all their other maids.
My guess for what is happening here is that your "rockstar" has awesome productivity compared to the rest of your team because he gets to quickly slap together something that barely works for now, while everyone else on your team ends up stuck with the drudgery of refactoring the damn thing into a proper design that can be modified by meer mortals.
...or worse yet, your whole team is deathly afraid of messing with anything in there, because they don't understand it and tweaking certian things might make the magic quit working. So when maintanence is required they just blindlyt bash around the edges for weeks trying to get it to work in the slighly different way you now need.
I will grant you that there are demographic issues here. But if that is a big issue then we need to address these problems AS demographic issues and not as economic issues.
Good. At least you are sort of starting to get it.
Here is the central issue that I really feel is being ignored. Bad schools persist with bad teachers and bad administrations for many years and nothing is done about it.
There are specific instances where this is true. However, in general it is horseshit.
Far and above the most important factor in how kids perform in school is their homelife. Kids who have nothing much else to worry about in life than their grades tend to do fairly well. Kids who have a single parent working 3 jobs in a vain attempt to manage to feed them one crappy meal a day, kids who have abusive (and/or insane) parents at home, kids who have to walk a guantlet through homicadal gang territories to get to school, or get grocieries, these kids don't tend to do too well in school. Kids who have issues like dyslexia, poor vision, ADHD, etc., but no family with enough money to help them deal with these issues, they don't do as well.
When you have a large percentage of kids with life issues like this, as you do in any poor comminuty in this nation, that whole school is going to look "bad". No amount of magic new techniques are going to fix that problem if you leave all the kids with their same shitty lives and untreated issues.
Blaming teachers is just a dodge, so that nobody starts asking why this nation puts up with a huge amount of kids being raised in conditions close to Somalia.
...particularly if you aren't indepdently wealthy, and thus your kid is there on scholarship anyway. In that situation, you have about as much voice as your average barnicle.
Not only that, private schools know that they have no hold on students. They piss off the parents and the kids get put into another school. End of story.
Not quite. In fact, that only really matters if your kid is paying to go there (preferably the full tuition). If your parents are of average or less means, and thus you are there on "scholarship", they really couldn't care less about you. Its OK if you show up and learn and all, but you're essentially looked upon as a leech. Really, the entire purpose of the scholarship kids is to jack up the school's test scores so it looks impressive to the parents of the rich kids. But if Timmy doesn't fit in with the rich kids at Patrician Prep well and/or doesn't toe the line, there are plenty more non-paying scholarship brats where he came from begging to get in.
Voice of experience here. I went to one from 6th grade to graduation. Looked great on my transcript, but if I had it to do again, I'd have gone to the public "magnet" school instead.
That sounds what the billionaire-funded, NYC-based MAIG is doing for the Colorado recall elections right now.
If you are talking about Bloomburg's group, yes that is exactly what he's trying to do. You have it exactly. He's essentially borrowing the same pressure tactics the NRA has been using for decades, but attempting to employ them from the other side of the issue.
To be fair, you can achive your same mid-range "good enough, and way cheaper" effect by buying last season's iPhone.
However, it would be a reasonable point that you have far more mid-range options with Android than with Apple. Probably much cheaper for the same features too. That's because Apple is only one company, while "Android" is the entire rest of the industry. So you are comparing the choices from one company's product line to the choices from a least 3 different competing companies.
This is the thing. Only a true geek cares a bit about the OS on his phone. What a typical person cares about is that the phone has the features they like, a really good choice of apps, and that their new phone can do at least all the stuff their neighbor's can.
The first (and half of the last) is almost entirely a hardware issue. This is where a good hardware company can hope to compete with Samsung and Apple.
The second and balance of the third come down to market share of your OS. Apple gives it an impressive go, but really no one company can hope to compete with everybody else in the industry developing Android at the same time. So, unless you are Apple (and perhaps even then) it really doesn't pay to use an OS other than Android.
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My reaction was, really? I haven't seen my electric bill go down by half...
That's because you almost certianly don't get all your electricity from Natural Gas.
Where I live (Oklahoma) we get a rather large percentage (suprisingly) from renewables, particularly hydro, and another large amount from coal. The price of generating electricity from those has not dropped by half. So if NG is responsible for 1/3 of my power, and its cost drops by half, the best I could expect to see is a 17% reduction, right? And even that assumes they all cost the same to start with (very bad assumption)
If you are exeedingly unlucky, you may live somewhere that gets a lot of electricity from Nuclear power. That is about the most expensive source available, and of course its cost has not dropped one jot. If that's your situation, I doubt you noticed a blip in rates.
However, I did notice last winter that my Gas bill was almost negligable. I suspect its even cheaper in rural fracking areas, where they can now light their taps for heat. :-)
Politicians and traffic engineers purposefully make the law difficult to not break (IE low speed limits) and gives the officer the ability to pretty much pull anyone over at any time. They don't because they're only after bad guys like dark-skinned young men, so soccer moms get warnings or officer discretion all day long.
FTFY
About 20 years ago I was rear-ended by a person "driving along looking at their lap instead of where they're driving" as they tried to read a map. So should we outlaw those too?
Actually, most states have laws against "distracted driving". So you could be pulled over for all that too.
So why did many states feel the need to make extra special laws regulating cellphones, if you could already be pulled over for allowing them to distract you? Beats me. Ask a legislator. Or better yet, ask yourself who beneifits from such laws. (Hint: almost all such laws have special exceptions for Garmin's line of products. Go check yours out to see).
A couple of years ago when I happened to be the first in line stopped at a red light during rush hour, out of curiousity I thought I'd count how many of the long line of SUV's and minivans turning left in front of me on the way to a rich neighborhood were actually on the phone. I stopped counting at 14 out of 17.
A veritable crime wave of rich folks there. Quick, somebody call the cops!
The reason its not "perfect" to you, is its not made to suit you. Its made to suit the lobbyist group
Yup. Most of these anti-cellphone laws might as well be labeled "The Garmin Market Protection Act".
I still think the cop is correct in enforcing the law. The law is wrong in my opinion, but cops should not go out there and decide which laws to enforce and which ones not.
I'm sorry, but this is complete hooey. There are thousands upon thousands of minor (and major) laws being broken in any sizable city at any moment. Jaywalking, slighly off parking, meters running out, turn signals not being used, lights newly burnt out, customers being misled, etc. Picking and chosing which laws to enforce is not only something every single Cop does every single day on the job, but its a practical nessecity. Simply pulling over everyone who doesn't properly signal a turn would fully occupy any US police force I've ever seen. Like it or not, deciding which laws to enforce and which ones not to is exactly a cop's job.
I'm sorry to go off on you, but this is the exact kind of attitude that leads people to argue for the most unjust, heartless things imaginable because "its the law", and "they are lawbreakers", and I think that attitude merits a full-out attack.
I know we like to be all asburgers about rules here on ./, but laws are not like computer code! They are written by very imperfect humans, followed imperfectly by other imperfect humans, and enforced by imperfect humans. If you don't take that into accout, well, you aren't being very human yourself. Please go back to software coding, where you know what you are doing and leave politics to those who are capable of dealing with fuzzy concepts like "justice", "deterrence", and most of all, "humanity".
Seriously, why else would they veto Pants-Free Fridays?
Perhaps because they saw you in shorts once outside of work, and are still trying to pay off the therapy bills?
The author wrote an "epic" of his own, all word-wrapped in the column space from 73 to 132 (the width of common teletype paper and long Hollerith punch cards). What a waste of his time, you might think. But it was also a huge impediment to maintenance; you see, people in the lab LIKED his story (for a while), so they had to figure out how to patch the logic without breaking the flow of the story.
I've been a professional software developer for nearly 25 years now, and did it for fun for about 10 years prior to that. I'm old and jaded, and before this morning I thought I had come across every way in which a well-meaning person can make a computer program difficult to maintain.
Thank you more than words can express for restoring my sense of wonder in the universe today.
"Cetacean" does not mean or imply "Dolphin". Sperm Whales, (for example, the whale in Moby Dick) are also Ceateans.
I don't really mind someone like the GP getting a smidge sloppy with terminology in the interests of brevity, clarity, or wit. What I do mind is someone leaping all over them over a technicality, when they in fact don't have their details down right either.
That's true. However, this is now a much more densely populated world than we had in WWI. We now have about 7 billion people, as opposed to 1910's 800 million. More than 50% of that population is now packed into our cities, where in 1910 it was about 20%. Whereas borders and oceans used to be barriers to transmission, air travel has essentially erased all such barriers. So in many ways we are much more succeptible now than ever to communicable diseases we may not happen to have vaccienes or cures for, for whatever reason.
Ironicaly, the 1918 pandemic hit hardest amongst young folks with healthy immune systems, not the old and/or infirm. The current prevaling theory is that that strain had a way of inducing an over-reaction out of human immune systems. If yours happened to be more robust than average, it would kill you.
So in this one case, trying to "factor in people with compromised immune systems" would not significantly affect things.
For reference, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 is estimated to have killed anywhere from 3 to 6 percent of world population. It presumably would have been worse in more densly populated areas.
You'd like to to think we've gotten a bit better at treating the flu in the last century or so. However, I don't think you could seriously argue that 2% is too high for a worst-case scenario. It might be too low.
the code that is "greek" to the rest of the team, but which works.
We experienced developers (27 years in the industry here) have a word for that kind of code: "crap". Unless you are working at a place where the product that code runs is getting thrown out in 3 months, then I suppose it would be ok (because the product is essentially throwaway). Code that nobody else can understand might as well never had been written at all. Sooner or later there's gonna need to be either a bug fix or a product improvement. Well-written understandable code can be fixed or improved quickly. Code which nobody understands simply cannot be safely modified.
Its like a Hotel having a maid that pushes all the trash and dirt out into the hall for the other maids to clean up bragging about how much more efficent she is than all their other maids.
My guess for what is happening here is that your "rockstar" has awesome productivity compared to the rest of your team because he gets to quickly slap together something that barely works for now, while everyone else on your team ends up stuck with the drudgery of refactoring the damn thing into a proper design that can be modified by meer mortals.
...or worse yet, your whole team is deathly afraid of messing with anything in there, because they don't understand it and tweaking certian things might make the magic quit working. So when maintanence is required they just blindlyt bash around the edges for weeks trying to get it to work in the slighly different way you now need.
Texas is also completely devoid of True Scottsmen
I will grant you that there are demographic issues here. But if that is a big issue then we need to address these problems AS demographic issues and not as economic issues.
Good. At least you are sort of starting to get it.
Here is the central issue that I really feel is being ignored. Bad schools persist with bad teachers and bad administrations for many years and nothing is done about it.
There are specific instances where this is true. However, in general it is horseshit.
Far and above the most important factor in how kids perform in school is their homelife. Kids who have nothing much else to worry about in life than their grades tend to do fairly well. Kids who have a single parent working 3 jobs in a vain attempt to manage to feed them one crappy meal a day, kids who have abusive (and/or insane) parents at home, kids who have to walk a guantlet through homicadal gang territories to get to school, or get grocieries, these kids don't tend to do too well in school. Kids who have issues like dyslexia, poor vision, ADHD, etc., but no family with enough money to help them deal with these issues, they don't do as well.
When you have a large percentage of kids with life issues like this, as you do in any poor comminuty in this nation, that whole school is going to look "bad". No amount of magic new techniques are going to fix that problem if you leave all the kids with their same shitty lives and untreated issues.
Blaming teachers is just a dodge, so that nobody starts asking why this nation puts up with a huge amount of kids being raised in conditions close to Somalia.
How hard is it to fire a pedophile teacher?
I'd think the jail term would make the firing a bit of a non-issue.
Oh, my mistake; I didn't realize your title was ment to charactarize the contents of your message.
...particularly if you aren't indepdently wealthy, and thus your kid is there on scholarship anyway. In that situation, you have about as much voice as your average barnicle.
Not only that, private schools know that they have no hold on students. They piss off the parents and the kids get put into another school. End of story.
Not quite. In fact, that only really matters if your kid is paying to go there (preferably the full tuition). If your parents are of average or less means, and thus you are there on "scholarship", they really couldn't care less about you. Its OK if you show up and learn and all, but you're essentially looked upon as a leech. Really, the entire purpose of the scholarship kids is to jack up the school's test scores so it looks impressive to the parents of the rich kids. But if Timmy doesn't fit in with the rich kids at Patrician Prep well and/or doesn't toe the line, there are plenty more non-paying scholarship brats where he came from begging to get in.
Voice of experience here. I went to one from 6th grade to graduation. Looked great on my transcript, but if I had it to do again, I'd have gone to the public "magnet" school instead.
That sounds what the billionaire-funded, NYC-based MAIG is doing for the Colorado recall elections right now.
If you are talking about Bloomburg's group, yes that is exactly what he's trying to do. You have it exactly. He's essentially borrowing the same pressure tactics the NRA has been using for decades, but attempting to employ them from the other side of the issue.
They are definitely NOT toys The high performance ones have 5 to 10 HP motors
Sorry. Our mistake. So the useful purpose these serious pieces of non-toy equipment are flown for is...?
Couple this incident with Colorado selling thousands of drone hunting permits and perhaps its time to find a safer hobby than model aircraft. Like say noodling
To be fair, you can achive your same mid-range "good enough, and way cheaper" effect by buying last season's iPhone.
However, it would be a reasonable point that you have far more mid-range options with Android than with Apple. Probably much cheaper for the same features too. That's because Apple is only one company, while "Android" is the entire rest of the industry. So you are comparing the choices from one company's product line to the choices from a least 3 different competing companies.
This is the thing. Only a true geek cares a bit about the OS on his phone. What a typical person cares about is that the phone has the features they like, a really good choice of apps, and that their new phone can do at least all the stuff their neighbor's can.
The first (and half of the last) is almost entirely a hardware issue. This is where a good hardware company can hope to compete with Samsung and Apple.
The second and balance of the third come down to market share of your OS. Apple gives it an impressive go, but really no one company can hope to compete with everybody else in the industry developing Android at the same time. So, unless you are Apple (and perhaps even then) it really doesn't pay to use an OS other than Android.