If I were you, I would write a little memo to HR, explaining your concern that your prescribed med might show up in the drug test. Paste in a photograph of your prescription pill bottle, with your name clearly visible on its label. State the name and phone number of the prescribing physician.
With that documentation in your file, they'd be dumb to even think about taking action against you as a result of the test.
I don't ask people to contribute to Wikipedia if I think they're wrong.
But if you removed "recursive acronym" from the GNU article, it would be very interesting to find out whether Wikipedia's editors would let that stand.
I'm not going to throw around unsubstantiated accusations like you have done, but it seems like you don't want to make that edit because you're afraid it won't stand.
Everyone is free to do so. I've added a lot of information to Wikipedia, on topics I care about. I don't care about the topic of whether GNU is a recursive acronym... but I thought you did, since you took time to express disagreement.
Know economic history: every time a disruptive technology has reduced employment in one category of jobs, other categories of jobs have been created and/or expanded, for a net increase in overall employment.
Minorly disruptive technologies result in a minor net increase in employment. Hugely disruptive technologies result in a huge net increase in employment. There have been no exceptions to this rule.
There are more people employed today than at any time in history. This is true because of, not in spite of, the modern technologies that put a multiplier on the amount of work each individual is capable of accomplishing.
Not convinced? Then do this thought experiment: if all modern technologies suddenly disappeared, would employment increase? No; not only would most workers be thrown out of work, they would also starve. (But not before fighting horrific battles over the few remaining scraps of food.)
If you want to put humans out of work, there would be no better way to do so than to eliminate all automation, and return the economy to the state it was in 200 years ago, when it was able to support only a small fraction of the number of jobs that exist today.
Conversely, if you want employment to increase, encourage Wendy's to automate. Multiple jobs in other categories will be created for every fast-food job that is lost.
When any company's management deploys new technologies that make employees more productive, they aren't making any sort of statement about how much money their employees make. But they are contributing to growth and job creation in the overall economy.
Isaac Asimov said in 1978. "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." We should feel the same way, even more so, about progress in automation and robotics.
To the extent that Henry Ford paid his employees above-market wages, he had to pass that cost along to Ford's customers -- and nearly 100% of Ford's customers did not work for Ford.
Ford began exporting to other countries very early in its history, so the general standard of living of people all over the world was reduced by this decision: fewer people could afford to buy a Ford product, and those who did go through with the transaction had less money left over than they otherwise would have.
To pay the employees of any company above-market wages benefits a special interest (those employees) at the expense of the general interest (customers and potential customers who do not work for the company).
What Henry Ford chose to pay his employees was Henry Ford's business. Just don't make false claims that decisions like this are good for society in general. They never are.
As an aside...
paying his employees enough to where they could afford one of his cars
Whether an employee can afford the company's products has nothing to do with anything. Do you think Boeing employees should be paid enough to afford a 737?
How many additional trillions in wealth redistribution would it take, to get you to stop claiming that the working classes are being "strip-mined for their wealth"?
Serious question... would you be so kind as to give me a number, so I can understand what your definition of "being strip-mined" is.
Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course's online forum. Sometimes the same questions are asked again and again. Last year he began to wonder if he could automate the burden of answering so many repetitive questions.
The first order of business ought to be updating the course material to answer those frequently-asked-questions, so they don't need to be asked in the first place.
My interactions with professors usually went something like this:
"I don't understand how this answer was arrived at." Prof scrutinizes the textbook for a while, then says "ah, you have found an error in the text."
I wonder if Jill can handle that kind of interaction with students?
There are many questions Jill can't handle. Those questions were reserved for human teaching assistants.
It just happens that women are notably absent from historical church leaders
Interestingly, you haven't complained about the fact that the proportion of women recognized by the church as saints far exceeds the proportion of women awarded Nobel Prizes in the sciences.
Economic growth is the pleasurable way to increase tax revenue, in both the short term and the long term. Raising tax rates is the painful way to increase tax revenue, and it sometimes has the opposite effect in the long term.
How many people remember the way your search terms used to be highlighted in color on Google's cached copy of a page?
I would always click to the cached copy rather than the original page. When your eye was immediately drawn to the highlighted words you were searching for, it was a huge timesaver (especially on large pages; no need to use your browser's Find command).
Now multiply that time savings by the billions of Google searches that are conducted every year. The loss of that feature is a major hit on the productivity of the human race.
This has led to lower taxes without corresponding cuts in spending.
"Taxes" is a vague word. Please use the more precise terms "tax rates" and/or "tax revenue."
Your statement gives the impression that tax revenue is lower. No, revenue is at record-high levels. And that makes the size of our ongoing budget deficits all the more depressing; these deficits exist because the insatiable spending outpaces the record-high revenue.
Bush 43 reduced tax rates for all taxpayers, but those reductions had sunset provisions that made them expire at the end of 2010. Interestingly, the Democratic Congress of 2010 thought it unwise to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire during the weak economic recovery, and extended them to 2012 for all taxpayers via the "Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010," which President Obama signed. In 2012, he signed legislation making the Bush tax cuts permanent for anyone making under $400,000 per year. I'm glad a realization of economic reality made Democrats abandon their campaign promises to entirely roll back the Bush tax cuts.
spending = revenue + deficit Now, just tackle the spending side of the equation, where the problem lies.
Examining the track record of predictions made by those on both sides of the debate has its place.
Show me a doom-and-gloom climate prediction that has come true. Just one. I have shown you 107 that have not come true. How many failed predictions will it take to shake your faith in those who make such predictions? 1000?
My own prediction, so far, has come true. Allow me to explain it.
Twelve years ago, I examined sea level data going back to 1850, and saw that - sea level was rising at an average rate of 2 millimeters per year before humans started having an appreciable impact on CO2 levels - it continued to rise at that same rate after humans had caused a major increase in atmospheric CO2 levels
I predicted that sea level would continue to rise at an average rate of 2 millimeters per year. (Really, it was a no-brainer to predict that that steady trend, which showed no influence from human activity, would continue.)
Twelve years later, my prediction has been right on the money, unlike those of the climate alarmists.
And does the fact that you don't take me "seriously" cause you to disagree with my main point: that an air-conditioned habitat, where the outside temperature is 46 degrees Celsius, is far more habitable than a non-air-conditioned habitat that swelters in 44-degree weather?
The assertion: these regions will be less habitable than in pre-industrial times, when air conditioning hadn't been invented.
Assuming this climate prediction comes true (very dubious, as no previous prediction has come true); sorry, but I'll take 46 degrees Celsius and an air-conditioned residence over 44 degrees Celsius and no air conditioning, any day.
Now, if you want to talk about people in that region not being able to afford air conditioning, that is a different problem, caused by insufficient economic growth.
Here's an excellent article by Ashlee Vance about a self-driving neural net-based system created by one man, George Hotz: http://www.bloomberg.com/featu...
It contains one passage that sums up my fears:
Hotz hadn't programmed any of these behaviors into the vehicle. He can't really explain all the reasons it does what it does. It's started making decisions on its own.
This will come back to bite us. More than once. Systems can exhibit unexpected behavior even when the inventor has an excellent understanding of the invention; here, a very bright inventor seems to have no hope of fully understanding things.
Unexpected behavior from the control system of an object that has a lot of kinetic energy is usually bad. And a car is not the most dangerous thing you can put a neural net in charge of.
SpaceX will be the first entity to place humans on Mars.
And even after that upset is in the history books, there will still be some people who cling to the fantasy that government does things more efficiently than private enterprise.
The first emails were text-only. Then at some point email became a much more versatile communication tool, because we gained the ability to embed images. (When did that happen? I'm guessing about 24 years ago.)
Now, we are long overdue for email clients that let you easily embed video. I'm not talking about - linking to a video file hosted on some third-party server, or - video file attachments, or - having to figure out usage of ungainly templates,
but the convenience of honest-to-goodness embedded videos: when composing messages, the client lets you embed video just as easily as it allows you to embed images. The video data is stored only on the email server until the recipient retrieves the message, and can be played back right in their email client. Nothing appears in their "Downloads" folder, and nothing is handed off to Windows Media Player, or QuickTime Player, or (if using a standalone email client such as Thunderbird) a web browser.
Maybe the free webmail providers are opposed, because it would jack up their storage costs. But that's no reason to cripple the possibilities. They could make it an optional feature for paying members, until the cost of storing embedded videos becomes trivial (as happened long ago to the cost of storing embedded images).
What would it take to make this a reality... RFCs to add to existing email protocols? Or just convincing developers of email clients (like Thunderbird) to add the functionality?
Just one thing. WTF is wrong with having a strong work ethic (Protestant or otherwise)? Why characterize it, like Barad-dÃr, as something that casts a shadow?
there are more people employed now then any time previous
Agreed
mostly due to there being more people then ever before
No. You're saying "If you have babies, jobs for them will come," which is absolutely not the case.
Unless you know someone who, say, makes hand-dipped candles for a living, every worker you know owes the existence of their job to one or more modern technologies.
Disruptive technologies, not babymaking, is the reason there are more people employed today than at any time in human history. If the recent baby boom had been attempted 30000, 3000, or 300 years ago, it would have resulted in a lot of dead babies, not a lot of employed humans.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were you, I would write a little memo to HR, explaining your concern that your prescribed med might show up in the drug test. Paste in a photograph of your prescription pill bottle, with your name clearly visible on its label. State the name and phone number of the prescribing physician.
With that documentation in your file, they'd be dumb to even think about taking action against you as a result of the test.
AC, if you are really Zero__Kelvin,
I don't ask people to contribute to Wikipedia if I think they're wrong.
But if you removed "recursive acronym" from the GNU article, it would be very interesting to find out whether Wikipedia's editors would let that stand.
I'm not going to throw around unsubstantiated accusations like you have done, but it seems like you don't want to make that edit because you're afraid it won't stand.
Interesting find! Jesper promotes his theory on Wikipedia as well as Indiegogo.
However, {{Self-published}} was added on 6 October 2011.
Is it just a coincidence that "grim Jester" is so similar to "Jesper grim"?
Everyone is free to do so. I've added a lot of information to Wikipedia, on topics I care about. I don't care about the topic of whether GNU is a recursive acronym... but I thought you did, since you took time to express disagreement.
Good luck to them. FWIW, their "Quantum holonomy" theory has only a minor mention in the Wikipedia article on quantum gravity.
Then please go make a correction to the second paragraph of this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It says "GNU is a recursive acronym".
Recursive acronyms can be fun and clever. Not everyone immediately groks the concept, but that's no reason to beat ourselves up.
Know economic history: every time a disruptive technology has reduced employment in one category of jobs, other categories of jobs have been created and/or expanded, for a net increase in overall employment.
Minorly disruptive technologies result in a minor net increase in employment. Hugely disruptive technologies result in a huge net increase in employment. There have been no exceptions to this rule.
There are more people employed today than at any time in history. This is true because of, not in spite of, the modern technologies that put a multiplier on the amount of work each individual is capable of accomplishing.
Not convinced? Then do this thought experiment: if all modern technologies suddenly disappeared, would employment increase? No; not only would most workers be thrown out of work, they would also starve. (But not before fighting horrific battles over the few remaining scraps of food.)
If you want to put humans out of work, there would be no better way to do so than to eliminate all automation, and return the economy to the state it was in 200 years ago, when it was able to support only a small fraction of the number of jobs that exist today.
Conversely, if you want employment to increase, encourage Wendy's to automate. Multiple jobs in other categories will be created for every fast-food job that is lost.
When any company's management deploys new technologies that make employees more productive, they aren't making any sort of statement about how much money their employees make. But they are contributing to growth and job creation in the overall economy.
Isaac Asimov said in 1978. "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." We should feel the same way, even more so, about progress in automation and robotics.
You can say that the raw materials in each sandwich is $B. What you can't as easily predict though is how much you will pay to keep the lights on
Actually, the cost of electric power is a lot more stable than the cost of food commodities, such as a bushel of wheat.
Fortunately, there is a futures-trading market, which keeps the price of the underlying commodity more stable than it otherwise would be.
You have fallen for a fallacy.
To the extent that Henry Ford paid his employees above-market wages, he had to pass that cost along to Ford's customers -- and nearly 100% of Ford's customers did not work for Ford.
Ford began exporting to other countries very early in its history, so the general standard of living of people all over the world was reduced by this decision: fewer people could afford to buy a Ford product, and those who did go through with the transaction had less money left over than they otherwise would have.
To pay the employees of any company above-market wages benefits a special interest (those employees) at the expense of the general interest (customers and potential customers who do not work for the company).
What Henry Ford chose to pay his employees was Henry Ford's business. Just don't make false claims that decisions like this are good for society in general. They never are.
As an aside...
paying his employees enough to where they could afford one of his cars
Whether an employee can afford the company's products has nothing to do with anything. Do you think Boeing employees should be paid enough to afford a 737?
The working classes have largely been strip-mined for their wealth
Here's an interesting article: United States governments redistributed more than $2 trillion in wealth from the top 40 percent to the bottom 60 percent in 2012.
How many additional trillions in wealth redistribution would it take, to get you to stop claiming that the working classes are being "strip-mined for their wealth"?
Serious question... would you be so kind as to give me a number, so I can understand what your definition of "being strip-mined" is.
From TFA...
Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course's online forum. Sometimes the same questions are asked again and again. Last year he began to wonder if he could automate the burden of answering so many repetitive questions.
The first order of business ought to be updating the course material to answer those frequently-asked-questions, so they don't need to be asked in the first place.
My interactions with professors usually went something like this:
"I don't understand how this answer was arrived at."
Prof scrutinizes the textbook for a while, then says "ah, you have found an error in the text."
I wonder if Jill can handle that kind of interaction with students?
There are many questions Jill can't handle. Those questions were reserved for human teaching assistants.
Ah... the answer is no.
you are improving your own standard of living at the expense of future generations.
Yes, do you remember a scheme to spend borrowed money proposed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2008? He called it "a gift from the future."
Wrong -- future generations would more accurately call it "larceny from the past."
It just happens that women are notably absent from historical church leaders
Interestingly, you haven't complained about the fact that the proportion of women recognized by the church as saints far exceeds the proportion of women awarded Nobel Prizes in the sciences.
Economic growth is the pleasurable way to increase tax revenue, in both the short term and the long term. Raising tax rates is the painful way to increase tax revenue, and it sometimes has the opposite effect in the long term.
How many people remember the way your search terms used to be highlighted in color on Google's cached copy of a page?
I would always click to the cached copy rather than the original page. When your eye was immediately drawn to the highlighted words you were searching for, it was a huge timesaver (especially on large pages; no need to use your browser's Find command).
Now multiply that time savings by the billions of Google searches that are conducted every year. The loss of that feature is a major hit on the productivity of the human race.
This has led to lower taxes without corresponding cuts in spending.
"Taxes" is a vague word. Please use the more precise terms "tax rates" and/or "tax revenue."
Your statement gives the impression that tax revenue is lower. No, revenue is at record-high levels. And that makes the size of our ongoing budget deficits all the more depressing; these deficits exist because the insatiable spending outpaces the record-high revenue.
Bush 43 reduced tax rates for all taxpayers, but those reductions had sunset provisions that made them expire at the end of 2010. Interestingly, the Democratic Congress of 2010 thought it unwise to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire during the weak economic recovery, and extended them to 2012 for all taxpayers via the "Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010," which President Obama signed. In 2012, he signed legislation making the Bush tax cuts permanent for anyone making under $400,000 per year. I'm glad a realization of economic reality made Democrats abandon their campaign promises to entirely roll back the Bush tax cuts.
spending = revenue + deficit
Now, just tackle the spending side of the equation, where the problem lies.
Examining the track record of predictions made by those on both sides of the debate has its place.
Show me a doom-and-gloom climate prediction that has come true. Just one. I have shown you 107 that have not come true. How many failed predictions will it take to shake your faith in those who make such predictions? 1000?
My own prediction, so far, has come true. Allow me to explain it.
Twelve years ago, I examined sea level data going back to 1850, and saw that
- sea level was rising at an average rate of 2 millimeters per year before humans started having an appreciable impact on CO2 levels
- it continued to rise at that same rate after humans had caused a major increase in atmospheric CO2 levels
I predicted that sea level would continue to rise at an average rate of 2 millimeters per year. (Really, it was a no-brainer to predict that that steady trend, which showed no influence from human activity, would continue.)
Twelve years later, my prediction has been right on the money, unlike those of the climate alarmists.
And does the fact that you don't take me "seriously" cause you to disagree with my main point: that an air-conditioned habitat, where the outside temperature is 46 degrees Celsius, is far more habitable than a non-air-conditioned habitat that swelters in 44-degree weather?
The assertion: these regions will be less habitable than in pre-industrial times, when air conditioning hadn't been invented.
Assuming this climate prediction comes true (very dubious, as no previous prediction has come true); sorry, but I'll take 46 degrees Celsius and an air-conditioned residence over 44 degrees Celsius and no air conditioning, any day.
Now, if you want to talk about people in that region not being able to afford air conditioning, that is a different problem, caused by insufficient economic growth.
Here's an excellent article by Ashlee Vance about a self-driving neural net-based system created by one man, George Hotz: http://www.bloomberg.com/featu...
It contains one passage that sums up my fears:
Hotz hadn't programmed any of these behaviors into the vehicle. He can't really explain all the reasons it does what it does. It's started making decisions on its own.
This will come back to bite us. More than once. Systems can exhibit unexpected behavior even when the inventor has an excellent understanding of the invention; here, a very bright inventor seems to have no hope of fully understanding things.
Unexpected behavior from the control system of an object that has a lot of kinetic energy is usually bad. And a car is not the most dangerous thing you can put a neural net in charge of.
SpaceX will be the first entity to place humans on Mars.
And even after that upset is in the history books, there will still be some people who cling to the fantasy that government does things more efficiently than private enterprise.
So you believe the ability to embed images should be removed from email?
Are you also in favor of not allowing images to appear in textbooks? They should be about written communication!
The first emails were text-only. Then at some point email became a much more versatile communication tool, because we gained the ability to embed images. (When did that happen? I'm guessing about 24 years ago.)
Now, we are long overdue for email clients that let you easily embed video. I'm not talking about
- linking to a video file hosted on some third-party server, or
- video file attachments, or
- having to figure out usage of ungainly templates,
but the convenience of honest-to-goodness embedded videos: when composing messages, the client lets you embed video just as easily as it allows you to embed images. The video data is stored only on the email server until the recipient retrieves the message, and can be played back right in their email client. Nothing appears in their "Downloads" folder, and nothing is handed off to Windows Media Player, or QuickTime Player, or (if using a standalone email client such as Thunderbird) a web browser.
Maybe the free webmail providers are opposed, because it would jack up their storage costs. But that's no reason to cripple the possibilities. They could make it an optional feature for paying members, until the cost of storing embedded videos becomes trivial (as happened long ago to the cost of storing embedded images).
What would it take to make this a reality... RFCs to add to existing email protocols? Or just convincing developers of email clients (like Thunderbird) to add the functionality?
Just one thing. WTF is wrong with having a strong work ethic (Protestant or otherwise)? Why characterize it, like Barad-dÃr, as something that casts a shadow?
there are more people employed now then any time previous
Agreed
mostly due to there being more people then ever before
No. You're saying "If you have babies, jobs for them will come," which is absolutely not the case.
Unless you know someone who, say, makes hand-dipped candles for a living, every worker you know owes the existence of their job to one or more modern technologies.
Disruptive technologies, not babymaking, is the reason there are more people employed today than at any time in human history. If the recent baby boom had been attempted 30000, 3000, or 300 years ago, it would have resulted in a lot of dead babies, not a lot of employed humans.