How could crime have "ramped up" when there were so many cops standing around watching them?
Watch the videos from Oakland. The protesters viciously assaulted the police nightsticks, shields, tear-gas cannisters, etc. with military-grade abdominal muscles, heads, and faces.
I'd tell you to watch the New York videos, but the media blackout was quite effective.
Combine that with situations like the CRA, where the banks are told on the one hand to lend prudently, but on the other told they'll be penalized if they fail to lend enough in depressed areas, by definition a riskier prospect.
And yet, the rate of nonperforming loans is higher in non-CRA areas than in CRA areas. House flipping, for instance, is practically nonexistent in areas covered by the CRA.
Oh, wait. Up until relatively recently, the finance industry was dominated by partnerships and LLCs, with the management being primarily owners of the firm. The prospect of a lifetime's work going up in smoke is a very serious disincentive to risk-taking, and in fact "risk management" was a huge part of what they did.
This changed when firms went public and came to be run by employees rather than partners, with the usual issues of agency, of which asymmetrical incentives are high on the list.
I must point out that we'd never bypass the justice system unless the video from the drone showed with a high degree of probability that the suspect appeared to be mentally retarded.
How much melanin does it take to make someone retarded?
This is going to be great for Texas. Their law enforcement productivity has been down lately because the court system has been a bottleneck in processing the whole tips->executions pipeline, but this tool has the potential to bypass almost all of that. They should be able to go from anonymous tip to taking out a crack house with a grenade in mere minutes.
I'm upper middle class. I'm taxed at 15% for FICA plus about 12% federal income tax rate.. so 27% of my income just for federal income tax.
Either your definition of "upper middle class" is very modest indeed (the 12% average only puts you around the median income), or your income is almost entirely capital gains (15% base rate) in which case you're not paying FICA on it. For most people in the lower 3 quintiles, the actual tax take is quite a bit higher than that.
Designing and building trails for the Forest Service, for one. As in, spending more time hiking with a pack and sleeping in a tent than under a roof. In between doing things by hand rather than with power tools because the tools are too hard to get to where the work needs to be done.
Well, OK, we're not married. I'll wait while heads explode all over/.
Anyway, several years ago $DAUGHTER was headed off to University and it was time for her to take responsibility for her own computer, so we went shopping at Fry's and she got the usual mobo, PSU, HDD, video, etc. for the case I bought her. She and $HERSELF (not her mother but...) then built the box and, following the online instructions, did a Stage One installation of Gentoo.
Worked like a champ for four years, she kept it up and all w/o my needing to hold her hand (not that I object to holding her hand, even now.) She only replaced it because a laptop suited her needs better in grad school. So she wiped a new ThinkPad down to bare metal and installed Ubuntu. Here we are four years later and she's doing her dissertation on that ThinkPad, still no help required from Dad.
And before anyone asks:
* No, she's not a CS or other tech major. Sociology, actually.
* She already has a boyfriend and he's about 6'4" of professional outdoorsman.
Inglis was defeated in the Republican primary in June 2010.
Sounds like more than just "in name only" he was their official representative.
Sounds like the Party decided he is a Republican In Name Only. All of that history falls into the "that was then, this is now" category. Now he's complaining that he represents the Real Republican Party, and all of those voters don't count.
Not the question of whether telecommuters goof off. I mean that management hasn't a clue.
As far as I can tell, it's extremely rare for senior management to have any idea what the actual staff do, or especially what value they bring to the company. As far as most senior management know, their employees primarily produce warm chair seats. It follows that the only differences between employees in any job category is:
1) How many hours the seat stays warm, and
2) How much it costs to keep the chair warm.
Thus, the principal employee quality metric is hours/dollar because most employees keep chairs at nearly the same temperature. Longer hours are good, and it's an added bonus to not have to pay for the chairs. An employee who works from home is presumably keeping a chair warm even more than one who comes to the office, so the best possible employee is one who will accept a low wage (typically entry-level in someplace like Nigeria; the chair-warming learning curve isn't terribly steep) and who answers e-mails at all hours of the day, night, and weekend.
And this goes nicely with the Microchip PIC32 (MIPS-based) Arduinoid chipKIT boards that went public at the Bay Area Maker Faire: http://themakersworkbench.com/?q=node/421
Starts with a Bang is an astrophysics professor's coverage of dark matter and what we know about it (including why we believe it makes up most of the matter in the universe.)
So naturally all the comments turn to the subject of The Communist Manifesto rather than Marx' descriptive (not prescriptive) work.
For those who have even glanced at a history of economics, Marx takes on a rather different appearance. Along with John Stuart Mill and a few others, Marx was one of the founders of analyzing the stability of market economies in the wake of early-19th century boom/bust cycles -- which according to prevailing theory were impossible.
Later, Ricardo was so thoroughly embraced (for reasons not relevant here) that most of that prior work was swept under the rug until the Great Depression. Then we had Keynes, Hicks, and others (who disinterred the works of the economists of a century earlier). They in turn were swept under the rug by the 70s until the current depression -- which the prevailing theories of the last 30+ years tell us is impossible.
I've often fantasized about carrying a 2 million candle power hand held rechargeable spotlight to flash people behind me with their brights on.
Stifle that thought. I've seen it in practice.
Quite some years back I was driving home with the kids from the mountains on a Sunday night in the usual heavy two-lane traffic. With a few dozen cars ahead of me there was a major asshole in a jacked-up pickup behind me who kept flashing his high beams, presumably to get me to move over so he could do the same to the next 40 or so cars in line.
We finally got down into four-lane territory (still mountainous) and as we were coming to a turn he whips around us and then lit off a pair of headlamps under his rear bumper. I damn near went into the guardrail as he smoked off.
A while later, down in the valley, I saw him again (I got a good look at him as he was passing.) He was pulled off the road with a patrol cruiser behind him, another diagonally in front of him, and a third blocking him from the highway side. He and his passengers were face down on the dirt (Arizona desert: that sharp stuff isn't just stones) with officers well back with drawn weapons while other checked them over.
My best guess: he tried that trick on the wrong person.
What you want is a reflex reflector. E.g. traffic signs: they reflect incident light back to the source rather than the way a mirror does.
I confess to having long lusted after a way to paint the backs of my cars with the stuff, but I understand it's actually a plastic film. Wonder if I can get it applied the same way ads and such are?
Speaking from 40 years as a Physics/CS/EE, all of the clever things we've learned to do since flint was high tech have been based on having better materials to do them with.
As in, just try to make an airplane or gas turbine engine with 19th century materials. Not happening, steampunk to the contrary.
Same goes for anything else you're going to be doing before you hang up the CAD system for a golf cart.
Slashdot Mirror
How could crime have "ramped up" when there were so many cops standing around watching them?
Watch the videos from Oakland. The protesters viciously assaulted the police nightsticks, shields, tear-gas cannisters, etc. with military-grade abdominal muscles, heads, and faces.
I'd tell you to watch the New York videos, but the media blackout was quite effective.
Combine that with situations like the CRA, where the banks are told on the one hand to lend prudently, but on the other told they'll be penalized if they fail to lend enough in depressed areas, by definition a riskier prospect.
And yet, the rate of nonperforming loans is higher in non-CRA areas than in CRA areas. House flipping, for instance, is practically nonexistent in areas covered by the CRA.
This changed when firms went public and came to be run by employees rather than partners, with the usual issues of agency, of which asymmetrical incentives are high on the list.
By the time I compile 8, 12 will be out and that's the one I'm really waiting for.
I must point out that we'd never bypass the justice system unless the video from the drone showed with a high degree of probability that the suspect appeared to be mentally retarded.
How much melanin does it take to make someone retarded?
This is going to be great for Texas. Their law enforcement productivity has been down lately because the court system has been a bottleneck in processing the whole tips->executions pipeline, but this tool has the potential to bypass almost all of that. They should be able to go from anonymous tip to taking out a crack house with a grenade in mere minutes.
Fox News Should Be Pulled Apart By Wild Weasels.
What did wild weasels ever do to you?
Most significantly, the United States Republican Party?
The government seeing the email is one thing; using it in court as admissible evidence is another
And they would bother doing this "court" thing ... why?
I thought that had been repealed something like ten years ago.
I'm upper middle class. I'm taxed at 15% for FICA plus about 12% federal income tax rate.. so 27% of my income just for federal income tax.
Either your definition of "upper middle class" is very modest indeed (the 12% average only puts you around the median income), or your income is almost entirely capital gains (15% base rate) in which case you're not paying FICA on it. For most people in the lower 3 quintiles, the actual tax take is quite a bit higher than that.
Give me one reason why we should NOT hold corporations accountable for their actions.
Give me one mechanism whereby we can hold them responsible, and you may be on the way to answers.
Designing and building trails for the Forest Service, for one. As in, spending more time hiking with a pack and sleeping in a tent than under a roof. In between doing things by hand rather than with power tools because the tools are too hard to get to where the work needs to be done.
Anyway, several years ago $DAUGHTER was headed off to University and it was time for her to take responsibility for her own computer, so we went shopping at Fry's and she got the usual mobo, PSU, HDD, video, etc. for the case I bought her. She and $HERSELF (not her mother but ...) then built the box and, following the online instructions, did a Stage One installation of Gentoo.
Worked like a champ for four years, she kept it up and all w/o my needing to hold her hand (not that I object to holding her hand, even now.) She only replaced it because a laptop suited her needs better in grad school. So she wiped a new ThinkPad down to bare metal and installed Ubuntu. Here we are four years later and she's doing her dissertation on that ThinkPad, still no help required from Dad.
And before anyone asks:
* No, she's not a CS or other tech major. Sociology, actually.
* She already has a boyfriend and he's about 6'4" of professional outdoorsman.
Inglis was defeated in the Republican primary in June 2010.
Sounds like more than just "in name only" he was their official representative.
Sounds like the Party decided he is a Republican In Name Only. All of that history falls into the "that was then, this is now" category. Now he's complaining that he represents the Real Republican Party, and all of those voters don't count.
Color me unimpressed.
According to former Republican in name only representative Bob Inglis
Text in italics added. Mr. Inglis refutes his own thesis by indulging in fantasy regarding the nature of "conservatism."
As far as I can tell, it's extremely rare for senior management to have any idea what the actual staff do, or especially what value they bring to the company. As far as most senior management know, their employees primarily produce warm chair seats. It follows that the only differences between employees in any job category is:
1) How many hours the seat stays warm, and
2) How much it costs to keep the chair warm.
Thus, the principal employee quality metric is hours/dollar because most employees keep chairs at nearly the same temperature. Longer hours are good, and it's an added bonus to not have to pay for the chairs. An employee who works from home is presumably keeping a chair warm even more than one who comes to the office, so the best possible employee is one who will accept a low wage (typically entry-level in someplace like Nigeria; the chair-warming learning curve isn't terribly steep) and who answers e-mails at all hours of the day, night, and weekend.
And this goes nicely with the Microchip PIC32 (MIPS-based) Arduinoid chipKIT boards that went public at the Bay Area Maker Faire: http://themakersworkbench.com/?q=node/421
Would be hard to pay more ... than we currently do.
We can only hope.
Starts with a Bang is an astrophysics professor's coverage of dark matter and what we know about it (including why we believe it makes up most of the matter in the universe.)
For those who have even glanced at a history of economics, Marx takes on a rather different appearance. Along with John Stuart Mill and a few others, Marx was one of the founders of analyzing the stability of market economies in the wake of early-19th century boom/bust cycles -- which according to prevailing theory were impossible.
Later, Ricardo was so thoroughly embraced (for reasons not relevant here) that most of that prior work was swept under the rug until the Great Depression. Then we had Keynes, Hicks, and others (who disinterred the works of the economists of a century earlier). They in turn were swept under the rug by the 70s until the current depression -- which the prevailing theories of the last 30+ years tell us is impossible.
And so it goes.
I've often fantasized about carrying a 2 million candle power hand held rechargeable spotlight to flash people behind me with their brights on.
Stifle that thought. I've seen it in practice.
Quite some years back I was driving home with the kids from the mountains on a Sunday night in the usual heavy two-lane traffic. With a few dozen cars ahead of me there was a major asshole in a jacked-up pickup behind me who kept flashing his high beams, presumably to get me to move over so he could do the same to the next 40 or so cars in line.
We finally got down into four-lane territory (still mountainous) and as we were coming to a turn he whips around us and then lit off a pair of headlamps under his rear bumper. I damn near went into the guardrail as he smoked off.
A while later, down in the valley, I saw him again (I got a good look at him as he was passing.) He was pulled off the road with a patrol cruiser behind him, another diagonally in front of him, and a third blocking him from the highway side. He and his passengers were face down on the dirt (Arizona desert: that sharp stuff isn't just stones) with officers well back with drawn weapons while other checked them over.
My best guess: he tried that trick on the wrong person.
I confess to having long lusted after a way to paint the backs of my cars with the stuff, but I understand it's actually a plastic film. Wonder if I can get it applied the same way ads and such are?
As in, just try to make an airplane or gas turbine engine with 19th century materials. Not happening, steampunk to the contrary.
Same goes for anything else you're going to be doing before you hang up the CAD system for a golf cart.