And, really, let's be honest... the entire US foreign policy/trade policy is "America First" and is entirely built on American exceptionalism and local firms getting a leg up.
What you'll have to learn is in tandem to the notion of American Exceptionalism is the rest of the world not giving a fuck and refusing to treat you like spoiled children who feel entitled to a better deal.
American Exceptionalism has nothing to do with interactions with any other country, it is merely an exploration of how and why some little upstart nothing of a country managed to go from a deceleration of independence in 1776 to one of the top 2 world powers in 1976. Other countries have been around for hundreds of years longer, so it it not the age. The individual people are no different from people anywhere else in the world, so it is not the people. Other countries in the Americas were not greatly impacted by the world wars, etc.
In the end, the only thing really exceptional about the United States are the core tenants of freedom and liberty enshrined in our founding documents and, more importantly, respected by our political leaders. This releases the human potential of the american citizen to be as great as their talents and skills allow.
Says the right-wing snowflake. BTW, it's funny how the right-wingers are always going on and on about how businesses shouldn't have to serve gay people if it goes against the belief of the business owner, but if a business determines they don't want toxic, alt-right trolls on their website you guys suddenly do a 180 and baaaah like little babies. The sword cuts both ways, snowflake.
Just like 'You can buy any cake in the store, or any cake in the catalog, but I am not creating a new 'gay' wedding cake design for you' has been heralded from day one as 'refusing service'
Most conservatives seem pretty ok with just voicing concerns, but liberals seem to be all about coercion.
Webcomics have a similar problem when it comes to revenue, and many of them have turned to voluntary donations like Patreon where you can schedule a regular monthly donation to your preferred sites.
Combined with some unobtrusive ads, it seems to work pretty well for lots of artists. (some even add bonus content for those that donate over a certain amount, such as a browser cookie that disables the ads on their site for the month)
One of my favorite counters to references of the 'correctness' of the English language: 'The English Language is the product of Saxon sailors attempting to make time with Anglican bar-maids and is no more legitimate than any other issue of those unions.'
Another is: 'The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.' -James Nicoll
Perhaps one of the reasons that English is so popular as a language is that if you abuse whatever language you grew up speaking until it is no longer recognizable as the original language, you could easily claim that it is a dialect of English and it would be hard to dispute the claim...
Except that in the 1770's forming a militia was roughly similar to a Sheriff gathering a posse in the 1870's to hunt down a dangerous outlaw or how modern law enforcement may enlist the help of civilian volunteers to find someone lost in a wilderness area. Something more or less done on a few hours/days notice in order to achieve a specific goal.
Just because there has not been a recent need for well armed groups of civilians to be enlisted by government officers in many parts of the US, does not mean that having that resource available is a bad thing. (Search parties in areas with dangerous wild animals where parties are instructed to be armed would count as modern militias, but most of the people asking for tighter gun controls are not living in areas where that is an issue)
Note: The 'Wolverines' from "Red Dawn" would be a militia, as would most armed and organized groups of 'preppers' or 'survivalists'. A militia need not be government sanctioned.
What's happening now doesn't fit with it's purpose either but there you go. There are no more injuns to defend from and the federal government just flat out cannot be kept in check by an armed populace unless the intention is for battle with government which just no.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure,” -Jefferson 1787
So yes, battling with the government was indeed one of the things that the original founders deemed not only appropriate but necessary.
The Obama administration wasn't spying on the candidate of the opposing political party, they were monitoring someone engaging in illegal activity who was also communicating with the candidate of the opposing political party.
Except that they gave up on that investigation due to lack of evidence, then re-started it a year later, as soon as he became the campaign manager for a political opponent of the sitting president. I don't know how often secret investigations get re-started after they are dropped due to not finding anything, but the timing on this seems very suspicious to me.
There is no reason to worry about glacier covering being lost due to the end of the last Ice Age. You might as well worry about asteroids.
That is sort of like saying 'My gas tank is empty because I am out of gas.'
By definition, our _current_ ice age will end when we no-longer have locations with year-round Ice in both the northern and southern hemisphere(ie glaciers and ice-caps)
I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
Of course, it's meaningless to begin with. "Change" is what the climate DOES, always has, always will. The entire Gore-ful panic is designed to separate the people from their money and to allow the politicians to fun things forever.
And how is it that you know that climate has changed in the past. Do you really believe the scientists who told you this? They are the same scientists who you don't believe when they tell you that AGW is a problem. Are you just going to cherry pick based on what you want to believe?
When someone says 'according to my research, X seems to be the case', people will generally say, meh, ok.
When someone says 'X is the case and therefore everyone must do Y' people get very suspicious, especially when Y is something that enriches the speaker at the expense of the audience.
Add in bits like 'or humanity is domed' or 'even if I am wrong the risk is too great to ignore' and you lose even more credibility. Spokespeople who do not practice what they preach will quickly show any cause to be a scam, even if it is not(or not entirely). If enough time passes that some of those dooms-day predictions turn out to be provably false, then you lose even more credibility.
Unfortunately, even if AGW turns out to be an immediate existential threat to humanity, the politicians and other shysters have driven it's credibility so far underground that the name had to be changed twice(global cooling -> global warming -> climate change). And the continued exaggerations and FUD are taking it past the point where for many people, an unwashed hobo yelling about martians on a street corner while wearing a placard saying 'the end is near' is more credible.
TL;DR: The scientists with no vested interest in what we believe are much more credible than the people who try to control others based on FUD, even if that FUD may have some scientific basis behind parts of it. (and that FUD makes any real science related to it much harder to believe)
A thousand years ago, Christians were busy burning heretics while Arab physicians under the Fatamids were inventing what we now call "surgery".
There's plenty more, if you care to do a little reading.
It took about a thousand years for the followers of a man who admonished one of his followers for striking at one of the people who came to take the leader away to be tortured to death to have officially sanctioned warfare with special rewards in the afterlife guaranteed to those who died for the cause(I believe crusaders were promised a place in heaven if they died for the cause), but after a few hundred years of intermittent fighting, it was given up as not being appropriate, even though it was primarily to 'push back those that took the holy-land.' Currently the only 'county' run by this religion is less than half of a square kilometer of an Italian city, with a police force but no other military of its own.
Compared to a religious leader who spent a good chunk of his life at war, and has promised rewards for anyone who dies for the cause since the foundation of the religion. Not to mention the immediate successors that carried on the war for a good hundred years after his death, or the centuries of piracy(look up Barbary pirates, it was Muslim pirates that inspired the 'millions for defense but not one penny in tribute' quote) and capturing and selling slaves(I think that Muslim slavers provided a majority of the African slaves to the southern US, but it may just have been a plurality).
And clearly they have not decided that this is a bad idea because wikipedia lists 25 on-going Jihad bil Saif (Jihad by the sword) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sure any group of humans that has been around for 2000+ years will have some bad actors, even some in power, but that does not excuse the consistent bad behavior of other, younger groups(Mohammed lived in the 7th century).
I would be greatly surprised if it were difficult to name 2 Muslim 'bad behaviors' of similar scope for every Christian 'bad behavior,' even though Christianity is much larger and nearly half-again as old.
If they are truly as good as an average human, then they could adapt to drive in that traffic if humans can. I suspect the 'as good as an average human' is in fact a lie though, and no company is actually close to that.
It is generally accepted both that dogs have a better sense of smell than humans and that bats have better high-frequency hearing than humans. Neither one needs to be better than humans at algebra to be better than humans in their specific niche.
Automated vehicles are usually better than humans for long-distance highway driving. Humans tend to gradually lose focus and grow tired, an automated truck would be just as alert in hour 25 of a 2000 mile drive as it was in hour 1, but with humans that is far from the case.
Automated vehicles are not required to be better than the median driver when fresh, just consistently better than the distracted/tired/drunk/inexperienced/half-blind/reckless drivers that cause most accidents.
Yes. It's called a living wage. And yes, even summer jobs should pay a living wage. (BTW, most minimum wage jobs are held by adults struggling to support their families, not teens on summer break.)
That would be because as the minimum wage increases, the universe of potential jobs shrinks(at $15/hr, any jobs only worth $10/hr no longer exist), and as competition for those jobs grows, employers can demand more from those employees (harder work, poorer conditions, etc) until the number of willing applicants shrinks to the number of available positions. If your children depend on you, then you are willing to put up with a lot more excrement then if you just want to buy a new x-box.
The discussion is about giving people enough money to afford food and shelter, not limiting their potential earnings.[...]
Minimum wage has nothing to do with 'Giving' money(except for campaign contributions). Employment is about earning money by exchanging services for compensation, and only makes sense when those services provide more value to the employer than the cost of the compensation.
Minimum wage is about creating a minimum level of productivity, below which a person becomes unemployable. (it also affects a number of union negotiated contracts, and reduces competition, but that is a different argument)
Minimum wage does nothing for the person who does a great job, who the employer is afraid of losing to the competition. Minimum wage makes people who are not able to provide enough added-value unemployable. Minimum wage raises the minimum price point of human labor so that automation is more competitive for more jobs. Minimum wage also increases the risk to the employer when hiring(they lose more money if the new hire cannot do the job effectively) When a given task is only worth a certain amount, anyone hired to do that task must complete it more quickly to be cost-effective when minimum wage goes up.(and if it cannot be done more quickly, then it is just not cost-effective to have it done, eliminating the job entirely)
The *only* reason minimum wage even sounds like a good idea, is the belief that employers are sitting on huge piles of cash that they *could* give to their employees but choose not to. While this may be true in a few rare cases(see Apple), the vast majority of employers invest in growing their company with every spare nickle they can scrounge.
The problem is that these are not "entry positions". They are the only jobs available for people trying to support a family. They don't pay enough for one person to live on and certainly not enough to support a family. Funny... "simply look for the next job and find one that pays more"
Previous increases in minimum wage eliminated the truly entry level positions and the associated on the job training that would have allowed these people more freedom both to move up to higher paying jobs(possibly at a different company), or to start their own company(with it's own entry level positions).
It also means that the people trying to raise a family at the new minimum wage must compete with all of those who do not need to support a family and just want some extra cash such as students. Increased competition for a job means that the employer can provide fewer benefits and less tolerable working conditions until there are only just enough people desperate enough for the job to fill all of the available positions.
Then again the politicians bragging about raising the minimum wage do not care about unintended consequences, they just want their sound-bite and photo-op.
If the business didn't have a valid business plan because they didn't properly budget for labor, that just artificially lowers the price of the goods to fake a profit.
Profit = income-Cost of Goods Sold(COGS) COGS = Raw material costs + Labor costs
Nowhere does it state that there is a minimum labor cost for the profit to be real, you just need the COGS to be less than the price the customer is willing to pay for those goods.
If given good or service cannot be produced for a price customers are willing to pay, then it cannot be produced by a for-profit business, and that business will need 0 labor for that good.
With Minimum wage, you put a floor on the productivity of workers that can be hired. If the minimum wage is $15, and the laborer in question cannot provide at least $15 of added value in an hour, then that laborer is now unemployable.
This can be fixed by A) eliminating the minimum wage or B) Allow contracts that prevent a given laborer from leaving a given job until their employer has recouped the cost of training them up to a skill level that allows them to provide more than $15 of added value per hour.
note: B will only work for laborers that can be trained up to the required level of ability, and when an employer is willing to gamble that a given potential employee is sufficiently trainable.
Accenture was previously known as Author Anderson Consulting, which was a distinct organization from Author Anderson Financial Services(the one with the notorious problem). Accenture changed their name because the old one was contaminated by association, not because they specifically did anything wrong.
And Accenture has been doing lots of tech hiring for at least a dozen years now. (the culture is very big on 'up or out').
No comment on how effective their products are however(they are quite happy to hire 270 women to produce a baby in 1 day if that is what the client wants).
Source: Worked for Accenture from 2004-2007(shortly after the name change)
You can't have a free society without freedom of religion. People have a right to believe in fairy tails and talk and sing to an imaginary creature, however silly and pointless that may sound to people who are not religious.
I believe they were providing an indirect quote of Churchill in answer to the poster that asked what Churchill would say: (from http://thefederalistpapers.org... ) Churchill: [...]"The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men."[...]
While I agree that freedom of belief and religion are essential to a free society, I do not know how the practice of a religion that mandates ownership of other adult humans can be tolerated within such a society.
You would think that if this was and is the case, that it would have received more mention in discussions about Islam.
I'm in Canada, and I have seen people being escorted out of work in less than 30 minutes.
Some guy is called in a meeting, he goes there nonchalantly not knowing what is going to happen, then he has to give back his badge/key and is escorted by security outside the building. Some people were not even allowed to say "bye" to their coworker.
It works like this in North America.
Last time that happened to me(laid off, not fired), I got 2 weeks severance and 6 weeks accumulated PTO paid out. Found a new job in about a month and got 13 months of income that year.
We don't have flying cars for a number of reasons. Efficiency, reliability, user safety, public safety, supporting infrastructure (where to land), new complex regulatory requirements. eg, what about cars flying over your house.
Sure we do, they are called helicopters, they are just not practical for most people.
Actually, all of the ground landings take place right next to the ocean.
It's not that hard to conceive of a rocket booster coming back to Earth going off course by a fair distance and "landing" where it shouldn't. Definitely less chance of harm to property if this happens over the ocean than over land. It's not a worry that keeps me up at night or anything but it's certainly among the possible outcomes.
Have you ever been to Cape Canaveral? The little pointy bit is an Airforce base, and basically the rest of it is owned by NASA, mostly devoted to a secure zone/wilderness preserve.
Then you have a nice long causeway with a lots of water as a further buffer before you get to anything like privately owned land.
I am pretty sure that SpaceX has some means to destroy the returning booster before it gets close to the ground the 10+ miles off course it would need to be before getting close to private property.
Musk must be engaging in some serious 1984-esque doublethink here. Or maybe Trump is blackmailing him in some way?
It would be suicidal for the CEO of any company which has government contracts as a major part of its revenue(SpaceX) to snub the president elect. Not to mention the foolishness of refusing to advise a president who is probably looking at ending subsidies that makes another of your companies more profitable(Tesla).
There is also the angle of advising the president towards actions that reflect your world view, even if that world-view is not shared('we should push LED lights because they last longer and are safer than either incandescent or compact florescent, not to mention delaying the need to build more expensive power plants and power network upgrades' without even mentioning that the reduced power requirements could help fight global warming for example)
Actually, I'm pretty sympathetic to the (mostly real) grievances of Trump voters. My biggest problems with Trump are, in descending order:
- His general disdain for constitutional rights. People think it's no big deal now because they aren't the target of his disgust, but wait until the day you disagree with him.
His threatening remarks against that publisher are worrisome, but it was not a recurring theme as far as I am aware, so I am hopeful that it was just blowing hot-air.
Of course Hillary and Obama have plenty of public policy history that shows she cannot be trusted with any sort of power or authority, so it is sort of a fart vs hurricane type situation.
- I think he has given license to political and racial violence.
As opposed to the democratic party that paid for the mentally ill to wave inflammatory signs at trump rallies and allies itself with BLM? I am also pretty sure that Trump did not fire-bomb his own offices...
- And I don't think for one minute his tax policy will do anything other than benefit the very wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
But hey, maybe I am completely off-base here. Maybe everything is going to be fine, and His Trumpiness will bring peace and prosperity to all Americans. If that happens, I'll vote for him in 2020. It wouldn't be the first time I switched my vote based on a president's job performance.
As best as I can tell, Trump treats his employees well and finds highly capable people to put into positions of authority so he can be free move on to his next project. If he maintains this behavior with the presidency, it could be a major boon for the country.
At best he will bull-doze his way through the legislature to push through things like a term-limit amendment for us to vote on and a Reganesque tax policy. If not, it is not unlikely he will get fed up with the sausage-making in DC and hand everything but the title over to Pence. At worst he will be ham-strung by the Washington establishment and not get much of anything done.
Either one sounds better than letting Hillary sell our government to the highest bidder.
2. There is no federally issued or even state issue (to my knowledge) photo ID in the US. This is the biggest reason voter photo ID laws are regularly overturned as a form of voter suppression. If the government either at the state or federal level had a system for the distribution of free of charge photo IDs, these laws would be okay. However in this grand old free country of ours no such thing exists. You must pay for a driver's license and or state ID or a federally issued passport. Many low income individuals have no need for these and in many cases could not afford one if they wanted it. If the government makes getting a passport as free and easy as your social security card, which as it happens is an acceptable form of non-photo ID for voting, then this issue would be different.
To the best of my knowledge, every state that currently requires and ID to vote (like Texas) has a free state photo ID available.(Free Texas ID: http://www.dps.texas.gov/drive... ) In the past, these free IDs have not been adequate to counter the cries of 'voter suppression' that have often managed to get voter ID laws removed.
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And, really, let's be honest ... the entire US foreign policy/trade policy is "America First" and is entirely built on American exceptionalism and local firms getting a leg up.
What you'll have to learn is in tandem to the notion of American Exceptionalism is the rest of the world not giving a fuck and refusing to treat you like spoiled children who feel entitled to a better deal.
American Exceptionalism has nothing to do with interactions with any other country, it is merely an exploration of how and why some little upstart nothing of a country managed to go from a deceleration of independence in 1776 to one of the top 2 world powers in 1976.
Other countries have been around for hundreds of years longer, so it it not the age. The individual people are no different from people anywhere else in the world, so it is not the people. Other countries in the Americas were not greatly impacted by the world wars, etc.
In the end, the only thing really exceptional about the United States are the core tenants of freedom and liberty enshrined in our founding documents and, more importantly, respected by our political leaders. This releases the human potential of the american citizen to be as great as their talents and skills allow.
False equivalency is false.
(...)
Says the right-wing snowflake. BTW, it's funny how the right-wingers are always going on and on about how businesses shouldn't have to serve gay people if it goes against the belief of the business owner, but if a business determines they don't want toxic, alt-right trolls on their website you guys suddenly do a 180 and baaaah like little babies. The sword cuts both ways, snowflake.
Just like 'You can buy any cake in the store, or any cake in the catalog, but I am not creating a new 'gay' wedding cake design for you' has been heralded from day one as 'refusing service'
Most conservatives seem pretty ok with just voicing concerns, but liberals seem to be all about coercion.
Webcomics have a similar problem when it comes to revenue, and many of them have turned to voluntary donations like Patreon where you can schedule a regular monthly donation to your preferred sites.
Combined with some unobtrusive ads, it seems to work pretty well for lots of artists.
(some even add bonus content for those that donate over a certain amount, such as a browser cookie that disables the ads on their site for the month)
One of my favorite counters to references of the 'correctness' of the English language:
'The English Language is the product of Saxon sailors attempting to make time with Anglican bar-maids and is no more legitimate than any other issue of those unions.'
Another is:
'The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.' -James Nicoll
Perhaps one of the reasons that English is so popular as a language is that if you abuse whatever language you grew up speaking until it is no longer recognizable as the original language, you could easily claim that it is a dialect of English and it would be hard to dispute the claim...
Except that in the 1770's forming a militia was roughly similar to a Sheriff gathering a posse in the 1870's to hunt down a dangerous outlaw or how modern law enforcement may enlist the help of civilian volunteers to find someone lost in a wilderness area.
Something more or less done on a few hours/days notice in order to achieve a specific goal.
Just because there has not been a recent need for well armed groups of civilians to be enlisted by government officers in many parts of the US, does not mean that having that resource available is a bad thing. (Search parties in areas with dangerous wild animals where parties are instructed to be armed would count as modern militias, but most of the people asking for tighter gun controls are not living in areas where that is an issue)
Note: The 'Wolverines' from "Red Dawn" would be a militia, as would most armed and organized groups of 'preppers' or 'survivalists'. A militia need not be government sanctioned.
What's happening now doesn't fit with it's purpose either but there you go. There are no more injuns to defend from and the federal government just flat out cannot be kept in check by an armed populace unless the intention is for battle with government which just no.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure,” -Jefferson 1787
So yes, battling with the government was indeed one of the things that the original founders deemed not only appropriate but necessary.
The Obama administration wasn't spying on the candidate of the opposing political party, they were monitoring someone engaging in illegal activity who was also communicating with the candidate of the opposing political party.
Except that they gave up on that investigation due to lack of evidence, then re-started it a year later, as soon as he became the campaign manager for a political opponent of the sitting president.
I don't know how often secret investigations get re-started after they are dropped due to not finding anything, but the timing on this seems very suspicious to me.
There is no reason to worry about glacier covering being lost due to the end of the last Ice Age. You might as well worry about asteroids.
That is sort of like saying 'My gas tank is empty because I am out of gas.'
By definition, our _current_ ice age will end when we no-longer have locations with year-round Ice in both the northern and southern hemisphere(ie glaciers and ice-caps)
I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
Of course, it's meaningless to begin with. "Change" is what the climate DOES, always has, always will. The entire Gore-ful panic is designed to separate the people from their money and to allow the politicians to fun things forever.
And how is it that you know that climate has changed in the past. Do you really believe the scientists who told you this? They are the same scientists who you don't believe when they tell you that AGW is a problem. Are you just going to cherry pick based on what you want to believe?
When someone says 'according to my research, X seems to be the case', people will generally say, meh, ok.
When someone says 'X is the case and therefore everyone must do Y' people get very suspicious, especially when Y is something that enriches the speaker at the expense of the audience.
Add in bits like 'or humanity is domed' or 'even if I am wrong the risk is too great to ignore' and you lose even more credibility. Spokespeople who do not practice what they preach will quickly show any cause to be a scam, even if it is not(or not entirely).
If enough time passes that some of those dooms-day predictions turn out to be provably false, then you lose even more credibility.
Unfortunately, even if AGW turns out to be an immediate existential threat to humanity, the politicians and other shysters have driven it's credibility so far underground that the name had to be changed twice(global cooling -> global warming -> climate change). And the continued exaggerations and FUD are taking it past the point where for many people, an unwashed hobo yelling about martians on a street corner while wearing a placard saying 'the end is near' is more credible.
TL;DR:
The scientists with no vested interest in what we believe are much more credible than the people who try to control others based on FUD, even if that FUD may have some scientific basis behind parts of it. (and that FUD makes any real science related to it much harder to believe)
A thousand years ago, Christians were busy burning heretics while Arab physicians under the Fatamids were inventing what we now call "surgery".
There's plenty more, if you care to do a little reading.
It took about a thousand years for the followers of a man who admonished one of his followers for striking at one of the people who came to take the leader away to be tortured to death to have officially sanctioned warfare with special rewards in the afterlife guaranteed to those who died for the cause(I believe crusaders were promised a place in heaven if they died for the cause), but after a few hundred years of intermittent fighting, it was given up as not being appropriate, even though it was primarily to 'push back those that took the holy-land.' Currently the only 'county' run by this religion is less than half of a square kilometer of an Italian city, with a police force but no other military of its own.
Compared to a religious leader who spent a good chunk of his life at war, and has promised rewards for anyone who dies for the cause since the foundation of the religion. Not to mention the immediate successors that carried on the war for a good hundred years after his death, or the centuries of piracy(look up Barbary pirates, it was Muslim pirates that inspired the 'millions for defense but not one penny in tribute' quote) and capturing and selling slaves(I think that Muslim slavers provided a majority of the African slaves to the southern US, but it may just have been a plurality).
And clearly they have not decided that this is a bad idea because wikipedia lists 25 on-going Jihad bil Saif (Jihad by the sword)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sure any group of humans that has been around for 2000+ years will have some bad actors, even some in power, but that does not excuse the consistent bad behavior of other, younger groups(Mohammed lived in the 7th century).
I would be greatly surprised if it were difficult to name 2 Muslim 'bad behaviors' of similar scope for every Christian 'bad behavior,' even though Christianity is much larger and nearly half-again as old.
If they are truly as good as an average human, then they could adapt to drive in that traffic if humans can. I suspect the 'as good as an average human' is in fact a lie though, and no company is actually close to that.
It is generally accepted both that dogs have a better sense of smell than humans and that bats have better high-frequency hearing than humans.
Neither one needs to be better than humans at algebra to be better than humans in their specific niche.
Automated vehicles are usually better than humans for long-distance highway driving.
Humans tend to gradually lose focus and grow tired, an automated truck would be just as alert in hour 25 of a 2000 mile drive as it was in hour 1, but with humans that is far from the case.
Automated vehicles are not required to be better than the median driver when fresh, just consistently better than the distracted/tired/drunk/inexperienced/half-blind/reckless drivers that cause most accidents.
Yes. It's called a living wage.
And yes, even summer jobs should pay a living wage. (BTW, most minimum wage jobs are held by adults struggling to support their families, not teens on summer break.)
That would be because as the minimum wage increases, the universe of potential jobs shrinks(at $15/hr, any jobs only worth $10/hr no longer exist), and as competition for those jobs grows, employers can demand more from those employees (harder work, poorer conditions, etc) until the number of willing applicants shrinks to the number of available positions. If your children depend on you, then you are willing to put up with a lot more excrement then if you just want to buy a new x-box.
The discussion is about giving people enough money to afford food and shelter, not limiting their potential earnings.[...]
Minimum wage has nothing to do with 'Giving' money(except for campaign contributions).
Employment is about earning money by exchanging services for compensation, and only makes sense when those services provide more value to the employer than the cost of the compensation.
Minimum wage is about creating a minimum level of productivity, below which a person becomes unemployable.
(it also affects a number of union negotiated contracts, and reduces competition, but that is a different argument)
Minimum wage does nothing for the person who does a great job, who the employer is afraid of losing to the competition.
Minimum wage makes people who are not able to provide enough added-value unemployable.
Minimum wage raises the minimum price point of human labor so that automation is more competitive for more jobs.
Minimum wage also increases the risk to the employer when hiring(they lose more money if the new hire cannot do the job effectively)
When a given task is only worth a certain amount, anyone hired to do that task must complete it more quickly to be cost-effective when minimum wage goes up.(and if it cannot be done more quickly, then it is just not cost-effective to have it done, eliminating the job entirely)
The *only* reason minimum wage even sounds like a good idea, is the belief that employers are sitting on huge piles of cash that they *could* give to their employees but choose not to. While this may be true in a few rare cases(see Apple), the vast majority of employers invest in growing their company with every spare nickle they can scrounge.
The problem is that these are not "entry positions". They are the only jobs available for people trying to support a family. They don't pay enough for one person to live on and certainly not enough to support a family.
Funny... "simply look for the next job and find one that pays more"
Previous increases in minimum wage eliminated the truly entry level positions and the associated on the job training that would have allowed these people more freedom both to move up to higher paying jobs(possibly at a different company), or to start their own company(with it's own entry level positions).
It also means that the people trying to raise a family at the new minimum wage must compete with all of those who do not need to support a family and just want some extra cash such as students. Increased competition for a job means that the employer can provide fewer benefits and less tolerable working conditions until there are only just enough people desperate enough for the job to fill all of the available positions.
Then again the politicians bragging about raising the minimum wage do not care about unintended consequences, they just want their sound-bite and photo-op.
If the business didn't have a valid business plan because they didn't properly budget for labor, that just artificially lowers the price of the goods to fake a profit.
Profit = income-Cost of Goods Sold(COGS)
COGS = Raw material costs + Labor costs
Nowhere does it state that there is a minimum labor cost for the profit to be real, you just need the COGS to be less than the price the customer is willing to pay for those goods.
If given good or service cannot be produced for a price customers are willing to pay, then it cannot be produced by a for-profit business, and that business will need 0 labor for that good.
With Minimum wage, you put a floor on the productivity of workers that can be hired. If the minimum wage is $15, and the laborer in question cannot provide at least $15 of added value in an hour, then that laborer is now unemployable.
This can be fixed by
A) eliminating the minimum wage
or B) Allow contracts that prevent a given laborer from leaving a given job until their employer has recouped the cost of training them up to a skill level that allows them to provide more than $15 of added value per hour.
note: B will only work for laborers that can be trained up to the required level of ability, and when an employer is willing to gamble that a given potential employee is sufficiently trainable.
Accenture was previously known as Author Anderson Consulting, which was a distinct organization from Author Anderson Financial Services(the one with the notorious problem).
Accenture changed their name because the old one was contaminated by association, not because they specifically did anything wrong.
And Accenture has been doing lots of tech hiring for at least a dozen years now. (the culture is very big on 'up or out').
No comment on how effective their products are however(they are quite happy to hire 270 women to produce a baby in 1 day if that is what the client wants).
Source: Worked for Accenture from 2004-2007(shortly after the name change)
You can't have a free society without freedom of religion. People have a right to believe in fairy tails and talk and sing to an imaginary creature, however silly and pointless that may sound to people who are not religious.
I believe they were providing an indirect quote of Churchill in answer to the poster that asked what Churchill would say:
(from http://thefederalistpapers.org... )
Churchill: [...]"The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men."[...]
While I agree that freedom of belief and religion are essential to a free society, I do not know how the practice of a religion that mandates ownership of other adult humans can be tolerated within such a society.
You would think that if this was and is the case, that it would have received more mention in discussions about Islam.
I'm in Canada, and I have seen people being escorted out of work in less than 30 minutes.
Some guy is called in a meeting, he goes there nonchalantly not knowing what is going to happen, then he has to give back his badge/key and is escorted by security outside the building. Some people were not even allowed to say "bye" to their coworker.
It works like this in North America.
Last time that happened to me(laid off, not fired), I got 2 weeks severance and 6 weeks accumulated PTO paid out.
Found a new job in about a month and got 13 months of income that year.
We don't have flying cars for a number of reasons. Efficiency, reliability, user safety, public safety, supporting infrastructure (where to land), new complex regulatory requirements. eg, what about cars flying over your house.
Sure we do, they are called helicopters, they are just not practical for most people.
Actually, all of the ground landings take place right next to the ocean.
It's not that hard to conceive of a rocket booster coming back to Earth going off course by a fair distance and "landing" where it shouldn't. Definitely less chance of harm to property if this happens over the ocean than over land. It's not a worry that keeps me up at night or anything but it's certainly among the possible outcomes.
Have you ever been to Cape Canaveral?
The little pointy bit is an Airforce base, and basically the rest of it is owned by NASA, mostly devoted to a secure zone/wilderness preserve.
Then you have a nice long causeway with a lots of water as a further buffer before you get to anything like privately owned land.
I am pretty sure that SpaceX has some means to destroy the returning booster before it gets close to the ground the 10+ miles off course it would need to be before getting close to private property.
Carbonic acid? What's the pH of sea water treated with baking soda?
Sea water is currently about PH 8, Baking Soda is about PH 9, so I would guess it would be between 8 and 9 depending on the proportions.
Musk must be engaging in some serious 1984-esque doublethink here. Or maybe Trump is blackmailing him in some way?
It would be suicidal for the CEO of any company which has government contracts as a major part of its revenue(SpaceX) to snub the president elect.
Not to mention the foolishness of refusing to advise a president who is probably looking at ending subsidies that makes another of your companies more profitable(Tesla).
There is also the angle of advising the president towards actions that reflect your world view, even if that world-view is not shared('we should push LED lights because they last longer and are safer than either incandescent or compact florescent, not to mention delaying the need to build more expensive power plants and power network upgrades' without even mentioning that the reduced power requirements could help fight global warming for example)
Smartphones that don't have GPS are also a thing. None of my smartphones have ever had GPS.
If you connect to their network, they have a pretty good idea where you are, especially if you are moving.
Actually, I'm pretty sympathetic to the (mostly real) grievances of Trump voters. My biggest problems with Trump are, in descending order:
- His general disdain for constitutional rights. People think it's no big deal now because they aren't the target of his disgust, but wait until the day you disagree with him.
His threatening remarks against that publisher are worrisome, but it was not a recurring theme as far as I am aware, so I am hopeful that it was just blowing hot-air.
Of course Hillary and Obama have plenty of public policy history that shows she cannot be trusted with any sort of power or authority, so it is sort of a fart vs hurricane type situation.
- I think he has given license to political and racial violence.
As opposed to the democratic party that paid for the mentally ill to wave inflammatory signs at trump rallies and allies itself with BLM?
I am also pretty sure that Trump did not fire-bomb his own offices...
- And I don't think for one minute his tax policy will do anything other than benefit the very wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
But hey, maybe I am completely off-base here. Maybe everything is going to be fine, and His Trumpiness will bring peace and prosperity to all Americans. If that happens, I'll vote for him in 2020. It wouldn't be the first time I switched my vote based on a president's job performance.
As best as I can tell, Trump treats his employees well and finds highly capable people to put into positions of authority so he can be free move on to his next project.
If he maintains this behavior with the presidency, it could be a major boon for the country.
At best he will bull-doze his way through the legislature to push through things like a term-limit amendment for us to vote on and a Reganesque tax policy.
If not, it is not unlikely he will get fed up with the sausage-making in DC and hand everything but the title over to Pence.
At worst he will be ham-strung by the Washington establishment and not get much of anything done.
Either one sounds better than letting Hillary sell our government to the highest bidder.
2. There is no federally issued or even state issue (to my knowledge) photo ID in the US. This is the biggest reason voter photo ID laws are regularly overturned as a form of voter suppression. If the government either at the state or federal level had a system for the distribution of free of charge photo IDs, these laws would be okay. However in this grand old free country of ours no such thing exists. You must pay for a driver's license and or state ID or a federally issued passport. Many low income individuals have no need for these and in many cases could not afford one if they wanted it. If the government makes getting a passport as free and easy as your social security card, which as it happens is an acceptable form of non-photo ID for voting, then this issue would be different.
To the best of my knowledge, every state that currently requires and ID to vote (like Texas) has a free state photo ID available.(Free Texas ID: http://www.dps.texas.gov/drive... )
In the past, these free IDs have not been adequate to counter the cries of 'voter suppression' that have often managed to get voter ID laws removed.