I never understood this kind of shit happening in the UK. The US can sorta offer the excuse that there are hundreds of millions of people here, many are idiots, they are spread far and wide across an enormous space and often cluster in rural areas in small towns made up of flaking paint, baling wire and groupthink. They get power and authority over these areas and sometimes this power and authority translates into a successful state or federal position. But the UK is so much smaller by land mass and population. I'd expect that such a limitation would insulate it from the dangerous morons from taking the reigns. Has the UK entirely become apathetic to their current path? It seems to be true for the US for the time being but there are so many more hurdles to overcome and minds to change in the US.
Every time I see how bad things seem to be getting in the UK, I have to shake my head while being thankful that the US still hasn't gotten so bad in most places. But I digress, maybe it just seems as though through red white and blue colored lenses.
Simple enough to get around this by giving "tax incentives" to ISPs who are interested in following their paradigms. The companies that choose not to, can pay a local ISP tax at 75%.
This guy must be an idiot. The only language that is spoken by a roughly equivalent number of people in the world is Mandarin Chinese. Unless Junker intends to push for people switching to Mandarin, he should probably just sit down and stop making an ass of himself.
Its a good thing when there are fewer barriers to communication in the world. English for the most part, won on the global stage as the cross-over language. Short of another World War, I see little likelihood of this ever changing, especially when considering its embedded adoption in the technology sector.
What's funny is that once enough people are lured to Texas from California, the state will start implementing California like policies as well when they start getting elected. This sort of thing travels like pigpens dust trail.
That said, California is in a whole different world than Texas. There is a legitimate premium for space in California that doesn't exist in Texas. You get direct portage to China, an enormous tourist industry from mountains to beaches, millions more people and a lot more geologic/natural resource problems to deal with making usable land cost a lot more. Meanwhile in Texas, you can buy acres of land for the same price you would a shitty rundown condo in some parts of California. To deal with these issues and all competing parties, California has to ensure its bringing in enough revenue not to just take care of things today, but hopefully plan for the future. I don't know what the budget of CA looks like but its clear they either aren't bringing in enough revenue as it is or aren't spending it where repair is needed most; speaking to the recent dam chaos.
Point is, there is probably more to this than just taxing them more.
I think its pretty clear the intent of this law would be to tax factories located in industrial zones.
If it's a machine that can accomplish physical tasks automatically without human input, then it's quite broad; calculators would be included, for example.
That's a computer, not a robot. Oxford has this for a definition, "A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically." Keyword here is "actions" and in this case means in a physical, real world sense. A calculator does not perform real world actions. A robot is probably better defined as "an actuator or series of actuators that have been programmed to carry out a series of physical movements, in general to perform a necessary function." So under this definition, that covers most automated machines in factories.
Does that mean I'd have to pay a tax? If so, that's absurd, and I'd fight that tooth and nail.
Take a Voight-Kampff then maybe? If it comes back positive, yeah, you might need to pay the tax. Otherwise, you programmed a computer to do something, not a robot. Also, you probably don't own a factory located in an industrial zoned area.
By the way, I'm calling BS on anybody who thinks automation will make human labor obsolete or will otherwise result in long-term job losses.
I hope you have a good, non-replaceable job that is isolated from other people needing to fund your business. Just because your job won't or can't be automated, doesn't make it unlikely for your company to go bellyup as the amount of money people have to spend, slowly shrinks. If you don't believe the possible effects of this, just look at Detroit. That disaster didn't happen from automation, but it did happen from widespread job loss and obviously a complete mismanagement of the aftermath. It wasn't just the factory workers that lost their jobs though. The factory workers were no longer shopping for cars, consumer goods, or even just buying gas for their cars or they decided to completely move away depleting the potential income pool of all businesses in the city. UBI is meant to stop more Detroits from happening. It isn't mean to subsidize folks who want to live in SF at ridiculous rates. Dismissing the idea as bullshit comes at your own peril.
Peer pressure can be a large obstacle for parents to overcome. However, in my own observations, most parents these days are anything but active parents, constantly distracted by their phones or their other self interested bullshit, leaving little time to actually spend with their children. Teaching children that it is ok to be smart, even if they're a girl, starts at a young age with encouraging the child to be self capable, while remaining active in their lives such as playing with them, talking to them when they want to talk, helping them when they want help, and overall acting as a guide in their life.
I work in a museum type setting and every day, tons of parents will bring their children in and for all intents and purposes, flatly ignore their child. I've seen parents come in and leave their 3 and 4 year old children in strollers while they walked through reading content to themselves, never saying a word to their children, while the kid looks outward, eyes glazed, hating every moment of that day. Other parents will come in to our childrens section and just sit down and bury themselves into their phone while their kid runs off to do whatever wherever, "who cares anymore?" This is independence through neglect. I always find myself wanting to ask why they hell they had children if they didn't really want to spend time with them. For clarity I'm coming at this from being a parent myself.
Nothing about being a parent is easy. However, if you choose to try and make it easy on yourself by just ignoring your kids, being an unhelpful twat in guiding them in life, don't be shocked when they turn out to be incapable of doing a whole lot of things.
Now, all that said, I have no basis for calling your sibling or their spouse negligent parents. Again, peer pressure in school is a very legitimate obstacle. But I will say someone needs to be in that girls life instilling confidence every possible chance. She's going to have a tough road ahead when she finally has to face life in blunt force otherwise.
Youtube has pretty much been on a downward trend in UI usability since Google purchased the site. Every time they decide to "update" the interface, it seems to keep on steam rolling back in time. This "content focused" approach has left little presented up front, forcing users to go through menus to find the other shit the site can do. 2006 Youtube might look dated, but usability was much better overall, as was stability as I recall. With this latest iteration, this leaves me feeling like I'm using Windows 2.0, next will probably move us back to Windows 1.0 like functionality and I can't wait until everything is done from a terminal, including watching the video in hex!
Should this post have "AD" next to the title? This blatant advertisement counts for content now? Wouldn't even be at all shocked if this was written by a Microsoft employee.
Here's my takeaway.
1) The laptop is nice and thin, I'll give them that.
2) Battery life sounds good.
3) Touchscreen can be useful at times but I prefer an eraser tip. Nonetheless, this has been a key element of the Surface series.
4) Inability to install your own mass storage: DUMB
5) Carpetted laptop: DUMB. Now any accidental drips will last forever. Or even just hand grease. YUCK!
6) Speakers behind the keys: DUMB
7) Price point: DUMB. You can do a lot better for a lot less money. The 1TB version will set you back $3200! FUCK NO!
8) Windows 10, obviously since its coming from Microsoft: DUMB.
9) Weird ass resolution at 3000x2000: DUMB. Its nice and above HD but I'd expect HD content stretched to this weird size is going to look pretty shitty.
My overall rating, averaging it all together: DUMB.
In my experience, this is a very common perception from the business admin folks though. To them, you're paid to do your work in an allotted time frame. If you can do your work faster than the time frame given, they see it as being inefficient on their part, in paying you for more hours than the position requires so they see a need to trim the excess off if possible. You see this more often when a company decides to downsize and dump a larger workload on fewer employees than were available before. The value of the employee nearly always takes second consideration to the value of the work output. Sometimes such a view has merit, but in general its extremely unbalanced and has created an overall terrible working environment in the US.
I can entirely see how a company would initially see this as a problem. They are paying someone to do a project on the side that will likely never bring any money back to the company. In many companies, theres a policy that says anything you create while on the company dime or while utilizing company facilities, equipment, etc, is the property of the company since they have in essence paid for it by paying you.
I've seen people pushed out for this before and I've seen the same companies struggle to fill the hole they just created. The person provided a significant benefit to the company and was efficient enough to not really need to focus on anything company related for a few hours of the day. During this time, the employee did several side projects, some for small monetary values, others for free. It would seem easy from a business perspective to just assume that maybe they should just cut hours back if the employee doesn't need a full day to complete the tasks. This would provide the time for the employee to do these projects but this typically also comes with a reduction in salary.
The aforementioned employee saw their own work as highly valued since their salary was very satisfactory for the required work. However, when management stepped in and said they were reducing the number of hours the employee would work, and to reflect the "reduced work provided to the company" a reduced salary as well. The person was expected to continue performing at peak efficiency as they had, with a shorter day and a smaller salary. This was understandably taken as a perceived reduction in the value of this employee.
I think its important to mention that this person, largely enjoyed their position and did it exceptionally well. They had never had a bad evaluation, never been written up in 10 years despite having worked on side projects for most of it, and never let the side projects interrupt their daily duties. I think the side projects really provided a good creative outlet for this person and it helped motivate this person throughout their day.
Anyway, the person was pretty pissed off about the situation and stayed on maybe 2 weeks after this change before quitting. Management had a big "oh fuck" moment too since the person had a lot of knowledge that wasn't always well documented. Took them a year and a half to find a schmuck that was willing to try and work in the reduced hour position and he lasted all of a few months before being fired for not being able to perform the duties (big shock). So they decided to contract it out and pay a shit ton more than they used to.
While it presents an ethical dilemma, I think the greater perspective on the matter must be taken. Physically and mentally healthy employees are always going to perform the required tasks better than people deficient in either. Sometimes all that is needed is a good self driven but compensated outlet to provide that and I think we will see this to be much more true in situations where true UBI comes to fruition.
The question I would ask is "Is writing an unsolicited letter to the state engineering board regarding the safety issues resulting from the length of a yellow traffic light considered part of the profession of engineering?"
That is a great question and I would take it a step further and add semantics to it as well. Was he qualifying his knowledge in a professional sense or simply as a knowledgeable concerned citizen.
If Joe Bob Hillbilly says writes a letter concerned or upset about the dangers of short yellow lights, it might be easy to dismiss as a know-nothing citizen with an easily dismissed complaint. But if someone suggests they have a qualified knowledge and are simply expressing concern based on that knowledge, maybe it would be taken more seriously. I can totally see that being this guys thought process in writing his letter. He wanted to be heard and he wanted it to be known that his concern comes from qualified knowledge, not in an advisory, consulting, or more literally a practicing manner.
How does this person mention a qualified knowledge without speaking directly to that knowledge that would lead to this sort of fine? Does he leave it vague, simply stating "I have qualified knowledge"? That seems rather ambiguous and again, easily dismissed by those who would prefer to think they know better.
$100,000/yr = $8333/mo. Lets say your rent is up there at $5500/mo, that still leaves you with $2833/mo to feed yourself, your spouse and your 2 children. The remainder of what you have to spend nearly $34,000 for the year to pay your bills, buy food and buy whatever other crap you need. A helleva lot of people don't even make that much and support a family of 4 on a single income and their salary hasn't yet even covered their housing expenses. The lower amounts they mention, I can agree with, considering current rent prices in SF. But $100,000+ per year? National prices aren't SF prices. Your money goes a helleva lot further on the internet than nearly everyone living outside of places like SF.
Here's an idea. Tell the NIMBYs to go suck a fat one and start building appropriate housing for the demand. Or people could wise up and stop giving a shit about living anywhere near SF.
Star power? No. But if a star can license their likeness to these film companies without doing anything at all, thats a different story. Every voiceover can now star the exact same people that fit the bill of being a known and also willing to license their likeness for the least amount. Good luck breaking into this sort of market, pretty much forever.
That is a fantastic scenario for where a Kuerig can be useful. People of all walks need different aids to help them function in a day. But in general, most people do not need the "convenience" of Kuerig like devices. I can dump old grouds, fill up a coffee pot with water, dump it in the machine, throw in a new filter and new grounds all in under a minute and a half (I know this from heating up the last cup out of the coffee pot taking around 1m30s in the microwave). That doesn't account for other conveniences a Kuerig might provide but it really is typically unnecessary for the expense of the machine price and the continued cost to maintain use of the machine. For those without a huge everyday budget, it becomes pretty damn inconvenient for how convenient it is supposed to be.
The robots are coming for your job, no doubt. Theres a plethora of jobs that simply can't be easily replaced that typically involve the service industry; those will remain.
For the rest of the jobs out there, a robot awaits your position. Here's how I see things working. You graduate high school at 18, you can either choose to work from then until age 35, or you can go to college and work until age 35. At age 35, your UBI kicks in and is based on how much you made while working. If you have made yourself extremely valuable and highly skilled in a broad range of areas, maybe you get take your UBI and continue working at a higher wage.
Problem is, those few jobs, aren't guaranteed to go to the most qualified people. The wealthy want to remain wealthy and will give these positions to their family and friends to keep their wealth on the uptrend. This will gradually slow our growth as a society as these wealthy, unqualified and lowly skilled fuckups take over these important jobs. Lately, America has a great track record of picking the best system for the wealthiest people which also happens to be nearly the worst system for the most people. UBI is great and is absolutely necessary. But if you think you're getting fucked in the ass now, I suggest you stock up on lube.
Speaking of binding. How about lets not sell university published textbooks with no binding at all for $200+. This seems to be a growing trend at my local university. Of course, the only available vendor for the textbook is the university printery and since the the professors of these courses wrote or greatly contributed to these books, they make sure that if you don't buy the text book, that you're not going to pass the class. SGA tried to fight back a little by making several copies of each available at the library but surprise, you can remove them and you can't use the elementary school style tearout worksheets. Fuckers.
Maybe I missed it but what's the plan after the bag gets used for a single serving anyway? Do you then have to remove the bag and place it back into the fridge? This after having to first remove it from the fridge in the first place, put it in the machine and then place you glass under it. Couldn't they just sell jugs of juice that you could put in your fridge, pull out and pour a single glass? Have we become such a lazy society that pouring a glass of juice is too much?
Dumbass investors saw this as a Kuerig for vegans. A new device that accomplishes the goal of selling the most amount of cheap material crap to people at a exorbitantly marked up price, with a potentially successful marketing message of a "better way".
Somehow people bought heavily into the concept of Kuerig, even though you have had small (even single) serving coffee machines for decades and decades. But no, now you can buy a wasteful and expensive single serving cup that you drop in and there's a water tank and a pump that will eventually fail too, all for the low price of 5-10 small, simple, almost never failing, thermosiphon drip coffee maker. Oh and you get to pay tons more for your easy to use coffee cups now too! Yay!
A lot of people seem to think their lives get better as they acquire more technology. Doesn't matter what it is. If it has a button and a screen and it does something that didn't have a screen before, its better. Now it even has the internet so it can do... even more things or something.
TL;DR Why? Because stupidly blind and wasteful consumerism.
It puts a smile on my face to see such an expensive shit device like this fail so hard.
This should be interesting to watch play out. I honestly don't see this making it to trial and if it does, it'll be a speedy victory for Bose. The PTB absolutely do not want any sort of precendent set that says they are violating wire tapping and other privacy laws with these sort of everyday increasing intrusions from "smart devices".
However, one can be hopeful that a hard nosed judge is selected that truly sees this growing trend as the problem it has become and gives Bose the ban hammer. Such a ruling would have interesting implications for all sorts of devices. Ah well, shit in one hand, hope in the other I guess.
Ultrasonic clothes washers were never a truly efficient, marketable product. Soft materials are really good at absorbing sound waves. So when you subject a a tank full of sound absorbing material, with sound waves, not a whole lot happens unless you are talking about ridiculous, non-home friendly energy levels.
I wonder if during the ARPANET days, anyone pondered a use for such a communications tool to be able to send the digital equivalent of a middle school classroom note.
How does this help the citizens of that country? Now, not only are they in the dark, the rest of the world is in the dark in regards to their plight as well. The governments that institute these sort of shutoffs are already authoritarian and these organizations think the best response is to be authoritarian as well?
These governments are already going to have better organization that a random selection of the population. Banning the provision to expand IP addresses to a given country will do nothing to curtail their authoritarian efforts. Having that organization already in place allows them to respond to things like this more easily by instituting other wisely used channels, especially now that they know about this new rule. Meanwhile, the citizens are left out in the cold, and have to rely on very skilled local community leaders to lead the way of change. Such change has happened in the past. However the playing field just shifted away from the citizens in a hard way if this passes.
This "millenial types" stereotyping bullshit needs to end. Can I say all boomers fucked the country up? Maybe they are apathetic because their future looks bleak so they seek to standout, even if seems entirely unwarranted? And lets not forget that you or your kids generation raised these folks and taught them all these traits you seem to hate. Guess your generation sucks too?
You are absolutely right that it definitely could have gotten enough delta-v to get to any of the outer planets by doing several maneuvers while doing a slingshot orbit around Titan and Saturn. They explored this option pretty extensively with all of the outer planets, including Pluto.
The problem came down two-fold. One, they would have had to propose a somewhat costly extension to a spacecraft already on borrowed time. And Two, they would have had to leave the Saturn system a while ago, cutting out the last year to year and a half worth of observations to send it off onto another mission that it may not make it to.
Ultimately they decided, the maximum benefit from the spacecraft would be gained from keeping it in the Saturn system and destroying the spacecraft at the end to protect Titan and Enceledus.
Slashdot Mirror
I never understood this kind of shit happening in the UK. The US can sorta offer the excuse that there are hundreds of millions of people here, many are idiots, they are spread far and wide across an enormous space and often cluster in rural areas in small towns made up of flaking paint, baling wire and groupthink. They get power and authority over these areas and sometimes this power and authority translates into a successful state or federal position. But the UK is so much smaller by land mass and population. I'd expect that such a limitation would insulate it from the dangerous morons from taking the reigns. Has the UK entirely become apathetic to their current path? It seems to be true for the US for the time being but there are so many more hurdles to overcome and minds to change in the US.
Every time I see how bad things seem to be getting in the UK, I have to shake my head while being thankful that the US still hasn't gotten so bad in most places. But I digress, maybe it just seems as though through red white and blue colored lenses.
Simple enough to get around this by giving "tax incentives" to ISPs who are interested in following their paradigms. The companies that choose not to, can pay a local ISP tax at 75%.
This guy must be an idiot. The only language that is spoken by a roughly equivalent number of people in the world is Mandarin Chinese. Unless Junker intends to push for people switching to Mandarin, he should probably just sit down and stop making an ass of himself.
Its a good thing when there are fewer barriers to communication in the world. English for the most part, won on the global stage as the cross-over language. Short of another World War, I see little likelihood of this ever changing, especially when considering its embedded adoption in the technology sector.
What's funny is that once enough people are lured to Texas from California, the state will start implementing California like policies as well when they start getting elected. This sort of thing travels like pigpens dust trail.
That said, California is in a whole different world than Texas. There is a legitimate premium for space in California that doesn't exist in Texas. You get direct portage to China, an enormous tourist industry from mountains to beaches, millions more people and a lot more geologic/natural resource problems to deal with making usable land cost a lot more. Meanwhile in Texas, you can buy acres of land for the same price you would a shitty rundown condo in some parts of California. To deal with these issues and all competing parties, California has to ensure its bringing in enough revenue not to just take care of things today, but hopefully plan for the future. I don't know what the budget of CA looks like but its clear they either aren't bringing in enough revenue as it is or aren't spending it where repair is needed most; speaking to the recent dam chaos.
Point is, there is probably more to this than just taxing them more.
If it's a machine that can accomplish physical tasks automatically without human input, then it's quite broad; calculators would be included, for example.
That's a computer, not a robot. Oxford has this for a definition, "A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically." Keyword here is "actions" and in this case means in a physical, real world sense. A calculator does not perform real world actions. A robot is probably better defined as "an actuator or series of actuators that have been programmed to carry out a series of physical movements, in general to perform a necessary function." So under this definition, that covers most automated machines in factories.
Does that mean I'd have to pay a tax? If so, that's absurd, and I'd fight that tooth and nail.
Take a Voight-Kampff then maybe? If it comes back positive, yeah, you might need to pay the tax. Otherwise, you programmed a computer to do something, not a robot. Also, you probably don't own a factory located in an industrial zoned area.
By the way, I'm calling BS on anybody who thinks automation will make human labor obsolete or will otherwise result in long-term job losses.
I hope you have a good, non-replaceable job that is isolated from other people needing to fund your business. Just because your job won't or can't be automated, doesn't make it unlikely for your company to go bellyup as the amount of money people have to spend, slowly shrinks. If you don't believe the possible effects of this, just look at Detroit. That disaster didn't happen from automation, but it did happen from widespread job loss and obviously a complete mismanagement of the aftermath. It wasn't just the factory workers that lost their jobs though. The factory workers were no longer shopping for cars, consumer goods, or even just buying gas for their cars or they decided to completely move away depleting the potential income pool of all businesses in the city. UBI is meant to stop more Detroits from happening. It isn't mean to subsidize folks who want to live in SF at ridiculous rates. Dismissing the idea as bullshit comes at your own peril.
Peer pressure can be a large obstacle for parents to overcome. However, in my own observations, most parents these days are anything but active parents, constantly distracted by their phones or their other self interested bullshit, leaving little time to actually spend with their children. Teaching children that it is ok to be smart, even if they're a girl, starts at a young age with encouraging the child to be self capable, while remaining active in their lives such as playing with them, talking to them when they want to talk, helping them when they want help, and overall acting as a guide in their life.
I work in a museum type setting and every day, tons of parents will bring their children in and for all intents and purposes, flatly ignore their child. I've seen parents come in and leave their 3 and 4 year old children in strollers while they walked through reading content to themselves, never saying a word to their children, while the kid looks outward, eyes glazed, hating every moment of that day. Other parents will come in to our childrens section and just sit down and bury themselves into their phone while their kid runs off to do whatever wherever, "who cares anymore?" This is independence through neglect. I always find myself wanting to ask why they hell they had children if they didn't really want to spend time with them. For clarity I'm coming at this from being a parent myself.
Nothing about being a parent is easy. However, if you choose to try and make it easy on yourself by just ignoring your kids, being an unhelpful twat in guiding them in life, don't be shocked when they turn out to be incapable of doing a whole lot of things.
Now, all that said, I have no basis for calling your sibling or their spouse negligent parents. Again, peer pressure in school is a very legitimate obstacle. But I will say someone needs to be in that girls life instilling confidence every possible chance. She's going to have a tough road ahead when she finally has to face life in blunt force otherwise.
Youtube has pretty much been on a downward trend in UI usability since Google purchased the site. Every time they decide to "update" the interface, it seems to keep on steam rolling back in time. This "content focused" approach has left little presented up front, forcing users to go through menus to find the other shit the site can do. 2006 Youtube might look dated, but usability was much better overall, as was stability as I recall. With this latest iteration, this leaves me feeling like I'm using Windows 2.0, next will probably move us back to Windows 1.0 like functionality and I can't wait until everything is done from a terminal, including watching the video in hex!
Damn good times ahead folks!
I thought we were going to have to watch stale repetitive, mind numbing bullshit. Oh... I guess I misread it. They didn't strike.
Here's my takeaway.
My overall rating, averaging it all together: DUMB.
In my experience, this is a very common perception from the business admin folks though. To them, you're paid to do your work in an allotted time frame. If you can do your work faster than the time frame given, they see it as being inefficient on their part, in paying you for more hours than the position requires so they see a need to trim the excess off if possible. You see this more often when a company decides to downsize and dump a larger workload on fewer employees than were available before. The value of the employee nearly always takes second consideration to the value of the work output. Sometimes such a view has merit, but in general its extremely unbalanced and has created an overall terrible working environment in the US.
I can entirely see how a company would initially see this as a problem. They are paying someone to do a project on the side that will likely never bring any money back to the company. In many companies, theres a policy that says anything you create while on the company dime or while utilizing company facilities, equipment, etc, is the property of the company since they have in essence paid for it by paying you.
I've seen people pushed out for this before and I've seen the same companies struggle to fill the hole they just created. The person provided a significant benefit to the company and was efficient enough to not really need to focus on anything company related for a few hours of the day. During this time, the employee did several side projects, some for small monetary values, others for free. It would seem easy from a business perspective to just assume that maybe they should just cut hours back if the employee doesn't need a full day to complete the tasks. This would provide the time for the employee to do these projects but this typically also comes with a reduction in salary.
The aforementioned employee saw their own work as highly valued since their salary was very satisfactory for the required work. However, when management stepped in and said they were reducing the number of hours the employee would work, and to reflect the "reduced work provided to the company" a reduced salary as well. The person was expected to continue performing at peak efficiency as they had, with a shorter day and a smaller salary. This was understandably taken as a perceived reduction in the value of this employee.
I think its important to mention that this person, largely enjoyed their position and did it exceptionally well. They had never had a bad evaluation, never been written up in 10 years despite having worked on side projects for most of it, and never let the side projects interrupt their daily duties. I think the side projects really provided a good creative outlet for this person and it helped motivate this person throughout their day.
Anyway, the person was pretty pissed off about the situation and stayed on maybe 2 weeks after this change before quitting. Management had a big "oh fuck" moment too since the person had a lot of knowledge that wasn't always well documented. Took them a year and a half to find a schmuck that was willing to try and work in the reduced hour position and he lasted all of a few months before being fired for not being able to perform the duties (big shock). So they decided to contract it out and pay a shit ton more than they used to.
While it presents an ethical dilemma, I think the greater perspective on the matter must be taken. Physically and mentally healthy employees are always going to perform the required tasks better than people deficient in either. Sometimes all that is needed is a good self driven but compensated outlet to provide that and I think we will see this to be much more true in situations where true UBI comes to fruition.
The question I would ask is "Is writing an unsolicited letter to the state engineering board regarding the safety issues resulting from the length of a yellow traffic light considered part of the profession of engineering?"
That is a great question and I would take it a step further and add semantics to it as well. Was he qualifying his knowledge in a professional sense or simply as a knowledgeable concerned citizen.
If Joe Bob Hillbilly says writes a letter concerned or upset about the dangers of short yellow lights, it might be easy to dismiss as a know-nothing citizen with an easily dismissed complaint. But if someone suggests they have a qualified knowledge and are simply expressing concern based on that knowledge, maybe it would be taken more seriously. I can totally see that being this guys thought process in writing his letter. He wanted to be heard and he wanted it to be known that his concern comes from qualified knowledge, not in an advisory, consulting, or more literally a practicing manner.
How does this person mention a qualified knowledge without speaking directly to that knowledge that would lead to this sort of fine? Does he leave it vague, simply stating "I have qualified knowledge"? That seems rather ambiguous and again, easily dismissed by those who would prefer to think they know better.
$100,000/yr = $8333/mo. Lets say your rent is up there at $5500/mo, that still leaves you with $2833/mo to feed yourself, your spouse and your 2 children. The remainder of what you have to spend nearly $34,000 for the year to pay your bills, buy food and buy whatever other crap you need. A helleva lot of people don't even make that much and support a family of 4 on a single income and their salary hasn't yet even covered their housing expenses. The lower amounts they mention, I can agree with, considering current rent prices in SF. But $100,000+ per year? National prices aren't SF prices. Your money goes a helleva lot further on the internet than nearly everyone living outside of places like SF.
Here's an idea. Tell the NIMBYs to go suck a fat one and start building appropriate housing for the demand. Or people could wise up and stop giving a shit about living anywhere near SF.
Star power? No. But if a star can license their likeness to these film companies without doing anything at all, thats a different story. Every voiceover can now star the exact same people that fit the bill of being a known and also willing to license their likeness for the least amount. Good luck breaking into this sort of market, pretty much forever.
That is a fantastic scenario for where a Kuerig can be useful. People of all walks need different aids to help them function in a day. But in general, most people do not need the "convenience" of Kuerig like devices. I can dump old grouds, fill up a coffee pot with water, dump it in the machine, throw in a new filter and new grounds all in under a minute and a half (I know this from heating up the last cup out of the coffee pot taking around 1m30s in the microwave). That doesn't account for other conveniences a Kuerig might provide but it really is typically unnecessary for the expense of the machine price and the continued cost to maintain use of the machine. For those without a huge everyday budget, it becomes pretty damn inconvenient for how convenient it is supposed to be.
The robots are coming for your job, no doubt. Theres a plethora of jobs that simply can't be easily replaced that typically involve the service industry; those will remain.
For the rest of the jobs out there, a robot awaits your position. Here's how I see things working. You graduate high school at 18, you can either choose to work from then until age 35, or you can go to college and work until age 35. At age 35, your UBI kicks in and is based on how much you made while working. If you have made yourself extremely valuable and highly skilled in a broad range of areas, maybe you get take your UBI and continue working at a higher wage.
Problem is, those few jobs, aren't guaranteed to go to the most qualified people. The wealthy want to remain wealthy and will give these positions to their family and friends to keep their wealth on the uptrend. This will gradually slow our growth as a society as these wealthy, unqualified and lowly skilled fuckups take over these important jobs. Lately, America has a great track record of picking the best system for the wealthiest people which also happens to be nearly the worst system for the most people. UBI is great and is absolutely necessary. But if you think you're getting fucked in the ass now, I suggest you stock up on lube.
Speaking of binding. How about lets not sell university published textbooks with no binding at all for $200+. This seems to be a growing trend at my local university. Of course, the only available vendor for the textbook is the university printery and since the the professors of these courses wrote or greatly contributed to these books, they make sure that if you don't buy the text book, that you're not going to pass the class. SGA tried to fight back a little by making several copies of each available at the library but surprise, you can remove them and you can't use the elementary school style tearout worksheets. Fuckers.
Maybe I missed it but what's the plan after the bag gets used for a single serving anyway? Do you then have to remove the bag and place it back into the fridge? This after having to first remove it from the fridge in the first place, put it in the machine and then place you glass under it. Couldn't they just sell jugs of juice that you could put in your fridge, pull out and pour a single glass? Have we become such a lazy society that pouring a glass of juice is too much?
Dumbass investors saw this as a Kuerig for vegans. A new device that accomplishes the goal of selling the most amount of cheap material crap to people at a exorbitantly marked up price, with a potentially successful marketing message of a "better way".
Somehow people bought heavily into the concept of Kuerig, even though you have had small (even single) serving coffee machines for decades and decades. But no, now you can buy a wasteful and expensive single serving cup that you drop in and there's a water tank and a pump that will eventually fail too, all for the low price of 5-10 small, simple, almost never failing, thermosiphon drip coffee maker. Oh and you get to pay tons more for your easy to use coffee cups now too! Yay!
A lot of people seem to think their lives get better as they acquire more technology. Doesn't matter what it is. If it has a button and a screen and it does something that didn't have a screen before, its better. Now it even has the internet so it can do... even more things or something.
TL;DR Why? Because stupidly blind and wasteful consumerism.
It puts a smile on my face to see such an expensive shit device like this fail so hard.
This should be interesting to watch play out. I honestly don't see this making it to trial and if it does, it'll be a speedy victory for Bose. The PTB absolutely do not want any sort of precendent set that says they are violating wire tapping and other privacy laws with these sort of everyday increasing intrusions from "smart devices".
However, one can be hopeful that a hard nosed judge is selected that truly sees this growing trend as the problem it has become and gives Bose the ban hammer. Such a ruling would have interesting implications for all sorts of devices. Ah well, shit in one hand, hope in the other I guess.
Ultrasonic clothes washers were never a truly efficient, marketable product. Soft materials are really good at absorbing sound waves. So when you subject a a tank full of sound absorbing material, with sound waves, not a whole lot happens unless you are talking about ridiculous, non-home friendly energy levels.
I wonder if during the ARPANET days, anyone pondered a use for such a communications tool to be able to send the digital equivalent of a middle school classroom note.
How does this help the citizens of that country? Now, not only are they in the dark, the rest of the world is in the dark in regards to their plight as well. The governments that institute these sort of shutoffs are already authoritarian and these organizations think the best response is to be authoritarian as well?
These governments are already going to have better organization that a random selection of the population. Banning the provision to expand IP addresses to a given country will do nothing to curtail their authoritarian efforts. Having that organization already in place allows them to respond to things like this more easily by instituting other wisely used channels, especially now that they know about this new rule. Meanwhile, the citizens are left out in the cold, and have to rely on very skilled local community leaders to lead the way of change. Such change has happened in the past. However the playing field just shifted away from the citizens in a hard way if this passes.
This "millenial types" stereotyping bullshit needs to end. Can I say all boomers fucked the country up? Maybe they are apathetic because their future looks bleak so they seek to standout, even if seems entirely unwarranted? And lets not forget that you or your kids generation raised these folks and taught them all these traits you seem to hate. Guess your generation sucks too?
You are absolutely right that it definitely could have gotten enough delta-v to get to any of the outer planets by doing several maneuvers while doing a slingshot orbit around Titan and Saturn. They explored this option pretty extensively with all of the outer planets, including Pluto.
The problem came down two-fold. One, they would have had to propose a somewhat costly extension to a spacecraft already on borrowed time. And Two, they would have had to leave the Saturn system a while ago, cutting out the last year to year and a half worth of observations to send it off onto another mission that it may not make it to.
Ultimately they decided, the maximum benefit from the spacecraft would be gained from keeping it in the Saturn system and destroying the spacecraft at the end to protect Titan and Enceledus.