They have all the rights huh? Who gave them those rights? They are part of an international network, maybe it's time to have some minimal standards of free speech and neutrality. If they want to retain their Islamic imperatives, then they can build their own Islamic internet.
What a ridiculous equivalence you've drawn. Hopefully it was unintentional. If you think Jesus telling a woman to stop touching him is on par Mohammed's actions with women, you're wrong.
A better question is why is this country even allowed to own a tld. Time to centralize control of DNS in a locale with better (nobody's perfect) free speech and neutrality laws. Libya can build their own internet if they want a sharia compliant experience.
Region is only partially correct because people with similar cultures tend to cluster geographically. Religion is more correct. If a fundamentalist Muslim moves to America, he doesn't magically change morality. If you view each sect of Catholicism, to use your example, as a sub-religion, then it makes a lot of sense.
And I believe that doesn't count the massive fraud that goes on with Medicare, which is certainly greater than what goes on with private insurers. Heard something on NPR about that a while back.
No I love social programs. Please don't misunderstand. Education is great (though currently very inefficient.) Socially owned infrastructure like municipal broadband, well I'm in love with that idea.
What I don't like are unsustainable entitlement programs. Baby boomers are, frankly, selfish idiots who voted themselves an entitlement on the backs of their children, and then didn't have enough children to sustain it. Brilliant plan!
Entitlement programs? You mean like the bank, where you put money in and are entitled to ask for it back?
Very interesting, apparently you're not aware of how SS/Medicare works. It's not, and never has been, a savings program. It's a pay as you go program. What that means is the working population pays for the retired population.
In practical terms, it means the generation that started SS made out like bandits. SS/Medicare tax started at 1% -- because there were literally no retired people to pay for. (Then-current retirees didn't magically get swept into the system "for some reason" wink wink. Guess they didn't really care about old people as much as... themselves.)
Baby boomers feel entitled to SS because they paid *some* money into it. The tax rates have risen over the years. But really, I can't feel too sorry for them when I'm paying 12% from day one, whereas they started at maybe 3% - 5% (including employer portion).
I wonder what the economics are really like. By the time the fire department is involved, the fire is pretty big and a lot of damage has been done, not to mention the water damage. How many houses that are saved don't have to be substantially rebuilt anyway?
You're comparing an actual something to a virtual nothing. Not fair. Is there not a possibility that if all those resources were spent on something else we would now have something much more life-enhancing than GPS? Think flying cars... no, scratch that... world peace perhaps?
But you're also comparing things that don't exist with things that do. Honestly, if we spent less money on the military, we would just spend more money on entitlement programs. Temporary quality of life improvements, unfortunately unsustainable because of our population profile. Personally I'd prefer more military spending than we have now, because at least we (as in my generation) will get *something* for it. I don't have such high hopes for the 12% of every paycheck pumped into the SS Pyramid Scheme.
The problem today is that the wars we're going to fight are in places that we would like to be our friend when the war is over.
Yeah maybe it's time to give up on that ideal. It's not working out too well. Our so-called friends in Pakistan for instance attack us and give aid money to terrorists to attack us.
It's funny because we had a lot of support among Afghan citizens. We had friends. We just screwed it all up by not winning and threatening to give them back to the Taliban, under Pakistani control of course.
Well I guess we're keeping our friends in Pakistan happy.
For instance "government" overhead for managing medicare is apparently very small compared that of privately runned health insurance companies.
Medical overhead is reported in percentage terms. However, the average cost per person on Medicare (usually old people with lots of medications, etc) is substantially higher than the average person on private insurance. A quick search finds this:
In 2003, says the study, the average medical cost for a Medicare beneficiary per year was $6,600. The average medical cost for someone with employer-sponsored health insurance was $2,700.
So Medicare could be half as efficient per person as private insurers and still be more efficient per dollar.
When your enemy relies on secrecy, you might need secrecy too. We can stand in one spot all day long and say "we own this bit" but that doesn't really help the situation.
Well, let's say you're a woman working as a software developer, and you've put in some long hours and built a really good library that will make your software system much more solid, and when you go to show it off to your coworkers it's obvious that what they're thinking about (or worse, saying) is "nice rack", not "nice code".
Really??? That's a serious problem? People thinking you are hot? Give me a break!
I don't even know what to say. I'm trying to think of how it's bad to be considered pretty, or handsome in my case. I would love if girls looked at me and were distracted, rather than concentrating on the boring ass code I'm talking about. I'm really trying to picture it. "Jesus stdarg, those regular expression sound so interesting! You are so smart! Oh you weren't even talking about regular expressions?" *staring dreamily into my eyes* "So umm what are you doing after work anyway?" Yeah I'd be so depressed at that job!
I guess I would tell your hypothetical hot coder that she should start valuing *herself* for what she knows is good code. Be proud of your work. Don't expect everybody else to stop being human. And it's perfectly okay to relate to your coworkers as humans, not cogs in a machine producing some webapp.
To me it's far more serious that ugly people are discriminated against, than that hot people are... appreciated for their hotness. That's ridiculous. And the discrimination for ugliness applies to men as well as women.
she's already miles ahead in my book without having to learn how to parrot stupid lines about x86 vs. ARM.
Parrot stupid lines? I think people are being way too harsh about this blog post. The first point she makes is "1. Learn the language. This is key." and gives a link to a glossary of technical terms.
Man, I had no idea it was that much of an exaggeration. 2% of the US? People routinely claim that we could nuke the entire world 6 times over, so why not reduce our stockpiles by 83%.
For a job like software development you've got a point.
I know it's not PC to talk about looks for some reason, but what's wrong with having expectations like "stewardesses should be young and pretty" and "waitresses should be pretty and flirt a little bit?" It's human nature. People enjoy beauty. If I'm going to be cooped up somewhere for 7 hours, with people I'll never see in my life, I would rather have my coffee served by someone cute than not. And for the record, if they were really funny and friendly that would be fine too, but in reality they're neither, at least on the few flights I've been on in the last few years. They're just doing their job and can't wait to be done.
But even if they were secretly funny and friendly, for the sake of argument, that just shows one of the strengths of beauty. If you hire someone pretty, they're *always* pretty, because that's a passive attribute. If you hire someone funny, eh, they don't actually show off their funniness to most passengers, just the few they interact with for some reason.
A lot of people get late fees because the store didn't scan the return properly. It happened to me several times and I always had to waste time contesting it. They'd say "Okay let me check the shelf. Oh. Yeah it's here."
At some point they changed the definition of "two night rental" to be more like "2nd night rental." In other words you didn't get 2 full nights, you got about 1/2 of the first night and 1/2 of the second night for a total of 1 night. So I get a movie at 11pm on Friday, it's due back Saturday before midnight. That's supposed to be two nights. Rather than, you know, actually having it for two nights and returning it Sunday, which is how it used to be. Same thing happened with a week rental. You rent it Friday at 11pm, when is a 1 week rental due back? Thursday night! Because you had it for some portion of each day of a 1 week period. But in common parlance, 1 week from Friday night is next Friday night, not next Thursday night. I believe they got sued over that at some point.
Another issue that came up was returning the movie to a store other than the one where you rented it. You're allowed to do it, but maybe 20% of the time the original store charges you a late fee, and even when they get the movie or credit or however they do it from the other store, don't revert the charges. (Unless you bring it up.)
I rented a lot of movies, and paid very few late fees.. a handful which were actually legitimate. But in high school I had all the time in the world to talk to the manager, repeatedly, until they saw things my way. I can definitely see how easy it would be for someone else to be seriously ripped off by Blockbuster.
How long would you leave the money sit in your checking account (just waiting for someone to steal your bank information)? Now imagine that instead of a single $60k check it was thousands of $5-$10 checks that you were trying to keep track of.
I would say you have a duty to move it to a separate account where it's not "in the way" and monitor it, collecting interest, until you're tired of it. At that point, then you keep part of it as a nominal fee and return the rest to the original owner. And if you can't find them, you declare it as lost property. You don't get to just keep it! (I mean, clearly you do get to, as we see, but it's not right.)
In reality, gift cards aren't like your house check example, because most people don't make it their *business* to give/take loans and set up an infrastructure to deal with them. But if you give out gift cards, you obviously do. Why is it harder to keep track of 100000 little checks for 10 years than it is to keep track of 100000 little checks for 1 year? They're not doing it by hand anyway.
It's not like people bartered live chickens for their gift cards and the company is paying to maintain the chickens until the gift cards are cashed in. There's really no excuse.
It's really no different that putting 'Void after 60 days' on a payroll check.
I don't know, that doesn't absolve them of owing you the money, right? It just means that that particular check is void.
Hopefully Redbox will force Netflix out of much of the DVD market. They are way more convenient and cheaper for most people.
That will allow Netflix to focus on what I would love to see the most -- a completely internet based tv service. I can't wait until I can subscribe to HBO via Netflix.
But it seems like they need a kick in the pants to realize that the DVD mail business is not the future.
Anyway what really did surprise me was that 2x4 lengths are also not always as advertised, and vary quite a bit. I built a shed with my dad and we knew 2x4's were really only 3.5" wide, but assumed a 96" (or whatever) length was pretty much 96". Turns out some boards were up to 1/2" longer. We didn't learn that lesson until the plywood didn't fit properly. Sucked. The only ones that are reliable are the 93" lengths.
Yet their car factories are staffed by zero wage robots and they have higher quality than US factories. Maybe that's not directly related to their AI research, but in general they seem to have done pretty well for themselves, and they *have* destroyed US competitors (as well as European) in some related fields.
I always wondered where those statistics came from. We've dropped a bunch of bombs in deserts in the US and they have yet to all turn to glass. Are there really enough nukes in the US arsenal to kill every single person in an area 10 times the size the China? Or are we talking like, we have enough nukes to hit your military bases and major and minor cities 10 times and get like 60% of your population, but your rural areas will be mostly okay?
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They have all the rights huh? Who gave them those rights? They are part of an international network, maybe it's time to have some minimal standards of free speech and neutrality. If they want to retain their Islamic imperatives, then they can build their own Islamic internet.
What a ridiculous equivalence you've drawn. Hopefully it was unintentional. If you think Jesus telling a woman to stop touching him is on par Mohammed's actions with women, you're wrong.
A better question is why is this country even allowed to own a tld. Time to centralize control of DNS in a locale with better (nobody's perfect) free speech and neutrality laws. Libya can build their own internet if they want a sharia compliant experience.
Region is only partially correct because people with similar cultures tend to cluster geographically. Religion is more correct. If a fundamentalist Muslim moves to America, he doesn't magically change morality. If you view each sect of Catholicism, to use your example, as a sub-religion, then it makes a lot of sense.
From what I've read, their efficiency is about 5.7% compared to 12.7% in private insurers. See: http://www.naifa.org/advocacy/health/documents/Comparing_HealthCare_Admin_Costs.pdf
And I believe that doesn't count the massive fraud that goes on with Medicare, which is certainly greater than what goes on with private insurers. Heard something on NPR about that a while back.
No I love social programs. Please don't misunderstand. Education is great (though currently very inefficient.) Socially owned infrastructure like municipal broadband, well I'm in love with that idea.
What I don't like are unsustainable entitlement programs. Baby boomers are, frankly, selfish idiots who voted themselves an entitlement on the backs of their children, and then didn't have enough children to sustain it. Brilliant plan!
Entitlement programs? You mean like the bank, where you put money in and are entitled to ask for it back?
Very interesting, apparently you're not aware of how SS/Medicare works. It's not, and never has been, a savings program. It's a pay as you go program. What that means is the working population pays for the retired population.
In practical terms, it means the generation that started SS made out like bandits. SS/Medicare tax started at 1% -- because there were literally no retired people to pay for. (Then-current retirees didn't magically get swept into the system "for some reason" wink wink. Guess they didn't really care about old people as much as... themselves.)
Baby boomers feel entitled to SS because they paid *some* money into it. The tax rates have risen over the years. But really, I can't feel too sorry for them when I'm paying 12% from day one, whereas they started at maybe 3% - 5% (including employer portion).
I wonder what the economics are really like. By the time the fire department is involved, the fire is pretty big and a lot of damage has been done, not to mention the water damage. How many houses that are saved don't have to be substantially rebuilt anyway?
Of course this would have no impact on your taxes, your taxes would be just as high.
Why?
You're comparing an actual something to a virtual nothing. Not fair. Is there not a possibility that if all those resources were spent on something else we would now have something much more life-enhancing than GPS? Think flying cars... no, scratch that... world peace perhaps?
But you're also comparing things that don't exist with things that do. Honestly, if we spent less money on the military, we would just spend more money on entitlement programs. Temporary quality of life improvements, unfortunately unsustainable because of our population profile. Personally I'd prefer more military spending than we have now, because at least we (as in my generation) will get *something* for it. I don't have such high hopes for the 12% of every paycheck pumped into the SS Pyramid Scheme.
The problem today is that the wars we're going to fight are in places that we would like to be our friend when the war is over.
Yeah maybe it's time to give up on that ideal. It's not working out too well. Our so-called friends in Pakistan for instance attack us and give aid money to terrorists to attack us.
It's funny because we had a lot of support among Afghan citizens. We had friends. We just screwed it all up by not winning and threatening to give them back to the Taliban, under Pakistani control of course.
Well I guess we're keeping our friends in Pakistan happy.
For instance "government" overhead for managing medicare is apparently very small compared that of privately runned health insurance companies.
Medical overhead is reported in percentage terms. However, the average cost per person on Medicare (usually old people with lots of medications, etc) is substantially higher than the average person on private insurance. A quick search finds this:
In 2003, says the study, the average medical cost for a Medicare beneficiary per year was $6,600. The average medical cost for someone with employer-sponsored health insurance was $2,700.
So Medicare could be half as efficient per person as private insurers and still be more efficient per dollar.
I have never gotten worms from having sex with goats. Maybe vacuosly true maybe not...
When your enemy relies on secrecy, you might need secrecy too. We can stand in one spot all day long and say "we own this bit" but that doesn't really help the situation.
Well, let's say you're a woman working as a software developer, and you've put in some long hours and built a really good library that will make your software system much more solid, and when you go to show it off to your coworkers it's obvious that what they're thinking about (or worse, saying) is "nice rack", not "nice code".
Really??? That's a serious problem? People thinking you are hot? Give me a break!
I don't even know what to say. I'm trying to think of how it's bad to be considered pretty, or handsome in my case. I would love if girls looked at me and were distracted, rather than concentrating on the boring ass code I'm talking about. I'm really trying to picture it. "Jesus stdarg, those regular expression sound so interesting! You are so smart! Oh you weren't even talking about regular expressions?" *staring dreamily into my eyes* "So umm what are you doing after work anyway?" Yeah I'd be so depressed at that job!
I guess I would tell your hypothetical hot coder that she should start valuing *herself* for what she knows is good code. Be proud of your work. Don't expect everybody else to stop being human. And it's perfectly okay to relate to your coworkers as humans, not cogs in a machine producing some webapp.
To me it's far more serious that ugly people are discriminated against, than that hot people are... appreciated for their hotness. That's ridiculous. And the discrimination for ugliness applies to men as well as women.
she's already miles ahead in my book without having to learn how to parrot stupid lines about x86 vs. ARM.
Parrot stupid lines? I think people are being way too harsh about this blog post. The first point she makes is "1. Learn the language. This is key." and gives a link to a glossary of technical terms.
Man, I had no idea it was that much of an exaggeration. 2% of the US? People routinely claim that we could nuke the entire world 6 times over, so why not reduce our stockpiles by 83%.
For a job like software development you've got a point.
I know it's not PC to talk about looks for some reason, but what's wrong with having expectations like "stewardesses should be young and pretty" and "waitresses should be pretty and flirt a little bit?" It's human nature. People enjoy beauty. If I'm going to be cooped up somewhere for 7 hours, with people I'll never see in my life, I would rather have my coffee served by someone cute than not. And for the record, if they were really funny and friendly that would be fine too, but in reality they're neither, at least on the few flights I've been on in the last few years. They're just doing their job and can't wait to be done.
But even if they were secretly funny and friendly, for the sake of argument, that just shows one of the strengths of beauty. If you hire someone pretty, they're *always* pretty, because that's a passive attribute. If you hire someone funny, eh, they don't actually show off their funniness to most passengers, just the few they interact with for some reason.
A lot of people get late fees because the store didn't scan the return properly. It happened to me several times and I always had to waste time contesting it. They'd say "Okay let me check the shelf. Oh. Yeah it's here."
At some point they changed the definition of "two night rental" to be more like "2nd night rental." In other words you didn't get 2 full nights, you got about 1/2 of the first night and 1/2 of the second night for a total of 1 night. So I get a movie at 11pm on Friday, it's due back Saturday before midnight. That's supposed to be two nights. Rather than, you know, actually having it for two nights and returning it Sunday, which is how it used to be. Same thing happened with a week rental. You rent it Friday at 11pm, when is a 1 week rental due back? Thursday night! Because you had it for some portion of each day of a 1 week period. But in common parlance, 1 week from Friday night is next Friday night, not next Thursday night. I believe they got sued over that at some point.
Another issue that came up was returning the movie to a store other than the one where you rented it. You're allowed to do it, but maybe 20% of the time the original store charges you a late fee, and even when they get the movie or credit or however they do it from the other store, don't revert the charges. (Unless you bring it up.)
I rented a lot of movies, and paid very few late fees.. a handful which were actually legitimate. But in high school I had all the time in the world to talk to the manager, repeatedly, until they saw things my way. I can definitely see how easy it would be for someone else to be seriously ripped off by Blockbuster.
How long would you leave the money sit in your checking account (just waiting for someone to steal your bank information)? Now imagine that instead of a single $60k check it was thousands of $5-$10 checks that you were trying to keep track of.
I would say you have a duty to move it to a separate account where it's not "in the way" and monitor it, collecting interest, until you're tired of it. At that point, then you keep part of it as a nominal fee and return the rest to the original owner. And if you can't find them, you declare it as lost property. You don't get to just keep it! (I mean, clearly you do get to, as we see, but it's not right.)
In reality, gift cards aren't like your house check example, because most people don't make it their *business* to give/take loans and set up an infrastructure to deal with them. But if you give out gift cards, you obviously do. Why is it harder to keep track of 100000 little checks for 10 years than it is to keep track of 100000 little checks for 1 year? They're not doing it by hand anyway.
It's not like people bartered live chickens for their gift cards and the company is paying to maintain the chickens until the gift cards are cashed in. There's really no excuse.
It's really no different that putting 'Void after 60 days' on a payroll check.
I don't know, that doesn't absolve them of owing you the money, right? It just means that that particular check is void.
Hopefully Redbox will force Netflix out of much of the DVD market. They are way more convenient and cheaper for most people.
That will allow Netflix to focus on what I would love to see the most -- a completely internet based tv service. I can't wait until I can subscribe to HBO via Netflix.
But it seems like they need a kick in the pants to realize that the DVD mail business is not the future.
Is it really because of shrinkage and all that?
Anyway what really did surprise me was that 2x4 lengths are also not always as advertised, and vary quite a bit. I built a shed with my dad and we knew 2x4's were really only 3.5" wide, but assumed a 96" (or whatever) length was pretty much 96". Turns out some boards were up to 1/2" longer. We didn't learn that lesson until the plywood didn't fit properly. Sucked. The only ones that are reliable are the 93" lengths.
Only for as long as people keep thinking like that.
As long as *any* people keep thinking like that.
It might take a thousand, ten thousand, or even a hundred thousand years to achieve world piece. But even that is no reason not to try.
Doesn't that depend what happens to the people who try (but fail)?
Yet their car factories are staffed by zero wage robots and they have higher quality than US factories. Maybe that's not directly related to their AI research, but in general they seem to have done pretty well for themselves, and they *have* destroyed US competitors (as well as European) in some related fields.
I always wondered where those statistics came from. We've dropped a bunch of bombs in deserts in the US and they have yet to all turn to glass. Are there really enough nukes in the US arsenal to kill every single person in an area 10 times the size the China? Or are we talking like, we have enough nukes to hit your military bases and major and minor cities 10 times and get like 60% of your population, but your rural areas will be mostly okay?