Most sensible people expect that self-driving cars will go significantly above the speed limit
I guess I'm not sensible then because I expect self-driving cars to rigidly adhere to all traffic laws especially something as simple as a speed limit.
I expect this not because I don't realize that autonomous vehicles can respond quicker than humans and have better collision detection sensors than humans, but because they are mindless programmed automatons that should rigidly adhere to a set of rules that are programmed into them.
But Teslas are not fully autonomous anyway. If I want to speed while driving one, maybe I should be active in that decision and not just let the car do whatever it feels it can.
I live in a smaller city now - I usually refer to it as a "town" and people often go below the speed limit. Life seems a little slower around here, but I have lived in several big cities as well where even the slow drivers were exceeding the speed limit.
I once crested a little freeway overpass only to see a cop on the shoulder with his radar gun pointed at me and everyone else. I was doing about 80 in a 60.
Not to worry, I was going with the flow of traffic - and we all jammed on our brakes and slowed down to 60 until we got past him. He was waiting for someone going much faster than that and I doubt he had to wait very long either.
I do not miss living in that city full of freeways and their millions of drivers at all.
Maybe it's partially due to being a bit older, but I'm just not in that much of a hurry anymore and neither are most of the other people who live here. All 50 of them (I kid, my town is not that small).
Sure, some cities are abusive in collecting traffic fines, but except for a few small towns which run "speed traps" few are relying on it to pay for their budget and I recall laws being put into place (at least in Texas) to curb such abuses. Famous speed trap towns were suddenly limited in the amount of revenue they could pull from traffic citations.
The fact is that nobody would get traffic citations if they didn't violate the law.
I've gotten a few and while I may have grumbled and complained, I was breaking the law when I got them - generally for speeding.
In my small town we've got two intersections with red light cameras and they haven't tweaked the timing of the yellow lights and personally I think they're far too generous because I still see people running red lights and not being ticketed.
I've also seen the accidents caused by people who ignore red lights, too often resulting in death.
I'm more concerned with running red lights than speeding though as I think it's more dangerous and if SDC's are more compliant in respecting red lights (and stop signs) than the other drivers I see every day on the roads, then I welcome them.
I'm not really surprised that's up there - along with Donald Trump.
Ignoring politics for a moment we lost some important and popular people. Prince, David Bowie, John Glenn, Leonard Cohen, Gwen Ifil, John McLaughlin, Harper Lee, Florence Henderson, Abe Vigoda, Merle Haggard, Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali, Paul Kantner, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, and Arnold Palmer but not Carl Palmer.
Glen Frey, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Janet Reno, Fidel Castro, Shimon Peres. Gordie Howe, Bernie Worrel, that guy from Mr. Ed, Noel Neill, Antonin Scalia, George Kennedy,
I skipped over a lot of people to make my list that short.
Some of those people were old anyway and weren't expected to live and weren't doing much, but others were too young and had a lot more to offer the world.
Now I don't wish death upon Mick Jagger, but it's coming someday and how are they going to re-work that meme? "Hey Mick, look who I outlived this----Mick? Are you still breathing? Mick?...Mick? Oh bloody hell, now I've outlived Mick Jagger."
And then the Rolling Stones will be truly over. Or maybe Keith Richards will die first. Either of them is a good bet to die soon.
As a former resident of Maricopa County, it's a great idea. Can't be any worse than the drivers already there.
And don't blame me for Arpaio - I regret that I only had one opportunity to vote against him, but it was not enough. He's really gone of the deep end now that he finally lost his re-election bid though.
I have a "smart" TV and a "smart BluRay player". One Panasonic and one Samsung. The Panasonic (last I checked) only still had one service available and the Samsung bluray basically bricked its smart capabilities by insisting on firmware updates. It still plays discs, but barely. I just wanted to watch Netflix, why did it have to update Angry Birds or whatever it did?
My Roku is pretty sweet.
I recently added a Chromecast into the mix, but it's horrible. Last night I wanted to watch something but casting from my phone shut off after about a minute but I could cast from my computer - upstairs. Doesn't that defeat the whole idea of just being able to control things from my phone?
You want to pause? Okay, run upstairs and press pause.
Probably can blame it on the phone since my computer could do it fine, but I'm not impressed with Chromecast. I'll probably just buy a second Roku.
I'm not sure how to take your use of the word "bizarro" in front of the 4th Amendment.
Is it meant to say it is bizarre or that our politicians and law enforcement often treat our expectation that we have 4th Amendment rights as bizarre?
At any rate, it doesn't seem the government compelled Twitter to hand over this information so he found the person he wants to sue. Do it.
It's an interesting case. I only know of Eichenwald from his recent appearance with Tucker Carlson on Fox and he came across as less than sympathetic. I really wanted to know more about Trump's amphetamine problem and his mental health issues, but he never stopped counter-attacking to ever establish anything.
I mean, I want to believe but what came up was allegation without evidence which sounded more like it was speculation and hearsay if anything.
But this was sent with the intent to hurt him. I doubt the sender really understands epilepsy very well. I'll admit I don't.
Not only were they functional, they were instrumental to an unnamed company in Texas at one time.
I don't have a fancy HP or even a programmable one, but I have kept a TI-60 in my desk for at least 25 years. I guess I don't actually use it much anymore. I just checked. The battery is dead.
Okay, sometimes you can't help it. One of our family dogs when I was a kid loved to dig under the fence and escape despite our efforts to stop him. As it turned out all he really wanted was a ride in the car and if my father picked him up a mile away from our house, he got to hang his head out the window for a few minutes.
That was an explanation anyway, borne out that after a while my dad would just honk the horn a few times in the driveway and the dog would come home and he'd be rewarded with a brief ride around the neighborhood.
Genius on the dog's part. So manipulative, but he could have been run over.
I adopted a cat a couple months ago and at the shelter there was another cat that had a sign on its cage which said "Door Dasher". Yeah, I don't think I'll adopt that one. Sorry.
Keep your cat indoors and your dogs in your yard or on a leash. They'll live longer.
Oxfam interviewed dozens of Tyson workers across six states, almost all of whom reported being denied bathroom breaks outright or having to wait an unreasonably long time to use the bathroom—up to an hour or more. Hanson, a worker at a Tyson plant in Arkansas, had the uncomfortable experience of seeing his own mother urinate on the line; she now wears diapers to work to avoid it happening again. Tyson workers also report being fined if they are late returning from the bathroom. Jean, a worker from a Tyson Foods plant in Virginia, says, “You go to the bathroom one minute late, they have you disciplined. The supervisor will have you sign a discipline paper I don’t drink any water so I won’t have to go.”
the computers crash you must be paid until you are formally told to go home (so if it takes 3 hours for the manager to call a shutdown you get paid for that time)
In a past life when I supported software at distribution centers I'd sometimes get a call with some guy screaming at me that he's got a warehouse full of union workers sitting around being paid to do nothing because the system was down.
I had one guy tell me to call him every 10 minutes with a status update. This was in the days of pagers and dial-up modems. I just rolled my eyes and told him I would. How was I going to diagnose and fix his problem if I'm calling him every 10 minutes? Fortunately for me, it didn't even take 10 minutes to fix.
The difference in his tone of voice between the first time I called him and the 2nd time when I told him it was fixed was quite remarkable.
Could they both have made it up? Could they have been fooled by some photoshopper?
Yes, but usually it doesn't get reported so widely and quickly. My first instinct was not to assume it was "fake news". It was, "Did he really tweet that?" and I tried to find other sources.
Should I wait for Breitbart to confirm it?
I understand being skeptical but "fake news" will apparently be a constant refrain to deflect anything negative throughout his Presidency.
At least you included the "grossly generalistic" part and it is certainly true that some trump supporters are "Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic".
Go listen to Richard ("Hail Trump") Spencer, a guy who objects to being called a "white supremacist", a term he says is a "slur". If you listen to what he says there is no doubt that he is a racist. There's no doubt he is a white supremacist. ("Only Europeans could build something as beautiful as St. Paul's Cathedral or St. Peter's Cathedral"). Even he says he wants a "safe space".
So the question is, how many of trump supporters (not even half of Americans) are those things? Was it a gross generalization? Well, she said it was.
What's amazing to me though is how upset people got by that remark. It was like they took offense at being called something politically incorrect. Their fake outrage made it a rallying cry and a badge of honor for trump supporters.
When Spence was addressed by a cast member of Hamilton for nearly 60 whole seconds and he thanked him and told people not to boo, trump was whining about "safe spaces". The guy is actually offended by SNL, yet he says he doesn't need intelligence briefings.
Perhaps the criticism hits a little too close to home for Trump and his supporters. Will they ever get over it?
Obviously if they're offering legit credit protection they'll need an SSN, but presumably they already have it because I did cough up that information when I sought health care.
Assuming they're legit and I am inclined to agree they probably are, they're just using this to confirm that I am who I say I am.
But how else would anyone know my unique Customer ID Number unless the snail-mail was intercepted or someone had hacked into their system? And what good would it do an identity thief to enroll me into a year of credit monitoring?
I got a letter (actual paper sent via USPS) telling me that a healthcare provider suffered a data breach and my personal information has been stolen from them.
It tells me to go to a website to get a year of free credit monitoring and enter a customer number they have assigned me. I've never heard of this website. Warning bells go off, but as long as I only enter the customer number they assigned me what harm can it do? It seems legit. I really did use that healthcare provider. (So did thousands if not millions of other Americans who live near me). Google searches don't show any indication that it's a scam, but I shouldn't rely on that alone, should I?
And when I enter my customer ID number, it pulls up a form with my name and address already filled in (how else would they snail-mail me if they didn't know that) and it asks me to fill in my Social Security Number.
I actually think it's legitimate, but I'm not going to enter my SSN into some website just because someone sent me a physical letter instead of an e-mail, especially some website I never heard of.
10 years ago, I used weak passwords and often used the same password on different sites. Now I don't. There's no reason anyone in Podesta's position should be even more paranoid and careful. Did I go to g00gle.com or google.com?
Oddly enough, a few weeks ago I mis-dialed a bank and got a telesquatting number. If they had used a reasonably believable voice mail system I would have been fooled. Instead of the usual system I get when I call that bank I got a bunch of scatter-shot ads offering to save me money on everything from insurance to mobile phone service. If they had only asked for my banking credentials mimicking the bank's system I might have fallen for it.
I let the bank know. I don't think they care much.
Fast food has always been garbage. It won't get worse with automation.
Back in the '50s (or so I'm told) they hired "soda jerks" to serve people Coca Cola, but now we just fill our own 64 ounce Big Gulps at the convenience store.
But what about the poor out-of-work soda jerk? Nobody thinks about him. Maybe he went to college and now has a job as a barista.
I'm a bit skeptical of all the objections to automation. I've appreciated automation in my life. It makes things easier and cheaper. Maybe we should look at it as lowering the cost of living rather than putting people out of work.
He starts off by objecting to being called a White Supremacist. He says it's a "slur".
He also says he isn't a neo-nazi or the KKK.
He then goes on to say that "America is a white country".
He decries the idea of a black James Bond that was discussed a few years ago.
He says:
"You could call it 'the great erasure'. It is a radical transformation of the 'white wall' and because this is happening, because we feel it. Everyone feels it. That's why the alt-right is powerful, because it's so true."
"They should be afraid because we are changing the current paradigm."
He says white males are under-represented in Silicon Valley, which is a point which may hit home to me. I'm not sure if it's true but I'm pretty sure they're not hiring black people in record numbers either.
But that's okay because he hates all immigrants.
Some excerpts from that interview:
"We just have to say 'This is not your country'"
"'This is ours. You are not us. This country is for us.'"
"Only Europeans could be the first ones to go to space. Only Europeans could build something as magnificent as...as..uh...uh...St. Paul's Cathedral or St. Peter's Cathedral. Only Europeans could engage in the kind of scientific discovery that we engage with."
"Only Europeans can be like this."
"Being an immigrant - I mean - it's kind of pathetic to be honest. You know, you're kind of like shuffling off from your own country and you're just entering another one and you're just kind of taking advantage of what other people built, just washing up on our shore. Give me a break. I wouldn't be proud of a nation of immigrants."
What I find "scary" about this is that I know many people will buy into his rhetoric. Look, I'm all for clamping down on immigration and the abuse of the H1B system but this guy is a wannabe Hitler. (Goddammit, I just Darwin'ed my whole post).
The first step to becoming a radiology nurse is to become a nurse.
The first step toward a career in radiology nursing is becoming a registered nurse. In order to do this, you must first earn your degree in nursing. Although an Associate of Science in Nursing is usually acceptable, most employers prefer applicants with higher degrees, such a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing. After you’ve earned your degree, you will then need to pass the National council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses.
It goes on to say:
To be eligible to take the Certified Radiology Nurse exam, however, you must be a registered nurse with 2,000 hours of experience in radiology and at least 30 hours of additional education in radiology.
So, sure - it only takes 30 hours...after earning at least an Associate degree and spending a year working.
Certainly 84% of people don't watch sports. Only about 1/3 of the US even watches the Super Bowl and I'm guessing that's the most viewed sporting event in the US.
If accurate what this says to me is that sports viewers are more likely to have DVRs.
I don't even own a DVR. I do own a TV, but everything I watch is streamed over the internet or is on a hard drive, blu-ray or DVD in my home.
I have very little interest in watching sports. I don't mind watching a few highlights if there was a particularly good or interesting play but I'm not going to tune in to a game to wait for them to happen. I see no need for a DVR.
Believe it or not, one of the arguments against allowing grocery stores to sell beer is that the grocery stores (who are very eager to sell beer) would have to hire people over 21 to ring people up.
It was an absurd argument and some day we'll be able to buy beer with our groceries in my state.
Slashdot Mirror
Most sensible people expect that self-driving cars will go significantly above the speed limit
I guess I'm not sensible then because I expect self-driving cars to rigidly adhere to all traffic laws especially something as simple as a speed limit.
I expect this not because I don't realize that autonomous vehicles can respond quicker than humans and have better collision detection sensors than humans, but because they are mindless programmed automatons that should rigidly adhere to a set of rules that are programmed into them.
But Teslas are not fully autonomous anyway. If I want to speed while driving one, maybe I should be active in that decision and not just let the car do whatever it feels it can.
Traffic habits vary widely.
I live in a smaller city now - I usually refer to it as a "town" and people often go below the speed limit. Life seems a little slower around here, but I have lived in several big cities as well where even the slow drivers were exceeding the speed limit.
I once crested a little freeway overpass only to see a cop on the shoulder with his radar gun pointed at me and everyone else. I was doing about 80 in a 60.
Not to worry, I was going with the flow of traffic - and we all jammed on our brakes and slowed down to 60 until we got past him. He was waiting for someone going much faster than that and I doubt he had to wait very long either.
I do not miss living in that city full of freeways and their millions of drivers at all.
Maybe it's partially due to being a bit older, but I'm just not in that much of a hurry anymore and neither are most of the other people who live here. All 50 of them (I kid, my town is not that small).
What cities would those be?
Sure, some cities are abusive in collecting traffic fines, but except for a few small towns which run "speed traps" few are relying on it to pay for their budget and I recall laws being put into place (at least in Texas) to curb such abuses. Famous speed trap towns were suddenly limited in the amount of revenue they could pull from traffic citations.
The fact is that nobody would get traffic citations if they didn't violate the law.
I've gotten a few and while I may have grumbled and complained, I was breaking the law when I got them - generally for speeding.
In my small town we've got two intersections with red light cameras and they haven't tweaked the timing of the yellow lights and personally I think they're far too generous because I still see people running red lights and not being ticketed.
I've also seen the accidents caused by people who ignore red lights, too often resulting in death.
I'm more concerned with running red lights than speeding though as I think it's more dangerous and if SDC's are more compliant in respecting red lights (and stop signs) than the other drivers I see every day on the roads, then I welcome them.
I'm not really surprised that's up there - along with Donald Trump.
Ignoring politics for a moment we lost some important and popular people. Prince, David Bowie, John Glenn, Leonard Cohen, Gwen Ifil, John McLaughlin, Harper Lee, Florence Henderson, Abe Vigoda, Merle Haggard, Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali, Paul Kantner, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, and Arnold Palmer but not Carl Palmer.
Glen Frey, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Janet Reno, Fidel Castro, Shimon Peres. Gordie Howe, Bernie Worrel, that guy from Mr. Ed, Noel Neill, Antonin Scalia, George Kennedy,
I skipped over a lot of people to make my list that short.
Some of those people were old anyway and weren't expected to live and weren't doing much, but others were too young and had a lot more to offer the world.
Keith Richards is still alive!
You know that meme that floats around the internet that says "Hey Mick, look who I outlived this week".
Now I don't wish death upon Mick Jagger, but it's coming someday and how are they going to re-work that meme? "Hey Mick, look who I outlived this----Mick? Are you still breathing? Mick?...Mick? Oh bloody hell, now I've outlived Mick Jagger."
And then the Rolling Stones will be truly over. Or maybe Keith Richards will die first. Either of them is a good bet to die soon.
No sympathy for the devil.
As a former resident of Maricopa County, it's a great idea. Can't be any worse than the drivers already there.
And don't blame me for Arpaio - I regret that I only had one opportunity to vote against him, but it was not enough. He's really gone of the deep end now that he finally lost his re-election bid though.
My experience:
I have a "smart" TV and a "smart BluRay player". One Panasonic and one Samsung. The Panasonic (last I checked) only still had one service available and the Samsung bluray basically bricked its smart capabilities by insisting on firmware updates. It still plays discs, but barely. I just wanted to watch Netflix, why did it have to update Angry Birds or whatever it did?
My Roku is pretty sweet.
I recently added a Chromecast into the mix, but it's horrible. Last night I wanted to watch something but casting from my phone shut off after about a minute but I could cast from my computer - upstairs. Doesn't that defeat the whole idea of just being able to control things from my phone?
You want to pause? Okay, run upstairs and press pause.
Probably can blame it on the phone since my computer could do it fine, but I'm not impressed with Chromecast. I'll probably just buy a second Roku.
I'm not sure how to take your use of the word "bizarro" in front of the 4th Amendment.
Is it meant to say it is bizarre or that our politicians and law enforcement often treat our expectation that we have 4th Amendment rights as bizarre?
At any rate, it doesn't seem the government compelled Twitter to hand over this information so he found the person he wants to sue. Do it.
It's an interesting case. I only know of Eichenwald from his recent appearance with Tucker Carlson on Fox and he came across as less than sympathetic. I really wanted to know more about Trump's amphetamine problem and his mental health issues, but he never stopped counter-attacking to ever establish anything.
I mean, I want to believe but what came up was allegation without evidence which sounded more like it was speculation and hearsay if anything.
But this was sent with the intent to hurt him. I doubt the sender really understands epilepsy very well. I'll admit I don't.
No, I still don't think that explains it.
He's a good narrator and actor, but I do not understand the titty sprinkles reference.
Not only were they functional, they were instrumental to an unnamed company in Texas at one time.
I don't have a fancy HP or even a programmable one, but I have kept a TI-60 in my desk for at least 25 years. I guess I don't actually use it much anymore. I just checked. The battery is dead.
How long before these run over someone's pet?
What is your pet doing roaming the streets?
Okay, sometimes you can't help it. One of our family dogs when I was a kid loved to dig under the fence and escape despite our efforts to stop him. As it turned out all he really wanted was a ride in the car and if my father picked him up a mile away from our house, he got to hang his head out the window for a few minutes.
That was an explanation anyway, borne out that after a while my dad would just honk the horn a few times in the driveway and the dog would come home and he'd be rewarded with a brief ride around the neighborhood.
Genius on the dog's part. So manipulative, but he could have been run over.
I adopted a cat a couple months ago and at the shelter there was another cat that had a sign on its cage which said "Door Dasher". Yeah, I don't think I'll adopt that one. Sorry.
Keep your cat indoors and your dogs in your yard or on a leash. They'll live longer.
What will they demand next, bathroom breaks?
I don't know how true this is, but that has been alleged:
No relief for poultry workers
Oxfam interviewed dozens of Tyson workers across six states, almost all of whom reported being denied bathroom breaks outright or having to wait an unreasonably long time to use the bathroom—up to an hour or more. Hanson, a worker at a Tyson plant in Arkansas, had the uncomfortable experience of seeing his own mother urinate on the line; she now wears diapers to work to avoid it happening again. Tyson workers also report being fined if they are late returning from the bathroom. Jean, a worker from a Tyson Foods plant in Virginia, says, “You go to the bathroom one minute late, they have you disciplined. The supervisor will have you sign a discipline paper I don’t drink any water so I won’t have to go.”
the computers crash you must be paid until you are formally told to go home (so if it takes 3 hours for the manager to call a shutdown you get paid for that time)
In a past life when I supported software at distribution centers I'd sometimes get a call with some guy screaming at me that he's got a warehouse full of union workers sitting around being paid to do nothing because the system was down.
I had one guy tell me to call him every 10 minutes with a status update. This was in the days of pagers and dial-up modems. I just rolled my eyes and told him I would. How was I going to diagnose and fix his problem if I'm calling him every 10 minutes? Fortunately for me, it didn't even take 10 minutes to fix.
The difference in his tone of voice between the first time I called him and the 2nd time when I told him it was fixed was quite remarkable.
Could they be wrong?
Could they both have made it up? Could they have been fooled by some photoshopper?
Yes, but usually it doesn't get reported so widely and quickly. My first instinct was not to assume it was "fake news". It was, "Did he really tweet that?" and I tried to find other sources.
Should I wait for Breitbart to confirm it?
I understand being skeptical but "fake news" will apparently be a constant refrain to deflect anything negative throughout his Presidency.
Not sure about that actually being "fake news".
The Guardian is reporting it.
Fox News is reporting it
As are numerous other news outlets, both respectable and not so respectable.
Perhaps you've just assumed it was "fake" or perhaps you're helping to disseminate your own version of "fake news".
Hey, it's not so bad that he messed it up. He can blame auto-correct (although unpresidented is not a word any auto-correct should recognize).
The bigger issue is that he's involving himself in international affords before assuming office.
At least you included the "grossly generalistic" part and it is certainly true that some trump supporters are "Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic".
Go listen to Richard ("Hail Trump") Spencer, a guy who objects to being called a "white supremacist", a term he says is a "slur". If you listen to what he says there is no doubt that he is a racist. There's no doubt he is a white supremacist. ("Only Europeans could build something as beautiful as St. Paul's Cathedral or St. Peter's Cathedral"). Even he says he wants a "safe space".
So the question is, how many of trump supporters (not even half of Americans) are those things? Was it a gross generalization? Well, she said it was.
What's amazing to me though is how upset people got by that remark. It was like they took offense at being called something politically incorrect. Their fake outrage made it a rallying cry and a badge of honor for trump supporters.
When Spence was addressed by a cast member of Hamilton for nearly 60 whole seconds and he thanked him and told people not to boo, trump was whining about "safe spaces". The guy is actually offended by SNL, yet he says he doesn't need intelligence briefings.
Perhaps the criticism hits a little too close to home for Trump and his supporters. Will they ever get over it?
Obviously if they're offering legit credit protection they'll need an SSN, but presumably they already have it because I did cough up that information when I sought health care.
Assuming they're legit and I am inclined to agree they probably are, they're just using this to confirm that I am who I say I am.
But how else would anyone know my unique Customer ID Number unless the snail-mail was intercepted or someone had hacked into their system? And what good would it do an identity thief to enroll me into a year of credit monitoring?
I dunno.
I'm getting a kick out of imagining Bush trying to pronounce it and it sounds like he's saying "Alterterior" to me.
sorry, that's a cheap shot at a guy who is no longer president, but I can't resist.
I got a letter (actual paper sent via USPS) telling me that a healthcare provider suffered a data breach and my personal information has been stolen from them.
It tells me to go to a website to get a year of free credit monitoring and enter a customer number they have assigned me. I've never heard of this website. Warning bells go off, but as long as I only enter the customer number they assigned me what harm can it do? It seems legit. I really did use that healthcare provider. (So did thousands if not millions of other Americans who live near me). Google searches don't show any indication that it's a scam, but I shouldn't rely on that alone, should I?
And when I enter my customer ID number, it pulls up a form with my name and address already filled in (how else would they snail-mail me if they didn't know that) and it asks me to fill in my Social Security Number.
I actually think it's legitimate, but I'm not going to enter my SSN into some website just because someone sent me a physical letter instead of an e-mail, especially some website I never heard of.
10 years ago, I used weak passwords and often used the same password on different sites. Now I don't. There's no reason anyone in Podesta's position should be even more paranoid and careful. Did I go to g00gle.com or google.com?
Oddly enough, a few weeks ago I mis-dialed a bank and got a telesquatting number. If they had used a reasonably believable voice mail system I would have been fooled. Instead of the usual system I get when I call that bank I got a bunch of scatter-shot ads offering to save me money on everything from insurance to mobile phone service. If they had only asked for my banking credentials mimicking the bank's system I might have fallen for it.
I let the bank know. I don't think they care much.
Fast food has always been garbage. It won't get worse with automation.
Back in the '50s (or so I'm told) they hired "soda jerks" to serve people Coca Cola, but now we just fill our own 64 ounce Big Gulps at the convenience store.
But what about the poor out-of-work soda jerk? Nobody thinks about him. Maybe he went to college and now has a job as a barista.
I'm a bit skeptical of all the objections to automation. I've appreciated automation in my life. It makes things easier and cheaper. Maybe we should look at it as lowering the cost of living rather than putting people out of work.
White nationalist Richard Spencer talks to Al Jazeera
He starts off by objecting to being called a White Supremacist. He says it's a "slur".
He also says he isn't a neo-nazi or the KKK.
He then goes on to say that "America is a white country".
He decries the idea of a black James Bond that was discussed a few years ago.
He says:
"You could call it 'the great erasure'. It is a radical transformation of the 'white wall' and because this is happening, because we feel it. Everyone feels it. That's why the alt-right is powerful, because it's so true."
"They should be afraid because we are changing the current paradigm."
He says white males are under-represented in Silicon Valley, which is a point which may hit home to me. I'm not sure if it's true but I'm pretty sure they're not hiring black people in record numbers either.
But that's okay because he hates all immigrants.
Some excerpts from that interview:
"We just have to say 'This is not your country'"
"'This is ours. You are not us. This country is for us.'"
"Only Europeans could be the first ones to go to space. Only Europeans could build something as magnificent as...as..uh...uh...St. Paul's Cathedral or St. Peter's Cathedral. Only Europeans could engage in the kind of scientific discovery that we engage with."
"Only Europeans can be like this."
"Being an immigrant - I mean - it's kind of pathetic to be honest. You know, you're kind of like shuffling off from your own country and you're just entering another one and you're just kind of taking advantage of what other people built, just washing up on our shore. Give me a break. I wouldn't be proud of a nation of immigrants."
What I find "scary" about this is that I know many people will buy into his rhetoric. Look, I'm all for clamping down on immigration and the abuse of the H1B system but this guy is a wannabe Hitler. (Goddammit, I just Darwin'ed my whole post).
Most vehicles break when they hit a moose.
Indeed.
According to this site:
How do I Become a Radiology Nurse?
The first step to becoming a radiology nurse is to become a nurse.
The first step toward a career in radiology nursing is becoming a registered nurse. In order to do this, you must first earn your degree in nursing. Although an Associate of Science in Nursing is usually acceptable, most employers prefer applicants with higher degrees, such a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing. After you’ve earned your degree, you will then need to pass the National council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses.
It goes on to say:
To be eligible to take the Certified Radiology Nurse exam, however, you must be a registered nurse with 2,000 hours of experience in radiology and at least 30 hours of additional education in radiology.
So, sure - it only takes 30 hours...after earning at least an Associate degree and spending a year working.
Howlin' Wolf asked How Many More Years?
Now I'm gonna ask how many more milliseconds!
I'm surprised it's that high.
Certainly 84% of people don't watch sports. Only about 1/3 of the US even watches the Super Bowl and I'm guessing that's the most viewed sporting event in the US.
If accurate what this says to me is that sports viewers are more likely to have DVRs.
I don't even own a DVR. I do own a TV, but everything I watch is streamed over the internet or is on a hard drive, blu-ray or DVD in my home.
I have very little interest in watching sports. I don't mind watching a few highlights if there was a particularly good or interesting play but I'm not going to tune in to a game to wait for them to happen. I see no need for a DVR.
Believe it or not, one of the arguments against allowing grocery stores to sell beer is that the grocery stores (who are very eager to sell beer) would have to hire people over 21 to ring people up.
It was an absurd argument and some day we'll be able to buy beer with our groceries in my state.