The game industry is the western world's remaining sweat shop.
I think you meant "last remaining sweat shop", but that's not true. Every industry that has "cool" attached to it, has more people wanting in that there are positions, and doesn't have strong unions will contain almost nothing but overworked and underpaid people working in them. Look at almost any "content production" industry - writing, game development, music... it's repeated over and over. It only goes away when the "cool" factor dries up or people wise up. Usually it's the first that happens.
First of all, you forgot to tell the kids to stay off your lawn.
Second, all empires grow until the amount of loot they get from the conquered equals the treasure they have to spend to take it. At that point, there is a delicate balance and it just takes a bit of corruption or a few bad economic years to make things bad enough in the hinterlands to start a barbarian revolt - which raises the cost of maintenance which... a death spiral from which the empire usually doesn't emerge (they could, if they would just cut their losses and accept a slightly lower standard of living. That worked about as well back then as it does today). And, in the end, the barbarians invade and sack the center.
Ultimately, it was the unsustainable economics of empire and invasion that killed the Greek and Roman empires, not lack of inspiration (but, of course, there's precious little time for the latter when you're using all your resources trying to hold off a marauding barbarian hoard).
What I find unsettling about LA-200 is that many of the cowboys equally take a smaller dosage by the same needle (before using on the cows though) because it's practically the same as what they would've been given from an HMO but much less expense.
Well, the thing is that it's not "practically" the same, it's "exactly" the same. You don't want to set up two lines to produce the same crap. IF you ever had two lines, by now you've consolidated them and just repackage for different countries, uses, etc., or you've gone out of business. Simple economics, really. Besides, cowboys are tough - more cow than boy.
It's not only the beta lactams that you mention. The quinolones and sulfanamides are going away, too, in a blaze of resistance. The aminoglycosides are either relatively weak or (again) facing resistance issues. The only class of antibiotic drugs that aren't suffering as much from resistance issues are the oxazolidinones and that's only because (a) they haven't been around that long, (b) they are generally only effective against gram-positive strains of bacteria, and (c) they have relatively poor side effects. And there's only one of those approved for labeled use as an antibiotic.
As for your magic bullet of genome sequencing for drug design, I'm afraid you've probably only read layperson level, breathless press releases about it. I'm sure we'll have new antibiotics from that path about the same time we get large scale fusion reactors working to generate significant amounts of power. There's a hell of a lot of work between understanding attack vectors (which is what genome sequencing gives you *part* of - for the rest of the picture you need protein folding and large-scale chemical simulation... and don't forget solvation issues in the latter) and getting an actual working drug into production.
So Medicare could be half as efficient per person as private insurers and still be more efficient per dollar.
Yes and, in fact, it's already somewhere between three to five times more efficient "per dollar" which, assuming that your dollar figures are right, still make it more efficient overall "per person" than private insurers.
To quote many prominent Republicans, "9-11 changed everything."
To be fair, it did. It gave cover for authoritarian assholes to do whatever they wanted to do. Fighting wars in secrecy is just the tip of the iceberg. Welcome to the large gulag, comrade.
It's the same with the auto-timed thermostat for me. The UIs on those things were designed by demonic hellspawn. And once you lose the manual - good luck!
... this is what you get. Other countries jumping ahead of you. It's really a shame that conservatives have convinced everyone that governments can't do anything right except fighting protracted, useless wars, torturing enemies du jour, and spying on citizens. Otherwise we might actually have government projects that could do things that no private enterprise now has the time window to exploit (i.e., things that take longer than a fiscal quarter) - high-speed rail, more secure/robust power infrastructure, supercomputing research - just to name a few. Yes, we "sort of" encourage these sorts of things via government now, but only to a minimal level and with "public-private" partnerships that work worse than a purely governmental solution.
When the conservatives finally wedge us economically back to the status of a third-world country, I hope they'll be happy with themselves. Because we all know Somalia is the kind of laissez-faire paradise that they've wanted all along.
Apples are much harder to use for lunch than tuna sandwiches. I thought the iPad would work better because it was slimmer and fit my mouth better, but I still kept getting cut on the little metal and plastic bits when I chewed.
... you're taking the same strongarm robbery position as your average mafia don, and calling it "civilization."
Unless you think that "civilization" can survive a bout of widespread anarchy, yes. However, I'd like to think of it as a bunch of serfs killing their capitalist "feudal lords". After all, the lords simply "bought" the labor of their serfs with the protection they provided. Welcome to the jungle, pallie.
Maybe it's just a rationalization 20 years later for why Apple didn't adopt color graphics earlier.
Maybe it's just the realization that most software developers do a crappy enough job in black and white that giving them even more freedom to screw up in even more garish ways isn't that great of an idea. Really. You may hate Steve for this, but if it avoids a system looking like Microsoft Windows' Default - Blue Luna, it's worth it.
What exactly are you complaining about? You don't think a State Government here in the US doesn't have enough IT infrastructure and equipment so that it needs someone looking over it so that there's an overall strategy for service delivery? Usually, entities as small as counties here in the US are responsible for delivering enough services that the IT needs of each of these become relatively significant. Someone has to make sure that departments talk together and, hopefully, standardize so that one could achieve enterprise discounts for them (and, no, I'd usually rather not have Joe Schmuck from the IT department handling that sort of negotiations). Do you object to the label "CIO"? I tend to agree. The adoption of "corporate" titles for "governmental" jobs cheapens both, as they have distinct constituencies. However, it seems that for purposes of compensation, there needs to be some sort of titular compatibility, so what else is one to do?
Playing a shell game with the facts does not change reality.
You've never worked on Wall Street, have you? I know of many millionaires who have had their realities changed by "playing a shell game with the facts". Now very few of them happen to be "customers", but as they say, "The brokerage firm makes money, the broker makes money, and two out of three ain't bad."
Name a better way to project air power to the other side of the world?
Land bases a bit closer? And, if you can't get enough allies who agree with your objective to allow you to land and take off from their territory, I'd say that all the aircraft carriers in the world aren't going to help you.
The company I work for makes eeeeeevil weapons of war... I also worked at a chemical company.
I know that your "kooks" aren't in the right, but, can't you find anything less controversial to do for a living?
We've had people try to damage our products. We've had people SUCCEED in damaging our products.
Uh, that's sort of what people (especially people fighting you) do with "eeeeeevil weapons of war". If your company makes them so poorly that they break so easily, I'm not sure I'd want them on the battlefield.
At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.
And then, just like the current generation with drug use, they will call it "youthful indiscretion" and pass another law to lock up people doing the same things they did when they were young.
Slashdot Mirror
What's that? Is it some new form of torrent delivery system?
The game industry is the western world's remaining sweat shop.
I think you meant "last remaining sweat shop", but that's not true. Every industry that has "cool" attached to it, has more people wanting in that there are positions, and doesn't have strong unions will contain almost nothing but overworked and underpaid people working in them. Look at almost any "content production" industry - writing, game development, music... it's repeated over and over. It only goes away when the "cool" factor dries up or people wise up. Usually it's the first that happens.
Why FARK?
Although I share your dismay at even the thought - the answer is: Because it brings in page hits.
No, that one had electric tentacles and lived in the Sahara. They're still waiting to dig that one up.
Is this what happened to Rome and ancient Greece?
First of all, you forgot to tell the kids to stay off your lawn.
Second, all empires grow until the amount of loot they get from the conquered equals the treasure they have to spend to take it. At that point, there is a delicate balance and it just takes a bit of corruption or a few bad economic years to make things bad enough in the hinterlands to start a barbarian revolt - which raises the cost of maintenance which... a death spiral from which the empire usually doesn't emerge (they could, if they would just cut their losses and accept a slightly lower standard of living. That worked about as well back then as it does today). And, in the end, the barbarians invade and sack the center.
Ultimately, it was the unsustainable economics of empire and invasion that killed the Greek and Roman empires, not lack of inspiration (but, of course, there's precious little time for the latter when you're using all your resources trying to hold off a marauding barbarian hoard).
What I find unsettling about LA-200 is that many of the cowboys equally take a smaller dosage by the same needle (before using on the cows though) because it's practically the same as what they would've been given from an HMO but much less expense.
Well, the thing is that it's not "practically" the same, it's "exactly" the same. You don't want to set up two lines to produce the same crap. IF you ever had two lines, by now you've consolidated them and just repackage for different countries, uses, etc., or you've gone out of business. Simple economics, really. Besides, cowboys are tough - more cow than boy.
It's not only the beta lactams that you mention. The quinolones and sulfanamides are going away, too, in a blaze of resistance. The aminoglycosides are either relatively weak or (again) facing resistance issues. The only class of antibiotic drugs that aren't suffering as much from resistance issues are the oxazolidinones and that's only because (a) they haven't been around that long, (b) they are generally only effective against gram-positive strains of bacteria, and (c) they have relatively poor side effects. And there's only one of those approved for labeled use as an antibiotic.
As for your magic bullet of genome sequencing for drug design, I'm afraid you've probably only read layperson level, breathless press releases about it. I'm sure we'll have new antibiotics from that path about the same time we get large scale fusion reactors working to generate significant amounts of power. There's a hell of a lot of work between understanding attack vectors (which is what genome sequencing gives you *part* of - for the rest of the picture you need protein folding and large-scale chemical simulation... and don't forget solvation issues in the latter) and getting an actual working drug into production.
You can tell pretty quickly if viagra, thyroid medicine, or blood pressure medicine are fake..
Well, except for Viagra and the common Slashdot reader - he wouldn't ever get a chance to actually field test it...
So Medicare could be half as efficient per person as private insurers and still be more efficient per dollar.
Yes and, in fact, it's already somewhere between three to five times more efficient "per dollar" which, assuming that your dollar figures are right, still make it more efficient overall "per person" than private insurers.
To quote many prominent Republicans, "9-11 changed everything."
To be fair, it did. It gave cover for authoritarian assholes to do whatever they wanted to do. Fighting wars in secrecy is just the tip of the iceberg. Welcome to the large gulag, comrade.
It's the same with the auto-timed thermostat for me. The UIs on those things were designed by demonic hellspawn. And once you lose the manual - good luck!
... this is what you get. Other countries jumping ahead of you. It's really a shame that conservatives have convinced everyone that governments can't do anything right except fighting protracted, useless wars, torturing enemies du jour, and spying on citizens. Otherwise we might actually have government projects that could do things that no private enterprise now has the time window to exploit (i.e., things that take longer than a fiscal quarter) - high-speed rail, more secure/robust power infrastructure, supercomputing research - just to name a few. Yes, we "sort of" encourage these sorts of things via government now, but only to a minimal level and with "public-private" partnerships that work worse than a purely governmental solution.
When the conservatives finally wedge us economically back to the status of a third-world country, I hope they'll be happy with themselves. Because we all know Somalia is the kind of laissez-faire paradise that they've wanted all along.
Apples are much harder to use for lunch than tuna sandwiches. I thought the iPad would work better because it was slimmer and fit my mouth better, but I still kept getting cut on the little metal and plastic bits when I chewed.
... is everyone writing on the web 13 years old?
No. Some are dogs.
... you're taking the same strongarm robbery position as your average mafia don, and calling it "civilization."
Unless you think that "civilization" can survive a bout of widespread anarchy, yes. However, I'd like to think of it as a bunch of serfs killing their capitalist "feudal lords". After all, the lords simply "bought" the labor of their serfs with the protection they provided. Welcome to the jungle, pallie.
Maybe it's just a rationalization 20 years later for why Apple didn't adopt color graphics earlier.
Maybe it's just the realization that most software developers do a crappy enough job in black and white that giving them even more freedom to screw up in even more garish ways isn't that great of an idea. Really. You may hate Steve for this, but if it avoids a system looking like Microsoft Windows' Default - Blue Luna, it's worth it.
WHY DOES A CANTON HAVE A CIO?
What exactly are you complaining about? You don't think a State Government here in the US doesn't have enough IT infrastructure and equipment so that it needs someone looking over it so that there's an overall strategy for service delivery? Usually, entities as small as counties here in the US are responsible for delivering enough services that the IT needs of each of these become relatively significant. Someone has to make sure that departments talk together and, hopefully, standardize so that one could achieve enterprise discounts for them (and, no, I'd usually rather not have Joe Schmuck from the IT department handling that sort of negotiations). Do you object to the label "CIO"? I tend to agree. The adoption of "corporate" titles for "governmental" jobs cheapens both, as they have distinct constituencies. However, it seems that for purposes of compensation, there needs to be some sort of titular compatibility, so what else is one to do?
On the other hand, very few engineering programs require the engineer to take college-level biology.
Pity. We'd probably have more resilient designs if we did.
Playing a shell game with the facts does not change reality.
You've never worked on Wall Street, have you? I know of many millionaires who have had their realities changed by "playing a shell game with the facts". Now very few of them happen to be "customers", but as they say, "The brokerage firm makes money, the broker makes money, and two out of three ain't bad."
Can we start calling cigarettes, "All natural inhaled plant extracts"?
Probably not, since there's a lot of crap in there in addition to the tobacco that's probably not all that natural.
Name a better way to project air power to the other side of the world?
Land bases a bit closer? And, if you can't get enough allies who agree with your objective to allow you to land and take off from their territory, I'd say that all the aircraft carriers in the world aren't going to help you.
The company I work for makes eeeeeevil weapons of war... I also worked at a chemical company.
I know that your "kooks" aren't in the right, but, can't you find anything less controversial to do for a living?
We've had people try to damage our products. We've had people SUCCEED in damaging our products.
Uh, that's sort of what people (especially people fighting you) do with "eeeeeevil weapons of war". If your company makes them so poorly that they break so easily, I'm not sure I'd want them on the battlefield.
BETA.
when complete it weighs 10 pounds, about the weight of a full-grown cat...
My cat is much thicker than that, you insensitive clod!
At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.
And then, just like the current generation with drug use, they will call it "youthful indiscretion" and pass another law to lock up people doing the same things they did when they were young.