Proposition 13 was intended to make sure retirees wouldn't be price out of their homes once they had retired, due to the fact they had a fixed income. It also helps low income workers afford to live close to work since they couldn't afford homes otherwise they would end up living in coffin apartments.
To me, the dynamics of property prices and commutes seem to be no different from stellar dynamics. There is the gravitational pressure of workers wanting to live as close to work and other amenities like good schools as possible in order to reduce commute times. Then are opposing forces in trying to avoid crime areas, avoiding anywhere too high density, wanting to live close to green space, oceans and countryside. What you would propose is to start a supernova reaction that would just blow everything apart.
Businesses are moving out of California. It's cheaper moving to other Tech cities than it is to move to Tumbleweed Town. There are health problems due to fungus in the desert areas. Businesses also need to be close to top league universities, an instant supply of workers and other resources. Workers want to live and work in areas where there is plenty of choice of employer.
Families don't want to live in high rise blocks. What usually happens is that the more high-rise apartments you build, the more single couples you attract who then start looking for a "icing cake" home or a McMansion.
But there is a great waste of space where there are single story strip malls. In Europe and Canada you will find that they will build shopping malls next to Metro stations, and apartment/office blocks above those. Even strip malls will have three or more levels of apartments above them. Then you don't need a car to get around.
Microsoft Visual Studio is probably the best there is - at least it doesn't show up variables as [unknown] because the compiler and debugger developers couldn't agree on a data format to indicate where variables optimized into registers were stored.
Visual Studio seems to be extending functionality into the Internet so it retrieves news articles related to C++ and coding. Perhaps they will extend it into searching for useful Github repositories and libraries.
Studies have been done. The simplest ones involve working with people who have suffered brain damage from strokes and other accidents. That usually knocks out a region of the brain or two. Then the researchers can study how it affects the thinking process. Some people lose short-term memory - they can remember everything before their accident, but after that, they need a diary to keep track of what happened 10 minutes ago.
Others lose the ability to construct long sentences - the guy who made the "Kinder surprise" Humpty-Dumpty advert had that problem. Being able to comprehend long sentences is another problem that can happen. Even remembering words and meaning is another problem that can happen.
With vision, some people lose the ability to recognise an object. Vision works on two pathways; what and where it is/where it is moving. They know "something" is there, but it's just a blue smudge of flashing points. Or they just lose the ability to detect motion and just see an object continuously jumping from place to place. They might even lose the ability to correlate size and distance. Some even lose the ability to process the fact that an object has a left side and a right side. They will just draw half the object.
In many cases, our brains assign a single neuron to a single object. For route planning, every location gets a neuron, and those locations that connect together get neurons to connect to each other. Then finding a path just involves find a route between the two relevant neurons. Other neurons are dedicated to recognising the face of a person.
You can get electricity from solar panels. I've got a couple of mobile phone chargers which aren't much more than a laptop battery with an array of small solar panels. But those can recharge even on a cloudy day and recharge six mobile phones. I wish laptop batteries could be recharged in the same way.
Some mountain villages were making water traps using fine mesh - water blowing through with the wind condenses onto the meshes and drips down into a collection system. So all a container based system needs is a similar mesh that can unfold like a butterfly wing, extend out the collection channel and collect the water.
In Norway, they split up the distribution of service (the network) from the actual phone billing contract, much like other countries have separated electricity generation (wind, solar, nuclear) from the actual distribution.
I went back to having a landline after I noticed that certain recruitment agencies in the UK "retained by the electronics and embedded industry" kept blitzing me by Email and social media each and every time I tried sending off a resume by Email. Also, I discovered that there was an unexplained international block on incoming calls from the USA and Canada on my mobile phone line.
It's been like that for 20 years. I could list all the categories of all the different types of distractions: Purchase managers, sales and marketing people who stand up and shout down telephones for hours on end, especially right next or in front of you. I had to go away for a snack or early lunch because one guy would stand directly over me while shouting.
Employees who make sudden loud announcements because they love watching all these live traffic, train, ferry and airport websites. Group meetings in the aisles which sound like a public bar on a football night. When you try and type on the keyboard, the crowd suddenly starts shouting louder. Internal mail operatives who drop palettes of boxes with the sound of heavy munitions exploding. Followed by the recipient spending the rest of the day packing and unpacking items using duct tape, bubble wrap and cling film. One dude had to repackage boxes of five into boxes of three and spend the whole day doing this. Employees doing metalwork or woodwork with electric drills at their desk. People constantly pacing back and forth. Knew a couple of people who would just ping-pong around the person they were talking to like an electron in an orbital field. Drove me nuts as he kept going back and forth behind me while talking to the person in front of me. Testing various alarm systems and just leaving the alarms running through lunch, afternoon, evening and all night.
Some offices actually just had floor to ceiling partitions that pretended to be offices. Instead of swing doors, there were sliding doors. It helped mitigate some of the noise, but when your neighbor decided to have a mini basketball hoop on his wall, it didn't help.
Already done that. Now work as a freelancer, much to the annoyance of those recruitment agencies "retained by the electronics and embedded industries". Funny how those companies who can't find staff are the ones that don't give out references and require long resignation notice periods.
Be careful for what you wish for... you can end up with mandatory promotions, fixed career path options (you *MUST* become a manager or an architect after 10 years). I worked in a union shop and even the coffee breaks were regulated. You were only allowed to get one cup of coffee in the morning or afternoon. But other things like genuine flexitime were good - admins loved the ability to go out shopping at lunch-time or get their hair done.
Some companies just claimed they offered flexitime and jammed in a stand-up meeting at 9am to make sure no one came in later.
That happened with the bio-science PhD students doing genomics. Their thesis would be based on the analysis of a particular gene, protein, RNA strand. They would do investigations involving suspected possible interactions. For the majority, they could only prove there wasn't any interaction. If they were lucky, they could find some interaction and then explore what that involved and contribute that knowledge to the genomics project. Then after completing their PhD, they would join the ranks of other students who had now been turfed out to make way for the next wave of undergraduate researchers.
Doing experiments with genetics used to involve manual labour in a cycle where the research scientist proposes the experiment, the director approves it, the technician implements it and gathers the results, the research scientist analyzes the results, provides the conclusion, then continues the cycle. All of this was automated by getting a machine to perform experiments in bulk using 100+ test tubes and pipettes in parallel, using marker dyes and an optical camera plus expert system software.
The sonar gear used to do deep scans doesn't take up that much space. Those are small enough to attach to a ROV or even a small fishing boat. They consist of a number of transducers (underwater loudspeakers) and microphones to pick up the sonar reflections. Placed inside a waterproof case, they don't take much more space than a 1 litre bottle cut in half. Signal processing by a PC or custom silicon converts the raw data back into height information which can be stored as point cloud or terrain data.
Mobile phones get cracked screens, the memory chips might fry, the USB connector gets a bit wobbly and doesn't charge up. Or they get so filled up with updates that it simply isn't possible to use them any more.
I had enough problems trying to update a Samsung Galaxy S2 that I needed to uninstall Skype in order to get the memory space to install the updates and then reinstall Skype.
CAD workstations. Try visualizing a modern jumbo jet with over 100,000 components represented using the commercial CAD formats. Each of those has so much meta-data you need all that Gigabytes. Then there are GIS systems that model entire cities and states using multi-layer information and Terabytes of textures.
At least knowing the things you can do and can't do is one step.. For the record, everyone used to be able to afford to live in a city, take a bus or walk to work and not need a car... but when the universities expanded to take in more international students, all those apartments and houses that used to go to first time buyers and young couples have gone to buy-to-let landlords instead. The most desirable properties are the Victorian townhouses in the cities which usually sell for around £50K per bedroom, because they are priced at the business rate of one working person or couple per room. Now employers are only interested in you if you are willing to share a room through AirBnB
Then those young families have been forced to move into overspill housing estates, where everything is a car journey away. Buses only run every every two hours or only at the morning or evening. Streets don't have sidewalks on either side and the roads often form a maze of inter-exchange roundabouts and desolate rat runs that go past forests and fields. No one wants to travel alone by foot on those roads, so car travel is the only option.
With buses, it costs £2.50 for a long distance journey per person. A similar taxi cab journey costs £10. It's cheaper for five people to take a taxi than a bus.
All those valves, capacitors and resistors of an analogue TV were replaced with digital signal processing. The overlays to display channel numbers, the menu options to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, stereo sound modes are easier to do digitally than to have twiddly buttons, dials and levers. All the tuners are digital. As the IC's are memory-mapped, they have to have a CPU and software. Just the video buffer for an HD screen will take up megabytes of memory.
East Menlo Park used to have the highest murder rate of the USA. But it was actually just this small subdivision of low income housing bounded by freeways to the Dumbarton bridge. The problem with the dog poo is with the homeless people protesting the lack of sympathy of the new residents to their plight. They get shooed off by people making police complaints so they come back and take a dump.
In the past, middle management were the first to go. I remember the days before there were customer service systems - the SQL database that kept track of customer accounts, their addresses, contracts and orders. Each department had their own database, each with slightly different details. Sometimes a missing unit or floor number, telephone number. Orders were printed out on dockets, and floated between in, out and pending trays, then sent to "records". Then managers would approve orders, get large orders approved by their senior manager, and all the way up the chain. Each person would supervise three to five people. One the "paperless office" came in, nothing needed to be printed out any more. All that time spent approving and signing just disappeared. So did those management jobs.
Then customers starts getting booster pumps that suck out the required pressure X and flow-rate Y from the water mains. That causes other people to lose pressure and flow rate so they too get booster pumps. Then everyone has booster pumps and their water flow is back where they started.
Slashdot Mirror
Proposition 13 was intended to make sure retirees wouldn't be price out of their homes once they had retired, due to the fact they had a fixed income.
It also helps low income workers afford to live close to work since they couldn't afford homes otherwise they would end up living in coffin apartments.
To me, the dynamics of property prices and commutes seem to be no different from stellar dynamics. There is the gravitational pressure of workers wanting to live as close to work and other amenities like good schools as possible in order to reduce commute times. Then are opposing forces in trying to avoid crime areas, avoiding anywhere too high density, wanting to live close to green space, oceans and countryside. What you would propose is to start a supernova reaction that would just blow everything apart.
Businesses are moving out of California. It's cheaper moving to other Tech cities than it is to move to Tumbleweed Town. There are health problems due to fungus in the desert areas. Businesses also need to be close to top league universities, an instant supply of workers and other resources. Workers want to live and work in areas where there is plenty of choice of employer.
Families don't want to live in high rise blocks. What usually happens is that the more high-rise apartments you build, the more single couples you attract who then start looking for a "icing cake" home or a McMansion.
But there is a great waste of space where there are single story strip malls. In Europe and Canada you will find that they will build shopping malls next to Metro stations, and apartment/office blocks above those. Even strip malls will have three or more levels of apartments above them. Then you don't need a car to get around.
Microsoft Visual Studio is probably the best there is - at least it doesn't show up variables as [unknown] because the compiler and debugger developers couldn't agree on a data format to indicate where variables optimized into registers were stored.
Visual Studio seems to be extending functionality into the Internet so it retrieves news articles related to C++ and coding. Perhaps they will extend it into searching for useful Github repositories and libraries.
Studies have been done. The simplest ones involve working with people who have suffered brain damage from strokes and other accidents. That usually knocks out a region of the brain or two. Then the researchers can study how it affects the thinking process. Some people lose short-term memory - they can remember everything before their accident, but after that, they need a diary to keep track of what happened 10 minutes ago.
Others lose the ability to construct long sentences - the guy who made the "Kinder surprise" Humpty-Dumpty advert had that problem. Being able to comprehend long sentences is another problem that can happen. Even remembering words and meaning is another problem that can happen.
With vision, some people lose the ability to recognise an object. Vision works on two pathways; what and where it is/where it is moving. They know "something" is there, but it's just a blue smudge of flashing points. Or they just lose the ability to detect motion and just see an object continuously jumping from place to place. They might even lose the ability to correlate size and distance. Some even lose the ability to process the fact that an object has a left side and a right side. They will just draw half the object.
In many cases, our brains assign a single neuron to a single object. For route planning, every location gets a neuron, and those locations that connect together get neurons to connect to each other. Then finding a path just involves find a route between the two relevant neurons. Other neurons are dedicated to recognising the face of a person.
There are ice cube makers which do the same thing. They suck up the moisture in the air, condense and freeze it into ice cubes.
You can get electricity from solar panels. I've got a couple of mobile phone chargers which aren't much more than a laptop battery with an array of small solar panels. But those can recharge even on a cloudy day and recharge six mobile phones. I wish laptop batteries could be recharged in the same way.
Some mountain villages were making water traps using fine mesh - water blowing through with the wind condenses onto the meshes and drips down into a collection system. So all a container based system needs is a similar mesh that can unfold like a butterfly wing, extend out the collection channel and collect the water.
In Norway, they split up the distribution of service (the network) from the actual phone billing contract, much like other countries have separated electricity generation (wind, solar, nuclear) from the actual distribution.
I went back to having a landline after I noticed that certain recruitment agencies in the UK "retained by the electronics and embedded industry" kept blitzing me by Email and social media each and every time I tried sending off a resume by Email. Also, I discovered that there was an unexplained international block on incoming calls from the USA and Canada on my mobile phone line.
It's been like that for 20 years. I could list all the categories of all the different types of distractions:
Purchase managers, sales and marketing people who stand up and shout down telephones for hours on end, especially right next or in front of you. I had to go away for a snack or early lunch because one guy would stand
directly over me while shouting.
Employees who make sudden loud announcements because they love watching all these live traffic, train, ferry and airport websites.
Group meetings in the aisles which sound like a public bar on a football night. When you try and type on the keyboard, the crowd suddenly starts shouting louder.
Internal mail operatives who drop palettes of boxes with the sound of heavy munitions exploding. Followed by the recipient spending the rest of the day packing and unpacking items using duct tape, bubble wrap and cling film. One dude had to repackage boxes of five into boxes of three and spend the whole day doing this.
Employees doing metalwork or woodwork with electric drills at their desk.
People constantly pacing back and forth. Knew a couple of people who would just ping-pong around the person they were talking to like an electron in an orbital field. Drove me nuts as he kept going back and forth behind me while talking to the person in front of me.
Testing various alarm systems and just leaving the alarms running through lunch, afternoon, evening and all night.
If they could get away with it, they would put office desks under the stairwells:
http://www.czmcam.org/wp-conte...
Some offices actually just had floor to ceiling partitions that pretended to be offices. Instead of swing doors, there were sliding doors. It helped mitigate some of the noise, but when your neighbor decided to have a mini basketball hoop on his wall, it didn't help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Already done that. Now work as a freelancer, much to the annoyance of those recruitment agencies "retained by the electronics and embedded industries". Funny how those companies who can't find staff are the ones that don't give out references and require long resignation notice periods.
Be careful for what you wish for... you can end up with mandatory promotions, fixed career path options (you *MUST* become a manager or an architect after 10 years). I worked in a union shop and even the coffee breaks were regulated. You were only allowed to get one cup of coffee in the morning or afternoon. But other things like genuine flexitime were good - admins loved the ability to go out shopping at lunch-time or get their hair done.
Some companies just claimed they offered flexitime and jammed in a stand-up meeting at 9am to make sure no one came in later.
That happened with the bio-science PhD students doing genomics. Their thesis would be based on the analysis of a particular gene, protein, RNA strand. They would do investigations involving suspected possible interactions. For the majority, they could only prove there wasn't any interaction. If they were lucky, they could find some interaction and then explore what that involved and contribute that knowledge to the genomics project. Then after completing their PhD, they would join the ranks of other students who had now been turfed out to make way for the next wave of undergraduate researchers.
Doing experiments with genetics used to involve manual labour in a cycle where the research scientist proposes the experiment, the director approves it, the technician implements it and gathers the results, the research scientist analyzes the results, provides the conclusion, then continues the cycle. All of this was automated by getting
a machine to perform experiments in bulk using 100+ test tubes and pipettes in parallel, using marker dyes and an optical camera plus expert system software.
The sonar gear used to do deep scans doesn't take up that much space. Those are small enough to attach to a ROV or even a small fishing boat. They consist of a number of transducers (underwater loudspeakers) and microphones to pick up the sonar reflections. Placed inside a waterproof case, they don't take much more space than a 1 litre bottle cut in half. Signal processing by a PC or custom silicon converts the raw data back into height information which can be stored as point cloud or terrain data.
Mobile phones get cracked screens, the memory chips might fry, the USB connector gets a bit wobbly and doesn't charge up. Or they get so filled up with updates that it simply isn't possible to use them any more.
I had enough problems trying to update a Samsung Galaxy S2 that I needed to uninstall Skype in order to get the memory space to install the updates and then reinstall Skype.
CAD workstations. Try visualizing a modern jumbo jet with over 100,000 components represented using the commercial CAD formats. Each of those has so much meta-data you need all that Gigabytes. Then there are GIS systems that model entire cities and states using multi-layer information and Terabytes of textures.
At least knowing the things you can do and can't do is one step.. For the record, everyone used to be able to afford to live in a city, take a bus or walk to work and not need a car... but when the universities expanded to take in more international students, all those apartments and houses that used to go to first time buyers and young couples have gone to buy-to-let landlords instead. The most desirable properties are the Victorian townhouses in the cities which usually sell for around £50K per bedroom, because they are priced at the business rate of one working person or couple per room. Now employers are only interested in you if you are willing to share a room through AirBnB
Then those young families have been forced to move into overspill housing estates, where everything is a car journey away. Buses only run every every two hours or only at the morning or evening. Streets don't have sidewalks on either side and the roads often form a maze of inter-exchange roundabouts and desolate rat runs that go past forests and fields. No one wants to travel alone by foot on those roads, so car travel is the only option.
With buses, it costs £2.50 for a long distance journey per person. A similar taxi cab journey costs £10. It's cheaper for five people to take a taxi than a bus.
All those valves, capacitors and resistors of an analogue TV were replaced with digital signal processing. The overlays to display channel numbers, the menu options to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, stereo sound modes are easier to do digitally than to have twiddly buttons, dials and levers. All the tuners are digital. As the IC's are memory-mapped, they have to have a CPU and software. Just the video buffer for an HD screen will take up megabytes of memory.
You get implantable loop recorders that record the signal of your heart:
https://www.gosh.nhs.uk/teenag...
East Menlo Park used to have the highest murder rate of the USA. But it was actually just this small subdivision of low income housing bounded by freeways to the Dumbarton bridge. The problem with the dog poo is with the homeless people protesting the lack of sympathy of the new residents to their plight. They get shooed off by people making police complaints so they come back and take a dump.
In the past, middle management were the first to go. I remember the days before there were customer service systems - the SQL database that kept track of customer accounts, their addresses, contracts and orders. Each department had their own database, each with slightly different details. Sometimes a missing unit or floor number, telephone number. Orders were printed out on dockets, and floated between in, out and pending trays, then sent to "records". Then managers would approve orders, get large orders approved by their senior manager, and all the way up the chain. Each person would supervise three to five people. One the "paperless office" came in, nothing needed to be printed out any more. All that time spent approving and signing just disappeared. So did those management jobs.
Then customers starts getting booster pumps that suck out the required pressure X and flow-rate Y from the water mains. That causes other people to lose pressure and flow rate so they too get booster pumps. Then everyone has booster pumps and their water flow is back where they started.