I think if the employees were paid a living wage, it wouldn't be an issue, but they aren't. Bank tellers don't have room for advancement, and start out at about $8/hr, which didn't go up in the last minimum wage increase. Tell me, what incentive is there to keep private things private when you're a burger flipper? Give them extra training to justify the pay increase.
Make them experts in spotting fakes, figuring out when people are up to something, etc, etc.
Oh, wait, they're already trained for this? I'm sorry, but your job is worth more than $8/hr if it takes more than an hour or two to be trained.
You do not need high quality glass fibers to do consumer fiber runs. Plastic fiber will work just as well, and has a much better turn radius.
Glass fibers have no place in the home until they're literally fool proof. If I can't spool a cable around my arm or step on/trip over it without destroying it, I don't want it.
None of what you said matters when the prime market crashes, as it will pretty soon.
Where will they get the money for those bailouts? Individuals? No, a lot of people have lost everything, and a lot more will continue to do so. Why tax them? They weren't the ones that really screwed up. Tax the corporations? They're the only ones who really have money at the moment, and many of those don't.
So what do we do?
Stop bailing people out. Let them crash and burn. Let them starve.
Let them serve as a warning to others, in the future.
I've been getting calls from 202-495-7152 for about a week now, several times a day, and if I ask them to stop calling they hang up. I stayed on the line to see what it's about and it's one of those, "You won a million dollars, send us $10,000 for shipping insurance" scams.
I've reported them to as many people as I can, and no one cares.
So yeah, scamming is a pretty good way to make some extra cash, since no one cares enough to track them down or arrest them until they amass millions.
Just like every other industry that has to buy products, rarely do the experts have much say in which products would work the best.
How can you hold authority when you have to get the workers to make the decisions for you? Today it's which widget to buy, tomorrow it's how many hours they have to work, and next week, they'll be supervising themselves!
So here, employees, make the best of this Z-brand Widget that doesn't fit your needs at all. We bought 10,000 of them, and so help you if you don't use every single one of them.
Did I mention that Z-brand sent us managers to Vegas for a few days? Of course I didn't, because workers shouldn't know what goes on elsewhere in the company!
Muscles and spine are only half the battle. Without the balance loop from the brain, walking would be impossible. The only reason we can walk, being an upside down pyramid shape due to our hips, is because we have great ankles and feet, and because our brain subconsciously controls them for optimal balance.
The big thing about muscle tone is just to keep it. When any muscle is completely cut off from the brain, the muscle goes slack. The muscle will waste away very quickly, but perhaps a 'tone generator' can be developed as well? Something to be installed shortly after spinal injury to make sure the muscles still exist.
I learned cursive in elementary school. It was standard practice to write all of your papers in cursive.
It was horrible.
It was very hard to read quickly. It was hard to write quickly. It didn't cooperate with pencils/pens.
It made me hate handwriting in all of its forms.
As soon as I got to the point where I could type papers and print them out, that's exactly what I started doing. The only words in cursive I've written since the 5th grade have been my first and last names.
All of that wasted teaching could have been used to better teach math (something US schools utterly fail at) or even teach a better grasp of writing. It wasn't until I got to late middle school were we given even a little leeway in the content of our papers.
The brain can still function when 'brain dead.' Think about it. Your entire brain doesn't die once you don't get enough oxygen for a few minutes, you just can't maintain the feedback loop called consciousness. Just because of that, doesn't mean the cells aren't still functioning. Since you're unconscious, though, you may as well be dead if you can never recover from it.
Consciousness is a rather circular loop in the brain. Minor damage to part of that loop can ensure that you never wake up, unless a path around that damage is formed, which may or may not happen. We've seen people wake up from comas after years, because their brain has formed pathways around the damage.
Then we get into the whole debate of 'what is death?' True brain death would mean that the entire brain is dead, and can never recover from it. Little pockets of cells can survive for a period of time, but they will always die in the end if they aren't getting the oxygen/energy/minerals they need. So, unconscious is dead? No, it's just unconscious. We can distinguish between coma, sleep, death, etc. Terry Schiavo should have been considered dead, since +90% of her brain was dead, but because she showed some basic brainstem functions, people said she was alive. In reality, she was less alive and less able to be revived than someone who hasn't had a pulse in ten minutes!
Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students. Most likely what happened was that some kid presented with a previously-undetected heart defect and the school got sued. Now they're instating this to make sure that if someone else comes in with a funky rhythm, they can be taken to the hospital or allowed to rest as needed.
On an even more paranoid note, wouldn't the presence of these heart monitors open them up for these lawsuits to begin with? "Well, Johnny was WEARING a heart monitor when his heart stopped! The doctors said that there was probably some kind of variation in the heart's rhythm, and the school didn't detect OR treat it until it was too late! They LET our child die!"
They have the right to do whatever the fuck they please with your hardware if you sign an agreement that lets them. The only caveat is that it can hopefully be challenged and shot down in court. My phone or PS3 shouldn't be in danger of having functionality removed when an upgrade model is soon to appear...
By our very nature, humans are investors. We don't till fields for 6 months to get nothing out of it. We expect food or flowers or something that will increase our chances for survival. That's a risk. A gamble. Sometimes the crops die in a sudden snap frost. Sometimes a flood. Whatever the cause, sometimes the food or flowers or what not that have come up from the ground for ten years suddenly don't. Then there's famine. People die. People are miserable.
Faced with starvation or months and months of being miserable, people panic. At the first sign of a bad winter or a flood, they raid the storehouses, can as much as possible, make sure they have enough supplies to last them. This can cause even MORE people to panic.
Well, the stock market and economy aren't much different. What you have here is a bunch of farmers (investors) tending fields (the market) that may or may not pay out (investments). I doubt that a famine (bad investment) will kill them, but they sure act like it will. This makes people panic, and do things that may be irrational. Penny stocks got pretty popular for a while, because people were willing to try anything.
Even when the bubble was growing to its biggest, people still took unreasonable risks and played creative accounting games to keep it growing, because hey, everyone else was doing so well, why not them? If they can't afford a new yacht next year, they might as well starve!
The problem is that these 'discounts' match a price increase of the same amount when the technology is ready for the general population. One year, your health insurance provider will give you a $10/month break on your premiums if you sign a 'I do not smoke' form. The next year, the rates will go up by $10/month, or more.
The year after that, the rates go up yet again. They then tell your employer that if any employees are seen smoking on company grounds, they'll double their premiums. Suddenly, you can't smoke within view distance of your work building.
A few months later, they start blood pressure/cholesterol/insulin/weight monitoring. With a discount, of course, if you choose to opt-in.
Insurance is a gambling game. The company is the dealer, and we, the consumers, are the players. We belly up to the table, place our bets, and the dealer gives us our cards. Of course, they've been allowed to stack the deck with their own cards and change the rules around a little bit, because let's face it, you're playing in their casino, under their rules.
This is why people have such a problem with insurance companies. You know, you pay your premiums for five years, make one or two claims, and both of them are auto-rejected, making you call and beg for them to cover it, so you don't have to pay thousands of dollars for a procedure that took five minutes.
You know, each copy of Vista pre-installed on a laptop or a PC gets counted as a sale..whether or not real actual Vista DVDs or a serial key is included. Each copy of Vista sitting in a warehouse somewhere has already been 'sold.' Each copy of Vista sold (legally) for $20 in China is a sale.
Since the RIAA practices Hollywood accounting, I'd say that the piracy tax money ends up in a general find, which gets added into revenue calculations. The particular companies then take their revenue, subtract their expenses, and then pay the artists their agreed percentage based on that.
The real kicker? Advertisement, merchandising, future investing costs, etc., are listed as expenses. The individual companies have no incentive to cut back on these things, as the money will leaving them in some fashion, either to the artists, or to the advertising.
Perhaps the legal system is trying to cover the asses of the IT staff. You know, the staff that has been consistently downsized and out-sourced to the lowest bidder for several years in a row? The team that was first to take budget cuts, but that suffered the most?
I think they're just trying to buy time for the changes/repairs to be made. Sucks that he's the victim of it, but preying on the weakness of the government (federal or state or local) is always a Bad Idea.
There are many people out there who would rather gun down 30 of their fellow humans than sleep in a room with the same 30 they could have had to sleep in the same room with. That number would only increase as food and water supplies ran out. Would you kill for food if you were starving to death? What living being wouldn't?
Mean is having to murder for food.
Mean is disregarding overpopulation and reproducing anyway.
Mean is looking around and seeing all the people that will have less food or water because you refused to practice birth control.
There's a pretty good software fix for combating stealth fighters. It involves radar information sharing between many radar sources. Take a little piece of the picture from many different radar sources, and share them, and someone's going to get enough of a picture to launch a missile at. Guess what the F-22 can do?
As someone who has been in the computer industry for a long time, I can tell you that there are sweet spots everywhere. Would you pay $100 for a good video card, capable of 80% of the power of a $200 one? Or would you pay $400 for one with 110% of the power of a $200 one?
'Good Enough' is how technology has always been. Sure, we could make our jet fighters 10% more fuel efficient, if we added 50% to the cost of the engines, and a similar amount to the upkeep. We COULD do a lot of things, but one or two steps down from the best is still good enough for most applications in the real world.
If you look at 'work' as 'money' or 'energy invested' then often times an ounce of prevention would have been worth a pound of cure.
Unfortunately, what often happens is something like, "Let's make an asinine new change, push it out without warning, and then let customer service and tech support take the fallout for it. That's what they're there for, right?"
All that would have been needed would be a flier in the mail, maybe with the regular bill. Something of the sort. But no. Call volume triples for the next week, and God help you if you don't meet your two minute average phone call metric.
"You were on your way to pay for your space, were you? Sure, we get that all the time. You can take it up with the court in a few weeks. Mind that you remember to pay your parking next time."
Why should they change anything? The goal is to make money, and that's exactly what this will be doing.
The system isn't made to be fair. It's made to generate revenue. If more revenue can be generated by making you walk half of a block, hell, even an entire block, why not two, then it's going to be that way. The city has no vested interest in making things easier for its inhabitants if making things easier nets them less revenue.
Especially when you throw in a kickback or bribe to certain members that have the power to vote on these things...
It's all about corruption. Why replace perfectly good parking meters with a convoluted new system that will ensure that people get fined or at least ripped off on the price? Because it generates more money. Not because it's safer, or an improvement, or healthier, etc.
Why should the US cellular companies cater to people that like foreign technology? Foreign cell phones are cheaper, more numerous in options, have less features removed from the hardware via firmware, etc, etc.
The US cellular companies make their money based on contracts. When they can sell you a $50 phone for $200 without contract, or give it to you free with a two year contract, why should they change? They're extremely profitable right now. It's not in their best interests to change.
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I think if the employees were paid a living wage, it wouldn't be an issue, but they aren't. Bank tellers don't have room for advancement, and start out at about $8/hr, which didn't go up in the last minimum wage increase. Tell me, what incentive is there to keep private things private when you're a burger flipper? Give them extra training to justify the pay increase.
Make them experts in spotting fakes, figuring out when people are up to something, etc, etc.
Oh, wait, they're already trained for this? I'm sorry, but your job is worth more than $8/hr if it takes more than an hour or two to be trained.
Optical cable is fucking easy to do.
You do not need high quality glass fibers to do consumer fiber runs. Plastic fiber will work just as well, and has a much better turn radius.
Glass fibers have no place in the home until they're literally fool proof. If I can't spool a cable around my arm or step on/trip over it without destroying it, I don't want it.
None of what you said matters when the prime market crashes, as it will pretty soon.
Where will they get the money for those bailouts? Individuals? No, a lot of people have lost everything, and a lot more will continue to do so. Why tax them? They weren't the ones that really screwed up. Tax the corporations? They're the only ones who really have money at the moment, and many of those don't.
So what do we do?
Stop bailing people out. Let them crash and burn. Let them starve.
Let them serve as a warning to others, in the future.
I've been getting calls from 202-495-7152 for about a week now, several times a day, and if I ask them to stop calling they hang up. I stayed on the line to see what it's about and it's one of those, "You won a million dollars, send us $10,000 for shipping insurance" scams.
I've reported them to as many people as I can, and no one cares.
So yeah, scamming is a pretty good way to make some extra cash, since no one cares enough to track them down or arrest them until they amass millions.
Just like every other industry that has to buy products, rarely do the experts have much say in which products would work the best.
How can you hold authority when you have to get the workers to make the decisions for you? Today it's which widget to buy, tomorrow it's how many hours they have to work, and next week, they'll be supervising themselves!
So here, employees, make the best of this Z-brand Widget that doesn't fit your needs at all. We bought 10,000 of them, and so help you if you don't use every single one of them.
Did I mention that Z-brand sent us managers to Vegas for a few days? Of course I didn't, because workers shouldn't know what goes on elsewhere in the company!
Muscles and spine are only half the battle. Without the balance loop from the brain, walking would be impossible. The only reason we can walk, being an upside down pyramid shape due to our hips, is because we have great ankles and feet, and because our brain subconsciously controls them for optimal balance.
The big thing about muscle tone is just to keep it. When any muscle is completely cut off from the brain, the muscle goes slack. The muscle will waste away very quickly, but perhaps a 'tone generator' can be developed as well? Something to be installed shortly after spinal injury to make sure the muscles still exist.
I learned cursive in elementary school. It was standard practice to write all of your papers in cursive.
It was horrible.
It was very hard to read quickly. It was hard to write quickly. It didn't cooperate with pencils/pens.
It made me hate handwriting in all of its forms.
As soon as I got to the point where I could type papers and print them out, that's exactly what I started doing. The only words in cursive I've written since the 5th grade have been my first and last names.
All of that wasted teaching could have been used to better teach math (something US schools utterly fail at) or even teach a better grasp of writing. It wasn't until I got to late middle school were we given even a little leeway in the content of our papers.
The brain can still function when 'brain dead.' Think about it. Your entire brain doesn't die once you don't get enough oxygen for a few minutes, you just can't maintain the feedback loop called consciousness. Just because of that, doesn't mean the cells aren't still functioning. Since you're unconscious, though, you may as well be dead if you can never recover from it.
Consciousness is a rather circular loop in the brain. Minor damage to part of that loop can ensure that you never wake up, unless a path around that damage is formed, which may or may not happen. We've seen people wake up from comas after years, because their brain has formed pathways around the damage.
Then we get into the whole debate of 'what is death?' True brain death would mean that the entire brain is dead, and can never recover from it. Little pockets of cells can survive for a period of time, but they will always die in the end if they aren't getting the oxygen/energy/minerals they need. So, unconscious is dead? No, it's just unconscious. We can distinguish between coma, sleep, death, etc. Terry Schiavo should have been considered dead, since +90% of her brain was dead, but because she showed some basic brainstem functions, people said she was alive. In reality, she was less alive and less able to be revived than someone who hasn't had a pulse in ten minutes!
Paranoia, yes, but on who's part?
Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students. Most likely what happened was that some kid presented with a previously-undetected heart defect and the school got sued. Now they're instating this to make sure that if someone else comes in with a funky rhythm, they can be taken to the hospital or allowed to rest as needed.
On an even more paranoid note, wouldn't the presence of these heart monitors open them up for these lawsuits to begin with? "Well, Johnny was WEARING a heart monitor when his heart stopped! The doctors said that there was probably some kind of variation in the heart's rhythm, and the school didn't detect OR treat it until it was too late! They LET our child die!"
They have the right to do whatever the fuck they please with your hardware if you sign an agreement that lets them. The only caveat is that it can hopefully be challenged and shot down in court. My phone or PS3 shouldn't be in danger of having functionality removed when an upgrade model is soon to appear...
This is certainly true.
By our very nature, humans are investors. We don't till fields for 6 months to get nothing out of it. We expect food or flowers or something that will increase our chances for survival. That's a risk. A gamble. Sometimes the crops die in a sudden snap frost. Sometimes a flood. Whatever the cause, sometimes the food or flowers or what not that have come up from the ground for ten years suddenly don't. Then there's famine. People die. People are miserable.
Faced with starvation or months and months of being miserable, people panic. At the first sign of a bad winter or a flood, they raid the storehouses, can as much as possible, make sure they have enough supplies to last them. This can cause even MORE people to panic.
Well, the stock market and economy aren't much different. What you have here is a bunch of farmers (investors) tending fields (the market) that may or may not pay out (investments). I doubt that a famine (bad investment) will kill them, but they sure act like it will. This makes people panic, and do things that may be irrational. Penny stocks got pretty popular for a while, because people were willing to try anything.
Even when the bubble was growing to its biggest, people still took unreasonable risks and played creative accounting games to keep it growing, because hey, everyone else was doing so well, why not them? If they can't afford a new yacht next year, they might as well starve!
The problem is that these 'discounts' match a price increase of the same amount when the technology is ready for the general population. One year, your health insurance provider will give you a $10/month break on your premiums if you sign a 'I do not smoke' form. The next year, the rates will go up by $10/month, or more.
The year after that, the rates go up yet again. They then tell your employer that if any employees are seen smoking on company grounds, they'll double their premiums. Suddenly, you can't smoke within view distance of your work building.
A few months later, they start blood pressure/cholesterol/insulin/weight monitoring. With a discount, of course, if you choose to opt-in.
Insurance is a gambling game. The company is the dealer, and we, the consumers, are the players. We belly up to the table, place our bets, and the dealer gives us our cards. Of course, they've been allowed to stack the deck with their own cards and change the rules around a little bit, because let's face it, you're playing in their casino, under their rules.
This is why people have such a problem with insurance companies. You know, you pay your premiums for five years, make one or two claims, and both of them are auto-rejected, making you call and beg for them to cover it, so you don't have to pay thousands of dollars for a procedure that took five minutes.
You know, each copy of Vista pre-installed on a laptop or a PC gets counted as a sale..whether or not real actual Vista DVDs or a serial key is included. Each copy of Vista sitting in a warehouse somewhere has already been 'sold.' Each copy of Vista sold (legally) for $20 in China is a sale.
Children have been arrested there for pointing brightly colored plastic squirt guns at people and saying, "Bang."
Since the RIAA practices Hollywood accounting, I'd say that the piracy tax money ends up in a general find, which gets added into revenue calculations. The particular companies then take their revenue, subtract their expenses, and then pay the artists their agreed percentage based on that.
The real kicker? Advertisement, merchandising, future investing costs, etc., are listed as expenses. The individual companies have no incentive to cut back on these things, as the money will leaving them in some fashion, either to the artists, or to the advertising.
Aerodynamic heat sinks? Isn't that kind of an oxymoron?
Perhaps the legal system is trying to cover the asses of the IT staff. You know, the staff that has been consistently downsized and out-sourced to the lowest bidder for several years in a row? The team that was first to take budget cuts, but that suffered the most?
I think they're just trying to buy time for the changes/repairs to be made. Sucks that he's the victim of it, but preying on the weakness of the government (federal or state or local) is always a Bad Idea.
There are many people out there who would rather gun down 30 of their fellow humans than sleep in a room with the same 30 they could have had to sleep in the same room with. That number would only increase as food and water supplies ran out. Would you kill for food if you were starving to death? What living being wouldn't?
Mean is having to murder for food.
Mean is disregarding overpopulation and reproducing anyway.
Mean is looking around and seeing all the people that will have less food or water because you refused to practice birth control.
There's a pretty good software fix for combating stealth fighters. It involves radar information sharing between many radar sources. Take a little piece of the picture from many different radar sources, and share them, and someone's going to get enough of a picture to launch a missile at. Guess what the F-22 can do?
As someone who has been in the computer industry for a long time, I can tell you that there are sweet spots everywhere. Would you pay $100 for a good video card, capable of 80% of the power of a $200 one? Or would you pay $400 for one with 110% of the power of a $200 one?
'Good Enough' is how technology has always been. Sure, we could make our jet fighters 10% more fuel efficient, if we added 50% to the cost of the engines, and a similar amount to the upkeep. We COULD do a lot of things, but one or two steps down from the best is still good enough for most applications in the real world.
If you look at 'work' as 'money' or 'energy invested' then often times an ounce of prevention would have been worth a pound of cure.
Unfortunately, what often happens is something like, "Let's make an asinine new change, push it out without warning, and then let customer service and tech support take the fallout for it. That's what they're there for, right?"
All that would have been needed would be a flier in the mail, maybe with the regular bill. Something of the sort. But no. Call volume triples for the next week, and God help you if you don't meet your two minute average phone call metric.
Well, you'll get a ticket.
"You were on your way to pay for your space, were you? Sure, we get that all the time. You can take it up with the court in a few weeks. Mind that you remember to pay your parking next time."
Why should they change anything? The goal is to make money, and that's exactly what this will be doing.
The system isn't made to be fair. It's made to generate revenue. If more revenue can be generated by making you walk half of a block, hell, even an entire block, why not two, then it's going to be that way. The city has no vested interest in making things easier for its inhabitants if making things easier nets them less revenue.
Especially when you throw in a kickback or bribe to certain members that have the power to vote on these things...
It's all about corruption. Why replace perfectly good parking meters with a convoluted new system that will ensure that people get fined or at least ripped off on the price? Because it generates more money. Not because it's safer, or an improvement, or healthier, etc.
It's really not a joke, I suspect something like this will happen.
The only way they'll be able to completely stop torrents and warez downloading would be to cut off internet access entirely.
Never underestimate nerds who want to fix something, even if they have to resort to TCP/IP over Carrier Pigeon.
Why should the US cellular companies cater to people that like foreign technology? Foreign cell phones are cheaper, more numerous in options, have less features removed from the hardware via firmware, etc, etc.
The US cellular companies make their money based on contracts. When they can sell you a $50 phone for $200 without contract, or give it to you free with a two year contract, why should they change? They're extremely profitable right now. It's not in their best interests to change.