Some rumours say that a lot of the soldiers were conscripts thinking this was all a military exercise. Hand them rifles loaded with blanks, and plant a handful of agitators with live rounds amongst them. That might also explain the incredible ease with which some of these military units surrendered; real insurgents might be a bit more motivated to avoid arrest. And if a lot of these soldiers took part in this unwittingly, it'll be dead easy to convince them to plead guilty in exchange for clemency.
There's still no proof of a real coup or a staged one, and I doubt we'll ever see it. But I am still very sceptical. That headline you mention is another red flag: would real insurgents entrust a mission of that importance to a crew not in the know, being told only at the last minute they were going after Erdogan? Seems terribly risky. On the other hand, if you're staging a coup and you need some military action without cluing in a lot of people, this is exactly what I'd tell them.
Under the peculiar Turkish constitution, the army is actually charged with preserving the constitution and in particular the secular nature of the state. IIRC, the government is obliged to cede power to the Military Council when asked to do so by the military high command. If they do not do this, the army steps in and makes them. When these steps are followed, it is a legal and constitutional process... however what happened last week was an intervention following a coup within the military; the intervention was therefore not constitutional. However one could argue that the army still had a duty to step in and preserve the democratic and secular nature of the state, especially since Erdogan had already purged the military leadership and replaced them with his cronies, bypassing this constitutional safety valve.
With that said, there is an increasing amount of indication that this coup was staged. The small scale of the whole affair, the strange decisions made by the military insurgents (they went for loudness rather than effectiveness), the ease with which groups of them surrendered (according to some rumours, a lot of the soldiers were just conscripts thinking they were going on a military exercise), the repeatedly reported lack of any attempt to go after or at least capture high ranking government officials, followed by the sudden emergence of stories of miraculously narrow escapes by some of them, including the Heroic Leader. And of course the incredible far-reaching purges that were set in motion moments after the coup was suppressed. There's no proof this was staged, and even if it was I doubt we'll find evidence in the leaked emails, but I still say something smells. Bad. If you want to stage a coup without doing too much damage and without the danger of it escalating into an actual coup, then this is how to do it.
That's just silly. Still, it kind of works like that in the Netherlands too. They may not be able to boot you off your land very easily, not to build a mall or anything like that, but you have little control over the land around you if you do not own it. And often enough new developments are fitted very poorly into existing neighbourhoods (i.e. Built to maximise profits with little regard for existing houses, parking, daylight etc). In theory, municipalities are supposed to only approve plans that take the existing situation into account, in practice they often bow to project developers ("We can't put up that row of social housing if you don't let us use every square meter of this plot, and still make a profit").
Provincial and national planners are usually a little better, but not always, as a lot of politics comes into play. They spent billions to build a tunnel for the new high speed rail, to "protect the Green Heart", meaning the train runs under a couple of fields with a few cows and a horse and a half. But 20 km down the line, the thing runs practically through people's back yards.
"Fucking pretty", yes. That was what we were talking about; effective or not so effective use of CGI. Not about the other qualities of the movie. Avatar did cgi well, really well, even though it was a shallow (but very enjoyable) movie otherwise. The Fountain? A beautiful movie with great visuals and a great soundtrack based on an interesting premise. But even so I thought the execution was average. A lot of it was just eye candy in another form, art for arts sake, a convoluted telling of a Ho hum tale.
Really? Over here they cannot even kick you off a leasehold if the lease is paid up, and the rent on some of those leases has been bought off in perpetuity. Of course we have something like eminent domain, but it certainly can't be invoked for "any reason they see fit"
That's not the same as renting. Over here at least, property taxes are treated the same as any other tax. If you don't pay them, they'll send a pissy letter, add late fees, and eventually they can garnish your wages (up to a point) or even seize your assets and sell them off to pay for the debt. And a house or land is usually the last item being seized, and only if they debt is great enough. If not they'll just continue to pay the debt out of your wages.
Ownership means you are free to dispose of the property as you see fit, in principle. No one can force you to sell... until you stop paying your debts. No one can prevent you from changing the property... unless it becomes a health hazard or eyesore according to local rules, or unless your changes devalue the property to such a degree that the value is insufficient to discharge the outstanding debt. And those restrictions on ownership are nothing new, many such rules predate the Roman empire.
Meh. Different movies, different standards. A good blockbuster action flick doesn't need a great story, it needs to be simple and not have too many plot holes in it. A few holes are fine. Some of us just need to veg out from time to time with a few rattles and shiny things, plot holes and character development be damned.
With that said, the crop of good, enjoyable blockbuster action movies in the past few years has been rather meager. There were plenty of attempts, but what such movies do need is a few original ideas. And by original ideas I don't mean a gratuitous deep dive into the soul of cardboard cartoon characters. Think "Edge of Tomorrow", but I will even take "Battleship" over yet another god-damned superhero reboot.
I'd cite Avatar as another example. Not great writing but good use of CGI in a movie that is filmed almost entirely in a CGI world. But it's not easy, it demands an extra effort from the actors (VERY noticably lacking in films like the Phantom Menace), and Cameron employed some innovative techniques to make the camera movements believable, as it things were filmed using a camera on a dolly or boom in a real world.
Getting creatures right isn't easy either. Again Avatar did a decent job, but look at the more recent Star Wars movies, even the latest state-of-the-art production, and compare the creatures to the puppets from the original movies. The CGI looks plastic and faky in comparison.
Over here in "socialist" Europe, most people subscribe to those ideas. And many governments try to implement them. Note I say "try" because in practise it has proven to be not at all easy or cheap to for example separate the Cants from the Wonts. And if they Can't or are Unable to, how do you best assist them? Help them pay rent? This predictably increased rents, which they fixed with rent control. Which destroyed the private rental market and pretty much locked up the rental market for low middle class incomes. Asking development/construction companies doing housing projects to build cheap low income rental housing and paying for that by asking a little bit more for the larger houses they were going to sell, increased housing prices across the board, including prices of rental properties, further damaging that market. Same for incomes: make it too progressive and pile on benefits for unemployment people, and you end up in our situation where an unemployed person who goes back to work actually has less to spend. Who the hell is going to get up at arse 'o clock and work a crap job for less money? And in some situations the marginal tax burden is through the roof: a person going from minimum wage to a salary that's 80% higher has, when all is said and done, only 7% more to spend.
A lot of those nonlinear effects are due to governments trying to fix side effects brought about by programmes to help those who Can't. And those programmes either have a lot of people to apply the rules correctly, or you get a lot of Wonts taking full advantage. Even a relatively simple program like our "personal healthcare budget" needed some rules, bringing administrative waste and leeches. Under this program, people who need special care like a wheelchair, help around the house or a part time nurse, get assigned a personal budget which they can then use to buy the help they need. But of course it's not to be used as beer money, so there are rules. Complicated rules. So complicated that agencies sprang up to help people administer their assigned budget and ensure that they are in compliance, while of course taking a bit wet bite out of that budget as well. Then the government made hiring such agencies mandatory in certain cases. In other words, a simple idea to let people manage their own budget turned into a big mess.
UBI has the promise of not requiring any rules, but there are bound to be side effects that have to be addressed, with rules. For instance: companies who used to pay €2000 a month can now get away with paying only €1000 because that other half comes in the form of UBI. Do they still get 40 hours a week for that or are wages set to plummet? And do they get to keep the difference? You could tax them... but they will try and evade those taxes, and this will unfairly burden companies that do not use a lot of labour.
Turkey has been a member of NATO since '52, and has had 2 coups since ('60 and '80) as well as a military intervention in '71, and they stepped in as recently as '97. Keep in mind that the Turkish army is charged to defend democracy and step in when that is threatened. That may sound weird (and it's doubtful that their motives were as pure as that in '80) but it appears that it is kind of necessary sometimes.
True. Perhaps Erdogan underestimated how deeply ingrained Atatürk's legacy is in the military, and failed to fully defuse that time bomb. We can only hope that the Colonels or whoever they are are as firmly in control of the military as the Generals would be, or this could spiral out of control and into a civil war.
Don't be too quick though to believe the notion (all too eagerly repeated by CNN) that it's Gülenists leading the coup, i.e. a different brand of muslims. It might be true, but the Turkish government has always been quick to blame stuff on that movement. And if they want anyone in or outside the military to stand up against this coup, that would by far be the best lie to spread.
It's not the first time this happens. And it is (hopefully) not the sort of military coup as seen in other nations: a military coup seems like a scary and odd thing to have in a democracy, but the Turkish army has been charged since the days of Atatürk with the protection of the secular nature of the state. If a leader or party is too openly religious or attempting to change the constitution in their favour (and dear god does Erdogan ever fit that bill), they step in. And hopefully restore order and democracy presently.
Erdogan made no secret of his designs. From the man himself: "Democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination, you get off". And: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers"
The claim isn't that robots have no use or that humans are better for exploration. Strictly speaking it only claims that there is some exploration that only humans can do well. If that is true, I don't know.
Suppose we could put a couple of scientists on Mars, with tools, a rover, and lab equipment, and let them work for a few weeks (in reality they need to stay for a few months IIRC to get a feasible return trajectory to home). In those weeks, what would they be able to do in terms of science that a robot couldn't do? (The robot might take much longer but that doesn't matter as long as the battery and solar panels last). I've no idea.
What humans are good at is adapting to new circumstances. If something new and unexpected is found on Mars, humans are much better equipped to get the most out of their limited time and equipment to get to the bottom of it.
That's a fair point, but brings up the question of reasonable expectations. In an all-you-can-eat restaurant, almost anyone understands that it's what you eat in one sitting, no doggy bags, take all you want but eat all you take, and be respectful of the other diners (well, unless you've ever been to an all inclusive resort with a lot of Russian guests...) For "unlimited" online backups, what is a reasonable limit? I'm not surprised that people say "great: I can dump all my movies in there"... of course I am also not surprised that MS then decides to adjust their terms of service.
If you offer unlimited storage and someone uploads 75TB worth of data, they are not abusing the service but taking advantage of your generous offer. If you don't want 75TB of data, set a lower limit.
You might want to rethink that: Cobol guys make good money. It's kind of like learning SAP: it's soul-suckingly dreadful work but it pays very well, and SAP / ERP people always seem to be in good demand.
If you want to learn app development, look into cross-platform stuff. I'm having a decent experience with Xamarin (coding in C#, which is better than Objective-C and chocolate-and-sprinkles-covered-heavenly better than Java on Android), and there are some other options.
There is demand for quality coders everywhere I look. Problem is: companies seem to be able to select halfway decent coders from the absolute rubbish ones, but they are poor at spotting real talent, and (perhaps as a result) are unwilling to pay for it. I've had these discussions a few times, project manager or dept head wants a top coder for a difficult job, I tell them I can recommend someone but he does charge €x / hour, after which the response is "are you f-ing nuts?!". They do sometimes pay top rates for top talent to jump on a project and fix stuff that the team cannot handle, but they see it as paying troubleshooter / interim rates. Sure, you can hire 2 average coders instead of 1 really good one, or 6 Indians, but what these managers fail to understand is that the good one will do more than twice the work of the average ones and over 6 times of what the Indians will produce. Not because they are superhumanly fast coders, but because they help managers and teams avoid the mistakes they are crying about now.
Companies want (demand, beg for) quality coders, but only when their project goes tits up.
caught early in unit tests, etc.
I used to build my own gaming PCs but my last rig came prebuilt from the local computer store. They have preconfigured configurations but let you customize them or will provide (quality) advice if you want a faster and/or quieter machine for example. I don't know about overpriced, they charge €120 on top of the cost of the components, which is well worth it.
The machines themselves are fairly expensive, but unlike the old days, modern games run just fine on 3-year old machines or even older ones that have had a small upgrade. Maybe you're not going to run the latest game on 4k at the highest settings, but it'll run well and still look awesome. My previous rig lasted 6 years, my current one is into its 3rd year now and still going strong.
When you have options, go for what you already (more or less) know. I have a fair amount of C/C++ experience, about 4 years of Objective-C on iOS, and a bit of C#. When the time came to start writing for Android, choosing Xamarin was a no-brainer.
So even if the cops believed they could be dealing with armed robbers, the occupants of the car were only suspects at this points, and on really thin grounds at that. Absolutely no reason for the police to start shooting at the merest hint of trouble. And at this point all we have to go on is this unconfirmed police radio recording from a single source.
Also, if they suspected the occupants might be armed robbers, would the police just walk up to the driver's window and ask for ID? That just seems monumentally stupid.
Or perhaps police officers could try and be a bit less twitchy, and not shoot motorists who make a sudden move after being stopped for a broken taillight. They should "protect and serve", meaning that their safety most definitely comes second after that of ordinary citizens. I'm not talking about police confronting armed individuals who are obviously criminal, but about people pulled over in an ordinary traffic stop. In 2015, about 50 police officers in the USA died of gunfire, and only a small part of that concerns people pulling out a gun during a routine check. That number is in stark contrast with the couple of hundred unarmed citizens killed by police officers.
How policies are designed is only one side of the coin. The other side is deciding what to create policies for. That's where things start to get dangerous; the weight of evidence and rationality alone are not sufficient to set the scope of government. In the past there have been some rational arguments for race segregation, killing old people at age 75, and so on. Even if something seems rational and can be proven to be more efficient (for society), it still might not be a good idea, so you still need a set of rules to protect our civil liberties. What is rational and efficient depends on your principles as well, for example: do you believe in distribution of income and to what extent?
Also, people are not rational and there's little chance that they ever will be. Your policies will need to reflect that. You can try and ban religion "because it's stupid" but you're going to have some nasty riots on your hand. For that reason I don;t believe in a "rational society", but I do believe at the very least that we should apply some "weight of evidence" to the kind of policies we are making today.
Slashdot Mirror
Some rumours say that a lot of the soldiers were conscripts thinking this was all a military exercise. Hand them rifles loaded with blanks, and plant a handful of agitators with live rounds amongst them. That might also explain the incredible ease with which some of these military units surrendered; real insurgents might be a bit more motivated to avoid arrest. And if a lot of these soldiers took part in this unwittingly, it'll be dead easy to convince them to plead guilty in exchange for clemency.
There's still no proof of a real coup or a staged one, and I doubt we'll ever see it. But I am still very sceptical. That headline you mention is another red flag: would real insurgents entrust a mission of that importance to a crew not in the know, being told only at the last minute they were going after Erdogan? Seems terribly risky. On the other hand, if you're staging a coup and you need some military action without cluing in a lot of people, this is exactly what I'd tell them.
Under the peculiar Turkish constitution, the army is actually charged with preserving the constitution and in particular the secular nature of the state. IIRC, the government is obliged to cede power to the Military Council when asked to do so by the military high command. If they do not do this, the army steps in and makes them. When these steps are followed, it is a legal and constitutional process... however what happened last week was an intervention following a coup within the military; the intervention was therefore not constitutional. However one could argue that the army still had a duty to step in and preserve the democratic and secular nature of the state, especially since Erdogan had already purged the military leadership and replaced them with his cronies, bypassing this constitutional safety valve.
With that said, there is an increasing amount of indication that this coup was staged. The small scale of the whole affair, the strange decisions made by the military insurgents (they went for loudness rather than effectiveness), the ease with which groups of them surrendered (according to some rumours, a lot of the soldiers were just conscripts thinking they were going on a military exercise), the repeatedly reported lack of any attempt to go after or at least capture high ranking government officials, followed by the sudden emergence of stories of miraculously narrow escapes by some of them, including the Heroic Leader. And of course the incredible far-reaching purges that were set in motion moments after the coup was suppressed. There's no proof this was staged, and even if it was I doubt we'll find evidence in the leaked emails, but I still say something smells. Bad. If you want to stage a coup without doing too much damage and without the danger of it escalating into an actual coup, then this is how to do it.
That's just silly. Still, it kind of works like that in the Netherlands too. They may not be able to boot you off your land very easily, not to build a mall or anything like that, but you have little control over the land around you if you do not own it. And often enough new developments are fitted very poorly into existing neighbourhoods (i.e. Built to maximise profits with little regard for existing houses, parking, daylight etc). In theory, municipalities are supposed to only approve plans that take the existing situation into account, in practice they often bow to project developers ("We can't put up that row of social housing if you don't let us use every square meter of this plot, and still make a profit").
Provincial and national planners are usually a little better, but not always, as a lot of politics comes into play. They spent billions to build a tunnel for the new high speed rail, to "protect the Green Heart", meaning the train runs under a couple of fields with a few cows and a horse and a half. But 20 km down the line, the thing runs practically through people's back yards.
"Fucking pretty", yes. That was what we were talking about; effective or not so effective use of CGI. Not about the other qualities of the movie. Avatar did cgi well, really well, even though it was a shallow (but very enjoyable) movie otherwise. The Fountain? A beautiful movie with great visuals and a great soundtrack based on an interesting premise. But even so I thought the execution was average. A lot of it was just eye candy in another form, art for arts sake, a convoluted telling of a Ho hum tale.
Really? Over here they cannot even kick you off a leasehold if the lease is paid up, and the rent on some of those leases has been bought off in perpetuity. Of course we have something like eminent domain, but it certainly can't be invoked for "any reason they see fit"
That's not the same as renting. Over here at least, property taxes are treated the same as any other tax. If you don't pay them, they'll send a pissy letter, add late fees, and eventually they can garnish your wages (up to a point) or even seize your assets and sell them off to pay for the debt. And a house or land is usually the last item being seized, and only if they debt is great enough. If not they'll just continue to pay the debt out of your wages.
Ownership means you are free to dispose of the property as you see fit, in principle. No one can force you to sell... until you stop paying your debts. No one can prevent you from changing the property... unless it becomes a health hazard or eyesore according to local rules, or unless your changes devalue the property to such a degree that the value is insufficient to discharge the outstanding debt. And those restrictions on ownership are nothing new, many such rules predate the Roman empire.
Can't fault them for picking up the last seasons of Community either.
Meh. Different movies, different standards. A good blockbuster action flick doesn't need a great story, it needs to be simple and not have too many plot holes in it. A few holes are fine. Some of us just need to veg out from time to time with a few rattles and shiny things, plot holes and character development be damned.
With that said, the crop of good, enjoyable blockbuster action movies in the past few years has been rather meager. There were plenty of attempts, but what such movies do need is a few original ideas. And by original ideas I don't mean a gratuitous deep dive into the soul of cardboard cartoon characters. Think "Edge of Tomorrow", but I will even take "Battleship" over yet another god-damned superhero reboot.
I'd cite Avatar as another example. Not great writing but good use of CGI in a movie that is filmed almost entirely in a CGI world. But it's not easy, it demands an extra effort from the actors (VERY noticably lacking in films like the Phantom Menace), and Cameron employed some innovative techniques to make the camera movements believable, as it things were filmed using a camera on a dolly or boom in a real world.
Getting creatures right isn't easy either. Again Avatar did a decent job, but look at the more recent Star Wars movies, even the latest state-of-the-art production, and compare the creatures to the puppets from the original movies. The CGI looks plastic and faky in comparison.
Over here in "socialist" Europe, most people subscribe to those ideas. And many governments try to implement them. Note I say "try" because in practise it has proven to be not at all easy or cheap to for example separate the Cants from the Wonts. And if they Can't or are Unable to, how do you best assist them? Help them pay rent? This predictably increased rents, which they fixed with rent control. Which destroyed the private rental market and pretty much locked up the rental market for low middle class incomes. Asking development/construction companies doing housing projects to build cheap low income rental housing and paying for that by asking a little bit more for the larger houses they were going to sell, increased housing prices across the board, including prices of rental properties, further damaging that market. Same for incomes: make it too progressive and pile on benefits for unemployment people, and you end up in our situation where an unemployed person who goes back to work actually has less to spend. Who the hell is going to get up at arse 'o clock and work a crap job for less money? And in some situations the marginal tax burden is through the roof: a person going from minimum wage to a salary that's 80% higher has, when all is said and done, only 7% more to spend.
A lot of those nonlinear effects are due to governments trying to fix side effects brought about by programmes to help those who Can't. And those programmes either have a lot of people to apply the rules correctly, or you get a lot of Wonts taking full advantage. Even a relatively simple program like our "personal healthcare budget" needed some rules, bringing administrative waste and leeches. Under this program, people who need special care like a wheelchair, help around the house or a part time nurse, get assigned a personal budget which they can then use to buy the help they need. But of course it's not to be used as beer money, so there are rules. Complicated rules. So complicated that agencies sprang up to help people administer their assigned budget and ensure that they are in compliance, while of course taking a bit wet bite out of that budget as well. Then the government made hiring such agencies mandatory in certain cases. In other words, a simple idea to let people manage their own budget turned into a big mess.
UBI has the promise of not requiring any rules, but there are bound to be side effects that have to be addressed, with rules. For instance: companies who used to pay €2000 a month can now get away with paying only €1000 because that other half comes in the form of UBI. Do they still get 40 hours a week for that or are wages set to plummet? And do they get to keep the difference? You could tax them... but they will try and evade those taxes, and this will unfairly burden companies that do not use a lot of labour.
Why? Hobbyists have been building similar things for ages. Only back then they were called R/C aircraft or model aircraft, not drones.
Turkey has been a member of NATO since '52, and has had 2 coups since ('60 and '80) as well as a military intervention in '71, and they stepped in as recently as '97. Keep in mind that the Turkish army is charged to defend democracy and step in when that is threatened. That may sound weird (and it's doubtful that their motives were as pure as that in '80) but it appears that it is kind of necessary sometimes.
True. Perhaps Erdogan underestimated how deeply ingrained Atatürk's legacy is in the military, and failed to fully defuse that time bomb. We can only hope that the Colonels or whoever they are are as firmly in control of the military as the Generals would be, or this could spiral out of control and into a civil war.
Don't be too quick though to believe the notion (all too eagerly repeated by CNN) that it's Gülenists leading the coup, i.e. a different brand of muslims. It might be true, but the Turkish government has always been quick to blame stuff on that movement. And if they want anyone in or outside the military to stand up against this coup, that would by far be the best lie to spread.
It's not the first time this happens. And it is (hopefully) not the sort of military coup as seen in other nations: a military coup seems like a scary and odd thing to have in a democracy, but the Turkish army has been charged since the days of Atatürk with the protection of the secular nature of the state. If a leader or party is too openly religious or attempting to change the constitution in their favour (and dear god does Erdogan ever fit that bill), they step in. And hopefully restore order and democracy presently.
Erdogan made no secret of his designs. From the man himself: "Democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination, you get off". And: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers"
The claim isn't that robots have no use or that humans are better for exploration. Strictly speaking it only claims that there is some exploration that only humans can do well. If that is true, I don't know.
Suppose we could put a couple of scientists on Mars, with tools, a rover, and lab equipment, and let them work for a few weeks (in reality they need to stay for a few months IIRC to get a feasible return trajectory to home). In those weeks, what would they be able to do in terms of science that a robot couldn't do? (The robot might take much longer but that doesn't matter as long as the battery and solar panels last). I've no idea.
What humans are good at is adapting to new circumstances. If something new and unexpected is found on Mars, humans are much better equipped to get the most out of their limited time and equipment to get to the bottom of it.
Probe Droids. Even the Empire uses them.
That's a fair point, but brings up the question of reasonable expectations. In an all-you-can-eat restaurant, almost anyone understands that it's what you eat in one sitting, no doggy bags, take all you want but eat all you take, and be respectful of the other diners (well, unless you've ever been to an all inclusive resort with a lot of Russian guests...) For "unlimited" online backups, what is a reasonable limit? I'm not surprised that people say "great: I can dump all my movies in there"... of course I am also not surprised that MS then decides to adjust their terms of service.
If you offer unlimited storage and someone uploads 75TB worth of data, they are not abusing the service but taking advantage of your generous offer. If you don't want 75TB of data, set a lower limit.
You might want to rethink that: Cobol guys make good money. It's kind of like learning SAP: it's soul-suckingly dreadful work but it pays very well, and SAP / ERP people always seem to be in good demand.
If you want to learn app development, look into cross-platform stuff. I'm having a decent experience with Xamarin (coding in C#, which is better than Objective-C and chocolate-and-sprinkles-covered-heavenly better than Java on Android), and there are some other options.
There is demand for quality coders everywhere I look. Problem is: companies seem to be able to select halfway decent coders from the absolute rubbish ones, but they are poor at spotting real talent, and (perhaps as a result) are unwilling to pay for it. I've had these discussions a few times, project manager or dept head wants a top coder for a difficult job, I tell them I can recommend someone but he does charge €x / hour, after which the response is "are you f-ing nuts?!". They do sometimes pay top rates for top talent to jump on a project and fix stuff that the team cannot handle, but they see it as paying troubleshooter / interim rates. Sure, you can hire 2 average coders instead of 1 really good one, or 6 Indians, but what these managers fail to understand is that the good one will do more than twice the work of the average ones and over 6 times of what the Indians will produce. Not because they are superhumanly fast coders, but because they help managers and teams avoid the mistakes they are crying about now.
Companies want (demand, beg for) quality coders, but only when their project goes tits up. caught early in unit tests, etc.
I used to build my own gaming PCs but my last rig came prebuilt from the local computer store. They have preconfigured configurations but let you customize them or will provide (quality) advice if you want a faster and/or quieter machine for example. I don't know about overpriced, they charge €120 on top of the cost of the components, which is well worth it.
The machines themselves are fairly expensive, but unlike the old days, modern games run just fine on 3-year old machines or even older ones that have had a small upgrade. Maybe you're not going to run the latest game on 4k at the highest settings, but it'll run well and still look awesome. My previous rig lasted 6 years, my current one is into its 3rd year now and still going strong.
When you have options, go for what you already (more or less) know. I have a fair amount of C/C++ experience, about 4 years of Objective-C on iOS, and a bit of C#. When the time came to start writing for Android, choosing Xamarin was a no-brainer.
So even if the cops believed they could be dealing with armed robbers, the occupants of the car were only suspects at this points, and on really thin grounds at that. Absolutely no reason for the police to start shooting at the merest hint of trouble. And at this point all we have to go on is this unconfirmed police radio recording from a single source.
Also, if they suspected the occupants might be armed robbers, would the police just walk up to the driver's window and ask for ID? That just seems monumentally stupid.
Or perhaps police officers could try and be a bit less twitchy, and not shoot motorists who make a sudden move after being stopped for a broken taillight. They should "protect and serve", meaning that their safety most definitely comes second after that of ordinary citizens. I'm not talking about police confronting armed individuals who are obviously criminal, but about people pulled over in an ordinary traffic stop. In 2015, about 50 police officers in the USA died of gunfire, and only a small part of that concerns people pulling out a gun during a routine check. That number is in stark contrast with the couple of hundred unarmed citizens killed by police officers.
How policies are designed is only one side of the coin. The other side is deciding what to create policies for. That's where things start to get dangerous; the weight of evidence and rationality alone are not sufficient to set the scope of government. In the past there have been some rational arguments for race segregation, killing old people at age 75, and so on. Even if something seems rational and can be proven to be more efficient (for society), it still might not be a good idea, so you still need a set of rules to protect our civil liberties. What is rational and efficient depends on your principles as well, for example: do you believe in distribution of income and to what extent?
Also, people are not rational and there's little chance that they ever will be. Your policies will need to reflect that. You can try and ban religion "because it's stupid" but you're going to have some nasty riots on your hand. For that reason I don;t believe in a "rational society", but I do believe at the very least that we should apply some "weight of evidence" to the kind of policies we are making today.