I really should have thrown this in with the original comment.
A friend of mine grew up in New Jersey and worked in a drugstore during high school. This was still a non-automated place at the time - no scanners for prices. As a result, she had to know which items were considered "essential" by the NJ state legislature (and thus were exempt from tax) and which were not. Surprises: toothbrushes are essential, but toothpaste is not. Toilet paper (!) is not essential. And so forth.
So true. The unhacked Xbox was a nice console aside from being noisy, huge, and HEAVY. And not having a flat top. (Seriously, companies: we stack things. Make the top flat.)
The hacked Xbox was a dream: XBMC + big hard drive = negligible load times and incredible flexibility.
The Xbox was BORN to be modded. (Soft-modded ones were also fairly easy to keep clean for online play.) If your friends still have their Xboxes, get them together, do the softmod, and put XBMC on them.
Most people think that high incomes equal wealth, which is manifestly not true. You must either earn a LOT of money (>>$1M/yr), or live far below your means, or both, in order to really get wealthy.
How do you decide what's essential? (Reviewing the rules of some states, you'll find that it's not really intuitive.)
It's easier just to give every individual a certain exemption from taxes by paying them a small rebate each year consisting of (national sales tax rate) * (poverty-line consumption).
I tend to keep mine around 24, but occasionally - especially if it's been cool at night, ironically - will turn it lower to dehumidify. 18-20 is pretty typical for businesses, because people are moving around and generating heat. 26 is really too hot for comfort indoors in most of the South due to humidity.
Never been to Houston, have you? It never gets cool at night in the summer - typically the minimum temp is in the low 80s or upper 70s, but with very high humidity. Your strategy works pretty well in a lot of the Plains, though, where night temps go way down.
Why is this funny? It's one of the more interesting evolutionary adaptations - we've obviously learned to keep our eyes on the fire. (Whether to use it or flee it, I'll keep mum about.)
By height, not necessarily by speed. Still, all reaching orbit does is prove that you can hit any target on earth - they don't have to be able to do that. They can easily hit Japan.
Problem: we have 4 major and many minor carriers. Two carriers use CDMA and do not allow each other's phones on their network (that's Sprint and Verizon); there's no SIM card present, so unless they're willing to accept your phone, you can't stealthily use it on their network. Two carriers use GSM: AT&T and T-Mobile. However, they use different frequencies for 3G data, so you have to choose a phone for one or the other if you want that. Finally, T-Mobile is only barely a major - very little 3G data coverage and very limited range off the major roads.
In short, locking persists here because it allows the carriers to screw people over who want to use phones overseas without significantly changing the domestic market for service.
can get contracts without phones that are considerably cheaper
Not available in the US, which is why we're always changing phones. If you're going to pay the same each month, and you're reasonably happy with your carrier (and thus don't mind the contract), why not?
Isn't the "legit point" when they decide to expand from 3-4 people to 8-10? The only office I have personal experience with went totally legit when they went from boss + intern + 2 employees to boss + 2 partners + 2 interns + 4 employees. They had to buy so many new computers anyway that they used it as an opportunity to upgrade everybody, and picked up Office Small Business along the way for chicken feed. (Their most expensive app was a large proprietary beast that they were already legit on, so the pain was minimized.)
Money, of course, is fungible, which means that even if every nickel earned from revenue source X is used to fund project Y, the same number of dollars that were previously used to pay for project Y are now available for other uses.
The problem is that the student loans don't get smaller if you have more docs; while tuition and fees are a problem, med students also have to borrow the money they live on - room, board, dry cleaning.
And how will the best docs make more money if they can't see any more patients than the crappy ones (because of time limits), and yet aren't allowed by insurance or Medicare/Medicaid to charge more per patient because they're really good?
The ridiculous thing wasn't just that you worked 36 hours straight. It was that this typically occurred in a schedule in which people were on call every other night, which led to 36 hours on duty followed by 12 off.
Truck driving is boring, mostly; so's flying. It's hard to stay focused, and a moment's inattention is fatal. Medicine is much more tolerant of a momentary inattention; there's very little you can fail to do that will result in someone's death within seconds.
And there's the problem nobody wants to talk about: pay. As it is, in the Real World, many doctors work often obscene hours because you get paid for seeing patients, not for being on duty. You might wish that nobody work more than, say, 12 hours a day, but if you're the night guy, who sees a third of the patients the day guy does, you're nonetheless going to want to earn more than the day guy does because you give up your nights. In most of healthcare this is done by paying people extra to work nights and weekends - my hospital has a crew of people who work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights only, and those 36 hours are paid better than 40 hours working M-F 7-3. There's not a mechanism in most situations to pay doctors this way, and we want time off like anyone else. We choose to get it by taking call; remember that the default way of being (ie, the legal standard of proper care) is that you are responsible for your patients 24/7 unless you have arranged for someone else to take care of them. Tripling the number of doctors would also mandate increasing total physician compensation; we're not going to do the job for 1/3 the money, even if we only work 40 hours a week. While doctors do earn a lot more than the average Joe, the pay is not particularly high given the number of years of training, the amount of debt incurred, the sacrifice of your twenties to a standard of living not much better than a college student's, and the likelihood that in the presence of severe limitations on work hours the training period would be extended by a considerable amount.
In the case of residents, there is a competing danger to the patient: the more handoffs of care that occur, the more likely there is to be a miscommunication or a loss of information. Let me tell you a little story to try to illustrate this. A couple of years ago, I heard a code called overhead to the renal floor. I thought to myself, "hmm, just had a renal patient this morning, wonder if it was her?" I made my way up to the floor to find out. When I entered the room, the code team was busily quizzing nurses, residents, medical students, ANYONE, to try to find out why this lady had become unresponsive. I immediately announced myself, told them her pertinent medical history, told them what procedure had been done, what kind of anesthesia I performed, and offered my guess as to why she was out like a light. Now, this was at 4 in the afternoon. However, these things also happen at 10 in the morning - for cases that happened during the night. I turned what was originally a serious evaluation of possible cardiac arrest into a rather more calm evaluation of persistent sedation, just because I knew the patient better than anyone else in the room. There is much more knowledge in the head of someone who knows you well than there is in a chart; for the usual/. crowd, imagine being asked to evaluate mission-critical code that is currently borked (and costing the company millions per hour) given only - ONLY - the design docs and the CVS logs, versus doing so if you wrote it.
Finally, not every on-call hour is spent awake, although sometimes it feels like it. I get, on average, two to four hours of sleep per call, along with a fair amount of downtime in which I have no work to do. Yes, I've had them where I worked, hard, for 24 hours straight, and on the other extreme I had one - one! - in which I spent 24 hours in the hospital playing video games, surfing the internet, and doing exactly one hour of work.
I know this is a somewhat rambling comment, and I'm not sure it convinces you, but I hope it shows that there is some reasoning behind why it is the way it is.
Move on; this is now against the rules at every residency program in the country. I'm not saying the rules are never broken, but residents have rather strong powers to keep programs from coercing them.
For reference, the rules are:
No new patients after 24 hours.
You may stay up to 6 hours after a 24-hour on-call period to do followups and hand off care of your patients to someone else.
You must have 10 hours off between any two shifts of work.
You must not take call more often than every third night, averaged over a four-week period.
You must get one full day off per week, averaged over a four-week period.
Of course, programs can be more strict than this if they choose. In anesthesiology, for example, we work up to 24 hours - and then go home, period.
So? Psychologically, it's essentially impossible to believe that something you put so much work into was a total waste. And it wasn't. But you didn't get to live life the other way around, and so you'll never know which was better.
if your last decades are spent wishing you had a family
Yeah, true, if you want to have one. Some people don't.
The number of in-store rentals was limited by how fast movies came to you in the mail. Additionally, the in-store rentals were - unlike the mailed ones - subject to due dates and late fees. It was just a free rental.
Oh well, over to Netflix. The in-store exchange was the only thing BB had over them anyway.
No, they're quite sophisticated; they've realized that if enough lawsuits are filed in one low-population county, they'll eventually be one of the people "harmed" by some multinational. And they'll get their cut.
no sane national or international company has any presence whatsoever
Not true; Nissan and Toyota come to mind. They just paid off the right people. Essentially, they were granted huge tax breaks in return for funneling a large portion of the money saved to certain... interests. Like the trial lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
All I can say is, you're tougher than I am, if you think low 80s F is cool.
I really should have thrown this in with the original comment.
A friend of mine grew up in New Jersey and worked in a drugstore during high school. This was still a non-automated place at the time - no scanners for prices. As a result, she had to know which items were considered "essential" by the NJ state legislature (and thus were exempt from tax) and which were not. Surprises: toothbrushes are essential, but toothpaste is not. Toilet paper (!) is not essential. And so forth.
Just out of curiosity, where do you live?
So true. The unhacked Xbox was a nice console aside from being noisy, huge, and HEAVY. And not having a flat top. (Seriously, companies: we stack things. Make the top flat.)
The hacked Xbox was a dream: XBMC + big hard drive = negligible load times and incredible flexibility.
Are you guys all 12 year olds downloading MP3s? Why are discussions on piracy here always so immature?
Er, I think you answered your own question.
Oh, and they're downloading porn, too. Not just MP3s.
The Xbox was BORN to be modded. (Soft-modded ones were also fairly easy to keep clean for online play.) If your friends still have their Xboxes, get them together, do the softmod, and put XBMC on them.
well integrated with an online bookstore
Mod parent up. This is the signal lesson of the iPod. You MUST have store integration.
Most people think that high incomes equal wealth, which is manifestly not true. You must either earn a LOT of money (>>$1M/yr), or live far below your means, or both, in order to really get wealthy.
How do you decide what's essential? (Reviewing the rules of some states, you'll find that it's not really intuitive.)
It's easier just to give every individual a certain exemption from taxes by paying them a small rebate each year consisting of (national sales tax rate) * (poverty-line consumption).
I tend to keep mine around 24, but occasionally - especially if it's been cool at night, ironically - will turn it lower to dehumidify. 18-20 is pretty typical for businesses, because people are moving around and generating heat. 26 is really too hot for comfort indoors in most of the South due to humidity.
This is the sort of thing that sounds really good on paper but dies a squalling death as soon as you have your first homeowners' association meeting.
Never been to Houston, have you? It never gets cool at night in the summer - typically the minimum temp is in the low 80s or upper 70s, but with very high humidity. Your strategy works pretty well in a lot of the Plains, though, where night temps go way down.
Why is this funny? It's one of the more interesting evolutionary adaptations - we've obviously learned to keep our eyes on the fire. (Whether to use it or flee it, I'll keep mum about.)
By height, not necessarily by speed. Still, all reaching orbit does is prove that you can hit any target on earth - they don't have to be able to do that. They can easily hit Japan.
Problem: we have 4 major and many minor carriers. Two carriers use CDMA and do not allow each other's phones on their network (that's Sprint and Verizon); there's no SIM card present, so unless they're willing to accept your phone, you can't stealthily use it on their network. Two carriers use GSM: AT&T and T-Mobile. However, they use different frequencies for 3G data, so you have to choose a phone for one or the other if you want that. Finally, T-Mobile is only barely a major - very little 3G data coverage and very limited range off the major roads.
In short, locking persists here because it allows the carriers to screw people over who want to use phones overseas without significantly changing the domestic market for service.
can get contracts without phones that are considerably cheaper
Not available in the US, which is why we're always changing phones. If you're going to pay the same each month, and you're reasonably happy with your carrier (and thus don't mind the contract), why not?
Isn't the "legit point" when they decide to expand from 3-4 people to 8-10? The only office I have personal experience with went totally legit when they went from boss + intern + 2 employees to boss + 2 partners + 2 interns + 4 employees. They had to buy so many new computers anyway that they used it as an opportunity to upgrade everybody, and picked up Office Small Business along the way for chicken feed. (Their most expensive app was a large proprietary beast that they were already legit on, so the pain was minimized.)
I thought about that, but you've still freed up (in your example) $Z, and overages, in government, always find their way into the general fund...
Money, of course, is fungible, which means that even if every nickel earned from revenue source X is used to fund project Y, the same number of dollars that were previously used to pay for project Y are now available for other uses.
The problem is that the student loans don't get smaller if you have more docs; while tuition and fees are a problem, med students also have to borrow the money they live on - room, board, dry cleaning.
And how will the best docs make more money if they can't see any more patients than the crappy ones (because of time limits), and yet aren't allowed by insurance or Medicare/Medicaid to charge more per patient because they're really good?
Well...
/. crowd, imagine being asked to evaluate mission-critical code that is currently borked (and costing the company millions per hour) given only - ONLY - the design docs and the CVS logs, versus doing so if you wrote it.
The ridiculous thing wasn't just that you worked 36 hours straight. It was that this typically occurred in a schedule in which people were on call every other night, which led to 36 hours on duty followed by 12 off.
Truck driving is boring, mostly; so's flying. It's hard to stay focused, and a moment's inattention is fatal. Medicine is much more tolerant of a momentary inattention; there's very little you can fail to do that will result in someone's death within seconds.
And there's the problem nobody wants to talk about: pay. As it is, in the Real World, many doctors work often obscene hours because you get paid for seeing patients, not for being on duty. You might wish that nobody work more than, say, 12 hours a day, but if you're the night guy, who sees a third of the patients the day guy does, you're nonetheless going to want to earn more than the day guy does because you give up your nights. In most of healthcare this is done by paying people extra to work nights and weekends - my hospital has a crew of people who work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights only, and those 36 hours are paid better than 40 hours working M-F 7-3. There's not a mechanism in most situations to pay doctors this way, and we want time off like anyone else. We choose to get it by taking call; remember that the default way of being (ie, the legal standard of proper care) is that you are responsible for your patients 24/7 unless you have arranged for someone else to take care of them. Tripling the number of doctors would also mandate increasing total physician compensation; we're not going to do the job for 1/3 the money, even if we only work 40 hours a week. While doctors do earn a lot more than the average Joe, the pay is not particularly high given the number of years of training, the amount of debt incurred, the sacrifice of your twenties to a standard of living not much better than a college student's, and the likelihood that in the presence of severe limitations on work hours the training period would be extended by a considerable amount.
In the case of residents, there is a competing danger to the patient: the more handoffs of care that occur, the more likely there is to be a miscommunication or a loss of information. Let me tell you a little story to try to illustrate this. A couple of years ago, I heard a code called overhead to the renal floor. I thought to myself, "hmm, just had a renal patient this morning, wonder if it was her?" I made my way up to the floor to find out. When I entered the room, the code team was busily quizzing nurses, residents, medical students, ANYONE, to try to find out why this lady had become unresponsive. I immediately announced myself, told them her pertinent medical history, told them what procedure had been done, what kind of anesthesia I performed, and offered my guess as to why she was out like a light. Now, this was at 4 in the afternoon. However, these things also happen at 10 in the morning - for cases that happened during the night. I turned what was originally a serious evaluation of possible cardiac arrest into a rather more calm evaluation of persistent sedation, just because I knew the patient better than anyone else in the room. There is much more knowledge in the head of someone who knows you well than there is in a chart; for the usual
Finally, not every on-call hour is spent awake, although sometimes it feels like it. I get, on average, two to four hours of sleep per call, along with a fair amount of downtime in which I have no work to do. Yes, I've had them where I worked, hard, for 24 hours straight, and on the other extreme I had one - one! - in which I spent 24 hours in the hospital playing video games, surfing the internet, and doing exactly one hour of work.
I know this is a somewhat rambling comment, and I'm not sure it convinces you, but I hope it shows that there is some reasoning behind why it is the way it is.
For reference, the rules are:
Of course, programs can be more strict than this if they choose. In anesthesiology, for example, we work up to 24 hours - and then go home, period.
if your last decades are spent wishing you had a family
Yeah, true, if you want to have one. Some people don't.
The number of in-store rentals was limited by how fast movies came to you in the mail. Additionally, the in-store rentals were - unlike the mailed ones - subject to due dates and late fees. It was just a free rental.
Oh well, over to Netflix. The in-store exchange was the only thing BB had over them anyway.
unsophisticated rural jurors
No, they're quite sophisticated; they've realized that if enough lawsuits are filed in one low-population county, they'll eventually be one of the people "harmed" by some multinational. And they'll get their cut.
no sane national or international company has any presence whatsoever
Not true; Nissan and Toyota come to mind. They just paid off the right people. Essentially, they were granted huge tax breaks in return for funneling a large portion of the money saved to certain... interests. Like the trial lawyers.