I meant 401k only in the sense that it is a tax-deferred account in the employee's name. I'm all for allowing it to be invested or not as the employee wishes, though if it is just held as cash it won't be worth much due to inflation. I can't really offer a fix for the problems with the stock market in general - if no investment is suitable, well, then no investment is suitable.
As far as whether the payments are made into the account - the account is in the employees name and they get a statement. Sure, a company could not honor its duty to pay the employee's retirement fund just like they could choose not to issue a paycheck. However, the whole point of this arrangement is that if this happens you find out two weeks after it happens and not 20 years later when there isn't anything you can do about it.
Ok, so you have $10k in a bank account in Peru. You want to transfer the money to your account in the US. The bank says that before you're allowed to move the money you have to pay a $500 tax to the government. So, you propose to just tell the bank to close your account and keep the money?
Sure, Nokia could abandon a factory to save on a much smaller tax bill. They could even burn their own factory to the ground to prove a point. However, it isn't exactly a great business decision.
BTW, this is one of the reasons why companies didn't move all their stuff overseas a generation ago. It wasn't like the pay disparity was any less back then. If you want luxuries like reliable electricity, no hostage taking, no need to bribe the local politician, and no government shakedowns, well, sometimes you have to pay your workers a bit more to go along with that...
Replace Amazon with Modern, and you'll cover more ground while being just as accurate. Actually, on reflection, there's no need to modify the subject - Workers... is historically accurate for most of organized human civilization.
Yup - that's why companies these days are so process-oriented, and why IT managers tend to be project-oriented. They want to avoid making it about the people, which minimizes the value of any particular employee and therefore their bargaining power.
I think companies sell themselves short as a result, and not only their employees.
I remember sitting in a meeting many years ago where we were talking about how to estimate the cost of IT projects. It was a large-group brainstorming session, and I naively raised my hand suggesting that perhaps the availability of particular expertise might be a factor worth considering. That is, if you happen to have a lot of people around who are good at something, then perhaps the cost of projects they could apply their knowledge to should be estimated lower. The response was, "hmm, should base their project estimates on the individuals assigned to the project...maybe." It was of course said in a tone that suggested, "maybe not."
Such thinking tosses a wrench in process-oriented methodologies. The perceived problem is that it ends up increasing the apparent ROI of projects that aren't as impactful to the business simply because a bunch of people happen to be sitting around who could do the work. The cogs-in-the-machine approach would be to fire all those people and hire people who could work on something else, or get everybody to work equally-effectively on everything so that managers don't have to deal with all the HR mess.
However, it doesn't make sense when you think about how any small successful organization would run things. If you're a football team and you have the best receivers in the league, are you going to ask them to run the ball? If you're a start-up with a bunch of MD/CS types on staff working on a medical records application are you going to decide to diversify into auto repair estimates?
Just because the big manager wants to work on project XYZ this year doesn't mean that this is the most effective use of the organization's resources. Even if project ABC has a lower impact if it can be done with a tenth the cost/risk then it should be carefully considered. Sure, sometimes you need to make big changes, but managers are great at getting promoted for making big changes that later cause problems.
At my own employer the new head of R&D basically just repudiated the last ten years of strategy, which was in a different domain from automation but very much around the idea that you can decide where you want to innovate vs taking innovation wherever you can find it.
I'd never suggest the UK is perfect in this regard but whenever I see a story about an employer in the US treating employees like consumables to chew up and throw out it makes me feel a little better about the fact I have to pay a penny or two more to buy things packed by people treated like humans rather than animals.
I'll reply here and not to the AC on principle.
I'll agree with his point that many similar laws are on the books in the US. The problem in the US is that these rules are not well-enforced.
In the US it is illegal to not pay people for time worked. In practice I know LOTS of people who were asked to record only their scheduled hours and not their actual hours worked, but they were expected to complete their duties before leaving regardless of schedule. That is, they wanted to compensate them like hourly workers and treat them like they are salaried employees. Ironically one person I know who was asked to do this was employed by a public school - a government institution.
In the US it is illegal to allow employees to work without proper safeguards. Companies usually make their internal policies match the law for obvious reasons. In practice many employers routinely fire the slowest workers and do not enforce safety policies, so employees who value their jobs often disregard safety policy. If something goes wrong the employer points at the policy and provided safety equipment that was not used. The employer usually doesn't point out all the people who they fired for using the equipment (er, for not getting as much done as those not using the equipment).
In the US there are exceptions to the labor laws for professional employees, which probably includes the majority of those on Slashdot who are employed in their intended field in the US. As professionals we are believed to have the power to fend for ourselves - if my employer wanted me to skip meals I could just take one of the many other jobs in my field that are open on the market. That is a mixed bag in terms of outcome.
As far as worker's compensation goes - I know a judge who handles these cases. At least in the state I live in maybe it is a viable source of income if your alternative is Walmart, but if I got hurt at work the last thing I'd want to do is tick off my employer so that I could get $500/month or whatever.
Alternatives, such as just paying a fixed amount into a fund and letting the employee deal with it are easier but don't lead to better outcomes.
If you really have any outcome data on this I'd certainly be interested in pointers.
My feeling is that no company should ever owe a company anything for a period longer than a few weeks (just for administrative simplicity so that we're not doing hourly paychecks). I'd also ban any form of compensation or benefit that used length of employment in the calculation, since that is a form of deferred compensation (you get more money 10 years from now because you are working today).
There can still be retirement savings - just put them in funds like 401ks. The important thing is that they're employee-owned, not company-owned. They would not be company assets in a re-structuring. Companies could only advertise the amount contributed to the fund, not any promised future value of the fund.
How about a virus? Is a virus dangerous? What if ideas could be catching and self-replicating?
That's basically the definition of a meme, or at least it was until people re-invented animated gifs.
Symantec makes fortunes on the whole concept of self-replicating information. Good luck with arguing the philosophical difference between a computer virus and a book.
If a group of two or more people want to enter some kind of legal relationship they can voluntarily sign a contract which defines the rules by which they will operate and how the relationship will one day be severed. These contracts could even be standardized - the way real estate contracts often are.
People already can and do have kids and own property jointly without a contract, so the law would still have to handle those situations.
The main reason we need marriage to have legal standing is to simplify inheritance and divorce. If someone dies without a will or two people want to go their separate ways after 30 years the only way to resolve the issues without some defaults set out in law would be to sue.
Thankfully divorces don't involve court proceedings, and people don't have kids or live together unless they're married. Courts would simply be unequipped to handle such situations, since they can only be resolved with those involved are married.
why else would *software pirates* take the time and effort to release updates? It takes manpower, people who have to be made to do the work. I know this is a bit easier given its China but still, pirates don't use resources this way.
First, free tools to install windows updates are available online for legit copies of windows already. Auto-updaters are common on linux distros that have no plans to ever charge anybody for anything. So, it isn't entirely unheard of to offer updates without a revenue stream.
Second, they aren't offering this stuff for free. The posts above talk about $3 professionally-boxed copies of windows. If you want somebody to buy your $3 box of windows instead of somebody else's 50-cent boxless disc then you need to offer a value-add.
The only reason this stuff doesn't happen in the US is that the FBI would bust you if you sold pirated copies of windows. In a regulatory environment where piracy is not prevented, then it makes perfect sense that pirates would compete on quality/features/price/etc just as in any other market.
See, I go there. I get my own donation page. I donate a tiny amount, then follow the money. Unless wikileaks would like to not touch donations, they will have to bundle them in a separate address then use the money. That is where you can start tracking the money again.
Yes and no. They could just keep all the money in a bazillion separate accounts, and only combine them into single transactions when they don't have an individual account large enough to cover that one transaction. It would be like having 10,000 conventional bank accounts with $5 in each. When it comes time to pay a bill you just write out 47 checks.
But in that case the thermometer is measuring its own temperature, not "the temperature of the vacuum", whatever that means. And selective coatings with different absorption and emission spectra could change the reading of the thermometer. Does that change the "temperature of the vacuum"?
Would changing the spectra of light coming off the chamber walls actually change the equilibrium temperature reading of the thermometer?
I don't think such a coating could change the total energy emitted by the surface, and thus the total energy impacting the thermometer. Anything that causes an empty universe containing exactly two objects to end up in an equilibrium where the two objects aren't the same temperature seems like a thermodynamic challenge.
They'd have launched seaplanes - they could use the ocean as their runway.
However, according to WP they later decided to just launch kamikaze attacks instead. That certainly would make the submarine (which was far more expensive than the planes) less vulnerable to attack. Those bombers could fly for hours - if you're going to launch your attack close to the enemy mainland you're probably not going to want to linger that long. If the bombers were tailed on the return trip it would be impossible to recover them and escape.
One thing one could hope for out of these studies is some kind of diagnostic to identify transgendered individuals.
I understand what you're getting at, but there are a bunch of issues here: 1. Motivations for gender change may vary, therefore the causes for those motivations may vary. 2. Sexual differences could have many effects, and the ones that have to do with performance-based tests might not be the ones that tend to cause motivation for gender change. That means that individuals with unusual brain wiring might have one but not the other. 3. We're really only scratching the surface of how the brain works - behavior is really complex in general and anything dealing with individuals is even messier.
See the book "Unlocking the Clubhouse" for how high-achieving girls fascinated by computers suffer a death by a thousand cuts and switch fields despite their preference.
Honestly, I have no idea if there is any physical difference between men and women that contribute to the dearth of women in IT. I won't go there.
However, preference and success do not automatically go hand-in-hand. I know plenty of guys who are fascinated by computers but they simply lack the ability to do well in the field. I love playing a musical instrument but I'd starve to death if I depended on it to make a living, even though others do just fine. That isn't some cultural bias getting in my way - it just means that enjoyment is orthogonal to skill.
Not sure you can lump the male/female differences in the same category as human/chimp differences - they're completely different things, other than the fact that they're differences.
My understanding is that the relative low strength of men vs other primates is due to our muscles being optimized for endurance over strength. When you lift something up only about 10% of your muscle fibers are actually doing anything. Muscle fibers only have an endurance measured in seconds, and they have a much longer recovery time. So, your body basically just has a duty cycle where each fiber operates about 10% of the time and then rests while others take over.
Other primates are optimized for strength - when their muscles contract a much larger portion of their fibers contract, giving them far more power per unit of muscle mass. However, most primates could not sustain that level of effort for the length of time that a person could.
I've also heard this used to describe why an adrenaline rush gives a person super-human strength. Basically their muscles have switched into a coordinated contraction like an ape's and that gives them much higher strength at the cost of endurance.
There are apparently many who think that people evolved in Africa to be persistence hunters. We couldn't outrun four-legged animals, but we could follow them for hours until they tired and then spear them. If true that would explain why our muscles are optimized more for endurance. It also explains the lack of hair - you need hair to avoid freezing at night if you don't have clothes, but when you're doing a three hour marathon it just makes you overheat.
Odd that I have 6 ACs saying the same thing, so I'll just reply to one at random...
That's exactly how the carts work where I live. However, with that system there is no point in trying to vandalize carts to get the coin, so I figured they must use some other system where the original post was referring to.
If the only thing you have to do in order to get the coin is to return the cart, then I'd think that kids would just return the cart. It would be faster, easier, legal, and actually doing the store a favor.
It's currently still inflating (the monetary base is increasing). The exchange rate with the dollar is on a bit of a climb though.
I guess it depends on what school of economics you subscribe to, but inflation is not the result of a larger monetary base, but rather in increase of the supply of a currency compared to its demand. When demand is constant then your statement holds.
The idea that demand for money changes is the main argument behind having government regulate the supply of money - the practical buying power of currency can be held more constant in that case. Of course, the concept behind bitcoin/gold/etc is that the government cannot be trusted with this authority, and in those cases the value of the currency itself can fluctuate, causing its buying power to fluctuate as well.
Keep the assets stored off the computer, in a safe place and no risk of government seisure.
Yeah, like cash that is stored outside of a bank, in a safe place, has no risk of government seizure...
Well, you can encrypt and backup your bitcoins - they can seize you, but they can't actually seize your bitcoins. In fact, if you have a friend you trust with your backup they could transfer your coins to another wallet and render the wallet seized by the government worthless, as long as they do so before the government gets you to divulge the decryption key. So, bitcoins are actually defensible from seizure. Of course, your friend could just spend your coins even if they aren't seized by the government, so it is a security tradeoff.
That's an issue of scale. The complaint that "if everyone cashes out the price will go to 0" still applies to the stock market.
Sure, but scale matters. Your SSL connection depends on it, and for that matter so does the supply of bitcoins.
There is a big difference between a currency that can handle $1B transactions without issues, and one that can only handle $1k transactions without issues.
Face it, when you create a currency to facilitate crime don't be surprised when it becomes bogged down with crime.The majority of those drawn to the currency are inherently liars, cheats and thieves that is the purpose of the currency. You can bet deaths are bound to start occurring and holding the currency will become extremely dangerous for your health.
I don't think anybody created bitcoin for the purpose of facilitating crime, though it can be used in that manner in the same way that US dollars can be.
One of defining attributes of cash is that legal ownership is (practically speaking) the same as physical possession. If I sell you a house, you need to make sure that I actually own the house I'm trying to sell you or you could be in trouble. If I offer you a $20 bill to pay for some service you perform, you don't have to worry about whether I own the $20 bill. Cash would not be nearly as useful for low-value transactions if you had to validate its ownership on every transaction, or buy title insurance on every bill that you receive.
That very attribute is what makes any form of cash a target for thieves. If they can gain physical possession without immediately getting caught, they have increased their wealth.
US Dollars aren't specifically designed to facilitate crime, and yet you can easily be taken advantage of by criminals if you handle them foolishly. I can create a website in 10 minutes advertising a bank and just ask you to mail me a check to make your initial deposit. If I cash those checks and run off with the money, you're going to have a hard time getting it back. What I did would be illegal, just as what this bitcoin bank did was illegal, but that isn't going to get your money back. If you want your deposit to be FDIC insured, then make sure your bank is FDIC insured.
obviously, you don't sell them all at once, so you don't move the market with your actions. it doesn't make them any more or less valuable.
Suppose I want to buy 50 cars worth $20k each. That will cost me $1M. If I walk into a car dealer with a check for $1M from a major bank, I could walk out with all 50 cars as quickly as they can find the keys and sign the paperwork.
If I walk in with $1M in $100 bills, then I can do the same assuming the dealer is willing to file the required paperwork reporting a large cash transaction. In that sense, cash is actually less liquid than a check in bulk.
If I walk in with what you'd consider $1M in bitcoins most likely they would not be accepted. If I wanted to convert those to something that would be accepted it would probably take some time and I might not get the full $1M.
If I scaled this whole thing up 10x the issue with bitcoins becomes bigger. If you called up a large auto dealership and told them you had a $10M check that was burning a hole in your pocket they could probably take care of you same-day. Try to liquidate $10M in bitcoins to buy cars and you're likely to have real problems.
If your goal is to buy 500 cars, then having $10M in a US bank account is more useful than having "$10M" in a bitcoin wallet. That makes the former more valuable in the same way that cash is more valuable than an IOU, even if the issuer is good for the money.
I think one of the problems with mental health treatments is that we don't understand the disease very well - everything is empirical. We know about some receptors and we can make things that bind to them and have some activity, but we don't really have fine-grained control. It is a bit like practicing medicine when the best treatment for an infection was to cut a limb off - it is better than not cutting the limb off, but not really the treatment people are looking for.
An analogy I heard of from a psychiatrist was that some time ago you might go to the doctor and get diagnosed with a "cough." If that is your best possible diagnosis then a doc equipped with even the full arsenal of modern medications and procedures would basically be taking shots into the dark. One person with a "cough" might get better with no treatment at all, another might respond to an antibiotic, and another might respond to an inhaler. Of course "cough" is probably one of the easier issues to treat (well, maybe a lung doctor might disagree).
In the same way with mental illness we are pretty good at classifying diseases by their symptoms, but we generally don't get to the root causes. If the real reason that somebody is having a problem is that some particular receptor in their brain is too sensitive then a drug that inhibits it might very well completely cure them. If their problem is really something else then messing with that receptor might help them but also introduce other side-effects because we are treating a symptom and not the root cause. If their real problem is that some clump of neurons goes from point A to point B when in 99% of people it goes from point A to point C, then you're not going to be able to really fix them until we can actually rewire brains (and to start we can't even examine how individuals are wired in any practical way today).
It's the opposite actually. The carts are all chained together with short lengths of chain that have a tab that engages with the mechanism. To free the end trolley in the line you insert a pound coin and that unlocks the mechanism like a seatbelt so you can use the cart. To get your pound back you need to put the card back in the stack and reconnect it to the one in front, which releases the coin.
Yes, that's exactly how the ones over here work. So, what exactly are kids going after then? The ones chained up don't have any money in them - only ones that aren't chained up do. If you want to get the money out of one that isn't chained up you just need to park it. Seems like that would be a lot less hassle than trying to break the mechanism open.
Slashdot Mirror
I meant 401k only in the sense that it is a tax-deferred account in the employee's name. I'm all for allowing it to be invested or not as the employee wishes, though if it is just held as cash it won't be worth much due to inflation. I can't really offer a fix for the problems with the stock market in general - if no investment is suitable, well, then no investment is suitable.
As far as whether the payments are made into the account - the account is in the employees name and they get a statement. Sure, a company could not honor its duty to pay the employee's retirement fund just like they could choose not to issue a paycheck. However, the whole point of this arrangement is that if this happens you find out two weeks after it happens and not 20 years later when there isn't anything you can do about it.
They can turn the rules around overnight and demand the ransom, and they can do it in a totally legal manner.
Sure, but that isn't saying much. The de facto definition of legal is whatever the prevailing government says it is, anywhere.
Ok, so you have $10k in a bank account in Peru. You want to transfer the money to your account in the US. The bank says that before you're allowed to move the money you have to pay a $500 tax to the government. So, you propose to just tell the bank to close your account and keep the money?
Sure, Nokia could abandon a factory to save on a much smaller tax bill. They could even burn their own factory to the ground to prove a point. However, it isn't exactly a great business decision.
BTW, this is one of the reasons why companies didn't move all their stuff overseas a generation ago. It wasn't like the pay disparity was any less back then. If you want luxuries like reliable electricity, no hostage taking, no need to bribe the local politician, and no government shakedowns, well, sometimes you have to pay your workers a bit more to go along with that...
Replace Amazon with Modern, and you'll cover more ground while being just as accurate. Actually, on reflection, there's no need to modify the subject - Workers... is historically accurate for most of organized human civilization.
Yup - that's why companies these days are so process-oriented, and why IT managers tend to be project-oriented. They want to avoid making it about the people, which minimizes the value of any particular employee and therefore their bargaining power.
I think companies sell themselves short as a result, and not only their employees.
I remember sitting in a meeting many years ago where we were talking about how to estimate the cost of IT projects. It was a large-group brainstorming session, and I naively raised my hand suggesting that perhaps the availability of particular expertise might be a factor worth considering. That is, if you happen to have a lot of people around who are good at something, then perhaps the cost of projects they could apply their knowledge to should be estimated lower. The response was, "hmm, should base their project estimates on the individuals assigned to the project...maybe." It was of course said in a tone that suggested, "maybe not."
Such thinking tosses a wrench in process-oriented methodologies. The perceived problem is that it ends up increasing the apparent ROI of projects that aren't as impactful to the business simply because a bunch of people happen to be sitting around who could do the work. The cogs-in-the-machine approach would be to fire all those people and hire people who could work on something else, or get everybody to work equally-effectively on everything so that managers don't have to deal with all the HR mess.
However, it doesn't make sense when you think about how any small successful organization would run things. If you're a football team and you have the best receivers in the league, are you going to ask them to run the ball? If you're a start-up with a bunch of MD/CS types on staff working on a medical records application are you going to decide to diversify into auto repair estimates?
Just because the big manager wants to work on project XYZ this year doesn't mean that this is the most effective use of the organization's resources. Even if project ABC has a lower impact if it can be done with a tenth the cost/risk then it should be carefully considered. Sure, sometimes you need to make big changes, but managers are great at getting promoted for making big changes that later cause problems.
At my own employer the new head of R&D basically just repudiated the last ten years of strategy, which was in a different domain from automation but very much around the idea that you can decide where you want to innovate vs taking innovation wherever you can find it.
I'd never suggest the UK is perfect in this regard but whenever I see a story about an employer in the US treating employees like consumables to chew up and throw out it makes me feel a little better about the fact I have to pay a penny or two more to buy things packed by people treated like humans rather than animals.
I'll reply here and not to the AC on principle.
I'll agree with his point that many similar laws are on the books in the US. The problem in the US is that these rules are not well-enforced.
In the US it is illegal to not pay people for time worked. In practice I know LOTS of people who were asked to record only their scheduled hours and not their actual hours worked, but they were expected to complete their duties before leaving regardless of schedule. That is, they wanted to compensate them like hourly workers and treat them like they are salaried employees. Ironically one person I know who was asked to do this was employed by a public school - a government institution.
In the US it is illegal to allow employees to work without proper safeguards. Companies usually make their internal policies match the law for obvious reasons. In practice many employers routinely fire the slowest workers and do not enforce safety policies, so employees who value their jobs often disregard safety policy. If something goes wrong the employer points at the policy and provided safety equipment that was not used. The employer usually doesn't point out all the people who they fired for using the equipment (er, for not getting as much done as those not using the equipment).
In the US there are exceptions to the labor laws for professional employees, which probably includes the majority of those on Slashdot who are employed in their intended field in the US. As professionals we are believed to have the power to fend for ourselves - if my employer wanted me to skip meals I could just take one of the many other jobs in my field that are open on the market. That is a mixed bag in terms of outcome.
As far as worker's compensation goes - I know a judge who handles these cases. At least in the state I live in maybe it is a viable source of income if your alternative is Walmart, but if I got hurt at work the last thing I'd want to do is tick off my employer so that I could get $500/month or whatever.
Alternatives, such as just paying a fixed amount into a fund and letting the employee deal with it are easier but don't lead to better outcomes.
If you really have any outcome data on this I'd certainly be interested in pointers.
My feeling is that no company should ever owe a company anything for a period longer than a few weeks (just for administrative simplicity so that we're not doing hourly paychecks). I'd also ban any form of compensation or benefit that used length of employment in the calculation, since that is a form of deferred compensation (you get more money 10 years from now because you are working today).
There can still be retirement savings - just put them in funds like 401ks. The important thing is that they're employee-owned, not company-owned. They would not be company assets in a re-structuring. Companies could only advertise the amount contributed to the fund, not any promised future value of the fund.
How about a virus? Is a virus dangerous? What if ideas could be catching and self-replicating?
That's basically the definition of a meme, or at least it was until people re-invented animated gifs.
Symantec makes fortunes on the whole concept of self-replicating information. Good luck with arguing the philosophical difference between a computer virus and a book.
Why the need for "registered couples?"
If a group of two or more people want to enter some kind of legal relationship they can voluntarily sign a contract which defines the rules by which they will operate and how the relationship will one day be severed. These contracts could even be standardized - the way real estate contracts often are.
People already can and do have kids and own property jointly without a contract, so the law would still have to handle those situations.
The main reason we need marriage to have legal standing is to simplify inheritance and divorce. If someone dies without a will or two people want to go their separate ways after 30 years the only way to resolve the issues without some defaults set out in law would be to sue.
Thankfully divorces don't involve court proceedings, and people don't have kids or live together unless they're married. Courts would simply be unequipped to handle such situations, since they can only be resolved with those involved are married.
why else would *software pirates* take the time and effort to release updates? It takes manpower, people who have to be made to do the work. I know this is a bit easier given its China but still, pirates don't use resources this way.
First, free tools to install windows updates are available online for legit copies of windows already. Auto-updaters are common on linux distros that have no plans to ever charge anybody for anything. So, it isn't entirely unheard of to offer updates without a revenue stream.
Second, they aren't offering this stuff for free. The posts above talk about $3 professionally-boxed copies of windows. If you want somebody to buy your $3 box of windows instead of somebody else's 50-cent boxless disc then you need to offer a value-add.
The only reason this stuff doesn't happen in the US is that the FBI would bust you if you sold pirated copies of windows. In a regulatory environment where piracy is not prevented, then it makes perfect sense that pirates would compete on quality/features/price/etc just as in any other market.
Good point, though nothing would stop you from landing on it, assuming you bothered to return.
Wrong. Totally wrong.
See, I go there. I get my own donation page. I donate a tiny amount, then follow the money. Unless wikileaks would like to not touch donations, they will have to bundle them in a separate address then use the money. That is where you can start tracking the money again.
Yes and no. They could just keep all the money in a bazillion separate accounts, and only combine them into single transactions when they don't have an individual account large enough to cover that one transaction. It would be like having 10,000 conventional bank accounts with $5 in each. When it comes time to pay a bill you just write out 47 checks.
But in that case the thermometer is measuring its own temperature, not "the temperature of the vacuum", whatever that means. And selective coatings with different absorption and emission spectra could change the reading of the thermometer. Does that change the "temperature of the vacuum"?
Would changing the spectra of light coming off the chamber walls actually change the equilibrium temperature reading of the thermometer?
I don't think such a coating could change the total energy emitted by the surface, and thus the total energy impacting the thermometer. Anything that causes an empty universe containing exactly two objects to end up in an equilibrium where the two objects aren't the same temperature seems like a thermodynamic challenge.
They'd have launched seaplanes - they could use the ocean as their runway.
However, according to WP they later decided to just launch kamikaze attacks instead. That certainly would make the submarine (which was far more expensive than the planes) less vulnerable to attack. Those bombers could fly for hours - if you're going to launch your attack close to the enemy mainland you're probably not going to want to linger that long. If the bombers were tailed on the return trip it would be impossible to recover them and escape.
One thing one could hope for out of these studies is some kind of diagnostic to identify transgendered individuals.
I understand what you're getting at, but there are a bunch of issues here:
1. Motivations for gender change may vary, therefore the causes for those motivations may vary.
2. Sexual differences could have many effects, and the ones that have to do with performance-based tests might not be the ones that tend to cause motivation for gender change. That means that individuals with unusual brain wiring might have one but not the other.
3. We're really only scratching the surface of how the brain works - behavior is really complex in general and anything dealing with individuals is even messier.
See the book "Unlocking the Clubhouse" for how high-achieving girls fascinated by computers suffer a death by a thousand cuts and switch fields despite their preference.
Honestly, I have no idea if there is any physical difference between men and women that contribute to the dearth of women in IT. I won't go there.
However, preference and success do not automatically go hand-in-hand. I know plenty of guys who are fascinated by computers but they simply lack the ability to do well in the field. I love playing a musical instrument but I'd starve to death if I depended on it to make a living, even though others do just fine. That isn't some cultural bias getting in my way - it just means that enjoyment is orthogonal to skill.
Not sure you can lump the male/female differences in the same category as human/chimp differences - they're completely different things, other than the fact that they're differences.
My understanding is that the relative low strength of men vs other primates is due to our muscles being optimized for endurance over strength. When you lift something up only about 10% of your muscle fibers are actually doing anything. Muscle fibers only have an endurance measured in seconds, and they have a much longer recovery time. So, your body basically just has a duty cycle where each fiber operates about 10% of the time and then rests while others take over.
Other primates are optimized for strength - when their muscles contract a much larger portion of their fibers contract, giving them far more power per unit of muscle mass. However, most primates could not sustain that level of effort for the length of time that a person could.
I've also heard this used to describe why an adrenaline rush gives a person super-human strength. Basically their muscles have switched into a coordinated contraction like an ape's and that gives them much higher strength at the cost of endurance.
There are apparently many who think that people evolved in Africa to be persistence hunters. We couldn't outrun four-legged animals, but we could follow them for hours until they tired and then spear them. If true that would explain why our muscles are optimized more for endurance. It also explains the lack of hair - you need hair to avoid freezing at night if you don't have clothes, but when you're doing a three hour marathon it just makes you overheat.
Odd that I have 6 ACs saying the same thing, so I'll just reply to one at random...
That's exactly how the carts work where I live. However, with that system there is no point in trying to vandalize carts to get the coin, so I figured they must use some other system where the original post was referring to.
If the only thing you have to do in order to get the coin is to return the cart, then I'd think that kids would just return the cart. It would be faster, easier, legal, and actually doing the store a favor.
It's currently still inflating (the monetary base is increasing). The exchange rate with the dollar is on a bit of a climb though.
I guess it depends on what school of economics you subscribe to, but inflation is not the result of a larger monetary base, but rather in increase of the supply of a currency compared to its demand. When demand is constant then your statement holds.
The idea that demand for money changes is the main argument behind having government regulate the supply of money - the practical buying power of currency can be held more constant in that case. Of course, the concept behind bitcoin/gold/etc is that the government cannot be trusted with this authority, and in those cases the value of the currency itself can fluctuate, causing its buying power to fluctuate as well.
Keep the assets stored off the computer, in a safe place and no risk of government seisure.
Yeah, like cash that is stored outside of a bank, in a safe place, has no risk of government seizure...
Well, you can encrypt and backup your bitcoins - they can seize you, but they can't actually seize your bitcoins. In fact, if you have a friend you trust with your backup they could transfer your coins to another wallet and render the wallet seized by the government worthless, as long as they do so before the government gets you to divulge the decryption key. So, bitcoins are actually defensible from seizure. Of course, your friend could just spend your coins even if they aren't seized by the government, so it is a security tradeoff.
That's an issue of scale. The complaint that "if everyone cashes out the price will go to 0" still applies to the stock market.
Sure, but scale matters. Your SSL connection depends on it, and for that matter so does the supply of bitcoins.
There is a big difference between a currency that can handle $1B transactions without issues, and one that can only handle $1k transactions without issues.
Face it, when you create a currency to facilitate crime don't be surprised when it becomes bogged down with crime.The majority of those drawn to the currency are inherently liars, cheats and thieves that is the purpose of the currency. You can bet deaths are bound to start occurring and holding the currency will become extremely dangerous for your health.
I don't think anybody created bitcoin for the purpose of facilitating crime, though it can be used in that manner in the same way that US dollars can be.
One of defining attributes of cash is that legal ownership is (practically speaking) the same as physical possession. If I sell you a house, you need to make sure that I actually own the house I'm trying to sell you or you could be in trouble. If I offer you a $20 bill to pay for some service you perform, you don't have to worry about whether I own the $20 bill. Cash would not be nearly as useful for low-value transactions if you had to validate its ownership on every transaction, or buy title insurance on every bill that you receive.
That very attribute is what makes any form of cash a target for thieves. If they can gain physical possession without immediately getting caught, they have increased their wealth.
US Dollars aren't specifically designed to facilitate crime, and yet you can easily be taken advantage of by criminals if you handle them foolishly. I can create a website in 10 minutes advertising a bank and just ask you to mail me a check to make your initial deposit. If I cash those checks and run off with the money, you're going to have a hard time getting it back. What I did would be illegal, just as what this bitcoin bank did was illegal, but that isn't going to get your money back. If you want your deposit to be FDIC insured, then make sure your bank is FDIC insured.
obviously, you don't sell them all at once, so you don't move the market with your actions. it doesn't make them any more or less valuable.
Suppose I want to buy 50 cars worth $20k each. That will cost me $1M. If I walk into a car dealer with a check for $1M from a major bank, I could walk out with all 50 cars as quickly as they can find the keys and sign the paperwork.
If I walk in with $1M in $100 bills, then I can do the same assuming the dealer is willing to file the required paperwork reporting a large cash transaction. In that sense, cash is actually less liquid than a check in bulk.
If I walk in with what you'd consider $1M in bitcoins most likely they would not be accepted. If I wanted to convert those to something that would be accepted it would probably take some time and I might not get the full $1M.
If I scaled this whole thing up 10x the issue with bitcoins becomes bigger. If you called up a large auto dealership and told them you had a $10M check that was burning a hole in your pocket they could probably take care of you same-day. Try to liquidate $10M in bitcoins to buy cars and you're likely to have real problems.
If your goal is to buy 500 cars, then having $10M in a US bank account is more useful than having "$10M" in a bitcoin wallet. That makes the former more valuable in the same way that cash is more valuable than an IOU, even if the issuer is good for the money.
I think one of the problems with mental health treatments is that we don't understand the disease very well - everything is empirical. We know about some receptors and we can make things that bind to them and have some activity, but we don't really have fine-grained control. It is a bit like practicing medicine when the best treatment for an infection was to cut a limb off - it is better than not cutting the limb off, but not really the treatment people are looking for.
An analogy I heard of from a psychiatrist was that some time ago you might go to the doctor and get diagnosed with a "cough." If that is your best possible diagnosis then a doc equipped with even the full arsenal of modern medications and procedures would basically be taking shots into the dark. One person with a "cough" might get better with no treatment at all, another might respond to an antibiotic, and another might respond to an inhaler. Of course "cough" is probably one of the easier issues to treat (well, maybe a lung doctor might disagree).
In the same way with mental illness we are pretty good at classifying diseases by their symptoms, but we generally don't get to the root causes. If the real reason that somebody is having a problem is that some particular receptor in their brain is too sensitive then a drug that inhibits it might very well completely cure them. If their problem is really something else then messing with that receptor might help them but also introduce other side-effects because we are treating a symptom and not the root cause. If their real problem is that some clump of neurons goes from point A to point B when in 99% of people it goes from point A to point C, then you're not going to be able to really fix them until we can actually rewire brains (and to start we can't even examine how individuals are wired in any practical way today).
It's the opposite actually. The carts are all chained together with short lengths of chain that have a tab that engages with the mechanism. To free the end trolley in the line you insert a pound coin and that unlocks the mechanism like a seatbelt so you can use the cart. To get your pound back you need to put the card back in the stack and reconnect it to the one in front, which releases the coin.
Yes, that's exactly how the ones over here work. So, what exactly are kids going after then? The ones chained up don't have any money in them - only ones that aren't chained up do. If you want to get the money out of one that isn't chained up you just need to park it. Seems like that would be a lot less hassle than trying to break the mechanism open.