The charge is turning the previously externalized cost of disposing of plastic bags into a paid cost. And that will change what market players do in order to reduce the number of bags being disposed. The cost of you using plastic bags doesn't go away just because you don't pay for them.
And we're talking about the not-giant burden of bringing your own bags when you go shopping. All that takes is a small amount of advanced planning. Oh, and you end up with less trash.
The costs of children being factored in are: - Food, easily $800 a year, or $14400 total. - Clothing, frequently cheap because of second-hand, but another $200 a year is not uncommon, so $3600 total. - Time off from work to take care of them (both in infancy and during illnesses). This is a very expensive item, with costs of $60,000 not uncommon. - What that does to the career of whichever parent takes that time off from work. This accounts for much of the disparity between men's and women's pay, costing mom (who are more likely to take the time off than dads) roughly $180,000 over those 18 years. - The larger home needed to have room for the child. Also, an important related expense is having the home in a neighborhood with a good school system. This is easily $300 a month increase, which comes out to $57400. - Medical care. Insurance for kids typically runs at least $1000 a year, so tack on another $18,000. - Transportation to and from school. If you're lucky and live near enough that the kid can walk, or have good school buses, this is $0, for others it's another $4000 or so over the kid's lifetime.
Add those up, and you get $404,000, right about the $400,000 figure I quoted. As for the $200K, have you ever looked at college tuition?
In the US, I should mention that there's another key dimension in play: Older workers bring with them more expensive health insurance costs. I just watched a major corporation end the career of a 25-year veteran of the company primarily because of that (it was a "layoff" that just happened to get rid of 22 workers who just happened to be the oldest workers who weren't chums with an executive).
Thank you, whoever you are. Your response reminds me of a classic definition of feminism being the radical notion that women are people.
Typically, when you get into a good committed relationship between capable people, then each helps support the other when they need it. Man or woman doesn't matter when the chips are down, love and committment do.
Children, on the other hand, are way more expensive than a lot of would-be parents give them credit for. To age 18, it's about $400K. If you're helping with college expenses, tack on another $200K. The little rascals are also the greatest diminisher of marital happiness, according to serious studies on the subject. I'm sure being a parent is a wonderful experience (that I've never had), but be careful out there and don't end up a parent by accident.
In Plato's Republic, the essential education of the ruling class required musical and artistic study. Plato thought that arts were a good way to cultivate creativity, and music was good for making people balance out emotional and logical thinking. It turns out he was absolutely right, at least about music: Centuries later, they've determined that musicians have a larger corpus collosum connecting the right and left brains, which enables them to better connect different kinds of thinking into a coherent whole.
Of course, teaching both art and music costs money for cash-scrapped school systems, and many states do not require that either be offered. So guess what is first to fall by the wayside when budgets are tight?
My theory on the whole JFK assassination has always been this: 1. Oswald was the sole shooter. 2. There were other people prepared to kill Kennedy if need be, who never fired a shot because Oswald did what he was supposed to. 3. Jack Ruby was more in on whatever was really going down than Oswald ever was.
And I'm going to make a perfectly reasonable case for "We don't consider your life useful and want to kill you":
Let's say you have a 95-year-old person with no living relatives, no living will, and a terminal illness. The 95-year-old is in no way responsive to sensory input, but is technically alive (with heartbeat, respiration, and some brain activity). What value is there, really, to spending lots of resources keeping that person technically alive, solely because nobody has the authority to say that this person's life is effectively over already? How about when those same resources could be used to, say, provide health care to poor people in their 20's who have potentially a long life ahead of them and with care would be able to work and parent but without care will eventually become disabled?
Aren't the people getting hit more important than the effects of a major disaster on global economic production? Basic morality, codified in numerous legal codes, artistic works, and centuries of human behavior says that lives matter more than stuff.
The reason I don't consider Rand Paui a centrist is that Rand Paul doesn't consider himself a centrist, and that conservative organizations such as the Club for Growth and the American Conservative Union both consider him among the most conservative people in the Senate.
If Obama had been an extremist, instead of a centrist, the Affordable Care Act would have started with the idea of creating a national public health care system similar to what has worked well in numerous other countries. In fact, he started with an idea from a conservative think tank and implemented by a Republican governor. He even defended the ACA against attacks from actual liberal extremists in Congress like Dennis Kucinich who were arguing that the ACA didn't even come close to going far enough.
We've had some liberal extremists over the years, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt being the most notable examples. Barack Obama is nothing like them, and it shows in his policies.
Do you know what a community organizer does day-to-day? Typically, what they're doing is taking charge of groups of volunteers. That means the difference between a community organizer and a manager is that the community organizer has to contend with the fact that they can neither fire the idiots nor offer any financial incentive to do what the organizer says.
In my view Obama has been fair-to-middling as president. There have been some serious problems, some serious successes (e.g. Osama bin Laden), and a lot of kinda-working things (including healthcare.gov, which I was able to successfully use last Friday). The economy doesn't suck as much as when Obama took office, but is far worse than it should be. The response to Hurricane Sandy wasn't perfect, but was a lot better than what happened with Katrina.
The last 5 presidents with significant business management experience were: George W Bush, George H W Bush, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover, and Warren Harding. Not exactly what I would call a litany of greatness.
No, but the people who hate the ACA want the general public to think that if the website sucks, the ACA must suck and should therefor be scrapped. The arguments don't even have to make sense anymore: We've gotten to the point where "It's snowing in Syracuse before Thanksgiving, so we should scrap the ACA."
Managers want to look at us - programmers, software engineers - as totally fungible, mere factory robots.
They have the same attitude towards accountants, secretaries, anyone who works on an assembly line, salespeople, HR reps, etc. There's fundamental contempt in the business world for people who actually produce stuff, like they're somehow deficient or inferior to those who go around reprioritizing action items to create synergies in the digital marketplace. That contempt can even spread towards relatively high-status people who produce stuff e.g. how big media companies treat musicians or actors.
From what I've seen so far, the cause of this is that management typically has gone to business school, and what they learn in business school is precisely to treat employees as replaceable components of a system. It's even in the language they use: "Personnel" became "Human Resources", making it clear that instead of flesh-and-blood humans like the managers themselves, rank-and-file employees were tools to be used up and then discarded.
I'd consider loading these folks up on a "B" Ark ship, except that I'm reasonably certain that if we removed one set of parasites another set would take over just as assuredly.
but our political system is set up to reward those who pander to the extremes (Gerrymandering + closed primaries in most states)
Explain this to me then: Why is it that the political stars of the Republican Party are the extremists (e.g. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz) while the political stars of the Democratic Party are usually centrists (e.g. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama)? Even Elizabeth Warren, to some degree a left-wing standard-bearer, has mostly just been pushing relentlessly for white-collar criminals to be tried for their crimes. Extreme liberal candidates with ideas like "Hey, let's make hedge fund managers pay the same tax rate as athletes who make less money" rarely even make it into the primaries.
These same extraordinary gentlemen are more likely by an order of magnitude to f*ck up than another applicant with no such resume.
There are basically 2 reactions for first-time offenders serving time: 1. Whoa, I really screwed up. I need to clean up my act, and do what "the man" is telling me to do - get a job, stay legit, get away from friends or family who were trying to pull me into fights, drugs, etc. 2. I'm a lost cause. Might as well have as much fun as I can before I get killed.
Any sane public official wants more of the first reaction than the second, and the fact is that the primary difference will be whether the ex-con can get a legitimate job after they're out. And I wouldn't be surprised if an ex-con who had the first reaction is actually more diligent and hardworking, because they are more motivated to stay clean. Some of the best coworkers I ever had were recovering alcoholics, and I'd expect similar sorts of reactions from some of those who have been in prison.
Oh, and if they were in for pot, I couldn't care less, provided it doesn't impede job performance.
In a lot of states, you do not have to inform the other party that you are recording the call. These recordings are of course what legal types refer to as "evidence".
Actually, what Reagan proved (and George W duplicated) is that deficits don't matter if there's a Republican in the White House, whereas when a Democrat is president any deficit is horribly evil and needs to be eliminated regardless of any other factor.
They're chess grandmasters, but they are still not able to deduce that "beating" is not necessarily a mathematical total order.
True, but in this case it doesn't really matter much: 1. The World Championship match is always a fairly long affair, enough time for the law of averages to take hold. 2. Magnus Carlsen is the highest-rated player in the world right now, which means that over his recent tournament play he is in fact the best there is. 3. To get to play for the World Championship, you have to win the candidate's tournament. Yes, it's theoretically possible for the not-best player to win the tournament, but it's very unlikely that the world champion is not among the very best that have ever existed. 4. Luck plays very little role in chess, because it's a game with no randomness and no hidden information. That's exactly what makes it interesting: in theory there could be a perfect chessplayer that wins or at least draws every time.
Not a new sentiment: As Upton Sinclair pointed out a century ago, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Well, that's before they finish off their secret plan: Tell the funniest joke in the world, on stage. Because what a way to go, even if it takes an entire audience with them!
The US is being gently pushed ( nudged ) into a beginning of irrelevance
I'd consider it more the US government trying to do whatever it can for the 0.1% of the country that pays for the majority of political campaigning, and screw the other 99.9% of us. And whether the US government becomes irrelevant or not, as long as the corporate overlords are happy, the politicians will be kept comfortable.
In the words of Number Two: "But you, like an idiot, want to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore! It's only corporations!"
This was done for everybody in Gitmo, they released a few dozen prisoners during the process
What about the mostly Yemeni prisoners who were tried, declared not guilty, and sent right back to their cells? Those guys actually constitute the majority of people in Gitmo right now.
Slashdot Mirror
The charge is turning the previously externalized cost of disposing of plastic bags into a paid cost. And that will change what market players do in order to reduce the number of bags being disposed. The cost of you using plastic bags doesn't go away just because you don't pay for them.
And we're talking about the not-giant burden of bringing your own bags when you go shopping. All that takes is a small amount of advanced planning. Oh, and you end up with less trash.
The costs of children being factored in are:
- Food, easily $800 a year, or $14400 total.
- Clothing, frequently cheap because of second-hand, but another $200 a year is not uncommon, so $3600 total.
- Time off from work to take care of them (both in infancy and during illnesses). This is a very expensive item, with costs of $60,000 not uncommon.
- What that does to the career of whichever parent takes that time off from work. This accounts for much of the disparity between men's and women's pay, costing mom (who are more likely to take the time off than dads) roughly $180,000 over those 18 years.
- The larger home needed to have room for the child. Also, an important related expense is having the home in a neighborhood with a good school system. This is easily $300 a month increase, which comes out to $57400.
- Medical care. Insurance for kids typically runs at least $1000 a year, so tack on another $18,000.
- Transportation to and from school. If you're lucky and live near enough that the kid can walk, or have good school buses, this is $0, for others it's another $4000 or so over the kid's lifetime.
Add those up, and you get $404,000, right about the $400,000 figure I quoted. As for the $200K, have you ever looked at college tuition?
The company I worked for had been acquired by a huge rollup company. We all knew what we coming, and come it did.
So what was it like working for Bain Capital for the four years you lived through it?
(ducks)
In the US, I should mention that there's another key dimension in play: Older workers bring with them more expensive health insurance costs. I just watched a major corporation end the career of a 25-year veteran of the company primarily because of that (it was a "layoff" that just happened to get rid of 22 workers who just happened to be the oldest workers who weren't chums with an executive).
Thank you, whoever you are. Your response reminds me of a classic definition of feminism being the radical notion that women are people.
Typically, when you get into a good committed relationship between capable people, then each helps support the other when they need it. Man or woman doesn't matter when the chips are down, love and committment do.
Children, on the other hand, are way more expensive than a lot of would-be parents give them credit for. To age 18, it's about $400K. If you're helping with college expenses, tack on another $200K. The little rascals are also the greatest diminisher of marital happiness, according to serious studies on the subject. I'm sure being a parent is a wonderful experience (that I've never had), but be careful out there and don't end up a parent by accident.
In Plato's Republic, the essential education of the ruling class required musical and artistic study. Plato thought that arts were a good way to cultivate creativity, and music was good for making people balance out emotional and logical thinking. It turns out he was absolutely right, at least about music: Centuries later, they've determined that musicians have a larger corpus collosum connecting the right and left brains, which enables them to better connect different kinds of thinking into a coherent whole.
Of course, teaching both art and music costs money for cash-scrapped school systems, and many states do not require that either be offered. So guess what is first to fall by the wayside when budgets are tight?
My theory on the whole JFK assassination has always been this:
1. Oswald was the sole shooter.
2. There were other people prepared to kill Kennedy if need be, who never fired a shot because Oswald did what he was supposed to.
3. Jack Ruby was more in on whatever was really going down than Oswald ever was.
And I'm going to make a perfectly reasonable case for "We don't consider your life useful and want to kill you":
Let's say you have a 95-year-old person with no living relatives, no living will, and a terminal illness. The 95-year-old is in no way responsive to sensory input, but is technically alive (with heartbeat, respiration, and some brain activity). What value is there, really, to spending lots of resources keeping that person technically alive, solely because nobody has the authority to say that this person's life is effectively over already? How about when those same resources could be used to, say, provide health care to poor people in their 20's who have potentially a long life ahead of them and with care would be able to work and parent but without care will eventually become disabled?
if they put up a fight chalk up an even bigger win for environmentalims because the publicity raises awareness about global warming.
Raising awareness is pointless when the general public is already aware of the problem. That's the big reason I don't get involved in most walkathons.
Aren't the people getting hit more important than the effects of a major disaster on global economic production? Basic morality, codified in numerous legal codes, artistic works, and centuries of human behavior says that lives matter more than stuff.
Amazon: BBC employees have increased incidence of mental illness.
(Thing is, they're probably both right)
The reason I don't consider Rand Paui a centrist is that Rand Paul doesn't consider himself a centrist, and that conservative organizations such as the Club for Growth and the American Conservative Union both consider him among the most conservative people in the Senate.
If Obama had been an extremist, instead of a centrist, the Affordable Care Act would have started with the idea of creating a national public health care system similar to what has worked well in numerous other countries. In fact, he started with an idea from a conservative think tank and implemented by a Republican governor. He even defended the ACA against attacks from actual liberal extremists in Congress like Dennis Kucinich who were arguing that the ACA didn't even come close to going far enough.
We've had some liberal extremists over the years, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt being the most notable examples. Barack Obama is nothing like them, and it shows in his policies.
Do you know what a community organizer does day-to-day? Typically, what they're doing is taking charge of groups of volunteers. That means the difference between a community organizer and a manager is that the community organizer has to contend with the fact that they can neither fire the idiots nor offer any financial incentive to do what the organizer says.
In my view Obama has been fair-to-middling as president. There have been some serious problems, some serious successes (e.g. Osama bin Laden), and a lot of kinda-working things (including healthcare.gov, which I was able to successfully use last Friday). The economy doesn't suck as much as when Obama took office, but is far worse than it should be. The response to Hurricane Sandy wasn't perfect, but was a lot better than what happened with Katrina.
The last 5 presidents with significant business management experience were: George W Bush, George H W Bush, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover, and Warren Harding. Not exactly what I would call a litany of greatness.
No, but the people who hate the ACA want the general public to think that if the website sucks, the ACA must suck and should therefor be scrapped. The arguments don't even have to make sense anymore: We've gotten to the point where "It's snowing in Syracuse before Thanksgiving, so we should scrap the ACA."
Managers want to look at us - programmers, software engineers - as totally fungible, mere factory robots.
They have the same attitude towards accountants, secretaries, anyone who works on an assembly line, salespeople, HR reps, etc. There's fundamental contempt in the business world for people who actually produce stuff, like they're somehow deficient or inferior to those who go around reprioritizing action items to create synergies in the digital marketplace. That contempt can even spread towards relatively high-status people who produce stuff e.g. how big media companies treat musicians or actors.
From what I've seen so far, the cause of this is that management typically has gone to business school, and what they learn in business school is precisely to treat employees as replaceable components of a system. It's even in the language they use: "Personnel" became "Human Resources", making it clear that instead of flesh-and-blood humans like the managers themselves, rank-and-file employees were tools to be used up and then discarded.
I'd consider loading these folks up on a "B" Ark ship, except that I'm reasonably certain that if we removed one set of parasites another set would take over just as assuredly.
but our political system is set up to reward those who pander to the extremes (Gerrymandering + closed primaries in most states)
Explain this to me then: Why is it that the political stars of the Republican Party are the extremists (e.g. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz) while the political stars of the Democratic Party are usually centrists (e.g. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama)? Even Elizabeth Warren, to some degree a left-wing standard-bearer, has mostly just been pushing relentlessly for white-collar criminals to be tried for their crimes. Extreme liberal candidates with ideas like "Hey, let's make hedge fund managers pay the same tax rate as athletes who make less money" rarely even make it into the primaries.
These same extraordinary gentlemen are more likely by an order of magnitude to f*ck up than another applicant with no such resume.
There are basically 2 reactions for first-time offenders serving time:
1. Whoa, I really screwed up. I need to clean up my act, and do what "the man" is telling me to do - get a job, stay legit, get away from friends or family who were trying to pull me into fights, drugs, etc.
2. I'm a lost cause. Might as well have as much fun as I can before I get killed.
Any sane public official wants more of the first reaction than the second, and the fact is that the primary difference will be whether the ex-con can get a legitimate job after they're out. And I wouldn't be surprised if an ex-con who had the first reaction is actually more diligent and hardworking, because they are more motivated to stay clean. Some of the best coworkers I ever had were recovering alcoholics, and I'd expect similar sorts of reactions from some of those who have been in prison.
Oh, and if they were in for pot, I couldn't care less, provided it doesn't impede job performance.
In a lot of states, you do not have to inform the other party that you are recording the call. These recordings are of course what legal types refer to as "evidence".
Actually, what Reagan proved (and George W duplicated) is that deficits don't matter if there's a Republican in the White House, whereas when a Democrat is president any deficit is horribly evil and needs to be eliminated regardless of any other factor.
They're chess grandmasters, but they are still not able to deduce that "beating" is not necessarily a mathematical total order.
True, but in this case it doesn't really matter much:
1. The World Championship match is always a fairly long affair, enough time for the law of averages to take hold.
2. Magnus Carlsen is the highest-rated player in the world right now, which means that over his recent tournament play he is in fact the best there is.
3. To get to play for the World Championship, you have to win the candidate's tournament. Yes, it's theoretically possible for the not-best player to win the tournament, but it's very unlikely that the world champion is not among the very best that have ever existed.
4. Luck plays very little role in chess, because it's a game with no randomness and no hidden information. That's exactly what makes it interesting: in theory there could be a perfect chessplayer that wins or at least draws every time.
Not a new sentiment: As Upton Sinclair pointed out a century ago, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Obligatory Jessica Williams clip
Well, that's before they finish off their secret plan: Tell the funniest joke in the world, on stage. Because what a way to go, even if it takes an entire audience with them!
The US is being gently pushed ( nudged ) into a beginning of irrelevance
I'd consider it more the US government trying to do whatever it can for the 0.1% of the country that pays for the majority of political campaigning, and screw the other 99.9% of us. And whether the US government becomes irrelevant or not, as long as the corporate overlords are happy, the politicians will be kept comfortable.
In the words of Number Two: "But you, like an idiot, want to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore! It's only corporations!"
This was done for everybody in Gitmo, they released a few dozen prisoners during the process
What about the mostly Yemeni prisoners who were tried, declared not guilty, and sent right back to their cells? Those guys actually constitute the majority of people in Gitmo right now.