She provides some details about where she lives. It's about 30 miles from where she works and it's the cheapest place she could find that had access to the train.
She's quit using the heater but in general you want to keep a place no colder than 50 or 55 degrees or you'll run into problems with condensation (moisture damage).
The larger question is what sort of minimum standard of living should working full time get you. Further she seems to contend that this job requires some level of skill and training above what your typical minimum wage job requires. There's a legal minimum that Yelp is required to pay. Then there's the going rate for similar workers. I'd also contend that there's an ethical minimum.
Something else to consider is that in the 60's the average CEO made about 50 times what the average worker did. Today it's up to about 300 or 400 times. Now, the CEO of Yelp's compensation is $1.00 or something like that but he has an 11% stake in the company and his net worth is around $200 million.
In short, the industrial revolution created a ton of jobs that required few skills. AI and automation doesn't do that.
Hunting requires a fair amount of skill. So does being a farmer. There were other skilled and valued roles of course, but historically low skilled people were slaves, servants, and the like. Early in the industrial revolution, low skilled workers toiled under horrible and dangerous conditions for little pay. With the rise of collective bargaining and the labor movement, many of these people could make a decent living.
As time has gone on though, more of these low skilled but decent paying positions have either been moved to where the pay is low or automated out of existence. While a high school diploma obtained from a free education was enough to get a decent job in decades past, that is less and less the case.
The knowledge revolution creates jobs too, but jobs that require special skills. These skills require a post high school education that you pay for yourself. An average college student graduates with 30,000 worth of debt. Once they start working, they need to start saving for retirement almost immediately.
As computers and machinery are able to do more and more, people are needed less and less. Fewer people will have the means or aptitude to obtain the skills that are beyond what machines can do. Those that can will do well but they will live a much less stable society unless there are tremendous changes to our economic systems.
If you're happy driving a bus that's great. There's something to be said for having a job that you can leave at work.
Like you I had a job where I worked ridiculous hours for a salary that seemed good until you calculated what I was making per hour. What I figured out though is that certain skills are in demand and that I could afford to be particular. There are places, even in the tech world, where going home at a reasonable hour is the norm. Initially I took a small salary hit but over time that's ticked back up.
If I had stayed at that other company I'd probably be making more but I'd also probably be divorced and dealing with all the extra expenses and emotional drama of dealing with that.
Note: In my post above, it is possible that the 1 out of the hundred doctors who disagreed with the diagnosis is correct. However, I feel you should make decisions on the best information you have available, not whether or not you want to believe it.
I'll go out on limb and say that virtually no one posting here is qualified on their own to come to any conclusions about whether the earth is warming or not. That's not to say they aren't smart people, just that researching long term climate patterns and their causes is not their vocation and not something they're trained for. Lots of people can regurgitate information they found somewhere else. They can also do some analysis on some subset of data and come to some conclusions which may or may not be correct.
Climate modeling is complex and at some point you have to rely on the experts. For example, let say you're not feeling well and haven't been for months. In fact, it's getting worse. You try to diagnose and treat it yourself but it's not working so you go to the doctor who sends you to a specialist. The specialist says you've got some terminal illness. There is a treatment but it's not guaranteed to work and the treatment itself is going to make you feel worse for awhile. That sucks, but doctors make mistakes right? So you get a second opinion. That doctor agrees with the first. In fact you end up seeing 100 of them and all but one agree with the diagnosis and the treatment. Which one are you going to believe?
When it comes to climate science, maybe 90 some percent of scientists world wide are on the take and just perpetuating the climate change myth in order to keep their funding sources in tact. Or just maybe, actually trying to lower CO2 emissions world wide is not trivial and there's a number of influential people who stand to lose big if we do it. It means some lucrative industries (fossil fuel production) would have to be dramatically scaled back. It might even mean lifestyle changes which are never easy and are a tough sell. There are a whole lot of built in reasons for people not wanting to believe it.
" In 1960, in a poll organised by the American Cancer Society, only a third of all US doctors agreed that cigarette smoking should be considered ‘a major cause of lung cancer’. This same poll revealed that 43% of all American doctors were still smoking cigarettes on a regular basis, with occasional users accounting for another 5%. With half of all doctors smoking, it should come as no surprise that most Americans remained unconvinced of life-threatening harms from the habit."
- http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/...
So even doctors are fallible and inclined not to believe things that would suggest they need to change. Yes, the climate scientists could be just parroting each other, participating in group think, and trying to keep their funding alive. I don't believe that is what's really going on.
In my experience it's usually the IT people that have religious fights over Linux vs Windows.
Management wants stuff that works and costs to be low. They may want a Windows box or Mac on their desk, but they don't care what's running on the servers in the rack.
The idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were responsible for the housing bubble and subsequent crash has been pretty well debunked: http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
I run a small IT department. We will continue to keep some services in house but frankly the same sort of incident you refer to is the kind of thing that being able to turn up services in the cloud can help deal with.
Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (Saas) each comes with their own set of risks and rewards, but so does managing all that internally. You need to have your eyes wide open. If a company can save a significant amount of time and money all while improving availability by moving something to the cloud, eventually they probably will. It would be stupid of them not to.
If you work in the IT field you need to understand that your most important skill is being able to adapt to a constantly changing technology landscape. There are folks who can make a living taking care of legacy stuff but personally that's not a position I'd like myself or anyone on my staff to be in.
A shorter answer is that if you really want to see scientific studies and economic evaluations they are out there. I would imagine life expectancies improve with fewer emissions. As far as the shrinking middle class goes, that probably has little to do with the cost of electricity since for most people the electric bill is a small portion of their total household costs. If that weren't the case, people would be much more concerned about saving electricity than they tend to be.
What I'm saying is that implementing energy efficiency measures plus replacing coal with wind and gas turbines hasn't negatively impacted how Minnesota ranks nationally in terms of what it pays for electricity. In 1999, Minnesota paid more for it's electricity than did other states (on average). Now it pays less in spite of being a leader in cutting emissions from electricity generation. I suppose it could be paying 5 c/kWh if Minneapolis didn't mind looking like Shanghai, but that would have required removing controls that were already in place and replacing nuclear plants with coal plants.
Forget CO2 for a minute and just look up the term "externalities". There are lots of studies on the costs to society of generating electricity by various means. If you want one in particular, here's one from Harvard that says that the true cost of electricity generation from coal is 500 Billion annually. http://cleantechnica.com/2011/...
Other potential solutions haven't seen serious consideration and funding because so far there's not enough evidence that they are more practical than the approaches already being pursued. Perhaps if the Koch brothers quit funding campaigns to discredit climate scientists and instead poured money into geoengineering research, it would be farther along.
Look up "Geoengineering" to see a few examples of other research that's going on.
The fear mongering that's gone on related to dealing with climate change is that fixing things will be too expensive and will drive energy prices sky high. Minnesota is well on its ways to meeting its emissions goals for electrical power generation yet electricity costs in Minnesota are relatively low. The national average is 10.45 cents per kWh. The cost in Minnesota is 9.63 cents. So no, the emissions goals are not holding back the economy.
You also have to realize that there are economic consequences for allowing to climate change to continue unabated.
It is rather surprising to me that there is so much angst over whether or not this problem really exists and whether or not it should be tackled. We have a pretty recent example of a potential global crisis that was averted. A ton of money was spent doing so and yet the world economy boomed. I'm talking about Y2K. Companies spent a fortune updating their hardware and software to avoid the problem. It worked. And the economy didn't tank. In fact, just the opposite. The difference then was that it was the companies themselves that would suffer the consequences for not addressing the problem rather than some poor folks living in coastal areas. That's why they just sucked it up and did what they needed to do.
As far as things being implemented on an unscientific basis, I don't think that's entirely true. Obviously however, getting 200 countries to agree to do anything is absolutely going to be a very political process and to a certain extent the science of any solution will suffer to some degree as a result. There is no way around that.
Taking a course of action doesn't mean that research can't and won't continue on other options. Pursuing the EPA's current clean power plan doesn't mean economic collapse either. Minnesota is already half way towards its 2030 emissions goal and its economy is doing quite well.
It's not just NOAA who thinks that we have a problem and it isn't something made up by the Obama administration. Climate scientists across the world have come to the same conclusion.
Besides, look who is behind the funding of judicialwatch.org and I think you'll know how seriously to take their accusations.
The worker enters the agreement because they need to get paid. The company only needs so many workers so there is almost always more potential workers than jobs. There are 7 billion people in the world after all.
It's a level playing field for only a relatively few specialized occupations and those who are in industries where the workers have organized. Unions are in decline in this country and not so coincidentally so is the middle class.
Demand peak doesn't start at sunset. It starts in the heat of the afternoon while businesses are still operating and A/C loads are the highest. The "Duck" problem is real but often exaggerated and solvable. Excess production can be exported and relatively clean solutions like storage or Natural Gas turbines can be used to cover when solar production is low.
The percent of electricity in the US generated from coal has dropped from 50% to 39% in about a decade. Almost 3/4 of the coal plants in the US are 30 years old or more. 40 years is the average life span. A lot of coal plants are going to be replaced in the next 10 to 15 years, - most likely with something other than new coal plants. Especially when you take the EPA's clean power plan into consideration.
I imagine cars would be charged mostly over night where there is low demand anyway (non peak). Heavy electrical users are often give price breaks on electricity use during non-peak hours, - sometimes residential users can get those discounts too.
Utilities are all about reducing demand use so they don't have to build and operate as many power plants. We get a break on our summer electric bill because we allow the local utility to cycle our A/C compressor on and off during peak load times. In the 10 years or so since we did that, we've never noticed a difference. So if car charges were a real problem, utilities could offer the same price break and just cycle the chargers on and off.
X11 is native on OS X via the open source and Apple supported XQuartz product. Halfdan the black's complaint was that he thought the only way to run wine on OS X was via X11 rather than OS X's own window server.
Software development is a pretty good field to be in right now. That doesn't mean that things are rosy for everyone and few professions are layoff proof. I certainly understand IT people being upset if they are being replaced by cheaper workers from abroad but at the same time I find it a little hypocritical that they expect the government to protect them.
Where was your shirt made, or even your computer? Isn't IT and technology in general responsible for the elimination of many many jobs in the last few decades? But many of us seem to only care when it's our jobs that are at risk.
Kids should learn to code because so much of our daily lives and our jobs is impacted by software. Maybe it turns into a career for them or may not. Maybe it's a skill than can use even if it's not their main job. Current issues with H1-Bs shouldn't be a reason not to teach US kids a valuable skill.
Kids should absolutely get some exposure to coding in school. Just like they should be taught music, math, reading, and history/social studies. I really don't understand the opposition to it. Most kids that are taught geometry really never get any use out of it in their professions, - should we just stop teaching it? So much of our world runs on software that kids should have some basic understanding of how it's created and what it does even if coding never turns into a career for them.
Further, we aren't really so special (by we I mean programmers). Just like anything else, some kids who are taught to code will get it right away, others will take longer, and some may never get it all.
In every profession there are people who excel, others that have some talent, and those that should be doing something else. That is OK. Knowing how to code gives you a leg up in lots of professions even if you're not a programmer.
Why use a relational database like postgres when you have no intention of using its relational features just because it can also store JSON data?
I'm a huge fan of postgres. I introduced it to the organization I work in probably 15 years ago and we continue to use it today. But there are some things it just doesn't do as well, - like scale, at least not as easily as a database like Cassandra can. Don't get me wrong, you give up a lot in many cases by not choosing an SQL database and it's not always the right choice. However, lack of critical thinking isn't inherent in using a NoSQL database. Lack of critical thinking is assuming a certain type of database is always the right choice for any future project, just because it's worked well in previous projects.
The idea of banning all Muslims is a reaction to an irrational fear.
Trump did not suggest banning Muslims from entering the country.
He most certainly did. This was what he said at a rally in North Carolina referring to a statement his campaign released: “Should I read you the statement?” he asked. The crowd enthusiastically agreed that he should. "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said, adding the word “hell" for emphasis this time.
No, he wasn't suggesting banning them forever but he also wasn't clear on what it would take to get such a ban lifted. If he were to suggest that we stop ALL immigration for 60 days so we can review our process for vetting, then I wouldn't have such an issue with it. But to stop it indefinitely? How long has it been since congress has been able to pass any significant immigration reform package?
There are definite winners and losers when it comes to the effects of immigration in this country but if you take an honest look at just illegal immigration alone, there is a small net benefit to the average American's wealth. How? Put simply, they buy stuff. I'm not suggesting there aren't abuses and that there shouldn't be reform but immigration actually generates wealth.
Why not temporarily ban white loners in their 20's from owning guns because most of the time it's one of them that are shooting up churches, schools, and theaters?
Banning all Muslims is not a common sense solution because your chances of getting killed by a Muslim in the US is virtually nil. It's not like people aren't getting killed on a daily basis, but the causes are much more mundane than terrorism.
The idea of banning all Muslims is a reaction to an irrational fear.
People on the left want to spend tax money on other stuff. People on the right don't trust the government with anything costing that much money except the military (which is sort of ironic).
Getting Apollo funded was not a slam dunk and it was a unique period in American history that may never be repeated. Explorers of the past were sometimes funded by governments but often had to get money from private sources. Either way many times it was in exchange for the promise of territory or riches. Further, none of these ventures compared to the scale of the space program.
I really don't think it's fear over the loss of life so much that holds manned space flight back. It's the fear of spending an enormous amount of money on something with shaky support and failing.
Slashdot Mirror
The insurance companies who've been raising premiums in coastal areas sure do.
She provides some details about where she lives. It's about 30 miles from where she works and it's the cheapest place she could find that had access to the train. She's quit using the heater but in general you want to keep a place no colder than 50 or 55 degrees or you'll run into problems with condensation (moisture damage).
The larger question is what sort of minimum standard of living should working full time get you. Further she seems to contend that this job requires some level of skill and training above what your typical minimum wage job requires. There's a legal minimum that Yelp is required to pay. Then there's the going rate for similar workers. I'd also contend that there's an ethical minimum.
Something else to consider is that in the 60's the average CEO made about 50 times what the average worker did. Today it's up to about 300 or 400 times. Now, the CEO of Yelp's compensation is $1.00 or something like that but he has an 11% stake in the company and his net worth is around $200 million.
In short, the industrial revolution created a ton of jobs that required few skills. AI and automation doesn't do that.
Hunting requires a fair amount of skill. So does being a farmer. There were other skilled and valued roles of course, but historically low skilled people were slaves, servants, and the like. Early in the industrial revolution, low skilled workers toiled under horrible and dangerous conditions for little pay. With the rise of collective bargaining and the labor movement, many of these people could make a decent living.
As time has gone on though, more of these low skilled but decent paying positions have either been moved to where the pay is low or automated out of existence. While a high school diploma obtained from a free education was enough to get a decent job in decades past, that is less and less the case.
The knowledge revolution creates jobs too, but jobs that require special skills. These skills require a post high school education that you pay for yourself. An average college student graduates with 30,000 worth of debt. Once they start working, they need to start saving for retirement almost immediately.
As computers and machinery are able to do more and more, people are needed less and less. Fewer people will have the means or aptitude to obtain the skills that are beyond what machines can do. Those that can will do well but they will live a much less stable society unless there are tremendous changes to our economic systems.
If you're happy driving a bus that's great. There's something to be said for having a job that you can leave at work.
Like you I had a job where I worked ridiculous hours for a salary that seemed good until you calculated what I was making per hour. What I figured out though is that certain skills are in demand and that I could afford to be particular. There are places, even in the tech world, where going home at a reasonable hour is the norm. Initially I took a small salary hit but over time that's ticked back up.
If I had stayed at that other company I'd probably be making more but I'd also probably be divorced and dealing with all the extra expenses and emotional drama of dealing with that.
Note: In my post above, it is possible that the 1 out of the hundred doctors who disagreed with the diagnosis is correct. However, I feel you should make decisions on the best information you have available, not whether or not you want to believe it.
I'll go out on limb and say that virtually no one posting here is qualified on their own to come to any conclusions about whether the earth is warming or not. That's not to say they aren't smart people, just that researching long term climate patterns and their causes is not their vocation and not something they're trained for. Lots of people can regurgitate information they found somewhere else. They can also do some analysis on some subset of data and come to some conclusions which may or may not be correct.
Climate modeling is complex and at some point you have to rely on the experts. For example, let say you're not feeling well and haven't been for months. In fact, it's getting worse. You try to diagnose and treat it yourself but it's not working so you go to the doctor who sends you to a specialist. The specialist says you've got some terminal illness. There is a treatment but it's not guaranteed to work and the treatment itself is going to make you feel worse for awhile. That sucks, but doctors make mistakes right? So you get a second opinion. That doctor agrees with the first. In fact you end up seeing 100 of them and all but one agree with the diagnosis and the treatment. Which one are you going to believe?
When it comes to climate science, maybe 90 some percent of scientists world wide are on the take and just perpetuating the climate change myth in order to keep their funding sources in tact. Or just maybe, actually trying to lower CO2 emissions world wide is not trivial and there's a number of influential people who stand to lose big if we do it. It means some lucrative industries (fossil fuel production) would have to be dramatically scaled back. It might even mean lifestyle changes which are never easy and are a tough sell. There are a whole lot of built in reasons for people not wanting to believe it.
" In 1960, in a poll organised by the American Cancer Society, only a third of all US doctors agreed that cigarette smoking should be considered ‘a major cause of lung cancer’. This same poll revealed that 43% of all American doctors were still smoking cigarettes on a regular basis, with occasional users accounting for another 5%. With half of all doctors smoking, it should come as no surprise that most Americans remained unconvinced of life-threatening harms from the habit." - http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/...
So even doctors are fallible and inclined not to believe things that would suggest they need to change. Yes, the climate scientists could be just parroting each other, participating in group think, and trying to keep their funding alive. I don't believe that is what's really going on.
In my experience it's usually the IT people that have religious fights over Linux vs Windows.
Management wants stuff that works and costs to be low. They may want a Windows box or Mac on their desk, but they don't care what's running on the servers in the rack.
The idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were responsible for the housing bubble and subsequent crash has been pretty well debunked: http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
I run a small IT department. We will continue to keep some services in house but frankly the same sort of incident you refer to is the kind of thing that being able to turn up services in the cloud can help deal with.
Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (Saas) each comes with their own set of risks and rewards, but so does managing all that internally. You need to have your eyes wide open. If a company can save a significant amount of time and money all while improving availability by moving something to the cloud, eventually they probably will. It would be stupid of them not to.
If you work in the IT field you need to understand that your most important skill is being able to adapt to a constantly changing technology landscape. There are folks who can make a living taking care of legacy stuff but personally that's not a position I'd like myself or anyone on my staff to be in.
A shorter answer is that if you really want to see scientific studies and economic evaluations they are out there. I would imagine life expectancies improve with fewer emissions. As far as the shrinking middle class goes, that probably has little to do with the cost of electricity since for most people the electric bill is a small portion of their total household costs. If that weren't the case, people would be much more concerned about saving electricity than they tend to be.
What I'm saying is that implementing energy efficiency measures plus replacing coal with wind and gas turbines hasn't negatively impacted how Minnesota ranks nationally in terms of what it pays for electricity. In 1999, Minnesota paid more for it's electricity than did other states (on average). Now it pays less in spite of being a leader in cutting emissions from electricity generation. I suppose it could be paying 5 c/kWh if Minneapolis didn't mind looking like Shanghai, but that would have required removing controls that were already in place and replacing nuclear plants with coal plants.
Forget CO2 for a minute and just look up the term "externalities". There are lots of studies on the costs to society of generating electricity by various means. If you want one in particular, here's one from Harvard that says that the true cost of electricity generation from coal is 500 Billion annually. http://cleantechnica.com/2011/...
Other potential solutions haven't seen serious consideration and funding because so far there's not enough evidence that they are more practical than the approaches already being pursued. Perhaps if the Koch brothers quit funding campaigns to discredit climate scientists and instead poured money into geoengineering research, it would be farther along.
Look up "Geoengineering" to see a few examples of other research that's going on.
The fear mongering that's gone on related to dealing with climate change is that fixing things will be too expensive and will drive energy prices sky high. Minnesota is well on its ways to meeting its emissions goals for electrical power generation yet electricity costs in Minnesota are relatively low. The national average is 10.45 cents per kWh. The cost in Minnesota is 9.63 cents. So no, the emissions goals are not holding back the economy.
You also have to realize that there are economic consequences for allowing to climate change to continue unabated.
It is rather surprising to me that there is so much angst over whether or not this problem really exists and whether or not it should be tackled. We have a pretty recent example of a potential global crisis that was averted. A ton of money was spent doing so and yet the world economy boomed. I'm talking about Y2K. Companies spent a fortune updating their hardware and software to avoid the problem. It worked. And the economy didn't tank. In fact, just the opposite. The difference then was that it was the companies themselves that would suffer the consequences for not addressing the problem rather than some poor folks living in coastal areas. That's why they just sucked it up and did what they needed to do.
As far as things being implemented on an unscientific basis, I don't think that's entirely true. Obviously however, getting 200 countries to agree to do anything is absolutely going to be a very political process and to a certain extent the science of any solution will suffer to some degree as a result. There is no way around that.
Taking a course of action doesn't mean that research can't and won't continue on other options. Pursuing the EPA's current clean power plan doesn't mean economic collapse either. Minnesota is already half way towards its 2030 emissions goal and its economy is doing quite well.
It's not just NOAA who thinks that we have a problem and it isn't something made up by the Obama administration. Climate scientists across the world have come to the same conclusion.
Besides, look who is behind the funding of judicialwatch.org and I think you'll know how seriously to take their accusations.
The worker enters the agreement because they need to get paid. The company only needs so many workers so there is almost always more potential workers than jobs. There are 7 billion people in the world after all.
It's a level playing field for only a relatively few specialized occupations and those who are in industries where the workers have organized. Unions are in decline in this country and not so coincidentally so is the middle class.
Demand peak doesn't start at sunset. It starts in the heat of the afternoon while businesses are still operating and A/C loads are the highest. The "Duck" problem is real but often exaggerated and solvable. Excess production can be exported and relatively clean solutions like storage or Natural Gas turbines can be used to cover when solar production is low.
The percent of electricity in the US generated from coal has dropped from 50% to 39% in about a decade. Almost 3/4 of the coal plants in the US are 30 years old or more. 40 years is the average life span. A lot of coal plants are going to be replaced in the next 10 to 15 years, - most likely with something other than new coal plants. Especially when you take the EPA's clean power plan into consideration.
I imagine cars would be charged mostly over night where there is low demand anyway (non peak). Heavy electrical users are often give price breaks on electricity use during non-peak hours, - sometimes residential users can get those discounts too.
Utilities are all about reducing demand use so they don't have to build and operate as many power plants. We get a break on our summer electric bill because we allow the local utility to cycle our A/C compressor on and off during peak load times. In the 10 years or so since we did that, we've never noticed a difference. So if car charges were a real problem, utilities could offer the same price break and just cycle the chargers on and off.
X11 is native on OS X via the open source and Apple supported XQuartz product. Halfdan the black's complaint was that he thought the only way to run wine on OS X was via X11 rather than OS X's own window server.
Software development is a pretty good field to be in right now. That doesn't mean that things are rosy for everyone and few professions are layoff proof. I certainly understand IT people being upset if they are being replaced by cheaper workers from abroad but at the same time I find it a little hypocritical that they expect the government to protect them.
Where was your shirt made, or even your computer? Isn't IT and technology in general responsible for the elimination of many many jobs in the last few decades? But many of us seem to only care when it's our jobs that are at risk.
Kids should learn to code because so much of our daily lives and our jobs is impacted by software. Maybe it turns into a career for them or may not. Maybe it's a skill than can use even if it's not their main job. Current issues with H1-Bs shouldn't be a reason not to teach US kids a valuable skill.
Kids should absolutely get some exposure to coding in school. Just like they should be taught music, math, reading, and history/social studies. I really don't understand the opposition to it. Most kids that are taught geometry really never get any use out of it in their professions, - should we just stop teaching it? So much of our world runs on software that kids should have some basic understanding of how it's created and what it does even if coding never turns into a career for them.
Further, we aren't really so special (by we I mean programmers). Just like anything else, some kids who are taught to code will get it right away, others will take longer, and some may never get it all.
In every profession there are people who excel, others that have some talent, and those that should be doing something else. That is OK. Knowing how to code gives you a leg up in lots of professions even if you're not a programmer.
Why use a relational database like postgres when you have no intention of using its relational features just because it can also store JSON data?
I'm a huge fan of postgres. I introduced it to the organization I work in probably 15 years ago and we continue to use it today. But there are some things it just doesn't do as well, - like scale, at least not as easily as a database like Cassandra can. Don't get me wrong, you give up a lot in many cases by not choosing an SQL database and it's not always the right choice. However, lack of critical thinking isn't inherent in using a NoSQL database. Lack of critical thinking is assuming a certain type of database is always the right choice for any future project, just because it's worked well in previous projects.
The idea of banning all Muslims is a reaction to an irrational fear.
Trump did not suggest banning Muslims from entering the country.
He most certainly did. This was what he said at a rally in North Carolina referring to a statement his campaign released: “Should I read you the statement?” he asked. The crowd enthusiastically agreed that he should. "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said, adding the word “hell" for emphasis this time.
No, he wasn't suggesting banning them forever but he also wasn't clear on what it would take to get such a ban lifted. If he were to suggest that we stop ALL immigration for 60 days so we can review our process for vetting, then I wouldn't have such an issue with it. But to stop it indefinitely? How long has it been since congress has been able to pass any significant immigration reform package?
There are definite winners and losers when it comes to the effects of immigration in this country but if you take an honest look at just illegal immigration alone, there is a small net benefit to the average American's wealth. How? Put simply, they buy stuff. I'm not suggesting there aren't abuses and that there shouldn't be reform but immigration actually generates wealth.
Why not temporarily ban white loners in their 20's from owning guns because most of the time it's one of them that are shooting up churches, schools, and theaters?
Banning all Muslims is not a common sense solution because your chances of getting killed by a Muslim in the US is virtually nil. It's not like people aren't getting killed on a daily basis, but the causes are much more mundane than terrorism.
The idea of banning all Muslims is a reaction to an irrational fear.
People on the left want to spend tax money on other stuff. People on the right don't trust the government with anything costing that much money except the military (which is sort of ironic).
Getting Apollo funded was not a slam dunk and it was a unique period in American history that may never be repeated. Explorers of the past were sometimes funded by governments but often had to get money from private sources. Either way many times it was in exchange for the promise of territory or riches. Further, none of these ventures compared to the scale of the space program.
I really don't think it's fear over the loss of life so much that holds manned space flight back. It's the fear of spending an enormous amount of money on something with shaky support and failing.