Two things, compared to the cost of a DUI, a cab fare is a total bargain.
Secondly, if cabs are generally perceived as too expensive, then there is a market for some kind of private van service that makes runs from the area with the bars. Load 10 drunks into a passenger van, get their addresses, let a computer pick the most efficient route, and charge each of them half the cab fare. If the usual cab fare was $30, that would be $150 and if you can make the round trip in an hour, and do a couple trips per Fri/Sat. night, it could be a decent sort of mid-low-income job. Better than McDs at least. There are plenty of people for whom $6-800/wk would be a good income.
Anyway, part of the problem with DUI in America, is that (aside from some very few exceptions) there is no other way to get home except by private vehicle. Even towns with busses usually shut those down before the bars let out.
The video isn't shocking, but what is shocking, is how blatant those immigration attorneys are about gaming the system to exclude qualified Americans in favor of H1Bs. Someone should air that on national tv or to congress.
Anyone who don't write publikation ready matarial for slashdot, holly devoid of errers or types, are obvioulsy a rediculous jock who shuld have his iPhone (feckin' fanboi) sumarily shoot with a HERF gun.
Yeah, but in the past those lawsuits cast the Feds as the bad guys (which they are of course) but in this lawsuit, the Feds are the putative good guys (LOL). Considering how rotten and corrupt the system is, top to bottom, I would be surprised if they dismissed this case on standing grounds. They'll wiggle around that in some way because in the American court system of today, getting to a specific predetermined result by any twisted means is what counts.
For example, when justice Roberts commented on the recent case in which it was determined that ignorance of the law is no excuse, unless you are a cop, he supported that opinion with this:
Chief Justice Roberts conceded that the court's decision at first blush ran afoul of the maxim that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."
On reflection, he said, the maxim holds the government and its citizens to the same standard where it counts.
"Just as an individual generally cannot escape criminal liability based on a mistaken understanding of the law," Chief Justice Roberts wrote, "so too the government cannot impose criminal liability based on a mistaken understanding of the law."
I won't vote for either the GOP or DNC as a protest vote. I get that it is a protest vote and my candidates (I'd vote for Satan if he ran as a third party candidate, barring any 3d party candidates, I vote for my cat) and that my candidate won't win. The best hope I have is to be perceived as a spoiler which _might_ shift a party my direction.
The simple fact is, the GOP and DNC totally agree on all of those issues. We basically have two Republican parties: the one in favor of gay marriage and abortion, and the one against. But if I expect that voting for GOP or DNC candidates will change anything I mentioned above, I would be deluded.
So in fact, we do have people to blame other than ourselves. We can blame the people that own the parties and we can blame the parties for a lack of actual choice. And I suppose we can blame "ourselves" -- or at least those who affiliate with either party -- for thinking there is one ioata of difference between the parties.
There's some scary Supreme Court precedent just handed down. The cop can be ignorant of the law, i.e., think you broke a law when you didn't, and then conduct a search, and that search is now legal thanks to a brand new Supreme Court decision. That's right, ignorance of the law is no excuse, except for cops.
Of course this is supposed to be limited to "reasonable" ignorance, but look at Smith v. Maryland. A one time, short term, metadata collection on a specific individual where there was certainly probable cause for a warrant if the cops had not been lazy, is today interpreted to mean that all metadata can be collected for every person, for all time, in the absence of probable cause. Or how the Executive branch interprets "imminent" to include "maybe possibly at some point of time in not so near future." This ruling is a free pass for the cops to do whatever the hell they want and claim ignorance of the law. Just give it 30 years.
Paying off Wallstreet and banksters to trash the economy
Massive universal surveillance
Importing cheap labor and exporting jobs
The most awesome largest prison industry on the planet
Mine resistant vehicles for rural sheriff's departments
Forced subsidization of the for-profit health insurance industry
Monopolies for Comcast (and its ilk)
And oh yeah, maybe, if there is anything left over, and after they fall into rivers, bridge repairs
The fact that a small percentage of the tax dollars go to something useful, is like saying that Jeffry Dahmer was nice to puppies so we should forget everything else about him.
I did the same thing. I had been waiting for my 80gb model to die before getting the 160gb model, but the news made me go out pick up one of the last boxed iPods in my area at the normal price.
What I particularly like about the classic is that it has physical buttons. That means I can change things while driving without averting my eyes. People don't think about the danger of driving, but when you aren't looking at the road, the chance of being in or causing some life changingly horrendous accident is so much greater.
Secondly, the arrangement of the physical buttons is important. I once had a Creative Labs ____ MG -- can't quite recall the name, circa 2000 or 2001. The button arrangement was horrid -- I had to squint and stare at the tiny buttons on the side every time to not accidentally delete while meaning to skip ahead. With the classic, I can skip and pause by feel alone. I'm sure there are other players I could learn this too, just saying the interface with the Classic is satisfactory for driving.
I don't personally know the answer to this, but I was interested too. There is a video on one of the articles linked in the the summary showing it doing various things, including video, and based on that, it looks promising. I can say that I've wasted far more than $35 on finding out a thing is crap, so this seems a pretty low risk proposition to try this thing out.
I probably wouldn't do the video thing, but if there was a way to make to the arduino libraries that come with Sparkfun or Adafruit gadgetry, this thing has the power to do some pretty interesting stuff, and a lot of it all at once.
Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi
on
Overly Familiar Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Ian M. Banks' culture series doesn't include the specific items you mention, but he certainly does deal with the cultural as well technical differences of a far future. The Player of Games would be a good start:
Elements include being able to change one's sex, glands to produce any number biologically useful/pleasurable substances at will, what do people do when they live in the embrace of a (mostly) benevolent AI that doesn't need them. And then there's a good story interwoven with it all.
The police seem very reluctant to prosecute women, and men are reluctant to apear weak.
I can speak to the second part. I've been punched in the face exactly one time in my life -- saw stars even -- by my then girlfriend. At a different point in our relationship, she choked me and by the time I realized she was serious, I was getting dizzy and my ability to stop it was compromised. Lucky for me she quit on her own. That was well over 20 years ago -- back then I said nothing. Even today, despite the passage of time and the consequent ability to chalk up my reticence about the incident to the ignorance of youth, I feel embarrassed by it -- so much so that it is a struggle to not post this as AC.
Hydropower. Lots of it. The same reason Alcoa has aluminum plants in WA. Electricity is cheap here, cheapest in the nation apparently: http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=...
I agree with you more than I disagree and in a society with a rehabilitative rather than retributive prison system, I would definitely agree. As things are now however, serving time does not demonstrate that a person is safe to society. I do understand your point about a permanent disadvantaged underclass, it's just that we need a prison system that will help reform people rather make them hardened, and to get there, we have to make prison far less about vengeance than it currently is.
Summer of 1994 (I can remember because it was just before I started grad school), I used Mavis Beacon to learn to touch type. I'd been using computers since I was 12 but just did the hunt and peck -- I think it took a couple weeks to become reasonably proficient, might even have been less. The thing is, once you learn to touch type, you only get better and better as time goes on. It was probably one of the best and most useful things I ever learned.
As for my cursive penmanship, that has always been beyond bad. And painful -- hand cramps and all that. I can print sort of legibly but hand writing belongs to the past for daily use. Quick notes of six or seven words, artistic calligraphy, scrawling something in the dirt on the back window of a car -- it's those sorts of occasional use cases for which writing by hand is reasonable.
Maybe a criminal background check too. Kidnappers should probably not be taxi drivers. But your point is right on -- as long as a person can demonstrate that he or she is not a threat to the public (bad driver, violent criminal, dangerous car), there is absolutely no reason to deny a license to be a taxi driver.
That's basically the current rule and it isn't working as intended because employers game the system. That's why it must be lopsided -- employers have no sense of fairness and after they get done gaming a lopsided system, it might settle at a fair level.
Workers bear the burden of H1B -- both the immigrants and the locals. That burden could be shifted by changing the rules. For example, make the visa last three years, non-renewable, cost $25,000 per visa paid for by the employer, and once the worker has been employed for two weeks, he/she will have the legal right to quit working for employer, even if that means sitting at home playing video games and doing no work at all, and make all employment contracts that contain some kind of damages provision if the worker quits or is fired, not just void, but result in a $25,000 fine, or twice the damages provision in the contract, whichever is greater, to be imposed on the employer.
This way, if a company really wants that genius they just gotta have, they can get that person no problem. They just better treat him/her right or risk losing a substantial investment. As for getting slave labor, it would make that completely unfeasible from a financial perspective.
Much of this change with the police occurred in the last 20 years with the militarization skyrocketing after 9/11. I don't know whether to call that rapid change or not -- it seems pretty rapid to me having occurred from my 20s to my 40s. Here in my smallish town of 80k, with many miles of fields and forests between it the next town of any consequence, the police have at least a two military vehicles. What is that for if not for practice and training as Police State Enforcers? If they aren't ready to take on that role now, how long would it take to train them as a paramilitary police force? Probably just a few years to hire up some of those desperate for a decent job and let them practice on the equipment they already have.
I had parents, I'm white, have a graduate degree, make six figures. I think of the police as mother-fucking-pigs because they are they enforcement side of the Constitution destroying political regime we have. While I realize that I'm not their prime target -- at this point in time -- that doesn't make the police nice or moral people. I see the racial bias stuff as nothing more than the pigs practicing for full on police state, at which point everyone will be a target.
What will cause attitudes toward these assholes to change is when the police stop using SWAT to bust up home poker games, give up the military equipment, and start trying to _serve_ their community rather looking at us like enemies. The problem starts with the cops and the changes have to start in the pig stye.
I wonder if the recent push open up immigration on all fronts, has something to do with the bank bailouts caused by the housing market crash. Basically, the banks now own a lot of useless foreclosed real estate and injection millions of people into the market, some percentage of which will do well enough to buy a house, may be seen as a good thing (by banks and elites).
Of course, it increases wage competition making it harder for working people to get ahead and is thus seen as a bad thing by such people.
I have no evidence, I'm not saying it is true, just mentioning it is some sort of possibility to explain why Democrats are so hell bent on opening the borders recently (aside from the obvious pandering to certain voting segments).
Far down on anyone's radar are environmental effects. There are enough people here already and the more we add, the more polluted and nasty our world gets.
Exactly and that's the point. If a flight of customers is going to make a business go under, that business is going to bitch to reps/senators and then something will happen.
To get there though, users must engage in flight to alternatives in a recognizable pattern. You think Google would totally not care if there was a demonstration day, where say google's usage rate dropped by a third and DuckDuckGo's septupled or whatever? Google would totally notice. So would DDG for that matter. Competition can also lead to better options.
Slashdot Mirror
Lame self-reply, but here's an example of a company in San Diego doing a similar thing:
http://thedrunkdriver.com/
Great name, and the rates look fine. Again, way cheaper than a DUI.
Two things, compared to the cost of a DUI, a cab fare is a total bargain.
Secondly, if cabs are generally perceived as too expensive, then there is a market for some kind of private van service that makes runs from the area with the bars. Load 10 drunks into a passenger van, get their addresses, let a computer pick the most efficient route, and charge each of them half the cab fare. If the usual cab fare was $30, that would be $150 and if you can make the round trip in an hour, and do a couple trips per Fri/Sat. night, it could be a decent sort of mid-low-income job. Better than McDs at least. There are plenty of people for whom $6-800/wk would be a good income.
Anyway, part of the problem with DUI in America, is that (aside from some very few exceptions) there is no other way to get home except by private vehicle. Even towns with busses usually shut those down before the bars let out.
The video isn't shocking, but what is shocking, is how blatant those immigration attorneys are about gaming the system to exclude qualified Americans in favor of H1Bs. Someone should air that on national tv or to congress.
Anyone who don't write publikation ready matarial for slashdot, holly devoid of errers or types, are obvioulsy a rediculous jock who shuld have his iPhone (feckin' fanboi) sumarily shoot with a HERF gun.
Yeah, but in the past those lawsuits cast the Feds as the bad guys (which they are of course) but in this lawsuit, the Feds are the putative good guys (LOL). Considering how rotten and corrupt the system is, top to bottom, I would be surprised if they dismissed this case on standing grounds. They'll wiggle around that in some way because in the American court system of today, getting to a specific predetermined result by any twisted means is what counts.
For example, when justice Roberts commented on the recent case in which it was determined that ignorance of the law is no excuse, unless you are a cop, he supported that opinion with this:
They aren't even trying to pretend they are making sense any longer. They just talk horseshit and expect us to eat it.
I won't vote for either the GOP or DNC as a protest vote. I get that it is a protest vote and my candidates (I'd vote for Satan if he ran as a third party candidate, barring any 3d party candidates, I vote for my cat) and that my candidate won't win. The best hope I have is to be perceived as a spoiler which _might_ shift a party my direction.
The simple fact is, the GOP and DNC totally agree on all of those issues. We basically have two Republican parties: the one in favor of gay marriage and abortion, and the one against. But if I expect that voting for GOP or DNC candidates will change anything I mentioned above, I would be deluded.
So in fact, we do have people to blame other than ourselves. We can blame the people that own the parties and we can blame the parties for a lack of actual choice. And I suppose we can blame "ourselves" -- or at least those who affiliate with either party -- for thinking there is one ioata of difference between the parties.
There's some scary Supreme Court precedent just handed down. The cop can be ignorant of the law, i.e., think you broke a law when you didn't, and then conduct a search, and that search is now legal thanks to a brand new Supreme Court decision. That's right, ignorance of the law is no excuse, except for cops.
Pick your poison:
http://thinkprogress.org/justi...
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
Of course this is supposed to be limited to "reasonable" ignorance, but look at Smith v. Maryland. A one time, short term, metadata collection on a specific individual where there was certainly probable cause for a warrant if the cops had not been lazy, is today interpreted to mean that all metadata can be collected for every person, for all time, in the absence of probable cause. Or how the Executive branch interprets "imminent" to include "maybe possibly at some point of time in not so near future." This ruling is a free pass for the cops to do whatever the hell they want and claim ignorance of the law. Just give it 30 years.
Your tax dollars at work:
The fact that a small percentage of the tax dollars go to something useful, is like saying that Jeffry Dahmer was nice to puppies so we should forget everything else about him.
I did the same thing. I had been waiting for my 80gb model to die before getting the 160gb model, but the news made me go out pick up one of the last boxed iPods in my area at the normal price.
What I particularly like about the classic is that it has physical buttons. That means I can change things while driving without averting my eyes. People don't think about the danger of driving, but when you aren't looking at the road, the chance of being in or causing some life changingly horrendous accident is so much greater.
Secondly, the arrangement of the physical buttons is important. I once had a Creative Labs ____ MG -- can't quite recall the name, circa 2000 or 2001. The button arrangement was horrid -- I had to squint and stare at the tiny buttons on the side every time to not accidentally delete while meaning to skip ahead. With the classic, I can skip and pause by feel alone. I'm sure there are other players I could learn this too, just saying the interface with the Classic is satisfactory for driving.
I don't personally know the answer to this, but I was interested too. There is a video on one of the articles linked in the the summary showing it doing various things, including video, and based on that, it looks promising. I can say that I've wasted far more than $35 on finding out a thing is crap, so this seems a pretty low risk proposition to try this thing out.
Anyway, here's the video link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I probably wouldn't do the video thing, but if there was a way to make to the arduino libraries that come with Sparkfun or Adafruit gadgetry, this thing has the power to do some pretty interesting stuff, and a lot of it all at once.
Ian M. Banks' culture series doesn't include the specific items you mention, but he certainly does deal with the cultural as well technical differences of a far future. The Player of Games would be a good start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Elements include being able to change one's sex, glands to produce any number biologically useful/pleasurable substances at will, what do people do when they live in the embrace of a (mostly) benevolent AI that doesn't need them. And then there's a good story interwoven with it all.
I can speak to the second part. I've been punched in the face exactly one time in my life -- saw stars even -- by my then girlfriend. At a different point in our relationship, she choked me and by the time I realized she was serious, I was getting dizzy and my ability to stop it was compromised. Lucky for me she quit on her own. That was well over 20 years ago -- back then I said nothing. Even today, despite the passage of time and the consequent ability to chalk up my reticence about the incident to the ignorance of youth, I feel embarrassed by it -- so much so that it is a struggle to not post this as AC.
Hydropower. Lots of it. The same reason Alcoa has aluminum plants in WA. Electricity is cheap here, cheapest in the nation apparently: http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=...
I agree with you more than I disagree and in a society with a rehabilitative rather than retributive prison system, I would definitely agree. As things are now however, serving time does not demonstrate that a person is safe to society. I do understand your point about a permanent disadvantaged underclass, it's just that we need a prison system that will help reform people rather make them hardened, and to get there, we have to make prison far less about vengeance than it currently is.
Summer of 1994 (I can remember because it was just before I started grad school), I used Mavis Beacon to learn to touch type. I'd been using computers since I was 12 but just did the hunt and peck -- I think it took a couple weeks to become reasonably proficient, might even have been less. The thing is, once you learn to touch type, you only get better and better as time goes on. It was probably one of the best and most useful things I ever learned.
As for my cursive penmanship, that has always been beyond bad. And painful -- hand cramps and all that. I can print sort of legibly but hand writing belongs to the past for daily use. Quick notes of six or seven words, artistic calligraphy, scrawling something in the dirt on the back window of a car -- it's those sorts of occasional use cases for which writing by hand is reasonable.
Maybe a criminal background check too. Kidnappers should probably not be taxi drivers. But your point is right on -- as long as a person can demonstrate that he or she is not a threat to the public (bad driver, violent criminal, dangerous car), there is absolutely no reason to deny a license to be a taxi driver.
That's basically the current rule and it isn't working as intended because employers game the system. That's why it must be lopsided -- employers have no sense of fairness and after they get done gaming a lopsided system, it might settle at a fair level.
Workers bear the burden of H1B -- both the immigrants and the locals. That burden could be shifted by changing the rules. For example, make the visa last three years, non-renewable, cost $25,000 per visa paid for by the employer, and once the worker has been employed for two weeks, he/she will have the legal right to quit working for employer, even if that means sitting at home playing video games and doing no work at all, and make all employment contracts that contain some kind of damages provision if the worker quits or is fired, not just void, but result in a $25,000 fine, or twice the damages provision in the contract, whichever is greater, to be imposed on the employer.
This way, if a company really wants that genius they just gotta have, they can get that person no problem. They just better treat him/her right or risk losing a substantial investment. As for getting slave labor, it would make that completely unfeasible from a financial perspective.
Much of this change with the police occurred in the last 20 years with the militarization skyrocketing after 9/11. I don't know whether to call that rapid change or not -- it seems pretty rapid to me having occurred from my 20s to my 40s. Here in my smallish town of 80k, with many miles of fields and forests between it the next town of any consequence, the police have at least a two military vehicles. What is that for if not for practice and training as Police State Enforcers? If they aren't ready to take on that role now, how long would it take to train them as a paramilitary police force? Probably just a few years to hire up some of those desperate for a decent job and let them practice on the equipment they already have.
Mal. Bad. In the Latin.
I had parents, I'm white, have a graduate degree, make six figures. I think of the police as mother-fucking-pigs because they are they enforcement side of the Constitution destroying political regime we have. While I realize that I'm not their prime target -- at this point in time -- that doesn't make the police nice or moral people. I see the racial bias stuff as nothing more than the pigs practicing for full on police state, at which point everyone will be a target.
What will cause attitudes toward these assholes to change is when the police stop using SWAT to bust up home poker games, give up the military equipment, and start trying to _serve_ their community rather looking at us like enemies. The problem starts with the cops and the changes have to start in the pig stye.
Yeah ... banksters explain some part (certainly not all, but some for certain) of the immigration reform push:
Head of banking group pushes Republicans to back immigration reform
Wells Fargo Official Links Lending to Immigration Reform
Silicon Valley Bank: In Support of Immigration Reform
How Immigration Reform Will Help Fix The Housing Recovery
I wonder if the recent push open up immigration on all fronts, has something to do with the bank bailouts caused by the housing market crash. Basically, the banks now own a lot of useless foreclosed real estate and injection millions of people into the market, some percentage of which will do well enough to buy a house, may be seen as a good thing (by banks and elites).
Of course, it increases wage competition making it harder for working people to get ahead and is thus seen as a bad thing by such people.
I have no evidence, I'm not saying it is true, just mentioning it is some sort of possibility to explain why Democrats are so hell bent on opening the borders recently (aside from the obvious pandering to certain voting segments).
Far down on anyone's radar are environmental effects. There are enough people here already and the more we add, the more polluted and nasty our world gets.
Exactly and that's the point. If a flight of customers is going to make a business go under, that business is going to bitch to reps/senators and then something will happen.
To get there though, users must engage in flight to alternatives in a recognizable pattern. You think Google would totally not care if there was a demonstration day, where say google's usage rate dropped by a third and DuckDuckGo's septupled or whatever? Google would totally notice. So would DDG for that matter. Competition can also lead to better options.
krokodil more likely.