Actually my (and most other Americans) disposable income has been flat and is not changing much. (We just looked at our first post-taxcut paycheck.)
See! I can do anecdotes too!
From the Tax Policy Center: The cut is estimated to be $930 this year for the middle one-fifth of taxpayers, which is about $35 a paycheck if you get paid every two weeks.
I don't know how much you get paid, but I'm not going to call an extra $30 in my paycheck a big jump in disposable income.
And I'm not going to celebrate it in any case, because come tax time, I'll likely owe way more than I ended up getting back in my paycheck anyway. Some of the other tax changes aren't going to be apparent until we get to filing next year, and it looks like some of them are going to hurt a lot of people. I really don't know what the SALT and standard deduction changes are going to mean for me personally, but initial indications are that I'm going to owe more come tax time. To the point that it might be worth upping my witholdings, and thus reducing my paycheck.
I was going to argue against this, but as I think about it, I think you're right about having to fear it. I don't think that there will be rational acceptance of it. And I think there will be lots of problems.
90% of the natives of the Americas died of disease in the century after first contact with Europeans. And while Europeans got syphilis in return, that pales in comparison to all of the plagues and poxes they brought to the continent.
When Darwin sailed around the world and cataloged all the species, he ate all of them as well.
When colonists show up anywhere, they bring their favorite native flora and fauna with them, even if its microbial. This almost always radically disrupts the ecosystem that is in place.
Imagine if alien life turns out to aggressively feed on plastic? Imagine if we bring fungus to a cellulose based alien world?
If alien life comes to us, we have all of that to fear. And if we come to them, likewise. And if they are advanced, they may want to make earth life harmless to them. And who can guess what that would mean?
But regardless of this, the major religions of the world will need to be updated based on the new knowledge, or they will need to fight tooth and nail to deny and discredit it. And I wouldn't be surprised if some new ones or splinters of old ones suddenly spring into being as people try to make sense of this new view of the universe.
That will cause a lot of social friction, and may well be bloody in parts of the world.
One of the most successful online communities I was ever part of had one single code of conduct: Don't be a dick.
The community enforced that. And if there wasn't consensus, the founder decided.
It wasn't perfect, but what it did was drive discussion on whether conduct someone was engaging in was dickish, or if the complainer was being a whiny dick. It forced discussion on where people's boundaries on "being a dick" were, and it helped people identify when their boundaries were way out of the norm compared to the rest of the community.
In this it was a brilliantly simple code of conduct. Instead of rules-lawyering a laundry list of dos and don'ts, the discussion centered solely on the conduct of an individual and the interpretation of that conduct by those complaining about it. I find it far superior to these expansive codes of conduct, because these are essentially checklists of ways to harass someone you don't like, even if the context of their conversation with others was pleasant for all involved. If you're forced to consider every statement for intent, and determine if it rises to the level of a community defined understanding of "being a dick", it significantly limits the ability to complain about all but the most egregious conduct.
Is the submitter 6? We know that's about how old the editors are, given their ability to edit. So I guess it stands to reason that a ridiculous question written by an ignorant child would make it onto the front page.
It should not be something that could metaphorically be bought in the store at the corner of your street (I'm over exagerating, but that's how you USAmerican seem to us).
No, you're not.
The town I grew up in was about 5,000 people, and we had a gun store on main street. It wasn't on the corner, however. It was mid-block. Between the hardware store and the post office. Sold hunting and fishing equipment and licences to hunt and fish too. But not gun licenses, because while you need a license to hunt, fish, drive a car, and for your dog, you don't need one to own a gun.
So no, not an exaggeration at all.
I grew up around guns, target shooting and hunting. Dad still has his small collection in the house, and still goes hunting. I've grown away from that, and it doesn't really interest me anymore.
Despite that background, I'm firmly in the camp of serious gun control. The current situation is unsustainable, and has been for some time. It's so beyond what should be happening in a civilized country that it's frankly insane.
If you want to lay blame for America's excessive guns, you can point your finger at King George. If he hadn't tried to disarm us, we wouldn't have written the right to bear arms into our bill of rights. That presents a major hurdle in regulating arms in the US, as it's a foundational right built into our country from the start. It's not an insurmountable barrier, but until more than half of the public is willing to make it a voting issue over the course of several years, it's not going to get dealt with.
Then, when they are done shrieking, they go back to handing out 'thoughts and prayers' which in their mind is the only real fix for the problem of mass shootings.
What's wrong with that? It's worked so well in the past! Think of all the shootings that didn't happen because of their thoughts and prayers. And here you are, blaming them when they miss one.
Google has long been under fire from photographers and publishers who felt that image search allowed people to steal their pictures...
Photographers and publishers want google to send your computer images, that you can't save.
It's DRM all over. "I want to send you something over the internet that you can see/hear, but that can't get saved on your computer."
Sure, you could restore this with a plugin, but it barely requires that. If it's on your screen, you can save it. FFS, it's already on your hard drive somewhere. I don't know of too many browsers that just store images in ram. Or is that why Chrome is such a damn memory hog....
You just made me double-check what we're paying and what we're getting. Already planning a saturday outing to the local cable branch to talk to them about WTF, how the hell did that creep up so high?
The good news is that every couple of years when we do that, and bring the old hardware with us, they somehow manage to hack down the price, hook us up with the better hardware, and add new services. Corporate helldesk line? Fucking abysmal. Local folks? Cheerful helpful, and generally awesome.
Two things I can think of: One, logistics of running a prize thing like that would be somewhat hard. Often for super rare chances (we'll give you 10% off for every inch of snow that falls on New Year's day) the sponsor will take out prize insurance, to mitigate having to pay out a pile of cash. Still, making sure that you have the longevity in the contest can be hard, especially given the boom and bust of so many companies on the cutting edge these days. Two, I bet if you did it anyway and brought it back to earth, Elon would buy it back from you. Seems well within his character to do that.
While the internet is a wonderful place where you can share your thoughts, when they are stupid, people will know you are stupid. It's a double-edged sword.
The FCC requirement for public access channels only apples to cable companies. It doesn't apply to satellite TV, and it doesn't apply to internet video services.
And that is what VT has done. They've required Comcast to set aside public access channels. Comcast has decided that they can continue to run 480p analog feeds, because nobody told them they couldn't. Until this recent renewal of their monopoly contract as a cable operator in VT where VT said they needed to provide digital HD public access channels.
Comcast could have just not signed that contract extension if they didn't want to do that. But no, they didn't. They signed it, and then sued. How in the world does that make any sense? That's abusive and evil, and allows them to keep their title as the biggest pieces of shit in the cable market.
Thanks for the laugh. I haven't used gentoo in years, but I might need to go back to it at some point soon. I bet compiling it is soooo much faster on modern processors. I have yet to use an OS that was snappier and more responsive than my old gentoo installs.
The 2016 model was the one which forced me to switch to a Dell Precision running Ububtu. It's got it's share of quirks, but nothing like the clusterfuck of apple's hardware and software.
A year and change in, and I'm more happy with this than I was with my old 2012 MBP. I've got the ports I need, and I can actually crack it open (once I fuck with the stupid non-standard screws) and do things. It's got an actual nVidia graphics card in it as well, not just some crappy embedded video.
And cost half the price of a similarly equipped MBP. No, not quite as snazzy, but whatever. Apple's evolution in their MBP line was opposite the direction I needed them to go, both in hardware and software. Where they were once my go-to, they definitely aren't now. While this focus on software quality is addressing one of my major complaints, there's no guarantee that it's more than lip service, and it's too little, too late for me personally anyway.
I doubt that MS will ever fix its issues either. Smartphones are the next computing evolution, and MS missed the boat hard on that one. With smarphones and game consoles being the primary devices that teens engage the world with, MS is left clinging onto businesses as their primary market. They'll be there for awhile yet, but google is really starting to put the squeeze on them. I don't see MS ever recovering to be as dominant as they used to be.
A second frustration is the viewpoint that the government can't manage anything without massive waste and corruption. I've worked with a number of very large private businesses now, and they all were shitshows on the inside. Bureaucratic mazes of self-imposed rules, employees that should have been fired years ago, silos in departments that didn't talk to each other and screwed up trivial tasks because of it, etc., etc.
These companies were no better than the state government agencies I've worked with, and in at least one case, were far worse. But not only were they incompetent, they also made a significant profit while being incompetent.
Had some of these projects been run by the government, they wouldn't have been any worse, and would likely have cost less, simply because government doesn't build in a profit margin. In areas where there are natural monopolies, it makes sense to have the government run things. It's far too easy for the private sector to milk every last dime out of an essential service if there aren't adequate avenues for competition. And whereas a private company is very resistant to do anything that doesn't improve revenue, the government can be lobbied to do such civil projects, if enough people feel it's worthwhile.
The problem is that most companies "peter principle" people into management. It's pretty much the worst way to run promotion in a business, and yet just about every business does it.
You take someone really good at the current job, and ask them to manage people who aren't as good at that job. Now you've removed one of your stars, and you're asking them to do a different job that they may or may not be good at. Knowing how to do your job well doesn't have any bearing on whether or not you're a good manager, unless your job is to be a manager. Some people are really good at managing people. Most are not.
And what percent of these people are given management and leadership training to build those capacities? Far, far too few.
That leaves us with the problem you so nicely explained. Lacking the skills to manage, it becomes an exercise in box checking, rather than actually assessing staff work and adjusting based on the results.
There's a deeper complication in that every weather forecast in the US relies upon NWS data and models. Every local one, and every commercial one. (weather.com, weatherunderground, Accuweather, etc.) In addition, the insurance industry, transportation industry, any sort of logistics branch of any company, etc. all rely on weather forecasting. Lots of commercial businesses have a weather forecaster on staff, or hire a company to provide that service. Anyone shipping perishable goods does, because knowing how long you can park a trailer in texas before you lose your shipment, or knowing to skip deliveries to Minnesota for 2 days due to a blizzard and everything freezing solid is pretty critical.
NWS does a lot of things that nobody realizes, and most of it is pretty important. For example, twice a day, every day of the year, NWS releases weather balloons from 900 locations. This is the only way to sample vertical slices of the atmosphere, and the vertical composition of the atmosphere drives a large part of our weather. Weather models continue to improve, but only because there is continual research and development on them. NWS develops the models, collects the data that gets fed into the models, runs the models, interprets the models, and releases the model data to all of the other forecasters and industries that need it.
Looking at NWS as just the guys that tell you to bring an umbrella tomorrow is really, really short-sighted. Our national weather forecasting is a core component of the economy, and if you're going to suggest cutting it, I think you need to very carefully plan that out, with a full understanding of the consequences. It's not just disaster planning and extreme weather events that could be impacted. It goes far beyond that.
Yep. That's my go-to, even with a weather/climate background. I hate the layout of their detailed forecast page, but that was fixed in a matter of an hour or so by writing my own iframe filled web page and screen scraping the important bits into logical locations. I now get the forecast, local weather loop, and "what's headed my way tomorrow" subset of the national radar loop all on one page, no scrolling required. That stays open as one of my pinned tabs.
No, it's really not easier to do all of that. Do you know what's easy? Everyone just using GMT or UT.
I look at my clock. It says 14:34. The person I want to get in touch with works between 12:00 and 19:00. Can I reach them now? Yes!
And that would work for everyone in the world. How does it currently work?
It's 2:34 and I need to get in touch with someone 1000 miles away. What are their work hours? What is their timezone offset? Did either of us adjust for DST while the other didn't? It is so mindlessly complicated that I can't figure out why anyone wants to keep this system. I know lots of people who have missed meetings because they traveled across a timezone, didn't remember to account for that, didn't update their computer clock, and were suddenly an hour off.
I really don't care if the clock says 13:00 when I get up in the morning. Those numbers don't really mean anything. I'm happy working 15:00-23:00. But across the world we want to get up at 6am and we want to have the midpoint of the day at 12:00, and so we continue to waste massive amounts of time and effort playing time detectives when we could just all agree to use the same time, and then only have to share hours of operation.
Why is Comcast the only provider being required to do this?
Because Comcast is the only provider in VT. They have a monopoly. And just signed an 11 year extension to that monopoly. They're very upset that in exchange for having complete control over the TV and Internet in VT (aside from OTA and wireless) that they are being required to provide an adequate level of service.
The requirement to have public access channels is a federal mandate. Cable companies see this as yet another cost to control, so they're still running on 1990s analog technology to produce them. They're not going to modernize and digitize the public access channels until the FCC tells them they have to. Or strips that requirement from the law, which I bet the cable companies would prefer.
VT has said, "We're giving you a monopoly, and these are the terms." Comcast doesn't like those terms, so instead of not signing that contract extension, they signed it and then sued.
So yeah, they're the same old pieces of shit they've always been.
But if you hire just by the skills and knowledge, you end up having a quite diverse cast anyway...
I'm not so sure I agree. There are a couple of problems with that, making it hard to do that effectively:
Lots of businesses start with your "do you have the right connections" method of finding employees, because when you're first starting out, you don't have an established HR or an understanding of how to find good candidates. As you grow the company, it's that more homogeneous group of people who are tasked with figuring out how to staff the growing company. Sure, they may just be hiring by skills and knowledge, but are they reaching a more diverse audience, or are they just reaching their network, as that's what they know? Do they know how to reach a diverse audience? Are they able to separate cultural differences from skills and knowledge?
Second, if you show up for an interview and everyone there doesn't look like you, do you take that job? Even if a company isn't making a diversity hire, and is honestly basing it on skills and knowledge, it can definitely look to someone coming in that they're going to be "that person", and that's not necessarily a position a lot of people want to be in.
It's a chicken and egg problem. If you start non-diverse, it can be hard and really, really disruptive to become diverse. If you start diverse, it's easy to stay that way.
So you're on the internet shitting on your co-workers, you've got a sig that's bitching about SJWs, and the only thing stopping you from letting projects at work fail is that the failure might impact you personally.
How, exactly, did you come to the conclusion that the problem is your coworkers and not your personality? Because you come across as pretty damn toxic to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually my (and most other Americans) disposable income has been flat and is not changing much. (We just looked at our first post-taxcut paycheck.)
See! I can do anecdotes too!
From the Tax Policy Center: The cut is estimated to be $930 this year for the middle one-fifth of taxpayers, which is about $35 a paycheck if you get paid every two weeks.
I don't know how much you get paid, but I'm not going to call an extra $30 in my paycheck a big jump in disposable income.
And I'm not going to celebrate it in any case, because come tax time, I'll likely owe way more than I ended up getting back in my paycheck anyway. Some of the other tax changes aren't going to be apparent until we get to filing next year, and it looks like some of them are going to hurt a lot of people. I really don't know what the SALT and standard deduction changes are going to mean for me personally, but initial indications are that I'm going to owe more come tax time. To the point that it might be worth upping my witholdings, and thus reducing my paycheck.
I was going to argue against this, but as I think about it, I think you're right about having to fear it. I don't think that there will be rational acceptance of it. And I think there will be lots of problems.
90% of the natives of the Americas died of disease in the century after first contact with Europeans. And while Europeans got syphilis in return, that pales in comparison to all of the plagues and poxes they brought to the continent.
When Darwin sailed around the world and cataloged all the species, he ate all of them as well.
When colonists show up anywhere, they bring their favorite native flora and fauna with them, even if its microbial. This almost always radically disrupts the ecosystem that is in place.
Imagine if alien life turns out to aggressively feed on plastic? Imagine if we bring fungus to a cellulose based alien world?
If alien life comes to us, we have all of that to fear. And if we come to them, likewise. And if they are advanced, they may want to make earth life harmless to them. And who can guess what that would mean?
But regardless of this, the major religions of the world will need to be updated based on the new knowledge, or they will need to fight tooth and nail to deny and discredit it. And I wouldn't be surprised if some new ones or splinters of old ones suddenly spring into being as people try to make sense of this new view of the universe.
That will cause a lot of social friction, and may well be bloody in parts of the world.
One of the most successful online communities I was ever part of had one single code of conduct: Don't be a dick.
The community enforced that. And if there wasn't consensus, the founder decided.
It wasn't perfect, but what it did was drive discussion on whether conduct someone was engaging in was dickish, or if the complainer was being a whiny dick. It forced discussion on where people's boundaries on "being a dick" were, and it helped people identify when their boundaries were way out of the norm compared to the rest of the community.
In this it was a brilliantly simple code of conduct. Instead of rules-lawyering a laundry list of dos and don'ts, the discussion centered solely on the conduct of an individual and the interpretation of that conduct by those complaining about it. I find it far superior to these expansive codes of conduct, because these are essentially checklists of ways to harass someone you don't like, even if the context of their conversation with others was pleasant for all involved. If you're forced to consider every statement for intent, and determine if it rises to the level of a community defined understanding of "being a dick", it significantly limits the ability to complain about all but the most egregious conduct.
Is the submitter 6? We know that's about how old the editors are, given their ability to edit. So I guess it stands to reason that a ridiculous question written by an ignorant child would make it onto the front page.
It was enough of an issue in Hawaii that it's now a $100 fine.
Exactly. It's why Chicago and Baltimore are so serene and peaceful.
It should not be something that could metaphorically be bought in the store at the corner of your street (I'm over exagerating, but that's how you USAmerican seem to us).
No, you're not.
The town I grew up in was about 5,000 people, and we had a gun store on main street. It wasn't on the corner, however. It was mid-block. Between the hardware store and the post office. Sold hunting and fishing equipment and licences to hunt and fish too. But not gun licenses, because while you need a license to hunt, fish, drive a car, and for your dog, you don't need one to own a gun.
So no, not an exaggeration at all.
I grew up around guns, target shooting and hunting. Dad still has his small collection in the house, and still goes hunting. I've grown away from that, and it doesn't really interest me anymore.
Despite that background, I'm firmly in the camp of serious gun control. The current situation is unsustainable, and has been for some time. It's so beyond what should be happening in a civilized country that it's frankly insane.
If you want to lay blame for America's excessive guns, you can point your finger at King George. If he hadn't tried to disarm us, we wouldn't have written the right to bear arms into our bill of rights. That presents a major hurdle in regulating arms in the US, as it's a foundational right built into our country from the start. It's not an insurmountable barrier, but until more than half of the public is willing to make it a voting issue over the course of several years, it's not going to get dealt with.
Then, when they are done shrieking, they go back to handing out 'thoughts and prayers' which in their mind is the only real fix for the problem of mass shootings.
What's wrong with that? It's worked so well in the past! Think of all the shootings that didn't happen because of their thoughts and prayers. And here you are, blaming them when they miss one.
Nobody is perfect.
Functionality? Did you catch what the problem is?
Google has long been under fire from photographers and publishers who felt that image search allowed people to steal their pictures...
Photographers and publishers want google to send your computer images, that you can't save.
It's DRM all over. "I want to send you something over the internet that you can see/hear, but that can't get saved on your computer."
Sure, you could restore this with a plugin, but it barely requires that. If it's on your screen, you can save it. FFS, it's already on your hard drive somewhere. I don't know of too many browsers that just store images in ram. Or is that why Chrome is such a damn memory hog....
Doubling down on my initial statement? That's a bold plan. We'll see how it pans out. I'm rooting for you kid!
You just made me double-check what we're paying and what we're getting. Already planning a saturday outing to the local cable branch to talk to them about WTF, how the hell did that creep up so high?
The good news is that every couple of years when we do that, and bring the old hardware with us, they somehow manage to hack down the price, hook us up with the better hardware, and add new services. Corporate helldesk line? Fucking abysmal. Local folks? Cheerful helpful, and generally awesome.
Two things I can think of: One, logistics of running a prize thing like that would be somewhat hard. Often for super rare chances (we'll give you 10% off for every inch of snow that falls on New Year's day) the sponsor will take out prize insurance, to mitigate having to pay out a pile of cash. Still, making sure that you have the longevity in the contest can be hard, especially given the boom and bust of so many companies on the cutting edge these days. Two, I bet if you did it anyway and brought it back to earth, Elon would buy it back from you. Seems well within his character to do that.
As someone on the internet recently said, "Thanks to Elon Musk there is now a non-zero chance of getting hit by a car in space."
Having been someone on the internet who has said this, and not remembering the source, I'll take credit for this insightfully stupid comment.
While the internet is a wonderful place where you can share your thoughts, when they are stupid, people will know you are stupid. It's a double-edged sword.
The FCC requirement for public access channels only apples to cable companies. It doesn't apply to satellite TV, and it doesn't apply to internet video services.
Pursuant to Section 611 of the Communications Act, local franchising authorities may require cable operators to set aside channels for public, educational, or governmental ("PEG") use.
And that is what VT has done. They've required Comcast to set aside public access channels. Comcast has decided that they can continue to run 480p analog feeds, because nobody told them they couldn't. Until this recent renewal of their monopoly contract as a cable operator in VT where VT said they needed to provide digital HD public access channels.
Comcast could have just not signed that contract extension if they didn't want to do that. But no, they didn't. They signed it, and then sued. How in the world does that make any sense? That's abusive and evil, and allows them to keep their title as the biggest pieces of shit in the cable market.
Thanks for the laugh. I haven't used gentoo in years, but I might need to go back to it at some point soon. I bet compiling it is soooo much faster on modern processors. I have yet to use an OS that was snappier and more responsive than my old gentoo installs.
The 2016 model was the one which forced me to switch to a Dell Precision running Ububtu. It's got it's share of quirks, but nothing like the clusterfuck of apple's hardware and software.
A year and change in, and I'm more happy with this than I was with my old 2012 MBP. I've got the ports I need, and I can actually crack it open (once I fuck with the stupid non-standard screws) and do things. It's got an actual nVidia graphics card in it as well, not just some crappy embedded video.
And cost half the price of a similarly equipped MBP. No, not quite as snazzy, but whatever. Apple's evolution in their MBP line was opposite the direction I needed them to go, both in hardware and software. Where they were once my go-to, they definitely aren't now. While this focus on software quality is addressing one of my major complaints, there's no guarantee that it's more than lip service, and it's too little, too late for me personally anyway.
I doubt that MS will ever fix its issues either. Smartphones are the next computing evolution, and MS missed the boat hard on that one. With smarphones and game consoles being the primary devices that teens engage the world with, MS is left clinging onto businesses as their primary market. They'll be there for awhile yet, but google is really starting to put the squeeze on them. I don't see MS ever recovering to be as dominant as they used to be.
A second frustration is the viewpoint that the government can't manage anything without massive waste and corruption. I've worked with a number of very large private businesses now, and they all were shitshows on the inside. Bureaucratic mazes of self-imposed rules, employees that should have been fired years ago, silos in departments that didn't talk to each other and screwed up trivial tasks because of it, etc., etc.
These companies were no better than the state government agencies I've worked with, and in at least one case, were far worse. But not only were they incompetent, they also made a significant profit while being incompetent.
Had some of these projects been run by the government, they wouldn't have been any worse, and would likely have cost less, simply because government doesn't build in a profit margin. In areas where there are natural monopolies, it makes sense to have the government run things. It's far too easy for the private sector to milk every last dime out of an essential service if there aren't adequate avenues for competition. And whereas a private company is very resistant to do anything that doesn't improve revenue, the government can be lobbied to do such civil projects, if enough people feel it's worthwhile.
I concur.
The problem is that most companies "peter principle" people into management. It's pretty much the worst way to run promotion in a business, and yet just about every business does it.
You take someone really good at the current job, and ask them to manage people who aren't as good at that job. Now you've removed one of your stars, and you're asking them to do a different job that they may or may not be good at. Knowing how to do your job well doesn't have any bearing on whether or not you're a good manager, unless your job is to be a manager. Some people are really good at managing people. Most are not.
And what percent of these people are given management and leadership training to build those capacities? Far, far too few.
That leaves us with the problem you so nicely explained. Lacking the skills to manage, it becomes an exercise in box checking, rather than actually assessing staff work and adjusting based on the results.
There's a deeper complication in that every weather forecast in the US relies upon NWS data and models. Every local one, and every commercial one. (weather.com, weatherunderground, Accuweather, etc.) In addition, the insurance industry, transportation industry, any sort of logistics branch of any company, etc. all rely on weather forecasting. Lots of commercial businesses have a weather forecaster on staff, or hire a company to provide that service. Anyone shipping perishable goods does, because knowing how long you can park a trailer in texas before you lose your shipment, or knowing to skip deliveries to Minnesota for 2 days due to a blizzard and everything freezing solid is pretty critical.
NWS does a lot of things that nobody realizes, and most of it is pretty important. For example, twice a day, every day of the year, NWS releases weather balloons from 900 locations. This is the only way to sample vertical slices of the atmosphere, and the vertical composition of the atmosphere drives a large part of our weather. Weather models continue to improve, but only because there is continual research and development on them. NWS develops the models, collects the data that gets fed into the models, runs the models, interprets the models, and releases the model data to all of the other forecasters and industries that need it.
Looking at NWS as just the guys that tell you to bring an umbrella tomorrow is really, really short-sighted. Our national weather forecasting is a core component of the economy, and if you're going to suggest cutting it, I think you need to very carefully plan that out, with a full understanding of the consequences. It's not just disaster planning and extreme weather events that could be impacted. It goes far beyond that.
Yep. That's my go-to, even with a weather/climate background. I hate the layout of their detailed forecast page, but that was fixed in a matter of an hour or so by writing my own iframe filled web page and screen scraping the important bits into logical locations. I now get the forecast, local weather loop, and "what's headed my way tomorrow" subset of the national radar loop all on one page, no scrolling required. That stays open as one of my pinned tabs.
No, it's really not easier to do all of that. Do you know what's easy? Everyone just using GMT or UT.
I look at my clock. It says 14:34. The person I want to get in touch with works between 12:00 and 19:00. Can I reach them now? Yes!
And that would work for everyone in the world. How does it currently work?
It's 2:34 and I need to get in touch with someone 1000 miles away. What are their work hours? What is their timezone offset? Did either of us adjust for DST while the other didn't? It is so mindlessly complicated that I can't figure out why anyone wants to keep this system. I know lots of people who have missed meetings because they traveled across a timezone, didn't remember to account for that, didn't update their computer clock, and were suddenly an hour off.
I really don't care if the clock says 13:00 when I get up in the morning. Those numbers don't really mean anything. I'm happy working 15:00-23:00. But across the world we want to get up at 6am and we want to have the midpoint of the day at 12:00, and so we continue to waste massive amounts of time and effort playing time detectives when we could just all agree to use the same time, and then only have to share hours of operation.
Why is Comcast the only provider being required to do this?
Because Comcast is the only provider in VT. They have a monopoly. And just signed an 11 year extension to that monopoly. They're very upset that in exchange for having complete control over the TV and Internet in VT (aside from OTA and wireless) that they are being required to provide an adequate level of service.
The requirement to have public access channels is a federal mandate. Cable companies see this as yet another cost to control, so they're still running on 1990s analog technology to produce them. They're not going to modernize and digitize the public access channels until the FCC tells them they have to. Or strips that requirement from the law, which I bet the cable companies would prefer.
VT has said, "We're giving you a monopoly, and these are the terms." Comcast doesn't like those terms, so instead of not signing that contract extension, they signed it and then sued.
So yeah, they're the same old pieces of shit they've always been.
Kids on your lawn again, eh?
But if you hire just by the skills and knowledge, you end up having a quite diverse cast anyway...
I'm not so sure I agree. There are a couple of problems with that, making it hard to do that effectively:
Lots of businesses start with your "do you have the right connections" method of finding employees, because when you're first starting out, you don't have an established HR or an understanding of how to find good candidates. As you grow the company, it's that more homogeneous group of people who are tasked with figuring out how to staff the growing company. Sure, they may just be hiring by skills and knowledge, but are they reaching a more diverse audience, or are they just reaching their network, as that's what they know? Do they know how to reach a diverse audience? Are they able to separate cultural differences from skills and knowledge?
Second, if you show up for an interview and everyone there doesn't look like you, do you take that job? Even if a company isn't making a diversity hire, and is honestly basing it on skills and knowledge, it can definitely look to someone coming in that they're going to be "that person", and that's not necessarily a position a lot of people want to be in.
It's a chicken and egg problem. If you start non-diverse, it can be hard and really, really disruptive to become diverse. If you start diverse, it's easy to stay that way.
So you're on the internet shitting on your co-workers, you've got a sig that's bitching about SJWs, and the only thing stopping you from letting projects at work fail is that the failure might impact you personally.
How, exactly, did you come to the conclusion that the problem is your coworkers and not your personality? Because you come across as pretty damn toxic to me.