That's why I'm starting to do searches for things I'm not searching for. I figure by process of elimination google will return the right thing eventually.
For us, those shows have been fresh, (mostly) well-done, and most importantly entertaining. They're not the over-the-top comic book material like the movies.
I actually thought Batman vs Superman did this for the first half of the movie. It raised some very good philosophical questions about morality and the potential liabilities of having an unaccountable, unkillable demigod exist in the world. It asked if Superman was necessary and sufficient for justice to exist in the world. It asked where the line was when being tough on crime shifts into crimes against humanity.
If they could have just let Superman and Batman be the complicated quasi-villains they were set up to be, and hadn't thrown in a kitchen sink of other poorly-thought-out characters with no inherent purpose or value to the story, it would have been really good. Who wins? If Superman wins, will he kill Batman, or try to reform him? If Batman wins and really does kill Superman, how does the world react? What are the long-term implications? Does Batman shift to really evil in the process of trying to kill Superman? Are there casualties as the two go to war, that both would have rather avoided?
But no, we interrupt the scheduled complicated and interesting story to inject a couple of villains, another hero or two, and then destroy half the city with a giant monster which almost kills the heroes but which does not. Because of Batman's crafty weapon and Superman's self-sacrifice and bravery. Two heroes, dong what they always do, in every single. god. damn. superhero. movie. ever.
The Batman vs Superman in my head is a hell of a lot more interesting than that. The part where Batman has to choose between killing Superman and letting him save someone he loves is particularly gripping. It's a shock when he kills Superman, because it drives home how much of a threat he thinks he is. But what he didn't realize was how much the threat of Superman made people toe the line. With Superman dead, crime gets way worse, and when called on it he tries to argue that freedom is more important. But the mob doesn't get that, and turns on him. Batman flees and recruits a small army, and the city gets overwhelmed with crime. He sweeps back in and restores very brutal order, and there is a mix of cheer and despair. Gotham sort-of returns to normal, but at what price?
An "almost chicken" laid a mutated "almost chicken" egg, which is now classed as a chicken. Ergo, the mutated "almost chicken" egg is the world's first chicken egg, which becomes the first chicken. q.e.d.
Not really.
Speciation occurs within a population which is mixing its DNA, not within one individual. It's really impossible to be so genetically different from your parents that you couldn't mate with them, and successfully mating is how we categorize a species. Within the population of a species you'll find a wide variance of DNA, and as time goes on, because they're mixing that constantly, the whole species is changing. Over time, that species may change so much that it's not the species it used to be, but this isn't happening at the individual level.
Take a subset of that species and isolate it genetically (usually by geographically isolating it) and over time the genetics of the two populations can drift apart to the point where we'd call them different species.
Ring species are particularly interesting, and a good example of how blurred this line is.
Species A can mate with B and D. Species C can mate with B and D. But Species A can't mate with Species C.
Generally, if things can produce viable offspring, we call them the same species. So here, A and C are pretty much the same species as B and D, but not the same species as each other?
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Neither.
They co-developed over hundreds of thousands of years, and there are thousands of different genetic types of birds that blur the lines between "chicken" and "not chicken". The variety in chickens is rather incredible. Check out Araucanas, Malay, Silkie, Ayam Cemani, Polish, Manx Rumpy, Modern Game, or Transylvanian Naked Neck chickens. Those are all chickens. However a whole lot of those are starting to look very not-chicken, and give them some genetic isolation and a few tens of thousands of years, and they won't be chickens anymore.
The big problem with the whole climate change thing is that it is hard. It's hard to analyze and even harder to predict the ultimate outcome, because there are just so many factors that all interact with each other. It's all imperfect so you can't guarantee the exact outcome.
This statement shows a really significant lack of understanding about climate science, and science in general.
Yes, it's hard. But it's also science. Science doesn't "guarantee the exact outcome". That's a typical layperson's misunderstanding of science, because science is hard and complicated, our education system is fairly crap in explaining how it works, and the media wants soundbites, eyes, and clicks rather than to convey understanding.
Science, unlike pseudo-science, gives a value and an uncertainty, and can explain how both are calculated. Climate science is no different. A whole lot of the media nonsense about "climate scientists say they were wrong about X" is often them reducing the size of the uncertainty. If I say, "There are 50 cows in that field, give or take 10", you know there are between 40 and 60. If later I count better and say, "There are 47 cows in that field, give or take 3", we now know that there are between 44 and 50. Note that 44 to 50 is a subset of 40 to 60, and has higher accuracy and less uncertainty. This is a good thing.
Unfortunately, most people view this increase in certainty as a bad thing, because it makes the original prediction "wrong". In large part this is because the media doesn't talk about the uncertainty, only the value. And often just a spitball average value, or an extreme value. "Dude claimed there were 60 cows in field, turns out there only were 44!", "Dude off by almost 30% on Cow Claims!!" would be the media headlines of the previous example.
It's baffling to me that "we know more about this than we did yesterday" is treated as if all knowledge should be suspect. In popular culture, apparently if you can't be omniscient, there is no reason to ever trust a single word you say. What's missing is the admission that science is the best tool we have for understanding the world. It's an imperfect tool, but we don't have an alternate tool. And given that, it's really important to understand what that tool tells you, and how it works. Without that, you can't really have faith in it.
And the earth is an oblate spheroid. I thought everyone learned that in school.
In 2006, the Mozilla Foundation received US$66.8 million in revenues, of which US$61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties" from Google.
From 2004 to 2014, the foundation had a deal with Google to make Google Search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site was also made the default home page of Firefox. The original contract expired in November 2006. However, Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and again through 2011. On December 20, 2011, Mozilla announced that the contract was once again renewed for at least three years to November 2014, at three times the amount previously paid, or nearly US$300 million annually. Approximately 90% of Mozilla’s royalties revenue for 2014 was derived from this contract.
In November 2014, Mozilla signed a five-year partnership (effective December 2014) with Yahoo!, making Yahoo! Search the default search engine for Firefox in North America. The default search engine in Russia will be Yandex, and in China, Baidu. Due to Mozilla's financial release timetables, the results of the Yahoo! contract will not be public until November 2016.
In November 2017, however, Mozilla announced that it was switching back to Google as the default search engine. This represented an early termination of its Yahoo partnership.
If you want truly independent, 90% funded by google isn't what you want. I don't know what the answer is, but it's not Firefox.
It's worse than that. Companies often get massive investments into the infrastructure that they will need to use, which often isn't included in the original deal. Power, water and sewer, transportation, etc. The rationale is that there's budget for improving those things anyway, and might as well improve them for the company which will now have thousands of employees and a giant building complex using all that.
This means that communities which aren't near the company and which had been earmarked for infrastructure upgrades now lose out, so the company can benefit.
Unless they're used for programming lessons, I don't understand why they are issued.
Maybe I just don't understand modern education, what can I say.
It has changed a ton in the last 10 years. A large percent of schools are issuing a portable device to every student. Google Apps for Education is a big deal, with tons of Chromebooks being issued to kids. Work is done using the Google suite of word processing tools, rather than the Microsoft ones. Kids are turning in video homework rather than paper homework. It's a crazy new world out there.
I find myself in surprising agreement with the Gates. As someone who was actually a teacher, I learned a lot about the deep negatives behind textbooks.
Not everyone on the planet can afford internet...
But they can afford it more than they can afford to keep current with textbooks. FFS, rural India and Africa have a surprisingly large amount of internet access. And not 100% of a community even needs it - just one person to pull down information.
By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date. It would be one thing if textbooks were cheap and we could just update them as needed, but they are a fucking racket. The people paid to write them are not necessarily experts in the subject, and they don't necessarily even have an education background. (I actually know some of them.) The cost that goes into making textbooks is really not that high, and the markup is utterly insane.
What we need are online texts that are free or very low cost, maintained and vetted by experts, and designed for educational use. We don't have that. We have parts of that, but not the whole package, which would be necessary to replace textbooks. If the Gates wanted to help, they'd set up such a system for all subjects. But to do that they'd have to understand something about the education system and hire some experts to work with teachers to figure out how to craft an internet replacement for textbooks. It would need to be low-bandwith, downloadable and printable, organized to match standardized curriculum, and be easy for teachers to craft lesson plans around.
But given this is the guy who made Microsoft, it's clear that such a concept would be utterly foreign to him.
Oddly enough, we actually DID do a LEO model years back, which was actually pretty effective, but it encouraged things like community outreach and police/citizen interaction which worked really well for officers on the ground but pissed off lawmakers and 'police unions', so it was largely dropped.
For several years I lived in walking distance between a police station and a neighborhood responsible for the vast majority of the police calls in the area. I could see the police station from my house, and the troubled neighborhood was a 10 minute walk behind me. I never, not once in five+ years, saw a cop on foot in my neighborhood.
For cops to be effective, they actually need to be part of the community. They can't just be a faceless, quasi-criminal organization which is not accountable to the citizens around them, and who those citizens don't know. Given their abuses and utter lack of engagement, I developed a healthy disdain for the police, and a fair bit of distrust for them. If that's where a white, middle-class attitude ends up, I can't imagine how poorly they were viewed by the folks who they actually came into contact with viewed them.
We don't need algorithms. We need police willing to be part of a community who are trusted to be fair and respected for being helpful, and not police viewed with fear and disrespect for being unaccountable murderous thugs and criminals who think they're better than everyone else. While Cracked isn't exactly an authoritative source, they had a very interesting interview with a brittish bobby at one point. What was really eye-opening is how much training they got to deal with people, and how "The one lesson that everyone who ever became a half-decent copper did take on board was that the most important piece of officer safety equipment we ever had was talk." It's a really different story when cops are asked to be good for a community and when they don't have quotas and metrics and all sorts of things they can arrest people for.
So that isn't on the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act then, that is on the previous tax bills that introduced the holes Amazon exploited.
So you don't think it's the job of a new tax bill to fix the problems with the old ones? Then why would we need a new one?
It's pretty hilarious that you're arguing that tax legislation shouldn't close tax loopholes. Seems like that's pretty much exactly what it should do, and the failure of a bill for a specific purpose to fix issues related to that thing is definitely grounds for criticism of those who wrote it and passed it.
Don't get me wrong, it is ludicrous that Amazon didn't pay anything but pretending there are no large scale economic benefits for the middle class in something like this and especially in increasing capital in corporations on the whole is disingenuous.
Then please demonstrate those benefits to the middle class. Wages are stagnant and not keeping up with inflation, and the middle class doesn't own much in the way of stocks. Large corporations like Amazon have driven lots of family owned business into the ground.
Please let us know where the economic benefit to the middle class is, because it's not really evident to most of us.
Yep. Wife and I upped our withholdings knowing that the corporate tax cut would bite us in the ass, and we still ended up paying more than last year. I was hoping to avoid having to cut a big check to the government, but apparently we'd need to chop another $25 out of each paycheck to avoid that.
And running out of gas can mean death. I assume you plan well for any moderately length trips in the winter when fucking that up means you might die, right? Not sure how the fuel in the car changes that. You just might need to plan a bit better with the current generation of batteries, but you're going to be planning anyway.
Back to your previous comment:
In Canada, we don't have enough gas stations in a lot of places.
But you do have electricity in a lot more places. That means while you might need to charge the electric car more than fill up the gas car, you'll have more places to do it. In an emergency, you can pull into any place with the lights on and ask them if you can grab some charge. You can't do that with a gas car.
welcoming them into your power base somehow will diminish you and your identity.
Well, it will.
The "baby boom" was quite literally that. The boomer generation was a giant bubble of largely white, christian, English-speaking, middle-class individuals. That's the world they grew up in. Before that the US was more diverse and there were more languages spoken, but that giant explosion of kids swamped that and really changed the demographic makeup of a lot of the US.
Now that bubble is behind us, and the US is becoming less white and less English speaking. It's returning to normal, although the pendulum is going to swing a long way the other direction and get stuck there. For the boomer generation and their kids, the world they grew up in is changing radically. Their mental model of "american" is no longer correct, and that's causing them a lot of anxiety.
When a bunch of strange people suddenly are injected into your world, you either fight to save your world, or you accept that your world is changing. The big problem is that a lot of people aren't good with change. Especially change they have no power to control.
Good news! The TCO of electric vehicles is already lower than ICE vehicles and will continue to fall as cheaper electric models are introduced and battery technology matures. So not having enough gas stations isn't going to matter for very much longer.
I really wonder if anyone here on/. with "timezone problems" lives in the real world or on a moon orbiting jupiter, you are hilarious.
And you obviously have never had to schedule virtual meetings with people in different timezones. You've never had your laptop fail to realize that you're a timezone over and that it needs to update meeting notification times. You've never encountered multiple people within the same timezone that both do and don't do DST that you need to schedule a meeting with.
I have done that, and I've worked with a lot of people who have done that. You thinking that this is easy is what's hilarious. You apparently have never done it if you do. It would massively simplify communication if we just all used UT. No figuring anything out - ask once when they're available, and you're done.
Your "easy" solution is a "figure it out once" which involves a bit of math and a table to account for DST being on and off at different times of the year in different countries. That's not easy, especially if it involves people in more than one location.
He's just learning how to better play the game. He can issue regulations. But did he? No. He said he might at some point in the distant future if telecos don't say that they're working on something that they'll implement sometime after that distant future.
"Tell me you're going to do something, and all is well." is vastly different than, "You are hereby ordered to do this, on this timeline, with this punishment if you don't comply. No extensions."
The issue is that a ton of companies have moved to VOIP, and/or have a lot of internal numbers but want calls to appear to becoming from the official, published business number so they look legitimate. It's going to be harder to google one of a thousand numbers to see if they are legitimate than one main business line.
Legitimate companies do have some fairly solid reasons to spoof their numbers.The big problem is that instead of putting any sorts of controls on this, the telecos took the cheap, easy way out and just threw up their hands and said, "whatever".
The big companies that want to do this pay the bills. The average residential customer can either accept getting shit on, or not have a phone number.
Easily changeable seems like a recipe for disaster. If fraud is an issue now, imagine if someone could change your SSN without you knowing.
Unique per relationship seems much, much more useful. Still an issue if someone gets one for a relationship you don't have, but not as problematic since you only have one subset of your credit score, taxes, etc., that you have to untangle, not all of them.
The puppet is temporary. The value of the data will extend far past 4 years. Granted, its value likely decreases as time goes on, but it doesn't have a hard stop.
except we've lost all additional layers of context for what a time of "5pm" actually means, which means we have to convey additional information on calls, not less.
No, it's less info, and far less complicated info.
Currently around the world we need timezone, whether or not they use DST, whether or not either of you are using DST, and the hours of operation of the business/person you're calling. You need to do all the fucking mental arithmetic to add up all those things and account for all that shit to see if you're going to both be around at the same time. Then once you find that common time you need to convert into each person's timezone so it makes sense to them.
In the scenario you think is more complicated, all we need are the hours of operation of the business. Then we compare to our hours, and we're done. If they say 8am-5pm, and we say 1pm-9pm, it's pretty damn easy to see that somewhere between 1pm-5pm we're both going to be available.
If they say 8am-5pm in UTC-1 with DST and you say 8am-5pm in UTC+6 without DST, what time are each of the parties available in common?
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I'm starting to do searches for things I'm not searching for. I figure by process of elimination google will return the right thing eventually.
For us, those shows have been fresh, (mostly) well-done, and most importantly entertaining. They're not the over-the-top comic book material like the movies.
I actually thought Batman vs Superman did this for the first half of the movie. It raised some very good philosophical questions about morality and the potential liabilities of having an unaccountable, unkillable demigod exist in the world. It asked if Superman was necessary and sufficient for justice to exist in the world. It asked where the line was when being tough on crime shifts into crimes against humanity.
If they could have just let Superman and Batman be the complicated quasi-villains they were set up to be, and hadn't thrown in a kitchen sink of other poorly-thought-out characters with no inherent purpose or value to the story, it would have been really good. Who wins? If Superman wins, will he kill Batman, or try to reform him? If Batman wins and really does kill Superman, how does the world react? What are the long-term implications? Does Batman shift to really evil in the process of trying to kill Superman? Are there casualties as the two go to war, that both would have rather avoided?
But no, we interrupt the scheduled complicated and interesting story to inject a couple of villains, another hero or two, and then destroy half the city with a giant monster which almost kills the heroes but which does not. Because of Batman's crafty weapon and Superman's self-sacrifice and bravery. Two heroes, dong what they always do, in every single. god. damn. superhero. movie. ever.
The Batman vs Superman in my head is a hell of a lot more interesting than that. The part where Batman has to choose between killing Superman and letting him save someone he loves is particularly gripping. It's a shock when he kills Superman, because it drives home how much of a threat he thinks he is. But what he didn't realize was how much the threat of Superman made people toe the line. With Superman dead, crime gets way worse, and when called on it he tries to argue that freedom is more important. But the mob doesn't get that, and turns on him. Batman flees and recruits a small army, and the city gets overwhelmed with crime. He sweeps back in and restores very brutal order, and there is a mix of cheer and despair. Gotham sort-of returns to normal, but at what price?
An "almost chicken" laid a mutated "almost chicken" egg, which is now classed as a chicken. Ergo, the mutated "almost chicken" egg is the world's first chicken egg, which becomes the first chicken.
q.e.d.
Not really.
Speciation occurs within a population which is mixing its DNA, not within one individual. It's really impossible to be so genetically different from your parents that you couldn't mate with them, and successfully mating is how we categorize a species. Within the population of a species you'll find a wide variance of DNA, and as time goes on, because they're mixing that constantly, the whole species is changing. Over time, that species may change so much that it's not the species it used to be, but this isn't happening at the individual level.
Take a subset of that species and isolate it genetically (usually by geographically isolating it) and over time the genetics of the two populations can drift apart to the point where we'd call them different species.
Ring species are particularly interesting, and a good example of how blurred this line is.
Species A can mate with B and D.
Species C can mate with B and D.
But Species A can't mate with Species C.
Generally, if things can produce viable offspring, we call them the same species. So here, A and C are pretty much the same species as B and D, but not the same species as each other?
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Neither.
They co-developed over hundreds of thousands of years, and there are thousands of different genetic types of birds that blur the lines between "chicken" and "not chicken". The variety in chickens is rather incredible. Check out Araucanas, Malay, Silkie, Ayam Cemani, Polish, Manx Rumpy, Modern Game, or Transylvanian Naked Neck chickens. Those are all chickens. However a whole lot of those are starting to look very not-chicken, and give them some genetic isolation and a few tens of thousands of years, and they won't be chickens anymore.
The big problem with the whole climate change thing is that it is hard. It's hard to analyze and even harder to predict the ultimate outcome, because there are just so many factors that all interact with each other. It's all imperfect so you can't guarantee the exact outcome.
This statement shows a really significant lack of understanding about climate science, and science in general.
Yes, it's hard. But it's also science. Science doesn't "guarantee the exact outcome". That's a typical layperson's misunderstanding of science, because science is hard and complicated, our education system is fairly crap in explaining how it works, and the media wants soundbites, eyes, and clicks rather than to convey understanding.
Science, unlike pseudo-science, gives a value and an uncertainty, and can explain how both are calculated. Climate science is no different. A whole lot of the media nonsense about "climate scientists say they were wrong about X" is often them reducing the size of the uncertainty. If I say, "There are 50 cows in that field, give or take 10", you know there are between 40 and 60. If later I count better and say, "There are 47 cows in that field, give or take 3", we now know that there are between 44 and 50. Note that 44 to 50 is a subset of 40 to 60, and has higher accuracy and less uncertainty. This is a good thing.
Unfortunately, most people view this increase in certainty as a bad thing, because it makes the original prediction "wrong". In large part this is because the media doesn't talk about the uncertainty, only the value. And often just a spitball average value, or an extreme value. "Dude claimed there were 60 cows in field, turns out there only were 44!", "Dude off by almost 30% on Cow Claims!!" would be the media headlines of the previous example.
It's baffling to me that "we know more about this than we did yesterday" is treated as if all knowledge should be suspect. In popular culture, apparently if you can't be omniscient, there is no reason to ever trust a single word you say. What's missing is the admission that science is the best tool we have for understanding the world. It's an imperfect tool, but we don't have an alternate tool. And given that, it's really important to understand what that tool tells you, and how it works. Without that, you can't really have faith in it.
And the earth is an oblate spheroid. I thought everyone learned that in school.
I will stick with Firefox for a truly independent browser
Aaah, yes, the browser from the truly independent Mozilla organization.
In 2006, the Mozilla Foundation received US$66.8 million in revenues, of which US$61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties" from Google.
From 2004 to 2014, the foundation had a deal with Google to make Google Search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site was also made the default home page of Firefox. The original contract expired in November 2006. However, Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and again through 2011. On December 20, 2011, Mozilla announced that the contract was once again renewed for at least three years to November 2014, at three times the amount previously paid, or nearly US$300 million annually. Approximately 90% of Mozilla’s royalties revenue for 2014 was derived from this contract.
In November 2014, Mozilla signed a five-year partnership (effective December 2014) with Yahoo!, making Yahoo! Search the default search engine for Firefox in North America. The default search engine in Russia will be Yandex, and in China, Baidu. Due to Mozilla's financial release timetables, the results of the Yahoo! contract will not be public until November 2016.
In November 2017, however, Mozilla announced that it was switching back to Google as the default search engine. This represented an early termination of its Yahoo partnership.
If you want truly independent, 90% funded by google isn't what you want. I don't know what the answer is, but it's not Firefox.
It's worse than that. Companies often get massive investments into the infrastructure that they will need to use, which often isn't included in the original deal. Power, water and sewer, transportation, etc. The rationale is that there's budget for improving those things anyway, and might as well improve them for the company which will now have thousands of employees and a giant building complex using all that.
This means that communities which aren't near the company and which had been earmarked for infrastructure upgrades now lose out, so the company can benefit.
Unless they're used for programming lessons, I don't understand why they are issued.
Maybe I just don't understand modern education, what can I say.
It has changed a ton in the last 10 years. A large percent of schools are issuing a portable device to every student. Google Apps for Education is a big deal, with tons of Chromebooks being issued to kids. Work is done using the Google suite of word processing tools, rather than the Microsoft ones. Kids are turning in video homework rather than paper homework. It's a crazy new world out there.
I find myself in surprising agreement with the Gates. As someone who was actually a teacher, I learned a lot about the deep negatives behind textbooks.
Not everyone on the planet can afford internet...
But they can afford it more than they can afford to keep current with textbooks. FFS, rural India and Africa have a surprisingly large amount of internet access. And not 100% of a community even needs it - just one person to pull down information.
By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date. It would be one thing if textbooks were cheap and we could just update them as needed, but they are a fucking racket. The people paid to write them are not necessarily experts in the subject, and they don't necessarily even have an education background. (I actually know some of them.) The cost that goes into making textbooks is really not that high, and the markup is utterly insane.
What we need are online texts that are free or very low cost, maintained and vetted by experts, and designed for educational use. We don't have that. We have parts of that, but not the whole package, which would be necessary to replace textbooks. If the Gates wanted to help, they'd set up such a system for all subjects. But to do that they'd have to understand something about the education system and hire some experts to work with teachers to figure out how to craft an internet replacement for textbooks. It would need to be low-bandwith, downloadable and printable, organized to match standardized curriculum, and be easy for teachers to craft lesson plans around.
But given this is the guy who made Microsoft, it's clear that such a concept would be utterly foreign to him.
You can't remember the first thing? I'll give you a hint: It's the thing that hurts now but didn't hurt when you were 30.
Oddly enough, we actually DID do a LEO model years back, which was actually pretty effective, but it encouraged things like community outreach and police/citizen interaction which worked really well for officers on the ground but pissed off lawmakers and 'police unions', so it was largely dropped.
For several years I lived in walking distance between a police station and a neighborhood responsible for the vast majority of the police calls in the area. I could see the police station from my house, and the troubled neighborhood was a 10 minute walk behind me. I never, not once in five+ years, saw a cop on foot in my neighborhood.
For cops to be effective, they actually need to be part of the community. They can't just be a faceless, quasi-criminal organization which is not accountable to the citizens around them, and who those citizens don't know. Given their abuses and utter lack of engagement, I developed a healthy disdain for the police, and a fair bit of distrust for them. If that's where a white, middle-class attitude ends up, I can't imagine how poorly they were viewed by the folks who they actually came into contact with viewed them.
We don't need algorithms. We need police willing to be part of a community who are trusted to be fair and respected for being helpful, and not police viewed with fear and disrespect for being unaccountable murderous thugs and criminals who think they're better than everyone else. While Cracked isn't exactly an authoritative source, they had a very interesting interview with a brittish bobby at one point. What was really eye-opening is how much training they got to deal with people, and how "The one lesson that everyone who ever became a half-decent copper did take on board was that the most important piece of officer safety equipment we ever had was talk." It's a really different story when cops are asked to be good for a community and when they don't have quotas and metrics and all sorts of things they can arrest people for.
So that isn't on the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act then, that is on the previous tax bills that introduced the holes Amazon exploited.
So you don't think it's the job of a new tax bill to fix the problems with the old ones? Then why would we need a new one?
It's pretty hilarious that you're arguing that tax legislation shouldn't close tax loopholes. Seems like that's pretty much exactly what it should do, and the failure of a bill for a specific purpose to fix issues related to that thing is definitely grounds for criticism of those who wrote it and passed it.
Don't get me wrong, it is ludicrous that Amazon didn't pay anything but pretending there are no large scale economic benefits for the middle class in something like this and especially in increasing capital in corporations on the whole is disingenuous.
Then please demonstrate those benefits to the middle class. Wages are stagnant and not keeping up with inflation, and the middle class doesn't own much in the way of stocks. Large corporations like Amazon have driven lots of family owned business into the ground.
Please let us know where the economic benefit to the middle class is, because it's not really evident to most of us.
Yep. Wife and I upped our withholdings knowing that the corporate tax cut would bite us in the ass, and we still ended up paying more than last year. I was hoping to avoid having to cut a big check to the government, but apparently we'd need to chop another $25 out of each paycheck to avoid that.
In an emergency, it would likely work around here. I thought Canadians were supposed to be friendly?
And running out of gas can mean death. I assume you plan well for any moderately length trips in the winter when fucking that up means you might die, right? Not sure how the fuel in the car changes that. You just might need to plan a bit better with the current generation of batteries, but you're going to be planning anyway.
Back to your previous comment:
In Canada, we don't have enough gas stations in a lot of places.
But you do have electricity in a lot more places. That means while you might need to charge the electric car more than fill up the gas car, you'll have more places to do it. In an emergency, you can pull into any place with the lights on and ask them if you can grab some charge. You can't do that with a gas car.
welcoming them into your power base somehow will diminish you and your identity.
Well, it will.
The "baby boom" was quite literally that. The boomer generation was a giant bubble of largely white, christian, English-speaking, middle-class individuals. That's the world they grew up in. Before that the US was more diverse and there were more languages spoken, but that giant explosion of kids swamped that and really changed the demographic makeup of a lot of the US.
Now that bubble is behind us, and the US is becoming less white and less English speaking. It's returning to normal, although the pendulum is going to swing a long way the other direction and get stuck there. For the boomer generation and their kids, the world they grew up in is changing radically. Their mental model of "american" is no longer correct, and that's causing them a lot of anxiety.
When a bunch of strange people suddenly are injected into your world, you either fight to save your world, or you accept that your world is changing. The big problem is that a lot of people aren't good with change. Especially change they have no power to control.
I'm going ot tell you know because I'm not an idiot.
I think we can all be sure of that.
Good news! The TCO of electric vehicles is already lower than ICE vehicles and will continue to fall as cheaper electric models are introduced and battery technology matures. So not having enough gas stations isn't going to matter for very much longer.
I really wonder if anyone here on /. with "timezone problems" lives in the real world or on a moon orbiting jupiter, you are hilarious.
And you obviously have never had to schedule virtual meetings with people in different timezones. You've never had your laptop fail to realize that you're a timezone over and that it needs to update meeting notification times. You've never encountered multiple people within the same timezone that both do and don't do DST that you need to schedule a meeting with.
I have done that, and I've worked with a lot of people who have done that. You thinking that this is easy is what's hilarious. You apparently have never done it if you do. It would massively simplify communication if we just all used UT. No figuring anything out - ask once when they're available, and you're done.
Your "easy" solution is a "figure it out once" which involves a bit of math and a table to account for DST being on and off at different times of the year in different countries. That's not easy, especially if it involves people in more than one location.
He's just learning how to better play the game. He can issue regulations. But did he? No. He said he might at some point in the distant future if telecos don't say that they're working on something that they'll implement sometime after that distant future.
"Tell me you're going to do something, and all is well." is vastly different than, "You are hereby ordered to do this, on this timeline, with this punishment if you don't comply. No extensions."
The issue is that a ton of companies have moved to VOIP, and/or have a lot of internal numbers but want calls to appear to becoming from the official, published business number so they look legitimate. It's going to be harder to google one of a thousand numbers to see if they are legitimate than one main business line.
Legitimate companies do have some fairly solid reasons to spoof their numbers.The big problem is that instead of putting any sorts of controls on this, the telecos took the cheap, easy way out and just threw up their hands and said, "whatever".
The big companies that want to do this pay the bills. The average residential customer can either accept getting shit on, or not have a phone number.
Easily changeable seems like a recipe for disaster. If fraud is an issue now, imagine if someone could change your SSN without you knowing.
Unique per relationship seems much, much more useful. Still an issue if someone gets one for a relationship you don't have, but not as problematic since you only have one subset of your credit score, taxes, etc., that you have to untangle, not all of them.
The puppet is temporary. The value of the data will extend far past 4 years. Granted, its value likely decreases as time goes on, but it doesn't have a hard stop.
except we've lost all additional layers of context for what a time of "5pm" actually means, which means we have to convey additional information on calls, not less.
No, it's less info, and far less complicated info.
Currently around the world we need timezone, whether or not they use DST, whether or not either of you are using DST, and the hours of operation of the business/person you're calling. You need to do all the fucking mental arithmetic to add up all those things and account for all that shit to see if you're going to both be around at the same time. Then once you find that common time you need to convert into each person's timezone so it makes sense to them.
In the scenario you think is more complicated, all we need are the hours of operation of the business. Then we compare to our hours, and we're done. If they say 8am-5pm, and we say 1pm-9pm, it's pretty damn easy to see that somewhere between 1pm-5pm we're both going to be available.
If they say 8am-5pm in UTC-1 with DST and you say 8am-5pm in UTC+6 without DST, what time are each of the parties available in common?
No, but it's marketed as one.
Your average kid playing sports does not need anything other than good food and water.