I looked into this recently, and was kind of surprised at what I found.
Mostly, my surprise is that they aren't that big. By revenue, they are 55th on the Fortune 500 list. For comparison, Dell is 51. Now Google is far more profitable, has a much larger market cap, and is growing very quickly... but still, I was shocked that they aren't larger. If you get a lot of your news from tech press like I do, then you could be led to believe that Google is swallowing up the world. But in fact, they are still smaller than Amazon, smaller than Microsoft, half the size of IBM, and 1/3 the size of Apple. Google definitely gets an outsized amount of press attention compared to their revenue, and get blamed for a lot of things that their size just doesn't support.
Wow, that's a good point. Even if the plane gets the equivalent of 90MPG per passenger, you are "driving" thousands of miles. Just shows how little we really can affect things as individuals.
I wish some stuff was made like that now. I'd gladly pay double or even triple the price for an attic fan that didn't require me to go up there and replace it every few years.
Yeah, I'm not an expert by any means (I simply inherited the kitchen), but it seems like they keep two sets of everything... dishes, silverware, shelf space, dishwashers, sinks, refrigerators, ovens... just about everything is duplicated - my understanding is that is to avoid cross-"contamination". All of the major appliances and many house lights are also either on timers or have Sabbath timers built-in. I have been de-timering my house since we first moved in:) At first it was quite freaky, as some of the timers are mechanical and the house was unoccupied through a couple of power outages, so the timers got out of sync. Things like the dishwasher suddenly kicking on at 4AM...
I gotta tell you, having two of everything is pretty sweet. No "emergency" appliance repairs, LOL... though the other fridge did not come with the house so we only have one of those - or maybe they had some way to share the fridge space.
Except that this is in my own kitchen with two of everything. The cheap dishwasher runs great, if noisy. The expensive one I've pulled out and replaced stuff three times now, including a ridiculous repair involving cheap plastic connectors that support the weight of the door. The super-pricey fridge developed a leak in the ice maker. After getting the run-around on parts (you HAVE to buy from "authorized dealers") I did some research and discovered that the ice maker is just a standard Whirlpool unit bolted in to the expensive freezer. Armed with that knowledge, you can get parts anywhere. The super-expensive rangetop has a fancy retracting hood. A $1.50 limit switch in a bad spot (susceptible to falling food) is flaky and until I eventually replace it, you have to know "the trick" to make the hood deploy. God knows what they'll want for that switch. The expensive oven lost a cooling fan, and the repair revealed the appliance to be assembled such that the only moving part was sandwiched between parts that are never meant to be separated. I field-modified it a bit so that I wouldn't have to disassemble the whole thing - I'm a mechanical engineer, and I estimate that it would have cost them about 15 cents to make the part more serviceable by bending the sheet metal mounts 90 degrees. They also standardized on a fastener - presumably to simplify their assembly process - but the fastener is Phillips head and so requires direct access. A slightly more expensive combination Phillips/hex head like you see on PCs would solve the issue, but would have added some cost. Would you pay an extra dollar for your oven to be more serviceable? I would, but I'm definitely not typical. Most people would have gotten the $350 estimate from the repair guy and bought a new oven. After all, it is nearly 8 years old!:)
Given this experience, any appliance purchases I make in the future will be high-volume regular consumer stuff. Even if it means more of the same shoddy cost-cutting, at least I won't be paying a premium for it.
Ditto on the mixer. My wife has this really crappy hand mixer that she bought - before she met me - at Woolworth's, if you remember that chain. So that was at least 17 years ago. Still going strong.
I've also noticed that the high-end appliances seem to have more problems than the cheap stuff. Admittedly, I'm a small sample size, but I bought a house that had previously been owned by Orthodox Jews, and so there are two of everything in the kitchen. I haven't had to repair any of the cheaper appliances, but the expensive stuff keeps nickel and diming me.
I don't think I agree with your thesis that educated people are less persuaded by advertising. Different kinds of adverts, sure, but not immune. Critical thinking probably helps in product selection for practical things, but educated people buy just as much (if not more!) frivolous stuff.
The hilarious thing about many of those sites is that the "block" is just a layer in front of the actual content. Firefox's built-in "inspect element" is usually enough to remove it and get to the content.
but the reality is that these sites have to pay the bills somehow.
And yet, here we are almost 20 years into the web and stuff is still largely free.
Personally, I think ad blockers must not be much of a problem or sites would be serving up the ads from their own domain. Right now they are trivial to block - most ads can be killed with a simple hosts file.
You seem very down on charters, but I'd like you to consider a few points.
First, public school funding in the US is a mess. We spend more than just about any other country in the world, yet have little to show for it. One reason is the crazy disparities that rich and poor districts have. Suburban schools with good student populations get funded at a better level than urban schools with horrendous student populations, when the reverse should probably be true. Charter schools help address this by separating funding from location.
Second, public schools tend to toe the line educationally. They are big institutions with a lot of momentum and little incentive to innovate. When they do try something new, it usually involves an experiment on a population of kids without any choice in the matter. Charter schools offer a way to experiment with new or untested methods using willing participants. It should not surprise you to find charters on average do no better than public schools - some ideas will not work out and some charters will be poorly run.
Third, public school - in an indirect way - helps perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Poor kids in a bad school have no choice. Kids of some means in a bad school can go to a private school. Charters aren't magic, but at least now you have something that poor kids never had before: the ability to flee to a better school.
Finally, I find the cycle of public money recycled into mandatory payments to lobbyists to be objectionable. To some extent, charters help break this cycle.
This underlines the importance of education to any functioning democracy.
That said, plural democracy is pretty fucked up all by itself unless the country is very homogenous. You have to have some protections in place for minorities. I'd like to see education curriculum require much more than a simple majority, given the importance of education. Education decisions should be much closer to consensus than to plurality.
We live in a society where account transfers are done by writing your name on a piece of paper which contains only non-secret information. If the banks can deal with that, then I think they can deal with an OS that might have some security vulnerability running on a machine that only contains a few thousand dollars.
I have a macro that removes tabs, double newlines, and double spaces after periods among other things. I don't really fault users - most people learned word processing by simply dicking around with the software.
The worst one for me is when they don't set the tab stops and so resort to hitting tab and then space a few times until the text lines up approximately where they want. No (easy) way to automate that out!
But they say, "well, we think it's this way," and a lot of people take it for gospel. That is, until some other group of researchers does another flawed experiment that produces another incorrect, different result. Rinse, repeat.
That's how we learn. Find the flaws in previous research and develop a new method without those flaws, fully understanding that you won't get it right either. The research is still useful, even if all it does is point out an area we don't fully understand.
Opinion has no place in the laboratory, unless we're experimenting on opinions.
OK, but I'm not sure why this paper is subject to that criticism.
In fact it is the opposite - scientists previously didn't understand the criteria, and now they think that they do. It is progress in our understanding of the natural world.
I'll add that the Libraries don't seem to be 100% compatible with even MS's Office. On my old computer, navigating to a Library would consistently crash Outlook. On my current computer, it still happens, though only very rarely. It's probably some odd filename or shortcut, but it sure is annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
Shorting won't pay off if it just goes flat like MS did for a decade.
I looked into this recently, and was kind of surprised at what I found.
Mostly, my surprise is that they aren't that big. By revenue, they are 55th on the Fortune 500 list. For comparison, Dell is 51. Now Google is far more profitable, has a much larger market cap, and is growing very quickly... but still, I was shocked that they aren't larger. If you get a lot of your news from tech press like I do, then you could be led to believe that Google is swallowing up the world. But in fact, they are still smaller than Amazon, smaller than Microsoft, half the size of IBM, and 1/3 the size of Apple. Google definitely gets an outsized amount of press attention compared to their revenue, and get blamed for a lot of things that their size just doesn't support.
Wow, that's a good point. Even if the plane gets the equivalent of 90MPG per passenger, you are "driving" thousands of miles. Just shows how little we really can affect things as individuals.
Catching up to Europe I suppose.
Only a low-margin company would target left-handers. ~
I wish some stuff was made like that now. I'd gladly pay double or even triple the price for an attic fan that didn't require me to go up there and replace it every few years.
Yeah, I'm not an expert by any means (I simply inherited the kitchen), but it seems like they keep two sets of everything... dishes, silverware, shelf space, dishwashers, sinks, refrigerators, ovens... just about everything is duplicated - my understanding is that is to avoid cross-"contamination". All of the major appliances and many house lights are also either on timers or have Sabbath timers built-in. I have been de-timering my house since we first moved in :) At first it was quite freaky, as some of the timers are mechanical and the house was unoccupied through a couple of power outages, so the timers got out of sync. Things like the dishwasher suddenly kicking on at 4AM...
I gotta tell you, having two of everything is pretty sweet. No "emergency" appliance repairs, LOL... though the other fridge did not come with the house so we only have one of those - or maybe they had some way to share the fridge space.
Except that this is in my own kitchen with two of everything. The cheap dishwasher runs great, if noisy. The expensive one I've pulled out and replaced stuff three times now, including a ridiculous repair involving cheap plastic connectors that support the weight of the door. The super-pricey fridge developed a leak in the ice maker. After getting the run-around on parts (you HAVE to buy from "authorized dealers") I did some research and discovered that the ice maker is just a standard Whirlpool unit bolted in to the expensive freezer. Armed with that knowledge, you can get parts anywhere. The super-expensive rangetop has a fancy retracting hood. A $1.50 limit switch in a bad spot (susceptible to falling food) is flaky and until I eventually replace it, you have to know "the trick" to make the hood deploy. God knows what they'll want for that switch. The expensive oven lost a cooling fan, and the repair revealed the appliance to be assembled such that the only moving part was sandwiched between parts that are never meant to be separated. I field-modified it a bit so that I wouldn't have to disassemble the whole thing - I'm a mechanical engineer, and I estimate that it would have cost them about 15 cents to make the part more serviceable by bending the sheet metal mounts 90 degrees. They also standardized on a fastener - presumably to simplify their assembly process - but the fastener is Phillips head and so requires direct access. A slightly more expensive combination Phillips/hex head like you see on PCs would solve the issue, but would have added some cost. Would you pay an extra dollar for your oven to be more serviceable? I would, but I'm definitely not typical. Most people would have gotten the $350 estimate from the repair guy and bought a new oven. After all, it is nearly 8 years old! :)
Given this experience, any appliance purchases I make in the future will be high-volume regular consumer stuff. Even if it means more of the same shoddy cost-cutting, at least I won't be paying a premium for it.
Ditto on the mixer. My wife has this really crappy hand mixer that she bought - before she met me - at Woolworth's, if you remember that chain. So that was at least 17 years ago. Still going strong.
I've also noticed that the high-end appliances seem to have more problems than the cheap stuff. Admittedly, I'm a small sample size, but I bought a house that had previously been owned by Orthodox Jews, and so there are two of everything in the kitchen. I haven't had to repair any of the cheaper appliances, but the expensive stuff keeps nickel and diming me.
s/event/refresh/
Yes, those are particularly annoying - and removing the event is more trouble than simply deleting the interfering DIV.
I don't think I agree with your thesis that educated people are less persuaded by advertising. Different kinds of adverts, sure, but not immune. Critical thinking probably helps in product selection for practical things, but educated people buy just as much (if not more!) frivolous stuff.
The hilarious thing about many of those sites is that the "block" is just a layer in front of the actual content. Firefox's built-in "inspect element" is usually enough to remove it and get to the content.
but the reality is that these sites have to pay the bills somehow.
And yet, here we are almost 20 years into the web and stuff is still largely free.
Personally, I think ad blockers must not be much of a problem or sites would be serving up the ads from their own domain. Right now they are trivial to block - most ads can be killed with a simple hosts file.
You seem very down on charters, but I'd like you to consider a few points.
First, public school funding in the US is a mess. We spend more than just about any other country in the world, yet have little to show for it. One reason is the crazy disparities that rich and poor districts have. Suburban schools with good student populations get funded at a better level than urban schools with horrendous student populations, when the reverse should probably be true. Charter schools help address this by separating funding from location.
Second, public schools tend to toe the line educationally. They are big institutions with a lot of momentum and little incentive to innovate. When they do try something new, it usually involves an experiment on a population of kids without any choice in the matter. Charter schools offer a way to experiment with new or untested methods using willing participants. It should not surprise you to find charters on average do no better than public schools - some ideas will not work out and some charters will be poorly run.
Third, public school - in an indirect way - helps perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Poor kids in a bad school have no choice. Kids of some means in a bad school can go to a private school. Charters aren't magic, but at least now you have something that poor kids never had before: the ability to flee to a better school.
Finally, I find the cycle of public money recycled into mandatory payments to lobbyists to be objectionable. To some extent, charters help break this cycle.
This underlines the importance of education to any functioning democracy.
That said, plural democracy is pretty fucked up all by itself unless the country is very homogenous. You have to have some protections in place for minorities. I'd like to see education curriculum require much more than a simple majority, given the importance of education. Education decisions should be much closer to consensus than to plurality.
We live in a society where account transfers are done by writing your name on a piece of paper which contains only non-secret information. If the banks can deal with that, then I think they can deal with an OS that might have some security vulnerability running on a machine that only contains a few thousand dollars.
I have a macro that removes tabs, double newlines, and double spaces after periods among other things. I don't really fault users - most people learned word processing by simply dicking around with the software.
The worst one for me is when they don't set the tab stops and so resort to hitting tab and then space a few times until the text lines up approximately where they want. No (easy) way to automate that out!
But this paper is in a respected, peer-reviewed journal. And it isn't being used to sell organic, cage-free, non-GMO pomegranates :)
But they say, "well, we think it's this way," and a lot of people take it for gospel. That is, until some other group of researchers does another flawed experiment that produces another incorrect, different result. Rinse, repeat.
That's how we learn. Find the flaws in previous research and develop a new method without those flaws, fully understanding that you won't get it right either. The research is still useful, even if all it does is point out an area we don't fully understand.
Opinion has no place in the laboratory, unless we're experimenting on opinions.
OK, but I'm not sure why this paper is subject to that criticism.
In defense of tomhath, the paper itself is a bit cavalier in its use of the word "transitivity"... it's not just TFA or the summary.
I'm not sure what your point is. If you want absolute certainty, you probably aren't interested in science.
In fact it is the opposite - scientists previously didn't understand the criteria, and now they think that they do. It is progress in our understanding of the natural world.
I'll add that the Libraries don't seem to be 100% compatible with even MS's Office. On my old computer, navigating to a Library would consistently crash Outlook. On my current computer, it still happens, though only very rarely. It's probably some odd filename or shortcut, but it sure is annoying.