Equal sign in my language COULD have been considered a unary do-nothing/"make a local copy" operator (i.e. "foo", "= foo", "= = foo" etc. are all the same thing - except that all but the first might not be acceptable as the target of an assignment, or might result in the store being discarded) - except that, as a special case, a single equal sign was explicitly forbidden to stand alone in an expression.
Correction:
Equal sign in my language COULD have been considered a unary do-nothing/"make a local copy" operator (i.e. "foo", "= foo", "= = foo" etc. are all the same thing) and stop there. If thinking that way, "= foo" IS "foo". Otherwise ":=" and "=:" wouldn't store anything. B-)
For completeness sake:= is a blocking assignment. Meaning that the next instruction is not executed until the assignment is completed.
You also want a non-blocking assignment. The actual assignment is delayed (and may be overridden in following non-blocking assignments).
Had that: "=:", as with "+:" vs. ":+", etc. Like C's equal-sign-concatinated-with-unary-op semantics, the side the colon is on tells you whether the store occurs before or after the whatever.
Equal sign in my language COULD have been considered a unary do-nothing/"make a local copy" operator (i.e. "foo", "= foo", "= = foo" etc. are all the same thing - except that all but the first might not be acceptable as the target of an assignment, or might result in the store being discarded) - except that, as a special case, a single equal sign was explicitly forbidden to stand alone in an expression.
Yep, in reality with this and even the farming jobs. The truth is "wages that Americans won't accept".
Not just that. They're at wages that can't even be offered. For instance: Some (not all) of the social programs where H1-B workers aren't eligible don't require the employer contribution. So hiring a US worker - even at the same pay - is substantially more expensive.
One of the problems is that, in a very competitive environment where labor costs are large compared to differences in process costs, if ONE competitor takes advantage of a cheat and another does not, the non-cheater loses the competitive bids. Thus, if the regulations aren't enforced, all must cheat or go out of business.
One place you see this is in the construction industry, with the "undocumented" workers. US workers need not apply (and the jobs aren't offered.) Contractors can't stay in business employing them at mandated minimum wages, benefit levels, and safety standards (which they CAN get the government to enforce) when their competitors can hire workers for less and cheat on all of the above - which those not here legally can't try to get enforced without risking deportation, but can afford to live on (especially if their family is on public assistance).
So if the government is going to put these regulations in place, it must enforce them. The "Invisible Hand" will deliver a knockout punch to anybody who follows expensive, but unenforced, rules.
At competitive wages, you can always find people willing to do the job.
Yep. The trick is to keep the playing field level.
When I did a "desk language" (a notation for writing code on paper notes, which might have had a compiler written for it later), about the time C was being developed (but before I had access to it), one of the things I did was carefully avoid items like that. One thing I did was ban the bare equal sign.
":=" Replacement (also: like C, unary ops had before and after replacement forms - by adding : the same way C adds =, i.e. ":+" and "+:" "==" Equality "===" Equivalence (Two variables are aliases for the same storage. Think "union" but as a separate "put these two things in the same storage / use this symbol (perhaps as a different type) for the same bits as that one" declaration.)
I also had the logical and bitwise operators swapped from the way C did it - because "||", "&&", etc. are mnemonic for a string of bits. (This proved to be the biggest stumbling block when I started coding in C.)
Why bother to guess, when the answer is in the article, and someone already posted the correct answer?
Because this time I didn't have enough time before a hard deadline, but thought some people might value my opinion anyhow. If I checked those items first, and the posting was still appropriate, I would not have had the time to compose and post it.
So I put the caveat right at the top:
- If a reader only wants something researched, he is free to stop right there and move on to another posting.
- If a reader values both my researched and my off-the-top-of-the-head postings, he knows this was the latter, and should check before trusting it.
Now I COULD have just posted it WITHOUT the caveat - as many posters do. Let me know if that's what you prefer. B-)
This is the "first crack in the wall" case. It brings all the guns possible to bear on the spooks.
If you can't get a win in the legal system when Attorney-client privilege and the right to legal council are at stake, and the investigative agencies are spying on lawyer/client communication and the research the lawyers do to support their court arguments, you might as well throw in the towel.
If you DO get a win, you've established that there are situations where the spying can be blocked. Then it's in the interest of all concerned, including the courts, to map out WHEN you can block them and when you can't. So there are a burst of little cases and the courts actually take them up. This fills in the "more populated areas of the map."
Does every American need to file suit to shut it down completely?
Rule of thumb for getting things to happen via the courts:
1) Find a slam-dunk case to establish a precedent. You're putting the first crack in the wall, establishing that there's something there.
2) Do (typically a small number of) additional cases to establish the extent of the precedent's application. Now that something is established, the courts switch from stonewall to map-it-out mode.
Prosecutors do this sort of stuff all the time. (That's why things like restricting freedom of the press and speech generally starts with going after child molesters and child pornography purveyors.)
But it works both ways. Here we have a case where government investigative agencies are going after the communications between lawyers and clients. That's a fundamental part of the legal system, so the actions of the spooks are likely to be as repellent to the judges at all levels as child molesters are to juries.
If the rulings on this case put the first crack in the wall, it should take no more than a handful more to get solid rules established about what the spooks can't do, and how to figure out when they did it and spank them.
After that, as with other rights, we'll be on the usual treadmill: The bad behavior will be reduced a lot; violations will occur, become more common, and eventually institutionalized - when not caught and fought; and intermittent suits will be needed now and then to trim it back and/or map out additional hands-off boundaries.
Did he prove he has standing to sue? Isn't that what most (all?) other lawsuits failed to do resulting in dismissal?
Just guessing:
- He's a lawyer (part of the legal system itself), suing over the phone info on himself and his firm.
- His, and his firm's, consultations with clients are privileged. So keeping records on who they talked to and when are a real infringement on a fundamental and recognized right. (It's not just "chilling" speech. Its chilling the right to an attorney.)
- The Snowden revelations show that these records are being kept on him - because they're being kept on EVERYONE. So he cleared the other hurdle that the secrecy of agency operations (including the gag order provisions of National Security Letters) usually raised.
So it looks like he's got enough to avoid the "no standing" excuse for courts to drop the hot potato.
The progressives have been very clear about trying to destroy the roots and symbols of rural culture in America. Religion and Guns? Clearly must be suppressed.
It's particularly significant when you realize that:
- The country was formed by and for "religious nuts with guns".
- The separation of church and state was both:
- Central to the beliefs of the Plymouth colony settlers (the "Separatists" - often conflated with the "Puritans" who settled a few tens of miles further north), and
- Written into the Bill of Rights by the leaders of several churches (who knew damn well that, if the government had an official church, it wouldn't be theirs, but WOULD lead to the same sort of religious suppression and/or religious wars that they came here to escape.)
From the viewpoint of the current "religious nuts with guns", the current suppression of the same is the result of a cultural war on them by later arrivals (including "The Ellis Island Crowd"), mainly lower-class descendants of serfs, who brought the elitist/royalist values the revolutionaries were trying to escape, and, rather than assimilating into the American Pluralist culture, decided to impose them, with the only substantial change being appointing themselves to a new class of nobles.
Did you just make all of that up? I can't find a single source that connects "redneck" with Native Americans, every definition I've seen ties it specifically to white people.
I got it from my wife - trained as a historian, a member of Phi Alpha Theta (the historical honor society), redneck, and raised as a part American Indian.
I'm not where I can consult her for references right now. If I think of it before this is off the front page I'll see if she can come up with some.
Yes, the term is used on rural whites. As I said above, the bit about insinuating American Indian admixture is one of the several allegedly derogatory slurs embedded in the package.
"Redneck" is a racial slur. It insinuates that the target is, not just from a rural culture (especially - a poor white southern farmer), and not just sunburned on the back of his neck due to working outdoors with a short haircut, but also that he may be part American Indian. (It originates in a time where this was considered to be extremely "poor breeding", and many so-called "sundown towns" had laws requiring people with any American Indian genetics to be out of town by undown.
It currently has an implication that the pepole it is applied to are unintelligent and uneducated. (The space program proves the lie of this: Note the accents of the people involved. A substantial fraction of real rocket scientists are, and were, rednecks.) This slur dates at least to the Scopes Monkey Trial (which was largely a propaganda piece fomented by the mining interests to brand the miners, who were trying to unionize at the time, as igorant idiots in the urban east coast's public perception.)
Rule of thumb: If you don't self-identify as a redneck, and wouldn't use the "N" word, don't use the "R" word.
When arctic ice melts, it doesn't lead to sea level rise, so as far as sea level rise is concerned.
Except for the drop-in-the-bucket part of it on land rather than in the Arcitc Ocean.
That's mostly Greenland and Iceland (which are really pretty small, though their position near the pole makes them look gigantic in Mercator projection maps.)
I hear there is joy in Iceland over their current warming trend. Though the recent retreat of their glaciers and improvement of their growing conditions is still far from that of the Medieval Optimum, they are once again able to grow some of the crops that were common there at the time.
Also, thickening of the ice doesn't slow global warming. Only growing ice extent can do that, by reducing albedo.
Which brings up the question of whether urban heat islands could be mitigated somewhat by switching from black asphalt and tar surfaces to painting the streets and roofs white?
Or, better yet, paint it with something like the new nanotech pigment that reflects (rather than absorbing and/or down-shifting) 97% of the incident light and only strongly couples to the "infrared window" where the atmosphere is transparent, "seeing" only the sun and the near-absolite-zero sky, not the infrafred from the greenhouse gasses and clouds. This results in a surface that, in full sunlight, is about 9 degrees F cooler that the surrounding air (and produce still more cooling when the sun is down).
Nine degrees F is about how much heating they're touting as a disaster, isn't it? Maybe we should paint whole continents. B-)
(Meanwhile, reducing the amount of energy used for air conditioning by deploying trick paint could cut a lot of fossil fuel use without degrading quality of life.)
The basic message is "we should leave the planet better off than we found it". Which is a good and admirable thing.
Hear hear!
The big problem is that nobody has a clear, and widely agreed-upon idea about what to do about it.
Even if the planet is warming, there are a number of steps between that and "We must stop it even if it takes us back to the stone age and kills off most of the population!" Most of the attention is on "Where's the temperature going?". That leaves out a number of others, starting with "Is it disastrous, bad, indifferent, good, or wonderful?"
And some of the options being put forth are fairly shady, dangerous, or just flat-out unacceptable. Sometimes two or three of those at once. [...] The whole "carbon credit" trading scheme has already proven totally shady, since it's a carte blanche license to pollute.
Provided you shovel a bunch of money into the carbon credit market, a substantial portion of which - to the tune of aggregate billions - went to the founders and operators of the market - notably, the same Al Gore who was pushing so hard to spread the idea that the science was "settled" and that ecogeddon was almost upon us unless the carbon content of the atmosphere was immediately reduced to pre-industrial levels, regardless of cost in money, freedom, and lives.
... one reason it may be working for In-N-Out is that, traditionally, fast food workers are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Worker retention is a *big* issue with fast food places. A normal issue a fast food manager has to deal with is people just not showing up for work.
On the other hand, might not at least some of that behavior be the result of the low pay, rather than inherent in the workers themselves?
If the companies pay the workers as if they expect them to take a hike with no company loyalty, is it any surprise when the workers live up to these expectations whenever it's convenient for them?
Your experience of In-n-Out Burger is quite different than mine, then. One of my buddies here in New England who originated on the west coast always raved about it... I tried it on a trip out to our offices in San Jose, and found it to be just more inedible crap.
The only two In-N-Out locations where I've ever had less than stellar service are in Silicon Valley - and even there it was only occasional. (The San Jose location near the 880/237 interchange, in particular, took a few months after it first opened to get their act together. The other was the Auto Mall store in Fremont - once, on the day the Chick Fill-A opened across the street.)
It only works while he is the only one doing it and getting massive coverage. As soon as he's out of the spotlight, they're going to have to get back to competing with the rest, but now have to deal with (possibly) inflated staffing costs.
ORLY?
It's worked for the west coast burger chain In-N-Out for decades. (They're NEARLY the oldest burger drive-through-and-eat-in in existence.)
Their people are very happy, very productive, and generally give extremely good service. With no advertising besides an occasional location-ahead billboard they're constantly swamped with customers. When the rest of the burger chains were having a strike, they were business as their (excellent) usual.
They pay their line people almost half-again what the typical fast-food chain pays, plus medical, dental, and vision for both full and PART time workers. This continues up the ranks to store manager as well.
Simple, good, ingredients and fast, friendly, happy service has done it for them pretty much since burger chains existed, and the competition hasn't caught on YET.
Also effectively banned, thanks to paranoia over its use in illegal drug manufacture, are most Iodine-containing preparations.
I found this out just after Fukishima. While the fallout was on its way to California I tried to get some potassium iodide pills to load our systems with NON-radioactive iodine before it arrived. And I discovered:
- No iodine suplements. (It's not that they were sold out - non of the chain stores OR health-food stores carried them anymore.)
- No iodine-based water purification tablets at the camping stores. (They'd gone to other chemicals and/or methods.)
- No tincture-of-iodine antiseptic for cuts.
- Not even iodine-based disclosing tablets for toothbrushing. The local compounding pharmacy offered to special-make some potassium-iodide pills (at a hefty price). But they didn't have the material in stock and would have had to order it from the manufacturer - with a delay of about a month. It would have arrived long after the fallout.
I found out from one of the stores what the problem was: Though the Federal Government hadn't actually BANNED iodine preparations, they'd put so much paperwork and inspection in place that it was no longer profitable to sell them. So all the retail outlets had switched to other alternatives or just quit carrying it.
This has been happening in several "private" schools for years.
It's been happening at least as far back as the late '40s:
For instance: The University of Michigan education department ran a laboratory school until a couple decades ago. Each class year initially admitted 30 boys and 30 girls. The students were subject to longitudinal tests for research as they progressed - so when someone had to leave (for instance, as a foreign exchange student) another was admitted to fill the place - and the student also readmitted upon return (to help make the longitudinal data retain accuracy). Thus a typical graduating class had maybe 33 or 34 of each sex.
They also served as the testbed for the actual teaching-a-class internship for School of Education students. So each one-year subject class was taught by a two-person team: A full professor of education and, for a half-year each, two college Education majors.
The education was superb, and slots for students were highly sought after. Children of high-ranking faculty (such as tenured professors) and officials were preferred - not just as an employment perk, but because they'd be less likely to move away, taking the kid, and thus corrupt the research data. (It also meant the school had access to a lot of data about the parents and perhaps other family members, who would typically be well disposed to its use in research.)
Given the quality of the education (and the financing of it by the school), there was a very long waiting list for openings. Many employees of the University would submit their kids' application as soon as they knew they were pregnant - which STILL wasn't any guarantee. (I only got into the school for my junior and senior high school years, when an opening for another boy finally occurred.)
The incident sounds similar to this one: [Russian air defence having first one, then several more, bogus detections of US missiles, in the days after they downed KAL 007, with Larry McDonald, US congressman from Georga, aboard, when it mis-navagated, over their secure base at Kamchatca and was mistaken for a spy plane.]
Rumor I heard about KAL 007: Former president Richard Nixon was scheduled to occupy the seat next to McDonald but had to cancel. It might have been a different story if the Soviets had downed a civilian plane with a former US President (and rabid anti-Communist) aboard.
I wonder if multi-verses are not at play: only "forked" realities in which we got "lucky" have us in it to ponder our luck. 99% of the forks got fried.
That's an interesting application of the Anthropic Principle.
One of the near-misses I read about was the commissioning of the DEW Line over-the-horizon early-warning radar.
There was some concern that the Russians might stage a pre-emptive strike just before it went into service. So the US put it into service a few days ahead of the announced date, disguised as a late-stage test of the equipment. The military and administration were prepared to react to the expected possible strike.
Some hours after the system went live it started showing volleys of missiles rising. Oops! Was it the feared attack? Was it time to retaliate, before the soviet missiles could wipe out that capability, leaving Russia in charge of a half-charred planet?
There was only one fly in the ointment: The system did not identify expected impact locations for the missiles. Failure of the computation, or a sign that this might be an illusion? (Remember this was 1957. Cray's first mainframe computer for CDC, with substantially less than 1 megaflop, was still three years in the future.)
The commander in charge smelled a rat, and recommended that the US NOT stage a "before their missiles wipe out most of our stuff" retaliatory strike, at least until we had other confirmation. The Russians actually WEREN'T attacking, so war-by-mistake was averted. It turns out that the radars had seen Moonrise. The moon was big enough to be visible by the sensitive over-the-horizon radars. But the round trip was long enough that several pulses had gone out meanwhile. The radar paired the returns with later pulses - and between that, the size of the moon, and other details came up with a fleet of targets. The imaginary targets were not on a ballistic trajectory (it looked like a "forced orbit" - orbiting with acceleration still occuring, rather than a ballistic trajectory - and even if you assume the "engine" would cut off right now and it went ballistic, the illusion wouldn't hit the planet). So the failure to identify expected impact locations was correct. Somehow, previous tests hadn't happened to occur at the right time of day for this effect to be noticed.
The system was modified to reject moonrise, went into service, and the Cold War stayed cold until it ended.
Being downwind of the atmospheric test blasts of Operation Upshot-Knothole was an early death warrant for some of the cast and crew of 1956's The Conquerer.
The Harry test released an unusually large amount of fallout [...] much of which later accumulated in the vicinity of St. George, Utah. [...] Two years after the blast, Howard Hughes filmed the motion picture The Conqueror near St. George. The cast and crew totaled 220 people. By the end of 1980, as ascertained by People magazine, 91 of them had some form of cancer and 46 had died of the disease.
[Howard Hughes] withdrew The Conqueror from circulation, and for years thereafter the only person who saw it was Hughes, who screened it night after night during his paranoid last years.
I'd heard that one of his hot buttons, during his recluse period, was fallout and nuclear tests. But I hadn't heard this story of the source of his fixation. Holy Cow!
Slashdot Mirror
Equal sign in my language COULD have been considered a unary do-nothing/"make a local copy" operator (i.e. "foo", "= foo", "= = foo" etc. are all the same thing - except that all but the first might not be acceptable as the target of an assignment, or might result in the store being discarded) - except that, as a special case, a single equal sign was explicitly forbidden to stand alone in an expression.
Correction:
Equal sign in my language COULD have been considered a unary do-nothing/"make a local copy" operator (i.e. "foo", "= foo", "= = foo" etc. are all the same thing) and stop there. If thinking that way, "= foo" IS "foo". Otherwise ":=" and "=:" wouldn't store anything. B-)
For completeness sake := is a blocking assignment. Meaning that the next instruction is not executed until the assignment is completed.
You also want a non-blocking assignment. The actual assignment is delayed (and may be overridden in following non-blocking assignments).
Had that: "=:", as with "+:" vs. ":+", etc. Like C's equal-sign-concatinated-with-unary-op semantics, the side the colon is on tells you whether the store occurs before or after the whatever.
Equal sign in my language COULD have been considered a unary do-nothing/"make a local copy" operator (i.e. "foo", "= foo", "= = foo" etc. are all the same thing - except that all but the first might not be acceptable as the target of an assignment, or might result in the store being discarded) - except that, as a special case, a single equal sign was explicitly forbidden to stand alone in an expression.
Yep, in reality with this and even the farming jobs. The truth is "wages that Americans won't accept".
Not just that. They're at wages that can't even be offered. For instance: Some (not all) of the social programs where H1-B workers aren't eligible don't require the employer contribution. So hiring a US worker - even at the same pay - is substantially more expensive.
One of the problems is that, in a very competitive environment where labor costs are large compared to differences in process costs, if ONE competitor takes advantage of a cheat and another does not, the non-cheater loses the competitive bids. Thus, if the regulations aren't enforced, all must cheat or go out of business.
One place you see this is in the construction industry, with the "undocumented" workers. US workers need not apply (and the jobs aren't offered.) Contractors can't stay in business employing them at mandated minimum wages, benefit levels, and safety standards (which they CAN get the government to enforce) when their competitors can hire workers for less and cheat on all of the above - which those not here legally can't try to get enforced without risking deportation, but can afford to live on (especially if their family is on public assistance).
So if the government is going to put these regulations in place, it must enforce them. The "Invisible Hand" will deliver a knockout punch to anybody who follows expensive, but unenforced, rules.
At competitive wages, you can always find people willing to do the job.
Yep. The trick is to keep the playing field level.
Shame about the fucking mess with = and ==.
When I did a "desk language" (a notation for writing code on paper notes, which might have had a compiler written for it later), about the time C was being developed (but before I had access to it), one of the things I did was carefully avoid items like that. One thing I did was ban the bare equal sign.
":=" Replacement (also: like C, unary ops had before and after replacement forms - by adding : the same way C adds =, i.e. ":+" and "+:"
"==" Equality
"===" Equivalence (Two variables are aliases for the same storage. Think "union" but as a separate "put these two things in the same storage / use this symbol (perhaps as a different type) for the same bits as that one" declaration.)
I also had the logical and bitwise operators swapped from the way C did it - because "||", "&&", etc. are mnemonic for a string of bits. (This proved to be the biggest stumbling block when I started coding in C.)
Why bother to guess, when the answer is in the article, and someone already posted the correct answer?
Because this time I didn't have enough time before a hard deadline, but thought some people might value my opinion anyhow. If I checked those items first, and the posting was still appropriate, I would not have had the time to compose and post it.
So I put the caveat right at the top:
- If a reader only wants something researched, he is free to stop right there and move on to another posting.
- If a reader values both my researched and my off-the-top-of-the-head postings, he knows this was the latter, and should check before trusting it.
Now I COULD have just posted it WITHOUT the caveat - as many posters do. Let me know if that's what you prefer. B-)
This is the "first crack in the wall" case. It brings all the guns possible to bear on the spooks.
If you can't get a win in the legal system when Attorney-client privilege and the right to legal council are at stake, and the investigative agencies are spying on lawyer/client communication and the research the lawyers do to support their court arguments, you might as well throw in the towel.
If you DO get a win, you've established that there are situations where the spying can be blocked. Then it's in the interest of all concerned, including the courts, to map out WHEN you can block them and when you can't. So there are a burst of little cases and the courts actually take them up. This fills in the "more populated areas of the map."
Does every American need to file suit to shut it down completely?
Rule of thumb for getting things to happen via the courts:
1) Find a slam-dunk case to establish a precedent. You're putting the first crack in the wall, establishing that there's something there.
2) Do (typically a small number of) additional cases to establish the extent of the precedent's application. Now that something is established, the courts switch from stonewall to map-it-out mode.
Prosecutors do this sort of stuff all the time. (That's why things like restricting freedom of the press and speech generally starts with going after child molesters and child pornography purveyors.)
But it works both ways. Here we have a case where government investigative agencies are going after the communications between lawyers and clients. That's a fundamental part of the legal system, so the actions of the spooks are likely to be as repellent to the judges at all levels as child molesters are to juries.
If the rulings on this case put the first crack in the wall, it should take no more than a handful more to get solid rules established about what the spooks can't do, and how to figure out when they did it and spank them.
After that, as with other rights, we'll be on the usual treadmill: The bad behavior will be reduced a lot; violations will occur, become more common, and eventually institutionalized - when not caught and fought; and intermittent suits will be needed now and then to trim it back and/or map out additional hands-off boundaries.
Did he prove he has standing to sue? Isn't that what most (all?) other lawsuits failed to do resulting in dismissal?
Just guessing:
- He's a lawyer (part of the legal system itself), suing over the phone info on himself and his firm.
- His, and his firm's, consultations with clients are privileged. So keeping records on who they talked to and when are a real infringement on a fundamental and recognized right. (It's not just "chilling" speech. Its chilling the right to an attorney.)
- The Snowden revelations show that these records are being kept on him - because they're being kept on EVERYONE. So he cleared the other hurdle that the secrecy of agency operations (including the gag order provisions of National Security Letters) usually raised.
So it looks like he's got enough to avoid the "no standing" excuse for courts to drop the hot potato.
The progressives have been very clear about trying to destroy the roots and symbols of rural culture in America. Religion and Guns? Clearly must be suppressed.
It's particularly significant when you realize that:
- The country was formed by and for "religious nuts with guns".
- The separation of church and state was both:
- Central to the beliefs of the Plymouth colony settlers (the "Separatists" - often conflated with the "Puritans" who settled a few tens of miles further north), and
- Written into the Bill of Rights by the leaders of several churches (who knew damn well that, if the government had an official church, it wouldn't be theirs, but WOULD lead to the same sort of religious suppression and/or religious wars that they came here to escape.)
From the viewpoint of the current "religious nuts with guns", the current suppression of the same is the result of a cultural war on them by later arrivals (including "The Ellis Island Crowd"), mainly lower-class descendants of serfs, who brought the elitist/royalist values the revolutionaries were trying to escape, and, rather than assimilating into the American Pluralist culture, decided to impose them, with the only substantial change being appointing themselves to a new class of nobles.
Did you just make all of that up? I can't find a single source that connects "redneck" with Native Americans, every definition I've seen ties it specifically to white people.
I got it from my wife - trained as a historian, a member of Phi Alpha Theta (the historical honor society), redneck, and raised as a part American Indian.
I'm not where I can consult her for references right now. If I think of it before this is off the front page I'll see if she can come up with some.
Yes, the term is used on rural whites. As I said above, the bit about insinuating American Indian admixture is one of the several allegedly derogatory slurs embedded in the package.
The names of a thousand hateful red necks.
"Redneck" is a racial slur. It insinuates that the target is, not just from a rural culture (especially - a poor white southern farmer), and not just sunburned on the back of his neck due to working outdoors with a short haircut, but also that he may be part American Indian. (It originates in a time where this was considered to be extremely "poor breeding", and many so-called "sundown towns" had laws requiring people with any American Indian genetics to be out of town by undown.
It currently has an implication that the pepole it is applied to are unintelligent and uneducated. (The space program proves the lie of this: Note the accents of the people involved. A substantial fraction of real rocket scientists are, and were, rednecks.) This slur dates at least to the Scopes Monkey Trial (which was largely a propaganda piece fomented by the mining interests to brand the miners, who were trying to unionize at the time, as igorant idiots in the urban east coast's public perception.)
Rule of thumb: If you don't self-identify as a redneck, and wouldn't use the "N" word, don't use the "R" word.
On the one hand, I'm not fond of black hats. On the other, that's really, really funny.
I'd have added a couple more "really"s if, instead of Gentoo, the bots switched 'em to OpenBSD
If they got it, they probably. needed a high security OS . B-)
When arctic ice melts, it doesn't lead to sea level rise, so as far as sea level rise is concerned.
Except for the drop-in-the-bucket part of it on land rather than in the Arcitc Ocean.
That's mostly Greenland and Iceland (which are really pretty small, though their position near the pole makes them look gigantic in Mercator projection maps.)
I hear there is joy in Iceland over their current warming trend. Though the recent retreat of their glaciers and improvement of their growing conditions is still far from that of the Medieval Optimum, they are once again able to grow some of the crops that were common there at the time.
Also, thickening of the ice doesn't slow global warming. Only growing ice extent can do that, by reducing albedo.
Which brings up the question of whether urban heat islands could be mitigated somewhat by switching from black asphalt and tar surfaces to painting the streets and roofs white?
Or, better yet, paint it with something like the new nanotech pigment that reflects (rather than absorbing and/or down-shifting) 97% of the incident light and only strongly couples to the "infrared window" where the atmosphere is transparent, "seeing" only the sun and the near-absolite-zero sky, not the infrafred from the greenhouse gasses and clouds. This results in a surface that, in full sunlight, is about 9 degrees F cooler that the surrounding air (and produce still more cooling when the sun is down).
Nine degrees F is about how much heating they're touting as a disaster, isn't it? Maybe we should paint whole continents. B-)
(Meanwhile, reducing the amount of energy used for air conditioning by deploying trick paint could cut a lot of fossil fuel use without degrading quality of life.)
The basic message is "we should leave the planet better off than we found it". Which is a good and admirable thing.
Hear hear!
The big problem is that nobody has a clear, and widely agreed-upon idea about what to do about it.
Even if the planet is warming, there are a number of steps between that and "We must stop it even if it takes us back to the stone age and kills off most of the population!" Most of the attention is on "Where's the temperature going?". That leaves out a number of others, starting with "Is it disastrous, bad, indifferent, good, or wonderful?"
And some of the options being put forth are fairly shady, dangerous, or just flat-out unacceptable. Sometimes two or three of those at once. [...] The whole "carbon credit" trading scheme has already proven totally shady, since it's a carte blanche license to pollute.
Provided you shovel a bunch of money into the carbon credit market, a substantial portion of which - to the tune of aggregate billions - went to the founders and operators of the market - notably, the same Al Gore who was pushing so hard to spread the idea that the science was "settled" and that ecogeddon was almost upon us unless the carbon content of the atmosphere was immediately reduced to pre-industrial levels, regardless of cost in money, freedom, and lives.
I notice the parent was moderated "flamebait". Whoosh!
... one reason it may be working for In-N-Out is that, traditionally, fast food workers are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Worker retention is a *big* issue with fast food places. A normal issue a fast food manager has to deal with is people just not showing up for work.
On the other hand, might not at least some of that behavior be the result of the low pay, rather than inherent in the workers themselves?
If the companies pay the workers as if they expect them to take a hike with no company loyalty, is it any surprise when the workers live up to these expectations whenever it's convenient for them?
They hijack database servers and use them for DDoS attacks?
That's like breaking into a bank and using its postage meter to send paper spam.
What's WRONG with these people?
Your experience of In-n-Out Burger is quite different than mine, then. One of my buddies here in New England who originated on the west coast always raved about it... I tried it on a trip out to our offices in San Jose, and found it to be just more inedible crap.
The only two In-N-Out locations where I've ever had less than stellar service are in Silicon Valley - and even there it was only occasional. (The San Jose location near the 880/237 interchange, in particular, took a few months after it first opened to get their act together. The other was the Auto Mall store in Fremont - once, on the day the Chick Fill-A opened across the street.)
It only works while he is the only one doing it and getting massive coverage. As soon as he's out of the spotlight, they're going to have to get back to competing with the rest, but now have to deal with (possibly) inflated staffing costs.
ORLY?
It's worked for the west coast burger chain In-N-Out for decades. (They're NEARLY the oldest burger drive-through-and-eat-in in existence.)
Their people are very happy, very productive, and generally give extremely good service. With no advertising besides an occasional location-ahead billboard they're constantly swamped with customers. When the rest of the burger chains were having a strike, they were business as their (excellent) usual.
They pay their line people almost half-again what the typical fast-food chain pays, plus medical, dental, and vision for both full and PART time workers. This continues up the ranks to store manager as well.
Simple, good, ingredients and fast, friendly, happy service has done it for them pretty much since burger chains existed, and the competition hasn't caught on YET.
Also effectively banned, thanks to paranoia over its use in illegal drug manufacture, are most Iodine-containing preparations.
I found this out just after Fukishima. While the fallout was on its way to California I tried to get some potassium iodide pills to load our systems with NON-radioactive iodine before it arrived. And I discovered:
- No iodine suplements. (It's not that they were sold out - non of the chain stores OR health-food stores carried them anymore.)
- No iodine-based water purification tablets at the camping stores. (They'd gone to other chemicals and/or methods.)
- No tincture-of-iodine antiseptic for cuts.
- Not even iodine-based disclosing tablets for toothbrushing.
The local compounding pharmacy offered to special-make some potassium-iodide pills (at a hefty price). But they didn't have the material in stock and would have had to order it from the manufacturer - with a delay of about a month. It would have arrived long after the fallout.
I found out from one of the stores what the problem was: Though the Federal Government hadn't actually BANNED iodine preparations, they'd put so much paperwork and inspection in place that it was no longer profitable to sell them. So all the retail outlets had switched to other alternatives or just quit carrying it.
This has been happening in several "private" schools for years.
It's been happening at least as far back as the late '40s:
For instance: The University of Michigan education department ran a laboratory school until a couple decades ago. Each class year initially admitted 30 boys and 30 girls. The students were subject to longitudinal tests for research as they progressed - so when someone had to leave (for instance, as a foreign exchange student) another was admitted to fill the place - and the student also readmitted upon return (to help make the longitudinal data retain accuracy). Thus a typical graduating class had maybe 33 or 34 of each sex.
They also served as the testbed for the actual teaching-a-class internship for School of Education students. So each one-year subject class was taught by a two-person team: A full professor of education and, for a half-year each, two college Education majors.
The education was superb, and slots for students were highly sought after. Children of high-ranking faculty (such as tenured professors) and officials were preferred - not just as an employment perk, but because they'd be less likely to move away, taking the kid, and thus corrupt the research data. (It also meant the school had access to a lot of data about the parents and perhaps other family members, who would typically be well disposed to its use in research.)
Given the quality of the education (and the financing of it by the school), there was a very long waiting list for openings. Many employees of the University would submit their kids' application as soon as they knew they were pregnant - which STILL wasn't any guarantee. (I only got into the school for my junior and senior high school years, when an opening for another boy finally occurred.)
The incident sounds similar to this one: [Russian air defence having first one, then several more, bogus detections of US missiles, in the days after they downed KAL 007, with Larry McDonald, US congressman from Georga, aboard, when it mis-navagated, over their secure base at Kamchatca and was mistaken for a spy plane.]
Rumor I heard about KAL 007: Former president Richard Nixon was scheduled to occupy the seat next to McDonald but had to cancel. It might have been a different story if the Soviets had downed a civilian plane with a former US President (and rabid anti-Communist) aboard.
I wonder if multi-verses are not at play: only "forked" realities in which we got "lucky" have us in it to ponder our luck. 99% of the forks got fried.
That's an interesting application of the Anthropic Principle.
One of the near-misses I read about was the commissioning of the DEW Line over-the-horizon early-warning radar.
There was some concern that the Russians might stage a pre-emptive strike just before it went into service. So the US put it into service a few days ahead of the announced date, disguised as a late-stage test of the equipment. The military and administration were prepared to react to the expected possible strike.
Some hours after the system went live it started showing volleys of missiles rising. Oops! Was it the feared attack? Was it time to retaliate, before the soviet missiles could wipe out that capability, leaving Russia in charge of a half-charred planet?
There was only one fly in the ointment: The system did not identify expected impact locations for the missiles. Failure of the computation, or a sign that this might be an illusion? (Remember this was 1957. Cray's first mainframe computer for CDC, with substantially less than 1 megaflop, was still three years in the future.)
The commander in charge smelled a rat, and recommended that the US NOT stage a "before their missiles wipe out most of our stuff" retaliatory strike, at least until we had other confirmation. The Russians actually WEREN'T attacking, so war-by-mistake was averted.
It turns out that the radars had seen Moonrise. The moon was big enough to be visible by the sensitive over-the-horizon radars. But the round trip was long enough that several pulses had gone out meanwhile. The radar paired the returns with later pulses - and between that, the size of the moon, and other details came up with a fleet of targets. The imaginary targets were not on a ballistic trajectory (it looked like a "forced orbit" - orbiting with acceleration still occuring, rather than a ballistic trajectory - and even if you assume the "engine" would cut off right now and it went ballistic, the illusion wouldn't hit the planet). So the failure to identify expected impact locations was correct. Somehow, previous tests hadn't happened to occur at the right time of day for this effect to be noticed.
The system was modified to reject moonrise, went into service, and the Cold War stayed cold until it ended.
Being downwind of the atmospheric test blasts of Operation Upshot-Knothole was an early death warrant for some of the cast and crew of 1956's The Conquerer.
I'd heard that one of his hot buttons, during his recluse period, was fallout and nuclear tests. But I hadn't heard this story of the source of his fixation. Holy Cow!