Calling computer languages "languages" is a metaphor that was convenient and imaginative at the time somebody first used it. It's like calling mathematics the language of science.
But they're not languages in the original sense of the term. They don't do all the other things we associate with language. Nobody grows up speaking C. Nobody tries to communicate with somebody in a foreign country using C. Nobody writes poetry in C.
For the most practical example, it's a big help if you're working in a company and you have at least one or two people who speaks the language of every country you're liable to do business in.
Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a Democrat, and went on to become a U.S. Senator.
Moynihan was liberal by today's standards, and he influenced Nixon on many of his policies. One of them was the guaranteed annual income (which Frederich von Hayeck also believed in).
Nixon also proposed a health plan which was probably more liberal than Obamacare.
One of the reasons some liberals hated Nixon was that he threw in his lot with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The story I heard was that he won his Congressional seat against Helen Gahagan Douglas by accusing her of being sympathetic to Communism. But other "liberals" were just as anti-Communist as Nixon.
It is true that in Nassau County, on Long Island, New York, when Alfonse D'Amato was county commissioner, you had to be a registered Republican and contribute to the Republican party to get a job.
After D'Amato left Long Island to become Senator from New York, he was involved in a lawsuit where both sides subpoenaed documents and filed them in court.
One letter showed up in which D'Amato was discussing with another Republican how much civil servants should be required to contribute to the Republican Party to keep their jobs. They were trying to decide whether it should be 2% or 3%.
Because the statutes of limitations had expired, D'Amato couldn't be prosecuted for that.
A friend of mine who lived on Long Island told me that when his daughter applied for a summer job as a lifeguard on the beach, the person who took the application told her that in order to get the job her parents had to be members of the Republican Party. The person said that if they weren't Republicans, she might as well not waste everybody's time filling out the application, because they would check.
Uber is doing background checks on drivers - at least as well as cab companies. Probably better because who can say how many cab drivers make it in via political favors?
That's what they claim but the facts don't support that. If anyone is making it by political favors, it's Uber. In California, Colorado and Illinois, they got themselves exempted from the taxi background checks by hiring lobbying firms and lobbying legislators.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12... Uber’s System for Screening Drivers Draws Scrutiny By MIKE ISAAC DEC. 9, 2014 Uber uses Hirease, a private company that says it has an average turnaround time of “less than 36 hours.” Both services do drug and alcohol testing, but neither does fingerprint testing. And they rely primarily on publicly available information. Although state background checks for taxi drivers vary by jurisdiction, lawmakers say they are generally more rigorous than either of these services. They usually include searches of private databases like F.B.I. records, gaining consent from prospective drivers for those searches, In California, those drivers must undergo checks by the state’s Justice Department, including fingerprint scanning, drug and alcohol testing, and searches of private databases. A check can take as little as three days, but as long as eight weeks. (Uber defeated bills to require the same checks, including fingerprints, required for taxi and limousine drivers, in California, Colorado, and Illinois.)
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/n... Risky Ride: Who's Behind the Wheel of Uber Cars? How safe is Uber? The NBC4 ITeam investigates. By Joel Grover and Keith Esparros Friday, May 2, 2014 Beverly Locke did. Working with the NBC4 I-Team, Locke filled out all the necessary documentation needed to become an Uber driver.... On her first day "on the job," she received a request from Paolo, a frequent UberX user, who was looking for a ride from his Hollywood apartment. He is an Uber fan. "I use cabs a lot," said Paolo. "And, it's almost half the fare in Uber than for a taxi driver." His phone lit up with a picture of Locke, and a message that said Beverly will pick him up in three minutes. What he didn't know is that Beverly was an ex-con with a violent past. Her 20-year rap sheet includes burglary, cocaine possession, and making criminal threats with the intent to cause death or bodily injury. "I pulled a girl out of a car and almost beat her to death," said Locke, who described herself as a reformed criminal with a good job and a desire to make up for her past. "I do not do criminal things anymore." NBC4 asked Locke to cancel the ride, so the former convict never actually carried a passenger. But the NBC4 I-Team found several examples in which drivers with a criminal past have picked up Uber passengers. Tadeusz Szczechowicz drove the streets of Chicago for a year, despite five prior arrests and two convictions for burglary and disorderly conduct. Syed Muzzafar had a prior conviction for reckless driving, but he cleared the Uber background check and was behind the wheel New Year's Eve when he was arrested for hitting and killing a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco. And, Jigneshkumar Patel was arrested for battery of an UberX passenger, a charge he said is "rubbish." Still, the UberX driver had a 2012 conviction for DUI. Uber declined to talk to NBC4 directly, but did send emails describing corporate policy on background checks. A message said Uber "leads the industry" with its "best-in-class background checks for drivers." Uber also said it has a "zero tolerance" policy for drug and alcohol offenses, and said it carefully screens applicants and immediately disqualif
The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" means that there should be quite a few dangerous people out there.
And if you refuse to hire people because of supposedly baseless accusations made against them, you can get sued for that too!
Why should it be okay for employers to consider applicants guilty until proven otherwise?
There are different levels of evidence for different purposes.
Convicting someone of a crime in the U.S. requires the highest level of evidence: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Suing somebody for damages in civil courts requires a lower level of evidence: a preponderance of evidence (more than 50%). That's why people (like O.J. Simpson) who are acquitted of a crime can lose a civil suit against them for damages.
Hiring somebody for a job in the U.S. requires the lowest level of evidence of all: employment at will. An employer can say, "That guy just doesn't seem right. I have a bad feeling about him. I don't want to hire him." And there's nothing the job applicants can do about it. The only exceptions are categories specifically prohibited by law, like race, gender, and age.
An employer would have a right to reject someone for a job where he has to meet the public if he's been arrested for rape. There may be rare exceptions but I can't imagine what they would be.
They would randomly choose "zones" in NYC, and charge for surge pricing in some, and not charge in others.
Then they could provide data to tell us how the demand for Uber vehicles matched the supply.
My guess: you would see more demand than supply in the areas with no surge pricing. Which is pretty banal. What might be interesting is to see the magnitude of the difference.
The factor that limits the number of cabs on the street is not the willingness of cab drivers to work, it's the number of medallions the City issues. If they wanted more cabs, they could just issue more mediallions.
The main problem with that is that the (public) streets have limited capacity, and more cabs would cause more traffic jams, with the end result that nobody could get through the (public) streets. I know that every day at 6pm 9th Avenue is jammed with bumper-to-bumper traffic, and I can walk faster than a cab.
This move by the AG office shows a complete lack of understanding of basic economics.
Have you ever considered the AG office understands exactly what they're doing, and prefer the negative consequences?
Or have you considered that the AG office understands basic economics and realizes that these claims of shortages unless we have surge pricing are bullshit?
I love the pharmaceutical companies that sell their cancer drugs for $100,000 a year, and say, "This is value pricing. This is what your life is worth."
Even when the original research for the drug was done by academic researchers with federal government grants. Even when they sell the same drug for half the price to national health care systems in Canada, England, and other places where the government is a tough negotiator.
Nobody wants to be out running a car service in a blizzard.
I've gotten cabs in blizzards in New York City just like any other days. There are lots of cab drivers willing to drive in any weather for $25-30 an hour.
My friends from Michigan tell me that a major storm in New York City is like their daily commute to work in Ann Arbor in winter.
How does this work? I mean it makes sense that you could drive in an emergency (getting someone to hospital, etc). Could a Taxi service offer an "emergency only" service?
From what I heard on the radio, it sounds as if the cops will enforce the ban with discretion. If you're driving to the hospital in an emergency, they'll let you go. If you're a cop or a doctor getting to his job, they'll let you go. Otherwise, there's a fine of about $1,000.
Or conversely, you should not be able to pay out the nose for it, and the driver will realize the risks and hazards of driving in the weather event, and will refrain from doing so, because the potential reward isn't worth it.
The risks and hazards of driving in bad weather are part of the job, and no big deal. If the risks were too great the police would close the roads. There are plenty of cab drivers who are willing to drive in the snow for $25 or $30 an hour. They have plenty of drivers driving snow plows.
And if there are hazards to driving in bad weather, who would you rather drive you -- a cab driver who's been driving in all kinds of weather for 60 hours a week, for 20 years, or some kid who's doing it a couple of hours a month in his free time?
The purpose of the elastic pricing was to make sure that there was always a nice supply of drivers. Cap the prices, and you won't have as many drivers available to drive you around in the snow. Econ 101, right?
Econ 101 has a lot of simple models that seem plausible. Then you have to go out in the world and see if the world actually works as you predicted. Or whether there's something you left out of your simple model.
Drivers want higher rates, but they also want higher volume. If you're one of the few cabs on the road, you'll spend more time carrying fares and less time cruising for passengers. So if they know there's a shortage of cabs, they'll get into their cabs and go out and make money. That's also Econ 101.
It's not that big a deal to drive in the snow, if you're prepared for it. If you're a cab driver (or any competent driver) you should be able to do it with no problems. There are lots of people who are willing to drive for $25 an hour or so, which is about what Uber and yellow cab drivers make. You don't have to bid them up to $75 an hour.
These assholes at Anonymous are so stupid that they identify people with the same name as the criminals. In other words, they're just as stupid as Homeland Security.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sp... Spike Lee retweets incorrect address of George Zimmerman, violates Twitter rules By Chenda Ngak CBS News December 13, 2012, 4:03 PM
Self-styled vigilantes attacked the home of a hospital paediatrician after apparently confusing her professional title with the word "paedophile", it emerged yesterday.
Dr Yvette Cloete, a specialist registrar in paediatric medicine at the Royal Gwent hospital in Newport, was forced to flee her house after vandals daubed it with graffiti in the middle of the night.
The word "paedo" was written across the front porch and door of the house she shared with her brother in the village of St Brides, south Wales.
Gwent police confirmed that the attack last Friday night was prompted by a confusion over the words "paedophile" and "paediatrician".
The suit should be against the company making the vaccine because it failed to work as advertised. That's if you are actually desiring to blame the party that failed to uphold its own end of the deal (and not other people for failing to agree with you).
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vp... How effective is MMR vaccine? More than 95% of the people who receive a single dose of MMR will develop immunity to all 3 viruses. A second vaccine dose gives immunity to almost all of those who did not respond to the first dose.
That's what manufacturers advertise, and that's the deal they have to uphold. Something like 1/1,000 people who get two doses will not get immunity. If everybody got two doses of MMR, the viruses wouldn't propagate, and those 1/1,000 people would be safe because of herd immunity. If some stupid, selfish people refuse to get vaccinated, they're putting those 1/1,000 people at risk. Those stupid, selfish people are responsible for the deaths of those 1/1,000 people. They should be forced to choose between getting vaccinated, or being quarantined all their lives like Typhoid Mary. The law on that goes back hundreds of years, to European law.
Most people would be shocked to learn that over 80% of what doctors practice has no scientific basis whatsoever. Evidence-based medicine is a relatively small part of things. It's a classic case of sheeple following authority (oh noes, he said sheeple to describe people who act like herd animals instead of being individuals, that bastard, we hate him now!).
90% of statistics, including yours, are bullshit.
In the UK, doctors work for the government, and NICE reviews the scientific evidence behind every treatment for effectiveness. No effectiveness, no treatment. I've read the NICE studies and they do a pretty good job.
In the US, Medicare, Medicaid and the private insurance companies also review medical treatments for effectiveness, although politics has more influence here. Also doctors who are making money in the free market are more likely to do things just because they can make money out of them. And consumers are mostly stupid. So they give antibiotics to everybody who comes in with a cold.
No it's not. Just because DDT doesn't increase the risk of breast cancer that it is somehow safe.
A Lancet review of epidemiological studies concluded that that DDT causes cancers of the liver, and pancreas, that there is mixed evidence that it causes cancers of the testes, and that it probably does not contribute to cancers of the rectum, prostate, endometrium, lung, or stomach.
(Rogan WJ, Chen A (2005). "Health risks and benefits of bis(4-chlorophenyl)-1,1,1-trichloroethane (DDT)". Lancet 366 (9487): 763–73.)
Not true. From the Lancet article:
Cancer
Although extensively studied, there is no convincing evidence that DDT or its metabolite DDE increase human cancer risk. Mainly on the basis of animal data, DDT is classified as a possible carcinogen (class 2B) by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)35 and as a reasonably anticipated human carcinogen by the US National Toxicology Program.36
DDT is linked with a lot of development problems - especially at the levels needed for malaria eradication.
Not quite. According to the article:
subsequent research has shown that exposure to DDT at amounts that would be needed in malaria control might cause preterm birth and early weaning
The significant word is might.
I think it's healthy that we're debating whether or not a chemical, that has both beneficial and harmful effects, should be used - but risk assessment isn't cut and dry.
I wish I had the actual news story to show you. The point was, he believed exactly what you do. But it wasn't true.
He thought that he could confess, retract the confession, and they couldn't convict him without some other evidence, because he wasn't really guilty.
He believed false convictions in a murder case just couldn't happen in this country.
However, as the New Yorker article said http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... when a jury has a confession, they always believe it. Even if the suspect retracts it, even he was manipulated into confessing, even if the police lied, and even if there's independent evidence that he's innocent.
Those kids really screwed the public over with their lies. We wasted over a million dollars and well over two man-years because they decided to lie and take credit for something they didn't do. I was shocked when I was in NYC in 2002 when they were released. There was no talk of charging for their crimes. They kept the police from pursuing the real rapist which allowed him to hurt other women. They are responsible.
The kids weren't responsible for those lies. They told the truth at first. They were coerced, manipulated and told to lie by the cops, who used methods like the Reid Technique which have been proven to produce false confessions. The cops were responsible for those lies, for wasting over a million dollars and for not convicting the real rapist. And that's what the courts decided when they awarded the kids millions in damages.
You might as well prosecute the defendants in the Stalin purge trials for lying.
Well actually you can walk into a police office and tell them you just murdered somebody, but unless they can prove it you'll never go to court, never mind go to jail.
Somebody actually did that and wound up getting convicted and sent to jail.
As I recall, he was in one state (Florida?) and didn't have money to get home to another state (New York?) so he walked into a police station and "confessed" to a crime he never committed. He thought he could just revoke the confession when he got home, but it didn't work that way. Once you confess to something, the juries always convict.
I think he was finally released after many years in jail.
It's one of the few things that are quite black and white, either someone committed a crime or he did not.
A plea bargain is not someone saying they partially committed a crime, it is them admitting full guilt to a crime.
In reality, a plea bargain is a strategic decision by a defendant or his lawyer that he would be better off taking a shorter sentence in a plea bargain than go to court, and get a much longer sentence if he loses.
I've seen typical plea bargain of 6 months, which is time served, versus 15 years if he loses in court.
Some judges insist on a legal fiction that the defendant is voluntarily admitting to the crime, but everybody knows that it's not voluntary and people are often forced to falsely admit to crimes to avoid the risk of a much worse sentence by a vindictive prosecutor.
Lawyers have cases on file where people pled guilty to avoid a much longer sentence, and were exonerated afterwards.
The courts are punishing people for exercising their constitutional right to a trial. The most outrageous thing is that the Supreme Court approved it.
What happens is the cops wear the suspect down. They go on for hours, insisting that the suspect is wrong, that they have conclusive evidence, and that if they confess it will go better for them (or even that if they confess, they can go home). They try to get the suspect actually believing that he might have done it, if these authority figures say so with such confidence.
The New Yorker story had an example of this:
I saw this effect in a video of an interrogation that an Iowa defense attorney sent me. His client, a young man who was eighteen at the time of the interview, had been wrongly accused of molesting a three-year-old girl at the day-care center where he worked. The detective never raised his voice or appeared anything other than sympathetic. But, in under two hours, he had the young man saying that he had blanked out and fondled the little girl. As if in a trance, the young man said, “I know it happened but I don’t remember any of it. . . . I guess it must have happened.” After a break in the interrogation, during which the young man was allowed to see his sister, he retracted his confession and maintained his innocence. The district attorney dropped the charges.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling computer languages "languages" is a metaphor that was convenient and imaginative at the time somebody first used it. It's like calling mathematics the language of science.
But they're not languages in the original sense of the term. They don't do all the other things we associate with language. Nobody grows up speaking C. Nobody tries to communicate with somebody in a foreign country using C. Nobody writes poetry in C.
For the most practical example, it's a big help if you're working in a company and you have at least one or two people who speaks the language of every country you're liable to do business in.
Nixon is a liberal by today's standards.
You laugh, but it's true.
Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a Democrat, and went on to become a U.S. Senator.
Moynihan was liberal by today's standards, and he influenced Nixon on many of his policies. One of them was the guaranteed annual income (which Frederich von Hayeck also believed in).
Nixon also proposed a health plan which was probably more liberal than Obamacare.
One of the reasons some liberals hated Nixon was that he threw in his lot with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The story I heard was that he won his Congressional seat against Helen Gahagan Douglas by accusing her of being sympathetic to Communism. But other "liberals" were just as anti-Communist as Nixon.
I understand that some Indians are also lawyers
Some Indian lawyers have families.
Therefore, some Indians have lawyers in the family.
It is true that in Nassau County, on Long Island, New York, when Alfonse D'Amato was county commissioner, you had to be a registered Republican and contribute to the Republican party to get a job.
After D'Amato left Long Island to become Senator from New York, he was involved in a lawsuit where both sides subpoenaed documents and filed them in court.
One letter showed up in which D'Amato was discussing with another Republican how much civil servants should be required to contribute to the Republican Party to keep their jobs. They were trying to decide whether it should be 2% or 3%.
Because the statutes of limitations had expired, D'Amato couldn't be prosecuted for that.
A friend of mine who lived on Long Island told me that when his daughter applied for a summer job as a lifeguard on the beach, the person who took the application told her that in order to get the job her parents had to be members of the Republican Party. The person said that if they weren't Republicans, she might as well not waste everybody's time filling out the application, because they would check.
But I don't know if that applies to taxi drivers.
If they refuse to play by the same rules,
Uber is doing background checks on drivers - at least as well as cab companies. Probably better because who can say how many cab drivers make it in via political favors?
That's what they claim but the facts don't support that. If anyone is making it by political favors, it's Uber. In California, Colorado and Illinois, they got themselves exempted from the taxi background checks by hiring lobbying firms and lobbying legislators.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
Uber’s System for Screening Drivers Draws Scrutiny
By MIKE ISAAC
DEC. 9, 2014
Uber uses Hirease, a private company that says it has an average turnaround time of “less than 36 hours.”
Both services do drug and alcohol testing, but neither does fingerprint testing. And they rely primarily on publicly available information.
Although state background checks for taxi drivers vary by jurisdiction, lawmakers say they are generally more rigorous than either of these services. They usually include searches of private databases like F.B.I. records, gaining consent from prospective drivers for those searches,
In California, those drivers must undergo checks by the state’s Justice Department, including fingerprint scanning, drug and alcohol testing, and searches of private databases. A check can take as little as three days, but as long as eight weeks.
(Uber defeated bills to require the same checks, including fingerprints, required for taxi and limousine drivers, in California, Colorado, and Illinois.)
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/n...
Risky Ride: Who's Behind the Wheel of Uber Cars?
How safe is Uber? The NBC4 ITeam investigates.
By Joel Grover and Keith Esparros
Friday, May 2, 2014
Beverly Locke did. Working with the NBC4 I-Team, Locke filled out all the necessary documentation needed to become an Uber driver....
On her first day "on the job," she received a request from Paolo, a frequent UberX user, who was looking for a ride from his Hollywood apartment. He is an Uber fan.
"I use cabs a lot," said Paolo. "And, it's almost half the fare in Uber than for a taxi driver."
His phone lit up with a picture of Locke, and a message that said Beverly will pick him up in three minutes.
What he didn't know is that Beverly was an ex-con with a violent past. Her 20-year rap sheet includes burglary, cocaine possession, and making criminal threats with the intent to cause death or bodily injury.
"I pulled a girl out of a car and almost beat her to death," said Locke, who described herself as a reformed criminal with a good job and a desire to make up for her past. "I do not do criminal things anymore."
NBC4 asked Locke to cancel the ride, so the former convict never actually carried a passenger. But the NBC4 I-Team found several examples in which drivers with a criminal past have picked up Uber passengers.
Tadeusz Szczechowicz drove the streets of Chicago for a year, despite five prior arrests and two convictions for burglary and disorderly conduct.
Syed Muzzafar had a prior conviction for reckless driving, but he cleared the Uber background check and was behind the wheel New Year's Eve when he was arrested for hitting and killing a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco.
And, Jigneshkumar Patel was arrested for battery of an UberX passenger, a charge he said is "rubbish." Still, the UberX driver had a 2012 conviction for DUI.
Uber declined to talk to NBC4 directly, but did send emails describing corporate policy on background checks. A message said Uber "leads the industry" with its "best-in-class background checks for drivers."
Uber also said it has a "zero tolerance" policy for drug and alcohol offenses, and said it carefully screens applicants and immediately disqualif
The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" means that there should be quite a few dangerous people out there.
And if you refuse to hire people because of supposedly baseless accusations made against them, you can get sued for that too!
Why should it be okay for employers to consider applicants guilty until proven otherwise?
There are different levels of evidence for different purposes.
Convicting someone of a crime in the U.S. requires the highest level of evidence: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Suing somebody for damages in civil courts requires a lower level of evidence: a preponderance of evidence (more than 50%). That's why people (like O.J. Simpson) who are acquitted of a crime can lose a civil suit against them for damages.
Hiring somebody for a job in the U.S. requires the lowest level of evidence of all: employment at will. An employer can say, "That guy just doesn't seem right. I have a bad feeling about him. I don't want to hire him." And there's nothing the job applicants can do about it. The only exceptions are categories specifically prohibited by law, like race, gender, and age.
An employer would have a right to reject someone for a job where he has to meet the public if he's been arrested for rape. There may be rare exceptions but I can't imagine what they would be.
They would randomly choose "zones" in NYC, and charge for surge pricing in some, and not charge in others.
Then they could provide data to tell us how the demand for Uber vehicles matched the supply.
My guess: you would see more demand than supply in the areas with no surge pricing. Which is pretty banal. What might be interesting is to see the magnitude of the difference.
The factor that limits the number of cabs on the street is not the willingness of cab drivers to work, it's the number of medallions the City issues. If they wanted more cabs, they could just issue more mediallions.
The main problem with that is that the (public) streets have limited capacity, and more cabs would cause more traffic jams, with the end result that nobody could get through the (public) streets. I know that every day at 6pm 9th Avenue is jammed with bumper-to-bumper traffic, and I can walk faster than a cab.
This move by the AG office shows a complete lack of understanding of basic economics.
Have you ever considered the AG office understands exactly what they're doing, and prefer the negative consequences?
Or have you considered that the AG office understands basic economics and realizes that these claims of shortages unless we have surge pricing are bullshit?
There's no such thing as "price gouging".
If you don't like the price, don't buy the thing.
I love the pharmaceutical companies that sell their cancer drugs for $100,000 a year, and say, "This is value pricing. This is what your life is worth."
Even when the original research for the drug was done by academic researchers with federal government grants. Even when they sell the same drug for half the price to national health care systems in Canada, England, and other places where the government is a tough negotiator.
Nobody wants to be out running a car service in a blizzard.
I've gotten cabs in blizzards in New York City just like any other days. There are lots of cab drivers willing to drive in any weather for $25-30 an hour.
My friends from Michigan tell me that a major storm in New York City is like their daily commute to work in Ann Arbor in winter.
Most of the affected area seems to have one.
How does this work? I mean it makes sense that you could drive in an emergency (getting someone to hospital, etc). Could a Taxi service offer an "emergency only" service?
From what I heard on the radio, it sounds as if the cops will enforce the ban with discretion. If you're driving to the hospital in an emergency, they'll let you go. If you're a cop or a doctor getting to his job, they'll let you go. Otherwise, there's a fine of about $1,000.
Or conversely, you should not be able to pay out the nose for it, and the driver will realize the risks and hazards of driving in the weather event, and will refrain from doing so, because the potential reward isn't worth it.
The risks and hazards of driving in bad weather are part of the job, and no big deal. If the risks were too great the police would close the roads. There are plenty of cab drivers who are willing to drive in the snow for $25 or $30 an hour. They have plenty of drivers driving snow plows.
And if there are hazards to driving in bad weather, who would you rather drive you -- a cab driver who's been driving in all kinds of weather for 60 hours a week, for 20 years, or some kid who's doing it a couple of hours a month in his free time?
The purpose of the elastic pricing was to make sure that there was always a nice supply of drivers. Cap the prices, and you won't have as many drivers available to drive you around in the snow. Econ 101, right?
Econ 101 has a lot of simple models that seem plausible. Then you have to go out in the world and see if the world actually works as you predicted. Or whether there's something you left out of your simple model.
Drivers want higher rates, but they also want higher volume. If you're one of the few cabs on the road, you'll spend more time carrying fares and less time cruising for passengers. So if they know there's a shortage of cabs, they'll get into their cabs and go out and make money. That's also Econ 101.
It's not that big a deal to drive in the snow, if you're prepared for it. If you're a cab driver (or any competent driver) you should be able to do it with no problems. There are lots of people who are willing to drive for $25 an hour or so, which is about what Uber and yellow cab drivers make. You don't have to bid them up to $75 an hour.
Given people are so fucking stupid they will attack paediatricians thinking they are paedophiles
That really is true, btw.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/...
Doctor driven out of home by vigilantes
RTFA, they are collecting official case information, not internet rumors. Don't worry about your nonexistent wife or girlfriend.
Oh, that's reassuring. They're collecting official unverified accusations, from reliable sources like anonymous reporting lines.
These assholes at Anonymous are so stupid that they identify people with the same name as the criminals. In other words, they're just as stupid as Homeland Security.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sp...
Spike Lee retweets incorrect address of George Zimmerman, violates Twitter rules
By Chenda Ngak CBS News December 13, 2012, 4:03 PM
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/...
Self-styled vigilantes attacked the home of a hospital paediatrician after apparently confusing her professional title with the word "paedophile", it emerged yesterday.
Dr Yvette Cloete, a specialist registrar in paediatric medicine at the Royal Gwent hospital in Newport, was forced to flee her house after vandals daubed it with graffiti in the middle of the night.
The word "paedo" was written across the front porch and door of the house she shared with her brother in the village of St Brides, south Wales.
Gwent police confirmed that the attack last Friday night was prompted by a confusion over the words "paedophile" and "paediatrician".
i keep hearing about this social contract, I never seen it, i never signed it. I had no choice in my being.
That's right. There is no social contract. I'm free to do whatever I want. I can kill you if I want. Now give me all your money or I'll shoot you.
The suit should be against the company making the vaccine because it failed to work as advertised. That's if you are actually desiring to blame the party that failed to uphold its own end of the deal (and not other people for failing to agree with you).
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vp...
How effective is MMR vaccine?
More than 95% of the people who receive a single dose of MMR will develop immunity to all 3 viruses. A second vaccine dose gives immunity to almost all of those who did not respond to the first dose.
That's what manufacturers advertise, and that's the deal they have to uphold. Something like 1/1,000 people who get two doses will not get immunity. If everybody got two doses of MMR, the viruses wouldn't propagate, and those 1/1,000 people would be safe because of herd immunity. If some stupid, selfish people refuse to get vaccinated, they're putting those 1/1,000 people at risk. Those stupid, selfish people are responsible for the deaths of those 1/1,000 people. They should be forced to choose between getting vaccinated, or being quarantined all their lives like Typhoid Mary. The law on that goes back hundreds of years, to European law.
Most people would be shocked to learn that over 80% of what doctors practice has no scientific basis whatsoever. Evidence-based medicine is a relatively small part of things. It's a classic case of sheeple following authority (oh noes, he said sheeple to describe people who act like herd animals instead of being individuals, that bastard, we hate him now!).
90% of statistics, including yours, are bullshit.
In the UK, doctors work for the government, and NICE reviews the scientific evidence behind every treatment for effectiveness. No effectiveness, no treatment. I've read the NICE studies and they do a pretty good job.
In the US, Medicare, Medicaid and the private insurance companies also review medical treatments for effectiveness, although politics has more influence here. Also doctors who are making money in the free market are more likely to do things just because they can make money out of them. And consumers are mostly stupid. So they give antibiotics to everybody who comes in with a cold.
No it's not. Just because DDT doesn't increase the risk of breast cancer that it is somehow safe.
A Lancet review of epidemiological studies concluded that that DDT causes cancers of the liver, and pancreas, that there is mixed evidence that it causes cancers of the testes, and that it probably does not contribute to cancers of the rectum, prostate, endometrium, lung, or stomach.
(Rogan WJ, Chen A (2005). "Health risks and benefits of bis(4-chlorophenyl)-1,1,1-trichloroethane (DDT)". Lancet 366 (9487): 763–73.)
Not true. From the Lancet article:
Cancer
Although extensively studied, there is no convincing evidence that DDT or its metabolite DDE increase human cancer risk. Mainly on the basis of animal data, DDT is classified as a possible carcinogen (class 2B) by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)35 and as a reasonably anticipated human carcinogen by the US National Toxicology Program.36
DDT is linked with a lot of development problems - especially at the levels needed for malaria eradication.
Not quite. According to the article:
subsequent research has shown that exposure to DDT at amounts that would be needed in malaria control might cause preterm birth and early weaning
The significant word is might.
I think it's healthy that we're debating whether or not a chemical, that has both beneficial and harmful effects, should be used - but risk assessment isn't cut and dry.
Yes, more grants for chemists!
I wish I had the actual news story to show you. The point was, he believed exactly what you do. But it wasn't true.
He thought that he could confess, retract the confession, and they couldn't convict him without some other evidence, because he wasn't really guilty.
He believed false convictions in a murder case just couldn't happen in this country.
However, as the New Yorker article said http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... when a jury has a confession, they always believe it. Even if the suspect retracts it, even he was manipulated into confessing, even if the police lied, and even if there's independent evidence that he's innocent.
Those kids really screwed the public over with their lies. We wasted over a million dollars and well over two man-years because they decided to lie and take credit for something they didn't do. I was shocked when I was in NYC in 2002 when they were released. There was no talk of charging for their crimes. They kept the police from pursuing the real rapist which allowed him to hurt other women. They are responsible.
The kids weren't responsible for those lies. They told the truth at first. They were coerced, manipulated and told to lie by the cops, who used methods like the Reid Technique which have been proven to produce false confessions. The cops were responsible for those lies, for wasting over a million dollars and for not convicting the real rapist. And that's what the courts decided when they awarded the kids millions in damages.
You might as well prosecute the defendants in the Stalin purge trials for lying.
Well actually you can walk into a police office and tell them you just murdered somebody, but unless they can prove it you'll never go to court, never mind go to jail.
Somebody actually did that and wound up getting convicted and sent to jail.
As I recall, he was in one state (Florida?) and didn't have money to get home to another state (New York?) so he walked into a police station and "confessed" to a crime he never committed. He thought he could just revoke the confession when he got home, but it didn't work that way. Once you confess to something, the juries always convict.
I think he was finally released after many years in jail.
It's one of the few things that are quite black and white, either someone committed a crime or he did not.
A plea bargain is not someone saying they partially committed a crime, it is them admitting full guilt to a crime.
In reality, a plea bargain is a strategic decision by a defendant or his lawyer that he would be better off taking a shorter sentence in a plea bargain than go to court, and get a much longer sentence if he loses.
I've seen typical plea bargain of 6 months, which is time served, versus 15 years if he loses in court.
Some judges insist on a legal fiction that the defendant is voluntarily admitting to the crime, but everybody knows that it's not voluntary and people are often forced to falsely admit to crimes to avoid the risk of a much worse sentence by a vindictive prosecutor.
Lawyers have cases on file where people pled guilty to avoid a much longer sentence, and were exonerated afterwards.
The courts are punishing people for exercising their constitutional right to a trial. The most outrageous thing is that the Supreme Court approved it.
That's not what the research says. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
What happens is the cops wear the suspect down. They go on for hours, insisting that the suspect is wrong, that they have conclusive evidence, and that if they confess it will go better for them (or even that if they confess, they can go home). They try to get the suspect actually believing that he might have done it, if these authority figures say so with such confidence.
The New Yorker story had an example of this:
I saw this effect in a video of an interrogation that an Iowa defense attorney sent me. His client, a young man who was eighteen at the time of the interview, had been wrongly accused of molesting a three-year-old girl at the day-care center where he worked. The detective never raised his voice or appeared anything other than sympathetic. But, in under two hours, he had the young man saying that he had blanked out and fondled the little girl. As if in a trance, the young man said, “I know it happened but I don’t remember any of it. . . . I guess it must have happened.” After a break in the interrogation, during which the young man was allowed to see his sister, he retracted his confession and maintained his innocence. The district attorney dropped the charges.