They went about it the wrong way I think. We don't need another insurance plan. What we need is for the HealthCare system to undergo some regulation to reign in their astronomical pricing schemes.
We wouldn't NEED health insurance if they weren't allowed to charge what they currently get away with for tests, medication and procedures.
Bring the prices down to realistic levels and a National Health Care system becomes much easier to afford and implement for everyone.
Show of hands. Who here thinks any of the following make sense:
The daily Hep C pill with a price tag of $1000 per pill Cancer treatments that run $100,000 per year Any hospital bill for a 30 day stay will all but bankrupt you
Seriously, take a look at a hospital bill and tell me you agree with the pricing. Go ahead.
The whole thing is so out of control that I would rather die from any injuries than go bankrupt and be a wage-slave the rest of my life to pay the bill off. ( Remember, in American hospitals you sign an agreement which states you will pay any costs the insurance does not pick up. Don't do so and they will harrass you for years. )
The only way this gets fixed is to regulate the industry. They're not going to do it on their own.
So the fix sounds easy, but gets complicated quickly.:|
Break them up. Don't think about it, threaten or consider it. To borrow a phrase from Nike: JUST DO IT
Force the companies who provide the bandwidth to split from the part of the company who sells content so there isn't any grey area issues. In order for the bandwidth side of the house to remain competitive, they'll need to upgrade their network to ensure they're delivering what their customers want. This also prevents the content folks from tweaking the network to ensure their own services get priority over competing ones. Taken to an extreme, and without some sort of oversight, the big players can absolutely destroy the competition in this manner.
They've already proven they can't be trusted to do the right thing themselves. Time to step in with a big stick and start swinging.
Of course, true competition needs to be in place to help fuel that fire otherwise we'll still end up with crappy throughput with no realistic choices of switching to another provider. We really need to end this whole regional mono / duopoly thing.
On top of this, we'll need to purge the Congressional votes-for-contributions types to make sure the legislation has a fair chance of happening.
I suppose the thing is, folks are kind of tired of the whole " Celebrity X comes out of the closet " stories. Yeah, we get it. It's the 21st century. Outside of the ultra-religious and maybe a hate-group or two, this information is right up there with " The sky is blue, water is wet and fast food is unhealthy for you. "
Personally, many folks don't care if the guy is Gay, Purple, or part of the Man-Bear-Pig gene-splice. The only thing anyone wants out of him ( professionally ) is to create a rock solid product. User friendly, reliable, secure and stable. That's pretty much it.
His non-professional agenda is really no ones business and his public disclosure of it is, imo, nothing more than bragging or boasting. In fact, it may come back to haunt him. Take Russia, for example, they're not real friendly with the Gay crowd so they may do something entertaining and ban all Apple products in the country. Can't set a bad example for the Russian kiddos now can we ? lol
So, in publicly coming out, he may very well have torpedoed any potential profits that could have been made there. ( Strawman of course, but folks seriously need to keep the information about their private life separate from their professional one. )
Does anyone other than Tim Cook give two sh*ts about what his sexual orientation is ? Do you see hetero-sexual folks stand up and proudly proclaim their preferences to the world ?
Why does anyone's sexual preferences even make the news at all ?
Tim: We don't care. It's lovely you're gay, waves some pom-poms around, but really, we don't care. If you want to impress the world, focus on creating Apple products that outperform the ones they are replacing or are so amazing that we buy Apple over the other options out there.
Read that: Less rainbows, more functional products.
Apologies for the bluntness, but folks coming out doth not the news make.
I had another thought on the entire matter as well in that even if the municipalities manage to pull this off, at some point they still have to hand the traffic over to one of the big boys on the block ( eg, the telecoms ) for it to be useful since they own all the long haul lines. Unless Google steps in and offers their " services ".:D
Why does Google remind me of the Mafia . . . . lol
I would suspect they'll use that as leverage in the upcoming discussions about it.
The Telecoms absolutely will throw a Godzilla sized tantrum since the high density metropolitan areas are their biggest cash cows they have. They would give two shits about losing some barely on the map town in the middle of nowhere, but you're talking about where the big $$$$ live now.
There will be lobbying, crying, arguments, pleading, secret back-room deals, and just mass hysteria for all the Telecoms. Hell, they might even get off their ass and start doing something now that they see a very frightening possibility of real competition to their profits starting to rear its head.
Because in some areas, the speed limits are not calculated in ways that make any logical sense. Is why some school zones are 20. Others are 25, 30, or even 35. Town A has different speed limits than town B. Etc, etc.
Example: The speed limit on the stretch of road I drive daily is mostly 65mph ( 104kph for you non US folks ). This particular road is six lanes of Interstate that traverse my entire State running North to South. In my section of it, the speed limit is mostly the 65mph I noted above.
However, once you cross the county line, it magically increases to 75mph.
Did the road magically become safer ? No.
What's happened is the idiot legislation within my State bought the argument ( from the petro-chemical industry ) that the reason the air quality in this particular region is so bad is because the vehicular traffic just drives too fast and thus, outputs more exhaust.:| ( You can't make this up ) Obviously, the fix is to slow traffic down. So that's exactly what they did. For county X and one county beyond in all directions.
It cannot possibly have anything to do with the fact that the area is industrial with multiple petro-chemical plants and a ship channel operating 24/7. Which, by design, also means it cannot possibly have anything to do with the near unregulated emissions of all the commercial traffic found in the area. ( Why is it my vehicle has strict emission rules, yet an 18-wheeler or dump truck can belch so much crap into the air when pulling away from a red-light or stop sign it blots out the damn sun ? )
Yeah, I've heard the argument. " Stricter emission standards on commercial traffic equates to higher consumer prices down the road. " To those I say, Fuck Off. What's good for the Goose is also good for the Gander as the saying goes I believe.
Nor can it have anything to do with the wind / weather patterns.
So, rant aside, the reason folks don't follow the local traffic regulations is because sometimes they are artificially low and calculated by anything but logic.
You actually work because we have tweaked society to where if you want any sort of life, it REQUIRES money to do so. Hell, even if you gave everything up and wanted to hunt / fish or farm all of your food and basic necessities, those require permits, licenses and / or taxes that aren't free.
You COULD forgo the licenses, permits and taxes but the government will simply fine and / or jail you for doing so without paying them their protection money.
The personal attainment of wealth is a goal that most people strive for because that is the Society we have evolved into. Without wealth, ( even minor amounts of it ), you'll likely be surviving out of a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere.
On the one hand, the number of claims should bottom out once self-drive cars are in place and the bugs sorted out. On the other, they'll have to re-calculate how they determine premium rates since the " human driver " factor will be (mostly) removed.
So, while they won't be paying out nearly as much in claims, they won't be taking in nearly as much in premiums either. Should be interesting.
Speed Traps will no longer be the revenue-cow that many towns rely on. Red-light cameras and similar tech will become a waste of time. How WILL Law Enforcement pay for their Soldier-Wanna-Be toys . . .:|
Hell, these things, once mainstream, will also shift the entire traffic structure around. Stalls, wrecks, weather, and other rubber-neck variables will pretty much go away meaning a much better driving experience. Great for the driver (passenger ?) , but probably not so great for the State / City governments who just LOVE congestion because it pushes the traffic onto their Toll Roads which they seem to be building in greater numbers these days. I would expect to see the Toll Roads become ghost roads ( in those areas where the Toll Roads are a means to bypass highway congestion and not the ONLY means into or out of an area ) as the reasons for utilizing them in the first place will become irrelevant.
Will need to put some more thought into it, but I bet the introduction of the self-drive vehicle will impact quite a bit of modern day revenue-generators which will probably cause a major panic along some lines. lol
My memory is probably lacking here. . . . but I thought the gas was a Fentanyl based one. A quick glance over at Wiki confirms my memory is still somewhat intact I suppose:
" A gas, it is presumed, based on a derivative of fentanyl was used in 2002 in the Moscow theatre hostage crisis to incapacitate Chechen terrorist attackers (and their hostages) too quickly for them to retaliate. More than 15% of those affected died, including 117 of the 800 hostages. "
As far as I'm concerned, the police forces of the United States do not need any further toys to play with / test out on their " battlefield ". We already have more than enough evidence of less than lethal devices ( read that Tasers ) being used as compliance devices instead of the non-lethal alternatives they were supposed to be.
In other words, if the officer has no justification in drawing his firearm, he also has no justification in pulling the Taser either.
Until we have a full blown independent system that polices the police, we don't need to provide them with any more means to terrorize the citizens of this country. Trust in Law Enforcement is already at an all time low in this country. If they keep pushing, they may soon get the " battlefield " they've always wanted. Unfortunately for them, battlefields are rarely one-way affairs. If they consider us the enemy, ( any non-LE typically is the enemy in their eyes ) then they had best realize we vastly outnumber and outgun them in every aspect.
For you LE's out there, imagine a job where you are in harms way every moment of every day from every citizen of this country. If you don't start culling the bad apples out, we'll simply start viewing you as you do us.
As the enemy.
When that day comes, (insert your favorite deity here) help you.
We invade and / or bomb half the planet typically as a knee jerk reaction to something that's happened ( or invented as an excuse ).
Hell, for that matter, that's pretty much how America as a whole works. All of our laws, our entire way of life is based on reactionary thinking vs any premeditated thought process.
The short version is: American policy makers don't think of what their actions will bring beyond the short term ( read that: election period ). No one sits back and considers what the consequences might be a bit further down the road. Some can see it, but they're usually not in any position to make the decisions.
I applaud the man for his forward thinking but he's living in a dream world if he thinks this is even remotely plausible any time soon.
As far as manned space travel goes, we've barely made it to the moon. Our GLOBAL space program barely qualifies to even call it such. It's rare we can get a vehicle off the ground on the first try ( or three ) without some glitch mucking things up. And we're just trying to get it off the damn ground lol
Consider:
We still use fossil fuels We kill each other over make believe entities in the sky We kill each other for resources Hell, we kill each other for fun and for practice
We haven't conquered war, poverty, hunger or disease and he thinks we have what it takes to colonize another planet ? For what exactly ? So we can spread our problems to Mars as well ? Hah
Maybe, just maybe, it's the destiny of a species as fucked up as ours to go extinct lest we infest the rest of the galaxy with our " way of life ".
We can't even fix the problems we have here on Earth and this guy is talking about going to Mars:)
Hint: Odds favor an extinction level asteroid / comet strike long before the dominant species on this planet puts their differences aside to allow us to achieve the level of technology needed to colonize another planet.
I know that Google and Apple have made very public announcements over how they plan on implementing encryption in their devices in order to keep your data private.
I just can't buy it. Trust, once violated, takes a VERY long time to rebuild. A simple press release of " We're not evil anymore ! Really ! " just doesn't do it for me.
If you think for one moment that the government and / or Law Enforcement is going to give up this kind of power without a fight, then you're delusional. Regardless of their claims, or the "concerns" by the administration and LE's in general, I consider it all a smoke-screen anyway.
For any company who makes this " promise " of sorts to us concerning our privacy consider this:
You've blown it once. You -MIGHT- get a second chance at this. Maybe.
If you do, and we find out you're in collusion with these folks yet again down the road, your entire company will simply cease to be. May as well sell it and turn off the lights because you will be forever blacklisted across the entire planet. THAT is what you're risking. Your entire existence now relies on your ability to regain the public trust.
The weapon folks try to figure out what the target defenses are capable of before the warheads reach their target, the really smart people start crunching numbers and come up with a solution designed to over-saturate their ( known ) defenses. We don't throw one warhead at a target, we throw several to ensure one gets through.
This snowballs as delivery systems get smarter or bigger ( supersonic+ cruise missiles, smart re-entry steering and evasion, multi-mirv's, remember the MX-Peacekeeper platform ? lol ) and as countermeasures do the same. ( Hypersonic projectiles, high energy zero time of flight systems, etc )
Same thing for conventional weapons ( especially cruise missiles ) for both land and sea targets.
Ship of X class has defenses Y. In order to ensure a kill on target, we need Z birds from multiple directions all with similar time on top capability to overwhelm said defenses and destroy target. If you compensate for additional platforms in the vicinity that may be protecting each other, ( Eg: A battle group ) you may have to throw a ridiculous amount of ordinance at your target ( say . . . the carrier ) in the hope it gets through at all.
Ditto for land targets. We never use one cruise missile on a building folks. . . . . we use a half a dozen or more lol
TBH though, our land based delivery systems are pretty much honeypot targets anymore. Bomber, sub and cruise missile delivery are much harder to target due to their mobility and not knowing if a sub is sitting just off your coast in the event you do something stupid is quite a deterrent in its own right.
However, put one of these weapons in the hands of a fanatic who has no issues about beheading folks, or volunteering to become a suicide bomber to kill infidels in the name of some pretend deity in the sky and all the deterrent in the world isn't going to stop them. Deterrent doesn't work with these types. You have to render them inoperable for lack of a better way to phrase it.
They know it and we know it. If they ever DO get one, it had better be the most closely guarded secret of all time or we'll end up leveling entire regions to ensure it never gets deployed.
I certainly don't want to sit in this cubicle ( or any cubicle for that matter ) for the rest of my life.
Barring winning the lottery, you need to have a fixed number somewhere down the line ( where you think you'll die ) so you can determine WHEN you can finally give up the daily grind and try to enjoy ( what's left of ) your life. You know . . . actually LIVE instead of just existing as a taxpayer. I can't understand the desire to live forever unless your current life is so abso-fucking-lutely amazing that words cannot be used to describe it.
I don't want to live to see all my friends and family die off over the years. ( already started and I'm only in my early 40's ) I don't want to go bankrupt trying to fight cancer ( go price cancer treatment and watch how quickly that kills your retirement nest egg ) or paying never-ending hospital bills for some unforseen bullshit that happens to you down the road. ( see recent story about guy who got hit with a $100k hospital bill from an assistant surgeon he didn't even know was working on him ) I don't want to get stuck in a gd nursing home sucked dry of any savings that took me nearly sixty YEARS to accumulate.
You want a good dose of reality ? Go visit a nursing home sometime. Get a good understanding of the morale and quality of life of those who live there and try to picture yourself as a resident who will never leave.
So, for those of you enjoying the most amazing gold-plated life that could ever be bestowed upon a human being, go for it. Live forever if you can. Have fun.
For others whose life doesn't exist at the top 1% ( and no expectations to see it improve as we age ), well, perhaps we look at death a bit differently than you do. We see it more as a merciful escape than an unpredictable and scary eventuality.
Since when did having a revoked drivers license stop anyone from driving ?
It works about the same as all the public service ads we get bombarded with that tell us not to text / talk and drive in the first place. Yet, by my observations, about 25% of the motorists on the road are screwing with their phone while hurtling down the freeway at 70mph. . . . .
The average idiot cannot be trusted to do the right thing, hence the " punishment " part of this problem. The hardware needs to be disabled before it will be effective, take the choice away from the folks who aren't bright enough to make the right choice to begin with.
The easy part will be disabling the phone of all but emergency calling while in motion at any speed faster than the typical human animal can walk / run. The hard part is differentiating between the drivers and passengers of the vehicle.
The damage caused to the intelligence community is only a fraction of the damage US corporations will have to endure.
The issue here is trust. Once you betray it, you never fully get it back. Ever.
This is why US companies need to fight this tooth and nail. Because when the truth finally does come out ( and it always does eventually ) it's pretty much THEIR ass that is left hanging in the wind. Regardless if the company is innocent or not, if the trust is gone, so are you. The government picks up the tab for the intelligence community so a trust issue there isn't going to cause them to go bankrupt. Take this into consideration the next time the government knocks on your door and asks for " help " in tracking the bad guys.
It's similar to how I see Law Enforcement anymore. They're not all bad people, but the few idiots they cover for or allow to wear the badge destroys the trust I have in them as a whole. To the point where I no longer trust any of them sadly.
The first things that come to mind about what going cashless could potentially fix would be tax dodging and illegal immigration.
Lots of folks love to get paid in cash so they don't have to report it to the IRS as income. In fact, many illegal immigrants are paid this way so a company can continue using them. The incentive for the illegal worker is no tax reporting to draw attention to the fact they're not supposed to be here anyway.
I rarely use cash anymore because unless you write down every purchase, it's difficult to track what you're spending it on. I just put it on a CC, pay it off in full every month and let them send me a report of where most of it is going.
Once you start tracking your own expenses, it definitely becomes an eye opener for you.
After reading the " How often should I change jobs " thread yesterday and noted most do so to keep asking for ever increasing pay, it isn't shocking to realize the big companies have turned to outside skills at a fraction of the cost of an American worker.
Why would they hire you at $100k + / year when they can pick someone up on a work visa, with the same skills, for half of that ? Especially for short term projects ? If they have the skills, how do you compete against someone willing to do the work at a fraction of the pay ?
Companies are under pressure to keep cutting costs and they have cut so much the only thing they have left is the labor pool.
It won't be long before American skills are just too expensive to consider for those companies who have the option to utilize outside labor. If you think unemployment is bad now, wait till they quit hiring locally because you won't / can't work for what your replacement is more than happy to get.
Not sure how to fix it either. Cost of living here is a lot higher than it is in ( insert your favorite country here ) so, as long as they have the skills, they will get the jobs instead of the guy who has had six jobs in the past three years and is demanding insane compensation and will likely jump ship in six months anyway.
"Why would the writer think that adding body sensors are an answer, 'instead of improving the fucking sound?"
They have to go a bit further back than the hardware I think. I've you've looked at a waveform for what passes as music these days, you would agree:D Listening to THAT on even a decent set of headphones won't help it any.
The folks that put this stuff together need to understand that the entire waveform isn't supposed to look like a solid block just barely under the clipping threshold.:|
This line of reasoning works great until they whip out the Taser because you weren't being " co-operative " with the officer.
Your point is valid, never consent to anything nor say anything to Law Enforcement, just understand you'll likely get the shit kicked out of you for standing up for your rights.
to note the furor of the drinking crowd is much the same as it is with the gun crowd when folks start talking about means to limit their consumption of it.
The fact that alcohol causes quite a bit of death should come as no shock to anyone. The fact that it causes MORE death than the favorite target of activists ( firearms ) these days isn't much of a shock either. What puzzles me is why folks continue to go after one with such ferocity and not the other ? Why is one such a popular icon of EVIL, while the other does even more damage ? ( Don't even get me started about heart disease, medical mistakes and the real scary killers of us all these days )
When was the last time you heard ANYONE speak of banning alcohol, certain types / amounts of alcohol, or alcohol in scary looking bottles ? Any Congressional bills getting drafted on the matter ? Demonstrations by folks with signs ? Anything ?
I don't buy ANY game at full price anymore. It's not that I'm cheap, I can easily afford them, it's that I'm fed up with games that are effectively Beta II at launch date. Been burned too many times I guess. Within a month of launch, most games will have a Gigabyte sized patch to fix all the crap that should have been fixed prior to release. The world certainly won't end if I don't get to play ( insert AAA title here ) on launch day. Considering the login server issues, DRM and just an overall shitty job ( is there such a thing as Quality Assurance these days ? ) I can wait.
Usually takes at least six months before I would consider the game stable.
By that time, all the bugs have been ironed out, the reviews are in either supporting or negating the pre-launch hype and the experience is more pleasant overall.
If everyone did this, companies would either release a finished and polished product as they are supposed to, or go bankrupt. Simple choice really. I choose to spend my money only on that which is worth it.
Interesting ruling, but I wonder how long it will take some law school type to figure out they may be able to apply this case to other unions as well.
All unions, to my knowledge anyway, prize seniority over all other variables. You can be the most amazing employee ever, but when it comes to layoffs, if you have less seniority than someone else, you get the boot first regardless of your abilities.
The flip side of that is you can be the most incompetent employee ever and, due to seniority rules, you get to stay because you've sat in the chair longer.
What really burns me about unions is the two aforementioned employees are paid the same once they have been with the company X years. In my opinion, this creates serious motivational issues for both employees:
One realizes they can do the bare minimum and still get paid.
While your super employee realizes that busting their ass is rather pointless since the other one that is sitting in the corner, drooling on themself is being paid exactly the same as well. ( to add insult to injury, if droolio has more seniority, they have more vacation time to boot )
I fight with unionites all the time who try to tell me the pay is what it is because the Union fights for their members. I point out that since Union dues are a percentage of employee pay, the Union is actually fighting for its own pay raise, not the members. It also explains why the unions never back down over pay, but will instantly give in to health care premium increases since those come out of the employees pockets and not the Unions.
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They went about it the wrong way I think. We don't need another insurance plan. What we need is for the HealthCare system to undergo some regulation to reign in their astronomical pricing schemes.
We wouldn't NEED health insurance if they weren't allowed to charge what they currently get away with for tests, medication and procedures.
Bring the prices down to realistic levels and a National Health Care system becomes much easier to afford and implement for everyone.
Show of hands. Who here thinks any of the following make sense:
The daily Hep C pill with a price tag of $1000 per pill
Cancer treatments that run $100,000 per year
Any hospital bill for a 30 day stay will all but bankrupt you
Seriously, take a look at a hospital bill and tell me you agree with the pricing. Go ahead.
The whole thing is so out of control that I would rather die from any injuries than go bankrupt and be a wage-slave the rest of my life to pay the bill off. ( Remember, in American hospitals you sign an agreement which states you will pay any costs the insurance does not pick up. Don't do so and they will harrass you for years. )
The only way this gets fixed is to regulate the industry. They're not going to do it on their own.
So the fix sounds easy, but gets complicated quickly. :|
Break them up. Don't think about it, threaten or consider it. To borrow a phrase from Nike: JUST DO IT
Force the companies who provide the bandwidth to split from the part of the company who sells content so there isn't any grey area issues. In order for the bandwidth side of the house to remain competitive, they'll need to upgrade their network to ensure they're delivering what their customers want. This also prevents the content folks from tweaking the network to ensure their own services get priority over competing ones. Taken to an extreme, and without some sort of oversight, the big players can absolutely destroy the competition in this manner.
They've already proven they can't be trusted to do the right thing themselves. Time to step in with a big stick and start swinging.
Of course, true competition needs to be in place to help fuel that fire otherwise we'll still end up with crappy throughput with no realistic choices of switching to another provider. We really need to end this whole regional mono / duopoly thing.
On top of this, we'll need to purge the Congressional votes-for-contributions types to make sure the legislation has a fair chance of happening.
I suppose the thing is, folks are kind of tired of the whole " Celebrity X comes out of the closet " stories. Yeah, we get it. It's the 21st century. Outside of the ultra-religious and maybe a hate-group or two, this information is right up there with " The sky is blue, water is wet and fast food is unhealthy for you. "
Personally, many folks don't care if the guy is Gay, Purple, or part of the Man-Bear-Pig gene-splice. The only thing anyone wants out of him ( professionally ) is to create a rock solid product. User friendly, reliable, secure and stable. That's pretty much it.
His non-professional agenda is really no ones business and his public disclosure of it is, imo, nothing more than bragging or boasting. In fact, it may come back to haunt him. Take Russia, for example, they're not real friendly with the Gay crowd so they may do something entertaining and ban all Apple products in the country. Can't set a bad example for the Russian kiddos now can we ? lol
So, in publicly coming out, he may very well have torpedoed any potential profits that could have been made there. ( Strawman of course, but folks seriously need to keep the information about their private life separate from their professional one. )
Does anyone other than Tim Cook give two sh*ts about what his sexual orientation is ? Do you see hetero-sexual folks stand up and proudly proclaim their preferences to the world ?
Why does anyone's sexual preferences even make the news at all ?
Tim: We don't care. It's lovely you're gay, waves some pom-poms around, but really, we don't care. If you want to impress the world, focus on creating Apple products that outperform the ones they are replacing or are so amazing that we buy Apple over the other options out there.
Read that: Less rainbows, more functional products.
Apologies for the bluntness, but folks coming out doth not the news make.
Bah, preview 4tw :|
Your not You're
You're line of thinking here is pretty solid.
:D
I had another thought on the entire matter as well in that even if the municipalities manage to pull this off, at some point they still have to hand the traffic over to one of the big boys on the block ( eg, the telecoms ) for it to be useful since they own all the long haul lines. Unless Google steps in and offers their " services ".
Why does Google remind me of the Mafia . . . . lol
I would suspect they'll use that as leverage in the upcoming discussions about it.
Expect to see the gloves come off for this fight.
:D
The Telecoms absolutely will throw a Godzilla sized tantrum since the high density metropolitan areas are their biggest cash cows they have. They would give two shits about losing some barely on the map town in the middle of nowhere, but you're talking about where the big $$$$ live now.
There will be lobbying, crying, arguments, pleading, secret back-room deals, and just mass hysteria for all the Telecoms. Hell, they might even get off their ass and start doing something now that they see a very frightening possibility of real competition to their profits starting to rear its head.
It will be glorious
Because in some areas, the speed limits are not calculated in ways that make any logical sense. Is why some school zones are 20. Others are 25, 30, or even 35. Town A has different speed limits than town B. Etc, etc.
:| ( You can't make this up ) Obviously, the fix is to slow traffic down. So that's exactly what they did. For county X and one county beyond in all directions.
Example: The speed limit on the stretch of road I drive daily is mostly 65mph ( 104kph for you non US folks ). This particular road is six lanes of Interstate that traverse my entire State running North to South. In my section of it, the speed limit is mostly the 65mph I noted above.
However, once you cross the county line, it magically increases to 75mph.
Did the road magically become safer ? No.
What's happened is the idiot legislation within my State bought the argument ( from the petro-chemical industry ) that the reason the air quality in this particular region is so bad is because the vehicular traffic just drives too fast and thus, outputs more exhaust.
It cannot possibly have anything to do with the fact that the area is industrial with multiple petro-chemical plants and a ship channel operating 24/7. Which, by design, also means it cannot possibly have anything to do with the near unregulated emissions of all the commercial traffic found in the area. ( Why is it my vehicle has strict emission rules, yet an 18-wheeler or dump truck can belch so much crap into the air when pulling away from a red-light or stop sign it blots out the damn sun ? )
Yeah, I've heard the argument. " Stricter emission standards on commercial traffic equates to higher consumer prices down the road. " To those I say, Fuck Off. What's good for the Goose is also good for the Gander as the saying goes I believe.
Nor can it have anything to do with the wind / weather patterns.
So, rant aside, the reason folks don't follow the local traffic regulations is because sometimes they are artificially low and calculated by anything but logic.
Chuckle.
You actually work because we have tweaked society to where if you want any sort of life, it REQUIRES money to do so. Hell, even if you gave everything up and wanted to hunt / fish or farm all of your food and basic necessities, those require permits, licenses and / or taxes that aren't free.
You COULD forgo the licenses, permits and taxes but the government will simply fine and / or jail you for doing so without paying them their protection money.
The personal attainment of wealth is a goal that most people strive for because that is the Society we have evolved into. Without wealth, ( even minor amounts of it ), you'll likely be surviving out of a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere.
Though, I'm not quite sure in which direction.
:|
On the one hand, the number of claims should bottom out once self-drive cars are in place and the bugs sorted out.
On the other, they'll have to re-calculate how they determine premium rates since the " human driver " factor will be (mostly) removed.
So, while they won't be paying out nearly as much in claims, they won't be taking in nearly as much in premiums either. Should be interesting.
Speed Traps will no longer be the revenue-cow that many towns rely on. Red-light cameras and similar tech will become a waste of time. How WILL Law Enforcement pay for their Soldier-Wanna-Be toys . . .
Hell, these things, once mainstream, will also shift the entire traffic structure around. Stalls, wrecks, weather, and other rubber-neck variables will pretty much go away meaning a much better driving experience. Great for the driver (passenger ?) , but probably not so great for the State / City governments who just LOVE congestion because it pushes the traffic onto their Toll Roads which they seem to be building in greater numbers these days. I would expect to see the Toll Roads become ghost roads ( in those areas where the Toll Roads are a means to bypass highway congestion and not the ONLY means into or out of an area ) as the reasons for utilizing them in the first place will become irrelevant.
Will need to put some more thought into it, but I bet the introduction of the self-drive vehicle will impact quite a bit of modern day revenue-generators which will probably cause a major panic along some lines. lol
My memory is probably lacking here. . . . but I thought the gas was a Fentanyl based one. A quick glance over at Wiki confirms my memory is still somewhat intact I suppose:
" A gas, it is presumed, based on a derivative of fentanyl was used in 2002 in the Moscow theatre hostage crisis to incapacitate Chechen terrorist attackers (and their hostages) too quickly for them to retaliate. More than 15% of those affected died, including 117 of the 800 hostages. "
As far as I'm concerned, the police forces of the United States do not need any further toys to play with / test out on their " battlefield ". We already have more than enough evidence of less than lethal devices ( read that Tasers ) being used as compliance devices instead of the non-lethal alternatives they were supposed to be.
In other words, if the officer has no justification in drawing his firearm, he also has no justification in pulling the Taser either.
Until we have a full blown independent system that polices the police, we don't need to provide them with any more means to terrorize the citizens of this country. Trust in Law Enforcement is already at an all time low in this country. If they keep pushing, they may soon get the " battlefield " they've always wanted. Unfortunately for them, battlefields are rarely one-way affairs. If they consider us the enemy, ( any non-LE typically is the enemy in their eyes ) then they had best realize we vastly outnumber and outgun them in every aspect.
For you LE's out there, imagine a job where you are in harms way every moment of every day from every citizen of this country. If you don't start culling the bad apples out, we'll simply start viewing you as you do us.
As the enemy.
When that day comes, (insert your favorite deity here) help you.
We invade and / or bomb half the planet typically as a knee jerk reaction to something that's happened ( or invented as an excuse ).
Hell, for that matter, that's pretty much how America as a whole works. All of our laws, our entire way of life is based on reactionary thinking vs any premeditated thought process.
The short version is: American policy makers don't think of what their actions will bring beyond the short term ( read that: election period ). No one sits back and considers what the consequences might be a bit further down the road. Some can see it, but they're usually not in any position to make the decisions.
I applaud the man for his forward thinking but he's living in a dream world if he thinks this is even remotely plausible any time soon.
:)
As far as manned space travel goes, we've barely made it to the moon. Our GLOBAL space program barely qualifies to even call it such. It's rare we can get a vehicle off the ground on the first try ( or three ) without some glitch mucking things up. And we're just trying to get it off the damn ground lol
Consider:
We still use fossil fuels
We kill each other over make believe entities in the sky
We kill each other for resources
Hell, we kill each other for fun and for practice
We haven't conquered war, poverty, hunger or disease and he thinks we have what it takes to colonize another planet ? For what exactly ? So we can spread our problems to Mars as well ? Hah
Maybe, just maybe, it's the destiny of a species as fucked up as ours to go extinct lest we infest the rest of the galaxy with our " way of life ".
We can't even fix the problems we have here on Earth and this guy is talking about going to Mars
Hint: Odds favor an extinction level asteroid / comet strike long before the dominant species on this planet puts their differences aside to allow us to achieve the level of technology needed to colonize another planet.
I know that Google and Apple have made very public announcements over how they plan on implementing encryption in their devices in order to keep your data private.
I just can't buy it. Trust, once violated, takes a VERY long time to rebuild. A simple press release of " We're not evil anymore ! Really ! " just doesn't do it for me.
If you think for one moment that the government and / or Law Enforcement is going to give up this kind of power without a fight, then you're delusional. Regardless of their claims, or the "concerns" by the administration and LE's in general, I consider it all a smoke-screen anyway.
For any company who makes this " promise " of sorts to us concerning our privacy consider this:
You've blown it once. You -MIGHT- get a second chance at this. Maybe.
If you do, and we find out you're in collusion with these folks yet again down the road, your entire company will simply cease to be. May as well sell it and turn off the lights because you will be forever blacklisted across the entire planet. THAT is what you're risking. Your entire existence now relies on your ability to regain the public trust.
Screw us again and you're done.
Want to know WHY we have so damn many warheads ?
The weapon folks try to figure out what the target defenses are capable of before the warheads reach their target, the really smart people start crunching numbers and come up with a solution designed to over-saturate their ( known ) defenses. We don't throw one warhead at a target, we throw several to ensure one gets through.
This snowballs as delivery systems get smarter or bigger ( supersonic+ cruise missiles, smart re-entry steering and evasion, multi-mirv's, remember the MX-Peacekeeper platform ? lol ) and as countermeasures do the same. ( Hypersonic projectiles, high energy zero time of flight systems, etc )
Same thing for conventional weapons ( especially cruise missiles ) for both land and sea targets.
Ship of X class has defenses Y. In order to ensure a kill on target, we need Z birds from multiple directions all with similar time on top capability to overwhelm said defenses and destroy target. If you compensate for additional platforms in the vicinity that may be protecting each other, ( Eg: A battle group ) you may have to throw a ridiculous amount of ordinance at your target ( say . . . the carrier ) in the hope it gets through at all.
Ditto for land targets. We never use one cruise missile on a building folks. . . . . we use a half a dozen or more lol
TBH though, our land based delivery systems are pretty much honeypot targets anymore. Bomber, sub and cruise missile delivery are much harder to target due to their mobility and not knowing if a sub is sitting just off your coast in the event you do something stupid is quite a deterrent in its own right.
However, put one of these weapons in the hands of a fanatic who has no issues about beheading folks, or volunteering to become a suicide bomber to kill infidels in the name of some pretend deity in the sky and all the deterrent in the world isn't going to stop them. Deterrent doesn't work with these types. You have to render them inoperable for lack of a better way to phrase it.
They know it and we know it. If they ever DO get one, it had better be the most closely guarded secret of all time or we'll end up leveling entire regions to ensure it never gets deployed.
I certainly don't want to sit in this cubicle ( or any cubicle for that matter ) for the rest of my life.
Barring winning the lottery, you need to have a fixed number somewhere down the line ( where you think you'll die ) so you can determine WHEN you can finally give up the daily grind and try to enjoy ( what's left of ) your life. You know . . . actually LIVE instead of just existing as a taxpayer. I can't understand the desire to live forever unless your current life is so abso-fucking-lutely amazing that words cannot be used to describe it.
I don't want to live to see all my friends and family die off over the years. ( already started and I'm only in my early 40's ) I don't want to go bankrupt trying to fight cancer ( go price cancer treatment and watch how quickly that kills your retirement nest egg ) or paying never-ending hospital bills for some unforseen bullshit that happens to you down the road. ( see recent story about guy who got hit with a $100k hospital bill from an assistant surgeon he didn't even know was working on him ) I don't want to get stuck in a gd nursing home sucked dry of any savings that took me nearly sixty YEARS to accumulate.
You want a good dose of reality ? Go visit a nursing home sometime. Get a good understanding of the morale and quality of life of those who live there and try to picture yourself as a resident who will never leave.
So, for those of you enjoying the most amazing gold-plated life that could ever be bestowed upon a human being, go for it. Live forever if you can. Have fun.
For others whose life doesn't exist at the top 1% ( and no expectations to see it improve as we age ), well, perhaps we look at death a bit differently than you do. We see it more as a merciful escape than an unpredictable and scary eventuality.
Since when did having a revoked drivers license stop anyone from driving ?
It works about the same as all the public service ads we get bombarded with that tell us not to text / talk and drive in the first place. Yet, by my observations, about 25% of the motorists on the road are screwing with their phone while hurtling down the freeway at 70mph. . . . .
The average idiot cannot be trusted to do the right thing, hence the " punishment " part of this problem. The hardware needs to be disabled before it will be effective, take the choice away from the folks who aren't bright enough to make the right choice to begin with.
The easy part will be disabling the phone of all but emergency calling while in motion at any speed faster than the typical human animal can walk / run. The hard part is differentiating between the drivers and passengers of the vehicle.
The damage caused to the intelligence community is only a fraction of the damage US corporations will have to endure.
The issue here is trust. Once you betray it, you never fully get it back. Ever.
This is why US companies need to fight this tooth and nail. Because when the truth finally does come out ( and it always does eventually ) it's pretty much THEIR ass that is left hanging in the wind. Regardless if the company is innocent or not, if the trust is gone, so are you. The government picks up the tab for the intelligence community so a trust issue there isn't going to cause them to go bankrupt. Take this into consideration the next time the government knocks on your door and asks for " help " in tracking the bad guys.
It's similar to how I see Law Enforcement anymore. They're not all bad people, but the few idiots they cover for or allow to wear the badge destroys the trust I have in them as a whole. To the point where I no longer trust any of them sadly.
The first things that come to mind about what going cashless could potentially fix would be tax dodging and illegal immigration.
Lots of folks love to get paid in cash so they don't have to report it to the IRS as income. In fact, many illegal immigrants are paid this way so a company can continue using them. The incentive for the illegal worker is no tax reporting to draw attention to the fact they're not supposed to be here anyway.
I rarely use cash anymore because unless you write down every purchase, it's difficult to track what you're spending it on. I just put it on a CC, pay it off in full every month and let them send me a report of where most of it is going.
Once you start tracking your own expenses, it definitely becomes an eye opener for you.
After reading the " How often should I change jobs " thread yesterday and noted most do so to keep asking for ever increasing pay, it isn't shocking to realize the big companies have turned to outside skills at a fraction of the cost of an American worker.
Why would they hire you at $100k + / year when they can pick someone up on a work visa, with the same skills, for half of that ? Especially for short term projects ? If they have the skills, how do you compete against someone willing to do the work at a fraction of the pay ?
Companies are under pressure to keep cutting costs and they have cut so much the only thing they have left is the labor pool.
It won't be long before American skills are just too expensive to consider for those companies who have the option to utilize outside labor. If you think unemployment is bad now, wait till they quit hiring locally because you won't / can't work for what your replacement is more than happy to get.
Not sure how to fix it either. Cost of living here is a lot higher than it is in ( insert your favorite country here ) so, as long as they have the skills, they will get the jobs instead of the guy who has had six jobs in the past three years and is demanding insane compensation and will likely jump ship in six months anyway.
"Why would the writer think that adding body sensors are an answer, 'instead of improving the fucking sound?"
:D Listening to THAT on even a decent set of headphones won't help it any.
:|
They have to go a bit further back than the hardware I think. I've you've looked at a waveform for what passes as music these days, you would agree
The folks that put this stuff together need to understand that the entire waveform isn't supposed to look like a solid block just barely under the clipping threshold.
This line of reasoning works great until they whip out the Taser because you weren't being " co-operative " with the officer.
Your point is valid, never consent to anything nor say anything to Law Enforcement, just understand you'll likely get the shit kicked out of you for standing up for your rights.
to note the furor of the drinking crowd is much the same as it is with the gun crowd when folks start talking about means to limit their consumption of it.
The fact that alcohol causes quite a bit of death should come as no shock to anyone. The fact that it causes MORE death than the favorite target of activists ( firearms ) these days isn't much of a shock either. What puzzles me is why folks continue to go after one with such ferocity and not the other ? Why is one such a popular icon of EVIL, while the other does even more damage ? ( Don't even get me started about heart disease, medical mistakes and the real scary killers of us all these days )
When was the last time you heard ANYONE speak of banning alcohol, certain types / amounts of alcohol, or alcohol in scary looking bottles ? Any Congressional bills getting drafted on the matter ? Demonstrations by folks with signs ? Anything ?
*crickets*
Exactly.
but it's more likely my experience. :D
I don't buy ANY game at full price anymore. It's not that I'm cheap, I can easily afford them, it's that I'm fed up with games that are effectively Beta II at launch date. Been burned too many times I guess. Within a month of launch, most games will have a Gigabyte sized patch to fix all the crap that should have been fixed prior to release. The world certainly won't end if I don't get to play ( insert AAA title here ) on launch day. Considering the login server issues, DRM and just an overall shitty job ( is there such a thing as Quality Assurance these days ? ) I can wait.
Usually takes at least six months before I would consider the game stable.
By that time, all the bugs have been ironed out, the reviews are in either supporting or negating the pre-launch hype and the experience is more pleasant overall.
If everyone did this, companies would either release a finished and polished product as they are supposed to, or go bankrupt. Simple choice really. I choose to spend my money only on that which is worth it.
Interesting ruling, but I wonder how long it will take some law school type to figure out they may be able to apply this case to other unions as well.
All unions, to my knowledge anyway, prize seniority over all other variables. You can be the most amazing employee ever, but when it comes to layoffs, if you have less seniority than someone else, you get the boot first regardless of your abilities.
The flip side of that is you can be the most incompetent employee ever and, due to seniority rules, you get to stay because you've sat in the chair longer.
What really burns me about unions is the two aforementioned employees are paid the same once they have been with the company X years. In my opinion, this creates serious motivational issues for both employees:
One realizes they can do the bare minimum and still get paid.
While your super employee realizes that busting their ass is rather pointless since the other one that is sitting in the corner, drooling on themself is being paid exactly the same as well. ( to add insult to injury, if droolio has more seniority, they have more vacation time to boot )
I fight with unionites all the time who try to tell me the pay is what it is because the Union fights for their members. I point out that since Union dues are a percentage of employee pay, the Union is actually fighting for its own pay raise, not the members. It also explains why the unions never back down over pay, but will instantly give in to health care premium increases since those come out of the employees pockets and not the Unions.