We keep a chatroom going with the lot of us (8 of us) in there at all times
Uggh, we all worked from home one time because an ice storm had brought down the electricity at the office. We had a group voice chat going on with like 8 people. It was horrible. I would never do it again. In fact, I find IM distracting in general and tend to treat it like e-mail. I'll check it at the next convenient break. My job takes a good amount of concentration and things like IM, or the GPs needing some information RIGHT NOW are a major distraction and contribute to an inefficient workplace.
In my experience telecommuting, I traded that for people who live with me coming up behind me and bothering me, forgetting that I'm on the clock.
That happens to me too. My wife doesn't work, and if I work from home, she thinks I am on vacation or something, because she wants me to pick up the kids, go to the store, make dinner, fix some broken thing, etc. I've had days when I was not feeling well and went to the office anyway because there were too many people at home and I knew I'd not get any work done.
Sure its nice to work at home, cuts down on office costs, but don't good managers read all the non verbal communication coming from their employees? How are managers suppose to do that through email or phone?
I would say a good candidate for telecommuting should be someone who doesn't need a lot of management. I think I would qualify. I hardly ever talk to my manager. He rarely ever assigns me work. I basically, on my own initiative, discover inefficiencies in the way our company does things and build the tools we need to make us more efficient. I work from the office, but it is extremely distracting and I find that I get much more work done when I am sick at home than when I am well at the office.
As an aside, in our company, sick means you are at home working instead of at the office working. You don't actually get to lay in bed and sleep or watch TV, but on the other hand, at least since you are still working. they don't actually limit your sick days...yet.
People usually don't switch to a new company unless they're going to save money anyways.
That's probably true. The only other reason is for better coverage. I'm not sure what the breakdown is. But they also say they only surveyed people who "reported a savings". Chances are, you are not going to report a savings unless it was a significant one, so that probably also skews the statistics.
Another problem is that insurance companies give you teaser rates and then up it the next year hoping you will be too lazy to switch. Just like you have to keep switching jobs to make more money, you also have to keep switching insurance companies to keep getting the good rate.
No one is abusing the network unless they are using more than the infinite allotment of data which was agreed to between AT&T and the contracting subscriber.
While I agree with you that they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, the samples you cite all result in only small upticks in value for today, while being absolutely devastating in the long run as subscribers leave in droves. If they REALLY had the best interests of their investors at heart, they would be investing in infrastructure and funding research. Unfortunately, the investors won't allow this as the investors insist on quarter to quarter profits RIGHT NOW and to hell with triple digit earnings over a decade. To them a dollar now is more important than $1,000 ten years from now.
Generally, you cannot walk into a restaurant and just eat for as many days as you want, even when they advertise unlimited buffet.
There are bounds on various axes which affect the outcome of the function "All you can eat", but if you ask I am sure that they will be happy to tell you the bounds and you can either choose to partake or not. For instance, they will likely tell you that it is for one sitting, so you will not be able to leave the restaurant and come back. Additionally, they will tell you that when the restaurant closes, you must leave, so if it is 9:30 and the restaurant closes at 10, you probably shouldn't order the buffet. They will also tell you that you cannot share your plate with other people.
What they will not do (and what AT&T does) is come back when you are halfway through your first plate and tell you that the "All you can eat" is only for as much as you can stack on a single plate and you can't go back through the line. Oh, and you can only have two rolls. And if you get extra rolls, each one will cost about 1/3 of an entire all you can eat meal.
As I explained elsewhere, advertising always uses the most pedantic definitions possible, stretching meaning to be misleading to customers, while still technically true, so that they're not hit by truth in advertising laws.
Yes, and a case in point that I noticed recently: One of the major insurance companies in the U.S., I don't remember which (shows how effective advertising is) advertised that the average person who switched to them saved $150. Then in a caveat at the end they admit that this is based on a survey of people who said they saved money by switching to this company. So in other words, they have completely thrown out anyone who switched and ended up paying more from the equation.
Another example is the one where 4 out of 5 dentists recommend some brand of gum. Well, in truth 99% of dentists recommend that you don't chew gum at all, but 4 out of 5 of the remaining 1% might recommend that brand over other brands.
No, it doesn't show that at all. It provides no effect size statistics to back up such a claim.
Well, by all means, lets have a larger study, then. However, I would still bet large sums of money that browsers that people have to go out of their way to find and use will tend to have smarter users than browsers that come by default with almost every computer. You don't have to get offended, just because this small sampling tends to back up what just plain makes sense. If you are an IE user, that doesn't make you dumb. It's just that a lot of dumb people tend to use IE, because that is what their computer came with, and they tend to drag down the average. Heck, I use IE from time to time, when some idiot webmaster has thrown standards to the wind in favor of special whizbangs that only IE supports. That doesn't make me any dumber for using it. Nor am I offended that people who use Chrome are on average smarter than people who use Firefox, like myself. Averages are just averages. Like 99% of people, I consider myself above average,
I don't see anybody claiming causation. Nobody says that using Chrome or Firefox instead of IE will MAKE you smarter. It just shows that people who use Firefox or Chrome tend to be smarter. This conclusion is an obvious one if you think about it. The average person, and the below average person, will most likely use the browser that comes with their computer. And of course, the average or below average person is probably going to have a MS based machine. The average or below average person probably is not even aware that there is an alternative to IE. You have to be an engineer, computer professional, or at the very least someone with a desire to know more about computers to even be aware of the existence of alternative browsers. These types of people are generally smarter than your average bear.
When reading this post, please note that I don't intend to make any absolutes. "On average" should be inferred in front of most of the statements herein. The only reason I didn't type it out every time was because we were already talking about averages.
Despite what people say they don't really want everything to be "equal"..
People who are below average or at least who perform below average absolutely want everything to be equal. It's the pesky above average people who want to be rewarded based on their skills and/or performance.
You can't legislate how people feel about one another. If society finds skinny people attractive, then banning them from TV is not going to affect it. Just like changing what you are allowed to call a certain race of people is not going to change how you feel about that race of people.
I wondered why I was not getting ahead in the world. I don't lie in LinkedIn or on resumes and I assumed nobody else did either.
At least I still have one advantage over everybody else. I only have to remember one version of my story.
Police regularly break other laws in the pursuit of their duty. Speeding, blowing stop signs, drawing weapons on people, wrestling people to the ground, etc. Why would destruction of evidence be any different?
Even in Canada, I pay about $80/month for a transit pass, which is significantly less than my car insurance/gas/maintenance.
When I lived near Chicago, it was also cheaper to get a bus pass and a train pass than a car and insurance and maintenance, but unfortunately, you still have to have a car because neither the train nor the bus will get you everywhere you want to go even in a big city like Chicago.
Again, look at Europe, and read up on why this happened to the US.
It happened because we were an agricultural society that lived off the land. It just hasn't unhappened as much in the U.S. as it has in Europe.
If prices had been higher in the US, perhaps the urban sprawl would be less since people would not be as willing to throw money out the tailpipe.
So what this would indicate is that if gas were not a concern, then people would prefer not to live in a dense population center. I know I prefer to live near but not in a big city. By living near, you can go into the city to see an event, dine, or go to museums, but you don't have to live with the crime, high housing costs, high public transportation costs, and well, the high density.
It is not true that you cannot teach a computer class without expensive computers.
Agreed. My High School had about $12,000 worth of computers. My school district is about the same size as the one in question. Now granted, this was just the one school, so if you put the same amount of technology into all the public schools in my district, you are probably talking about close to $200,000. A factor of about 200 difference from the Ann Arbor proposal.
What shame. Maybe they should have bought PCs instead. They may have run slow, but at least they would be able to work with Google Docs. Heck a 6 year old PC is still perfectly usable. I just upgraded a 9 year old computer last year. It still did everything I needed it to do, even ran games pretty fast. The only reason I upgraded was because it had developed a habit of blue screening, and hours spent trying to fix the problem only resulted in Microsoft telling me that my version of Windows which had been Genuine for the last 9 years was no longer Genuine.
I, on the other hand, used to live in Racine County Wisconsin, and despite paying ridiculous property tax rates the school systems were crap. I paid 2% of my homes value every year in taxes, which is even higher than DuPage county, Illinois (1.67%), even though that county is often touted as having the highest property tax rates. Yest, the schools sucked. Standardized scores sucked, the bus system sucked, the teachers were paid less than national average. There was no money for band, sports or activities. The money was clearly all going into somebodies pocket.
I still think that people who didn't live anywhere near there are allowed to have a say. Personally, I think $45 million is way too high for a computer overhaul in a public school. That is $2700 per student in the district, and probably less than 1/3 of the students in the district will end up in a class in which they need to use a computer. There are districts that only spend $5,000 for the whole budget per student, not just on the computer allotment.
The 3/1000 difference from.2425 to.2422 results in a Y30K problem. After 30,000 AD, we can relax for a while.
Due to tidal forces slowing the Earth's rotation, in the year 30,000, the day will be about half a second longer resulting in the year being only 365.2401 days long, so we will need to adjust our algorithms a lot sooner than that
Instead of giving them the reward ahead of time, how about an agreement where they have to do something first and get the carrot afterward?
No, we can't do that. We are trying to convert them to western thought. This is where you get the shiny thing you want now, then have to work for it to pay it, but then you get tired of working, and the shiny thing is not longer as interesting so you don't care to continue working so hard to pay for it.
Well, as someone else who is approaching the 100k mark, I cannot afford a $200 ticket, so I don't speed. I completely disagree with a sliding scale even though I haven't gotten a ticket in years. If we institute a sliding scales based on wealth, then cops will spend all day pulling over only high dollar cars because they know they will bring in more money. People who don't have much money will be allowed to get away with whatever they want because the cops know there is not money in punishing them for it. A traffic fine is a punishment for breaking the law, and it shouldn't matter how much money you make. It is just as illegal. It's not like a rich person is just going to say "Oh, well I can just pay $200 every day and go as fast as I want". After a couple of days, they won't have a license anymore, and if they persist in driving without a license, they will find themselves in jail.
If I was worth 6 million dollars I would be looooonnnnngggg gone from my day job. Are you serious?
If you were worth $6 million, part of your worth would be tied up in illiquid assets that can't be used for your day to day living. In fact, most people that are worth that much have almost their entire wealth in illiquid assets. That is why they keep working. But let's pretend that only half your wealth is tied up in cars, houses, retirement savings and so forth.Now, you have $3 million. You need to live off of that, so it would not be wise to put that in the stock market, because even though the market averages 10% there are whole decades where it is flat or goes down. So, in order to get a steady income, you need to invest in safe investments, like CDs, savings account, or treasury bonds. Right now, it looks like the best rate is going to be about 1%. That will get you about $30,000 per year to live on.
Christianity is an amoral scheme to collect money and cover up the sexual abuse of young boys.
Liar. Christianity has nothing to do with sexually abusing young boys. The discovery of several instances of sexual abuse in one offshoot of a Church which believes many of the same things as the Christian faith is a relatively recent phenomenon and is far from representing the foundations of Christianity.
As far as a scheme to collect money, most people going into ministry are well aware that they are going to have a great deal of difficulty supporting themselves. Pastors, the highest paid position in the Church, average only about $30,000. They aren't doing it for the money.
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We keep a chatroom going with the lot of us (8 of us) in there at all times
Uggh, we all worked from home one time because an ice storm had brought down the electricity at the office. We had a group voice chat going on with like 8 people. It was horrible. I would never do it again. In fact, I find IM distracting in general and tend to treat it like e-mail. I'll check it at the next convenient break. My job takes a good amount of concentration and things like IM, or the GPs needing some information RIGHT NOW are a major distraction and contribute to an inefficient workplace.
In my experience telecommuting, I traded that for people who live with me coming up behind me and bothering me, forgetting that I'm on the clock.
That happens to me too. My wife doesn't work, and if I work from home, she thinks I am on vacation or something, because she wants me to pick up the kids, go to the store, make dinner, fix some broken thing, etc. I've had days when I was not feeling well and went to the office anyway because there were too many people at home and I knew I'd not get any work done.
Sure its nice to work at home, cuts down on office costs, but don't good managers read all the non verbal communication coming from their employees? How are managers suppose to do that through email or phone?
I would say a good candidate for telecommuting should be someone who doesn't need a lot of management. I think I would qualify. I hardly ever talk to my manager. He rarely ever assigns me work. I basically, on my own initiative, discover inefficiencies in the way our company does things and build the tools we need to make us more efficient. I work from the office, but it is extremely distracting and I find that I get much more work done when I am sick at home than when I am well at the office.
As an aside, in our company, sick means you are at home working instead of at the office working. You don't actually get to lay in bed and sleep or watch TV, but on the other hand, at least since you are still working. they don't actually limit your sick days...yet.
People usually don't switch to a new company unless they're going to save money anyways.
That's probably true. The only other reason is for better coverage. I'm not sure what the breakdown is. But they also say they only surveyed people who "reported a savings". Chances are, you are not going to report a savings unless it was a significant one, so that probably also skews the statistics.
Another problem is that insurance companies give you teaser rates and then up it the next year hoping you will be too lazy to switch. Just like you have to keep switching jobs to make more money, you also have to keep switching insurance companies to keep getting the good rate.
No one is abusing the network unless they are using more than the infinite allotment of data which was agreed to between AT&T and the contracting subscriber.
While I agree with you that they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, the samples you cite all result in only small upticks in value for today, while being absolutely devastating in the long run as subscribers leave in droves. If they REALLY had the best interests of their investors at heart, they would be investing in infrastructure and funding research. Unfortunately, the investors won't allow this as the investors insist on quarter to quarter profits RIGHT NOW and to hell with triple digit earnings over a decade. To them a dollar now is more important than $1,000 ten years from now.
Generally, you cannot walk into a restaurant and just eat for as many days as you want, even when they advertise unlimited buffet.
There are bounds on various axes which affect the outcome of the function "All you can eat", but if you ask I am sure that they will be happy to tell you the bounds and you can either choose to partake or not. For instance, they will likely tell you that it is for one sitting, so you will not be able to leave the restaurant and come back. Additionally, they will tell you that when the restaurant closes, you must leave, so if it is 9:30 and the restaurant closes at 10, you probably shouldn't order the buffet. They will also tell you that you cannot share your plate with other people.
What they will not do (and what AT&T does) is come back when you are halfway through your first plate and tell you that the "All you can eat" is only for as much as you can stack on a single plate and you can't go back through the line. Oh, and you can only have two rolls. And if you get extra rolls, each one will cost about 1/3 of an entire all you can eat meal.
As I explained elsewhere, advertising always uses the most pedantic definitions possible, stretching meaning to be misleading to customers, while still technically true, so that they're not hit by truth in advertising laws.
Yes, and a case in point that I noticed recently: One of the major insurance companies in the U.S., I don't remember which (shows how effective advertising is) advertised that the average person who switched to them saved $150. Then in a caveat at the end they admit that this is based on a survey of people who said they saved money by switching to this company. So in other words, they have completely thrown out anyone who switched and ended up paying more from the equation.
Another example is the one where 4 out of 5 dentists recommend some brand of gum. Well, in truth 99% of dentists recommend that you don't chew gum at all, but 4 out of 5 of the remaining 1% might recommend that brand over other brands.
No, it doesn't show that at all. It provides no effect size statistics to back up such a claim.
Well, by all means, lets have a larger study, then. However, I would still bet large sums of money that browsers that people have to go out of their way to find and use will tend to have smarter users than browsers that come by default with almost every computer. You don't have to get offended, just because this small sampling tends to back up what just plain makes sense. If you are an IE user, that doesn't make you dumb. It's just that a lot of dumb people tend to use IE, because that is what their computer came with, and they tend to drag down the average. Heck, I use IE from time to time, when some idiot webmaster has thrown standards to the wind in favor of special whizbangs that only IE supports. That doesn't make me any dumber for using it. Nor am I offended that people who use Chrome are on average smarter than people who use Firefox, like myself. Averages are just averages. Like 99% of people, I consider myself above average,
I don't see anybody claiming causation. Nobody says that using Chrome or Firefox instead of IE will MAKE you smarter. It just shows that people who use Firefox or Chrome tend to be smarter. This conclusion is an obvious one if you think about it. The average person, and the below average person, will most likely use the browser that comes with their computer. And of course, the average or below average person is probably going to have a MS based machine. The average or below average person probably is not even aware that there is an alternative to IE. You have to be an engineer, computer professional, or at the very least someone with a desire to know more about computers to even be aware of the existence of alternative browsers. These types of people are generally smarter than your average bear.
When reading this post, please note that I don't intend to make any absolutes. "On average" should be inferred in front of most of the statements herein. The only reason I didn't type it out every time was because we were already talking about averages.
Despite what people say they don't really want everything to be "equal"..
People who are below average or at least who perform below average absolutely want everything to be equal. It's the pesky above average people who want to be rewarded based on their skills and/or performance.
You can't legislate how people feel about one another. If society finds skinny people attractive, then banning them from TV is not going to affect it. Just like changing what you are allowed to call a certain race of people is not going to change how you feel about that race of people.
Seriously, If you are on LinkedIn then you have failed at life
Go back to Farmville, you moron.
I wondered why I was not getting ahead in the world. I don't lie in LinkedIn or on resumes and I assumed nobody else did either.
At least I still have one advantage over everybody else. I only have to remember one version of my story.
Police regularly break other laws in the pursuit of their duty. Speeding, blowing stop signs, drawing weapons on people, wrestling people to the ground, etc. Why would destruction of evidence be any different?
Even in Canada, I pay about $80/month for a transit pass, which is significantly less than my car insurance/gas/maintenance.
When I lived near Chicago, it was also cheaper to get a bus pass and a train pass than a car and insurance and maintenance, but unfortunately, you still have to have a car because neither the train nor the bus will get you everywhere you want to go even in a big city like Chicago.
Again, look at Europe, and read up on why this happened to the US.
It happened because we were an agricultural society that lived off the land. It just hasn't unhappened as much in the U.S. as it has in Europe.
If prices had been higher in the US, perhaps the urban sprawl would be less since people would not be as willing to throw money out the tailpipe.
So what this would indicate is that if gas were not a concern, then people would prefer not to live in a dense population center. I know I prefer to live near but not in a big city. By living near, you can go into the city to see an event, dine, or go to museums, but you don't have to live with the crime, high housing costs, high public transportation costs, and well, the high density.
It is not true that you cannot teach a computer class without expensive computers.
Agreed. My High School had about $12,000 worth of computers. My school district is about the same size as the one in question. Now granted, this was just the one school, so if you put the same amount of technology into all the public schools in my district, you are probably talking about close to $200,000. A factor of about 200 difference from the Ann Arbor proposal.
What shame. Maybe they should have bought PCs instead. They may have run slow, but at least they would be able to work with Google Docs. Heck a 6 year old PC is still perfectly usable. I just upgraded a 9 year old computer last year. It still did everything I needed it to do, even ran games pretty fast. The only reason I upgraded was because it had developed a habit of blue screening, and hours spent trying to fix the problem only resulted in Microsoft telling me that my version of Windows which had been Genuine for the last 9 years was no longer Genuine.
I, on the other hand, used to live in Racine County Wisconsin, and despite paying ridiculous property tax rates the school systems were crap. I paid 2% of my homes value every year in taxes, which is even higher than DuPage county, Illinois (1.67%), even though that county is often touted as having the highest property tax rates. Yest, the schools sucked. Standardized scores sucked, the bus system sucked, the teachers were paid less than national average. There was no money for band, sports or activities. The money was clearly all going into somebodies pocket.
I still think that people who didn't live anywhere near there are allowed to have a say. Personally, I think $45 million is way too high for a computer overhaul in a public school. That is $2700 per student in the district, and probably less than 1/3 of the students in the district will end up in a class in which they need to use a computer. There are districts that only spend $5,000 for the whole budget per student, not just on the computer allotment.
The 3/1000 difference from .2425 to .2422 results in a Y30K problem. After 30,000 AD, we can relax for a while.
Due to tidal forces slowing the Earth's rotation, in the year 30,000, the day will be about half a second longer resulting in the year being only 365.2401 days long, so we will need to adjust our algorithms a lot sooner than that
Instead of giving them the reward ahead of time, how about an agreement where they have to do something first and get the carrot afterward?
No, we can't do that. We are trying to convert them to western thought. This is where you get the shiny thing you want now, then have to work for it to pay it, but then you get tired of working, and the shiny thing is not longer as interesting so you don't care to continue working so hard to pay for it.
Well, as someone else who is approaching the 100k mark, I cannot afford a $200 ticket, so I don't speed. I completely disagree with a sliding scale even though I haven't gotten a ticket in years. If we institute a sliding scales based on wealth, then cops will spend all day pulling over only high dollar cars because they know they will bring in more money. People who don't have much money will be allowed to get away with whatever they want because the cops know there is not money in punishing them for it. A traffic fine is a punishment for breaking the law, and it shouldn't matter how much money you make. It is just as illegal. It's not like a rich person is just going to say "Oh, well I can just pay $200 every day and go as fast as I want". After a couple of days, they won't have a license anymore, and if they persist in driving without a license, they will find themselves in jail.
If I was worth 6 million dollars I would be looooonnnnngggg gone from my day job. Are you serious?
If you were worth $6 million, part of your worth would be tied up in illiquid assets that can't be used for your day to day living. In fact, most people that are worth that much have almost their entire wealth in illiquid assets. That is why they keep working. But let's pretend that only half your wealth is tied up in cars, houses, retirement savings and so forth.Now, you have $3 million. You need to live off of that, so it would not be wise to put that in the stock market, because even though the market averages 10% there are whole decades where it is flat or goes down. So, in order to get a steady income, you need to invest in safe investments, like CDs, savings account, or treasury bonds. Right now, it looks like the best rate is going to be about 1%. That will get you about $30,000 per year to live on.
Christianity is an amoral scheme to collect money and cover up the sexual abuse of young boys.
Liar. Christianity has nothing to do with sexually abusing young boys. The discovery of several instances of sexual abuse in one offshoot of a Church which believes many of the same things as the Christian faith is a relatively recent phenomenon and is far from representing the foundations of Christianity.
As far as a scheme to collect money, most people going into ministry are well aware that they are going to have a great deal of difficulty supporting themselves. Pastors, the highest paid position in the Church, average only about $30,000. They aren't doing it for the money.