In the U.S., the average is only a few hundred deaths per year. It is higher worldwide. There are some countries with a miniscule percentage of the air traffic of the U.S. which consistently have more fatalities every year than the U.S.
The number of deaths in General Aviation accidents in the U.S. every year is higher than the number for commercial deaths every year despite there being hundreds of times as many people moved by commercial airline than by GA. You are slightly more likely to die in a GA accident by miles flown than by car, though the statistics for GA are improving in recent years.
I was given an HP laptop to use at work. I wanted a Dell, but the HP came with a $200 rebate that the requisition guy gets to pocket.
My computer shuts off with no error message about once every two weeks. At this point, it will not boot up in regular mode. I have to go into safe mode, run all my AV and adware programs, which turn up nothing serious, and then it will boot up normally. Or sometimes it won't. Twice I have had to recover from the recovery partition (because HP doesn't supply software discs). When you recover off the hardware partition it reloads all the HP crapware that comes preinstalled, and gives you a new user ID, which makes it annoying to go back and get all of the files out of your old "My Documents" folder. Plus many of your programs have to be reinstalled, and you lose a lot of your personalized configuration.
The last time my computer turned itself off uncommanded, it completely lost TCP/IP. I had to reset the TCP/IP catalog to get it working again.
My keyboard randomly goes into some mode that acts like the shift key is being held down, so all of my number keys display the symbols above them instead. I can only get out of this mode by trying combinations of going into and out of scroll lock, num lock and caps lock. Luckily, this only happens when I am using the laptop keyboard, and not when I am using an external keyboard. Other people in my office have complained of the same problem.
I will never buy an HP laptop again, and I did not buy nor want the one I have now.
Yes, and I assume a large part of that 35k is paying the salaries of maintenance personnel, deckhands, and other crew. Then, when the truly rich person is done with the boat, he can sell it, with good upkeep, for a substantial portion of the purchase price.
The type of person who would buy this laptop is not Bill Gates, with his billions, but some upper middle class guy who makes maybe $200k a year. He could get rich if he would save his money and invest wisely, but instead spends more than he makes on a McMansion, fancy cars, and gimmicky electronics. He will have nothing to leave to his children, and is probably one paycheck away from having to declare bankruptcy.
Truly rich people reinvest their money to make more money and fuel the economy. They don't buy gimmicky million dollar laptops. The truly rich leave that kind of frivolous spending for the far less wealthy who need to appear to be rich.
I don't see why dinosaurs would have had to burrow to survive. I'm sure many dinosaurs died because they were close to the blast. But others were on the other side of the world. Global climate changed as a result of the impact, and most of the larger dinosaurs probably died of starvation. The smaller ones probably found enough to stay alive. Notably, most of the early mammals were also small.
Here in Oklahoma, we brought the lottery to a vote three times and it passed all three times, but we never got the lottery until about a year after the third time.
Could it be that the only reason this is being brought up is because it has to do with marijuana?
A man has to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river. He has a rowboat, and it can only carry him and one other thing. If the fox and the chicken are left together, the fox will eat the chicken. If the chicken and the corn is left together, the chicken will eat the corn. How does the man do it?
Well, the real answer is that the problem hasn't been researched properly. There is no real reason why you would need to be able to move the fox, which would prove difficult to catch anyway. If you could catch the fox, you could put put the corn in a suitable container which should have been researched beforehand, and then take the fox across the river and dump it.
If you really need the chicken and the corn on the other side of the river, then you take the corn over, then go back and get the chicken. You don't need a fox. The fox is something you need to try to keep away from the chicken.
The question is incorrect and shows an ability of the questioner to reason out what they are asking.
The Microsoft thing was just plain stupid. The only thing I could fault Microsoft with was if they deliberately misled people into believing that MSFT would pay them benefits, take out their taxes or some other thing. Of course they did reclassify some people from employee to 1099, but if it was explained what this meant, and both parties were happy with it, then what is the big deal?
My guess is that the IRS is the big deal. Probably these 1099 people were not doing quarterly estimated taxes, and maybe not paying taxes at all, thinking that perhaps 1099 was akin to "under the table", which it is not. Rather than go after all the individuals, I could see the IRS pushing for legal remedies to try to get the natural consolidator of 1099 income (MSFT) to make the people be employees so that MSFT could withhold taxes.
But to me, it is just stupid. If I want to work at a company on a 1099 basis for 100 years, and the company wants me to do so, there should be no reason why that business relationship cannot be done.
I have a corporation, and when I was acting as a consultant, the stupid MSFT deal was making my client nervous as I had been there over a year. Hello! I have a corporation, for fscks sake! A genuine corporate Tax ID. I pay myself salary! I withhold taxes! I pay unemployment insurance and workers comp. I have general and professional liability insurance!
All of this brought on by a totally different situation at MSFT that should have been a non-issue anyway.
I think you don't understand. the parent was talking about full time employees who are exempt form overtime benefits, at a certain level on the pay scale at most organizations the company or institution basically owns the employee's time. Mostly these are critical and senior positions.
No, the intention of the law about exemptions is that they are supposed to be for critical and senior positions, but they reality is that just about everybody is classified as exempt in order to steal time from them.
I for one, like the GP post, have been promised the world, and delivered nothing more times than I can count, so after taking my current (exempt) position, I no longer work overtime. Period. If they don't like it, they can fire me, or pay me overtime, I don't really care which. I realize that many people are not in a position to make this stand. Neither am I. But I am making it anyway. If EVERYBODY made this stand, even those who are not in a position to do so, major change would be affected. A lot of people WOULD get fired. A lot of companies would fail. After all, there are many companies out there who can only afford to be in business if they don't have to pay their employees for the time they work. If that is the case, their business model is wrong, their solution is not viable, and they deserve to go under.
I find my self in an interesting combination of these two cases. While I am a salaried employee, my company primarily works on government contracts. This means that we need to account for our time down to the closest 1/10 of an hour as per US law.
Salaried employees working for consulting firms often end up with the worst injustices. After all, if they work overtime, the consulting company brings in BILLABLE DOLLARS, but they don't have to pay the employee anything. Obviously, this tends to make the consulting company try to get as much overtime out of you as possible.
Another situation is when the consulting company bills you out at a daily rate, and the client company usually figures they paid for a day of your time, so you need to be there for one 24 hour day in order for them to get their money's worth out of you.
According to the Bible, no one can know the exact dates of Jesus' second coming, not even Jesus himself knows. There is considerable debate about whether the tribulation will be pre-rapture or post-rapture, but suffice it to say that no one, including the Mayans, can know when the end of the world will be, if Jesus himself does not know.
Of course, if Christianity is wrong, then all bets are off and maybe the Mayans do know when Jesus is coming. But then we have a Paradox.
I'd assume that the cars you have now are much nicer than the car you probably had as a teen. Most teens can only afford cheap clunkers so you paid much less because the car was worth much less.
That's true, but the expensive part of car insurance is the medical. Sure it costs $3k to fix a dented bumper, but it can cost $100k to fix the real or imagined pain of the person in the other vehicle.
Yes, "may" is the key word. And guess what? Before they did this study, they could have also said "people who play car racing games may be more likely to take risks and drive aggressively when driving in real life." They have done a study, and not proven anything. People who believe their argument will see the stats as confirmation, people who don't believe their argument, or people who examine closely how they performed the study, will dismiss the stats as invalid. Nothing has been accomplished.
if someone put me in one of those I'd feel no responsibility to drive sensibly since I would have no worries about killing people or dying like you have on real roads
I agree with you, and I'd feel even less responsibility if they had just shown me some racing video games. I'd assume I was supposed to mimic what I had just seen.
One part I don't miss about being a stupid teenager is the insurance premiums I , on the other hand, paid far less when I was a teenager then I do now. My premium was about $200 a year. Now, with no accidents or tickets, I pay about $200 a month. Granted I have three cars with full coverage, and a wife (also with no accidents or tickets) on the policy.
Really? I watch several hours of TV a week, and rarely see any violence. Maybe it is just the legislators TV that get violence. My TV comes with a handy remote control that can be used to regulate my violence intake, and I keep it pretty low.
This is not to counter the argument that seeing violence breeds violence, because I think it definitely influences behavior, but there is no reason to have to watch the voilent drek on TV if you don't want to.
Something I suggest to Christians to try to fathom their beliefs is that perhaps God exists outside of time and space and that God could have created the universe with an infinitely deep past; ie there is no reason for a Christian to believe that the universe is any specific age or that 'creation' happened at a specific time.
Some Christians readily soak this up while others just stare blankly before quoting some irrelevent bible verse. Its a useful calibration.
Try pointing out to them that the Bible clearly states that God created Adam as an adult and not as a baby that had to grow up. Perhaps this will help.
I am a Christian and absolutely believe that God exists outside of space and time, and that he created space and time. I also fully support science as science is the study of nature, which God made, and therefore should give us more of an understanding of God. The only "science" I don't like is the "science" that seems to have as a singular objective not to further knowledge of nature, but to attempt to disprove the existence of God.
Personally I find the Flying Spaghetti Monster equally convincing.
I don't. The FSM has only been seriously considered for a decade at most, writings discussing the FSM are highly contradictory in nature, and available only on the internet and mostly only in articles mocking more established religions, and the main proponents of his existence still live in their mother's basement. I will lay down money that there is not a single believer in the FSM who would not recant their belief if the were commanded to do so or die.
I figure if there is a device there and the airbag deploys, then the person is going to experience "death by blackberry". Perhaps we should make the airbag sense the presence of a wireless device within 2 feet and deploy immediately, hopefully before the luser has shifted into drive,
That's a good start, but you forgot:
Changing the radio station
Putting on make-up
Shaving
Talking on a cell phone
Eating
Drinking
Smoking
Referring to a map
Referring to a GPS
Driving with children in the car*
And reading should be exapanded to include road signs, especially highway interchange signs
And I am sure I have left plenty of other distractions out as well
*Yes, I have children and realize they need to get from place to place, but I am definitely aware that they steal a dangerous amount of my attention when in the car.
Microsoft doesn't do anything unless money is involved.
As opposed to the cybersquatters, who are holding the websites just to display their opinion? The opinion that "This website is available for lease or for sale. Please contact " etc, etc.
Whether it's banned or not, I wouldn't want a new pilot taking his first solo flight at night.
As far as I recall, that would be perfectly legal, but fortunately, the pilot training industry is capable of determining for itself that first solo at night is a bad idea, and I don't know of anyone who has done that.
That being said, in the U.S., if you fly in the great flat midwest of the U.S., flying at night is fairly safe. Anything tall has a light on it, and it is often EASIER to fly by ground reference at night, at least if you are using highways, not so much if you are using lakes and rivers. It is amazing how similar city shapes on the map correspond to the pattern of lights that they put off.
Well, you can't fly a plane at night if you live in a country that bans night VFR flying and you're not rated for IFR.
And the U.S. is not one of the countries that bans night VFR flying. I don't know that GP was from the states or not, or whether he was referencing DST in general (which many countries do), or just the recent change in the DST (which only the U.S. did).
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In the U.S., the average is only a few hundred deaths per year. It is higher worldwide. There are some countries with a miniscule percentage of the air traffic of the U.S. which consistently have more fatalities every year than the U.S.
The number of deaths in General Aviation accidents in the U.S. every year is higher than the number for commercial deaths every year despite there being hundreds of times as many people moved by commercial airline than by GA. You are slightly more likely to die in a GA accident by miles flown than by car, though the statistics for GA are improving in recent years.
I don't know about shipping, but most flights over the Pacific are conducted in either the far north or far south Pacific due to great circle routing.
I was given an HP laptop to use at work. I wanted a Dell, but the HP came with a $200 rebate that the requisition guy gets to pocket.
My computer shuts off with no error message about once every two weeks. At this point, it will not boot up in regular mode. I have to go into safe mode, run all my AV and adware programs, which turn up nothing serious, and then it will boot up normally. Or sometimes it won't. Twice I have had to recover from the recovery partition (because HP doesn't supply software discs). When you recover off the hardware partition it reloads all the HP crapware that comes preinstalled, and gives you a new user ID, which makes it annoying to go back and get all of the files out of your old "My Documents" folder. Plus many of your programs have to be reinstalled, and you lose a lot of your personalized configuration.
The last time my computer turned itself off uncommanded, it completely lost TCP/IP. I had to reset the TCP/IP catalog to get it working again.
My keyboard randomly goes into some mode that acts like the shift key is being held down, so all of my number keys display the symbols above them instead. I can only get out of this mode by trying combinations of going into and out of scroll lock, num lock and caps lock. Luckily, this only happens when I am using the laptop keyboard, and not when I am using an external keyboard. Other people in my office have complained of the same problem.
I will never buy an HP laptop again, and I did not buy nor want the one I have now.
Yes, and I assume a large part of that 35k is paying the salaries of maintenance personnel, deckhands, and other crew. Then, when the truly rich person is done with the boat, he can sell it, with good upkeep, for a substantial portion of the purchase price.
The type of person who would buy this laptop is not Bill Gates, with his billions, but some upper middle class guy who makes maybe $200k a year. He could get rich if he would save his money and invest wisely, but instead spends more than he makes on a McMansion, fancy cars, and gimmicky electronics. He will have nothing to leave to his children, and is probably one paycheck away from having to declare bankruptcy.
Truly rich people reinvest their money to make more money and fuel the economy. They don't buy gimmicky million dollar laptops. The truly rich leave that kind of frivolous spending for the far less wealthy who need to appear to be rich.
I don't see why dinosaurs would have had to burrow to survive. I'm sure many dinosaurs died because they were close to the blast. But others were on the other side of the world. Global climate changed as a result of the impact, and most of the larger dinosaurs probably died of starvation. The smaller ones probably found enough to stay alive. Notably, most of the early mammals were also small.
Here in Oklahoma, we brought the lottery to a vote three times and it passed all three times, but we never got the lottery until about a year after the third time.
Could it be that the only reason this is being brought up is because it has to do with marijuana?
A man has to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river. He has a rowboat, and it can only carry him and one other thing. If the fox and the chicken are left together, the fox will eat the chicken. If the chicken and the corn is left together, the chicken will eat the corn. How does the man do it?
Well, the real answer is that the problem hasn't been researched properly. There is no real reason why you would need to be able to move the fox, which would prove difficult to catch anyway. If you could catch the fox, you could put put the corn in a suitable container which should have been researched beforehand, and then take the fox across the river and dump it.
If you really need the chicken and the corn on the other side of the river, then you take the corn over, then go back and get the chicken. You don't need a fox. The fox is something you need to try to keep away from the chicken.
The question is incorrect and shows an ability of the questioner to reason out what they are asking.
The Microsoft thing was just plain stupid. The only thing I could fault Microsoft with was if they deliberately misled people into believing that MSFT would pay them benefits, take out their taxes or some other thing. Of course they did reclassify some people from employee to 1099, but if it was explained what this meant, and both parties were happy with it, then what is the big deal?
My guess is that the IRS is the big deal. Probably these 1099 people were not doing quarterly estimated taxes, and maybe not paying taxes at all, thinking that perhaps 1099 was akin to "under the table", which it is not. Rather than go after all the individuals, I could see the IRS pushing for legal remedies to try to get the natural consolidator of 1099 income (MSFT) to make the people be employees so that MSFT could withhold taxes.
But to me, it is just stupid. If I want to work at a company on a 1099 basis for 100 years, and the company wants me to do so, there should be no reason why that business relationship cannot be done.
I have a corporation, and when I was acting as a consultant, the stupid MSFT deal was making my client nervous as I had been there over a year. Hello! I have a corporation, for fscks sake! A genuine corporate Tax ID. I pay myself salary! I withhold taxes! I pay unemployment insurance and workers comp. I have general and professional liability insurance!
All of this brought on by a totally different situation at MSFT that should have been a non-issue anyway.
I think you don't understand. the parent was talking about full time employees who are exempt form overtime benefits, at a certain level on the pay scale at most organizations the company or institution basically owns the employee's time. Mostly these are critical and senior positions.
No, the intention of the law about exemptions is that they are supposed to be for critical and senior positions, but they reality is that just about everybody is classified as exempt in order to steal time from them.
I for one, like the GP post, have been promised the world, and delivered nothing more times than I can count, so after taking my current (exempt) position, I no longer work overtime. Period. If they don't like it, they can fire me, or pay me overtime, I don't really care which. I realize that many people are not in a position to make this stand. Neither am I. But I am making it anyway. If EVERYBODY made this stand, even those who are not in a position to do so, major change would be affected. A lot of people WOULD get fired. A lot of companies would fail. After all, there are many companies out there who can only afford to be in business if they don't have to pay their employees for the time they work. If that is the case, their business model is wrong, their solution is not viable, and they deserve to go under.
I find my self in an interesting combination of these two cases. While I am a salaried employee, my company primarily works on government contracts. This means that we need to account for our time down to the closest 1/10 of an hour as per US law.
Salaried employees working for consulting firms often end up with the worst injustices. After all, if they work overtime, the consulting company brings in BILLABLE DOLLARS, but they don't have to pay the employee anything. Obviously, this tends to make the consulting company try to get as much overtime out of you as possible.
Another situation is when the consulting company bills you out at a daily rate, and the client company usually figures they paid for a day of your time, so you need to be there for one 24 hour day in order for them to get their money's worth out of you.
According to the Bible, no one can know the exact dates of Jesus' second coming, not even Jesus himself knows. There is considerable debate about whether the tribulation will be pre-rapture or post-rapture, but suffice it to say that no one, including the Mayans, can know when the end of the world will be, if Jesus himself does not know.
Of course, if Christianity is wrong, then all bets are off and maybe the Mayans do know when Jesus is coming. But then we have a Paradox.
I'd assume that the cars you have now are much nicer than the car you probably had as a teen. Most teens can only afford cheap clunkers so you paid much less because the car was worth much less.
That's true, but the expensive part of car insurance is the medical. Sure it costs $3k to fix a dented bumper, but it can cost $100k to fix the real or imagined pain of the person in the other vehicle.
Yes, "may" is the key word. And guess what? Before they did this study, they could have also said "people who play car racing games may be more likely to take risks and drive aggressively when driving in real life." They have done a study, and not proven anything. People who believe their argument will see the stats as confirmation, people who don't believe their argument, or people who examine closely how they performed the study, will dismiss the stats as invalid. Nothing has been accomplished.
if someone put me in one of those I'd feel no responsibility to drive sensibly since I would have no worries about killing people or dying like you have on real roads
I agree with you, and I'd feel even less responsibility if they had just shown me some racing video games. I'd assume I was supposed to mimic what I had just seen.
One part I don't miss about being a stupid teenager is the insurance premiums
I , on the other hand, paid far less when I was a teenager then I do now. My premium was about $200 a year. Now, with no accidents or tickets, I pay about $200 a month. Granted I have three cars with full coverage, and a wife (also with no accidents or tickets) on the policy.
Really? I watch several hours of TV a week, and rarely see any violence. Maybe it is just the legislators TV that get violence. My TV comes with a handy remote control that can be used to regulate my violence intake, and I keep it pretty low.
This is not to counter the argument that seeing violence breeds violence, because I think it definitely influences behavior, but there is no reason to have to watch the voilent drek on TV if you don't want to.
Some Christians readily soak this up while others just stare blankly before quoting some irrelevent bible verse. Its a useful calibration.
Try pointing out to them that the Bible clearly states that God created Adam as an adult and not as a baby that had to grow up. Perhaps this will help.
I am a Christian and absolutely believe that God exists outside of space and time, and that he created space and time. I also fully support science as science is the study of nature, which God made, and therefore should give us more of an understanding of God. The only "science" I don't like is the "science" that seems to have as a singular objective not to further knowledge of nature, but to attempt to disprove the existence of God.
Imagine Ballmer with a chair like that -- what couldn't he do!
Yes, he would be truly able to throw his weight around.
Personally I find the Flying Spaghetti Monster equally convincing.
I don't. The FSM has only been seriously considered for a decade at most, writings discussing the FSM are highly contradictory in nature, and available only on the internet and mostly only in articles mocking more established religions, and the main proponents of his existence still live in their mother's basement. I will lay down money that there is not a single believer in the FSM who would not recant their belief if the were commanded to do so or die.
I figure if there is a device there and the airbag deploys, then the person is going to experience "death by blackberry". Perhaps we should make the airbag sense the presence of a wireless device within 2 feet and deploy immediately, hopefully before the luser has shifted into drive,
That's a good start, but you forgot:
Changing the radio station
Putting on make-up
Shaving
Talking on a cell phone
Eating
Drinking
Smoking
Referring to a map
Referring to a GPS
Driving with children in the car*
And reading should be exapanded to include road signs, especially highway interchange signs
And I am sure I have left plenty of other distractions out as well
*Yes, I have children and realize they need to get from place to place, but I am definitely aware that they steal a dangerous amount of my attention when in the car.
Microsoft doesn't do anything unless money is involved.
As opposed to the cybersquatters, who are holding the websites just to display their opinion? The opinion that "This website is available for lease or for sale. Please contact " etc, etc.
Whether it's banned or not, I wouldn't want a new pilot taking his first solo flight at night.
As far as I recall, that would be perfectly legal, but fortunately, the pilot training industry is capable of determining for itself that first solo at night is a bad idea, and I don't know of anyone who has done that.
That being said, in the U.S., if you fly in the great flat midwest of the U.S., flying at night is fairly safe. Anything tall has a light on it, and it is often EASIER to fly by ground reference at night, at least if you are using highways, not so much if you are using lakes and rivers. It is amazing how similar city shapes on the map correspond to the pattern of lights that they put off.
Well, you can't fly a plane at night if you live in a country that bans night VFR flying and you're not rated for IFR.
And the U.S. is not one of the countries that bans night VFR flying. I don't know that GP was from the states or not, or whether he was referencing DST in general (which many countries do), or just the recent change in the DST (which only the U.S. did).