I'm a little confused by your response. The postal service is written into the constitution, but the laws for funding of the pension obligations was written by Fedex and UPS and passed by the congress after a little campaign cash got passed around. I'm struggling to remember a law that the postal service got written on their behalf. Can you furnish an example?
The security and dependability of the mail was a big deal to the founding fathers, because it ensured privacy, facilitated commerce and provided the handling for unfettered communications between the people and the government. The logistical conditions are different, today, but those same elements still apply. It's the infrastructure of a free society, in gross terms. Voter information, tax forms, subpoenas, government invoices, correspondence with government agencies and branches of government, benefit payouts all need a dependable and timely way to get to people that is not influenced by or unduly affected by private industry. Everyone needs that stuff, so a basic foundation of affordable service for all citizens is necessary.
Postage actually used to be a tax when I was a kid, but they changed it to a service back in the eighties, if I remember correctly, and this opened up the private letter delivery market for UPS and Fedex and the rest. It's really the exact opposite of your contention that the USPS took over a commercial niche. The postal service can still be sued for liability, so I don't know what kind of immunity you're talking about. What offenses are you thinking about?
The TSA isn't needed anymore because the procedures around admittance to the cockpit, and reinforcement of the cockpit door, have been adopted. Nobody is walking onto planes with bombs. They're stashing them onboard when they're being serviced, and that points to focusing on the security of the airport and monitoring of personnel. When I was flying out of the Dominican Republic, there was a cop body-searching everybody that approached and walked away from every plane. That's all he did was scan IDs and do pat-downs. It's all taken care of. We can go back to treating passengers as we did before 2001.
As someone who has handled hundreds and hundreds of photographs used as exhibits for trial, I can tell you that the polaroid is pretty much the gold standard for evidence photography precisely because it cannot be messed with. (It can, technically, but tampering is an incredibly delicate job and extremely hard to conceal in practice.) The "negative" for polaroids is also the print, and their origin (and the image) can be tied directly to a specific point in time. Film is a little more consistent because there's way less variability in the development chemistry as a result of temperature (one of the problems with a lot of polaroid chemical formulations), and the negative is the more compact source of truth about the image, but film still has a two-step process from capture-to-printed-image. Both analog methods beat digital. They deteriorate on known timescales, with known effects from humidity and temperature, too, so it's easier to assess provenance and chain of custody. Further, any modification of the image, for film, almost always needs to be done at printmaking time. Usually this means lightening or darkening or color correcting, but you have to be an exacting master of the darkroom and enlarger to perform the time-consuming kind of editing tricks with printmaking that someone can knock off in 10 minutes with photoshop. Those skills (and the time involved) applied to negatives are far more challenging because you have to work with the chemistry of the post-exposure emulsion and the physical surface of thesubstrate itself. It still leaves evidence behind, too, no matter how hard one might try. Watch the X-wing and TIE fighter scenes in the original analog film version of StarWars, and you'll see ghosty-framed tracking boxes around those models as they fly through space. Those were done with frame-by-frame cutouts of images, with emulsions hand-painted over the cuts after gluing, but the optical properties of the film substrate itself gave the trick away, and that was at the very peak of negative image manipulation technique at the time, and you'll get loads of analog camera people who will argue forever about the question of whether it's still the peak, never since surpassed.
Except that you're wrong. The peel-apart film that is now totally discontinued is for the Land rangefinder camera. The 8x10 stuff is sill very popular with portrait and landscape photographers, but it's not the same size, and it works with a different camera mechanism.
Those friggin' alien postmen STILL keep losing my mail.
I've had it. Let's contract it out to the postal service on Omichron Persei VIII and be done with it.
My GF's in Longmont and she got municipal fiber to her condo. It's amazingly fast. I'm really quite envious, but not to the point where I'm dying to get century link out to my house to install the commercial flavor. Municipal IS the way to go, I'm convinced.
Adults get no benefit from the HPV vaccine. It needs to be given to pre-pubescent kids not because they have not yet become sexually active, but because the vaccine only causes the desired immune response when it's been given while the immune system itself is still evolving... that is, before it's fully developed. Also, both men and women can be exposed to HPV, and carry it without symptoms. It's a pesky little devil of a virus
See, here's the thing: In order to get the benefit of the HPV vaccine, you have to get it when you are young, not so that you can get it before sexual activity, but because the immune system is still developing at that time, and can produce the most effective and continuing response to HPV. There is a non-zero chance that you and your wife will get HPV. All it takes a divorce, an affair or untimely death to cause new couplings and the risk is there.
Our standups take five minutes for a US-local team of nine. Occasionally, a conversation gets started, but usually the interested parties just meet up afterwards. I think your team is sufficiently small that there's not a lot of structure required, which is great, but not every team is so lucky.
I manage a DevOps team, with lots of system administration work, and we were never able to get Scrum or Kanban to take off or get the results that were advertised. We dropped both, on our team, but we kept the daily standup (I actually wanted to kill it, but the team surprised me and said they wanted it). I still don't do anything for that meeting but read the roll-call, but if the team gets value from it, then it stays. The thing that agile seems to help in the broader organization (and I got this from a Scaled Agile training over the past couple weeks) is to help get diverse practitioners in the same room (testers, architects, project folks, execs), and helps give them a common language around expectations and timing, "Scaled Agile" calls these events "ceremonies", which is so syrupy that it makes me sick -- they're meetings -- but they do have very clear goals and opportunities to clear away misconceptions, so I think they're helpful. Agile also folds in the regular process of retrospectives, which I think are valuable as long as teams have the luxury of time to correct things that don't work well. Honestly, I think Agile is generally benign, and is helpful in chunking work into bits that can be worked iteratively, but teams need some degree of freedom to let go of the parts that don't work.
Well, while you can get by without meat and poultry inspections for a little bit, and without water quality monitoring for awhile, or game and fisheries monitoring for awhile, or atmospheric tracking and monitoring for awhile, or auditing financial institutions for legal compliance, there would be a time afterwards when stuff like that would become meaningful again. None of that stuff showed up in the government basket out of thin air. It's nice to think that it can all be burned down and nobody would care, but the truth of it is that there are things the government does (most of what it does, actually) which private industry does not or cannot do reliably or without undue influence. Yep, there's also a lot of paperwork and inefficiency, too.
... and I mentioned it on one of the gawker blogs and I pretty much got denounced as an anti-science troll. It's an unpopular opinion, but sending squishy meat-bags to mars is a waste of time, money and other resources that can be directed to other, more pressing priorities on this planet, or to projects that use robotic probes for exploration.
It's a fascinating question, but let's just start with the assumption that I get a few billion and the tax man takes half. I have 1.5 billion to work with.
I'd probably start out with setting up a few small charitable trusts with 10 million each, for things that I care about in my community -- food banks, educational assistance for economically disadvantaged students, and housing & heating assistance for the elderly and disabled. They would pay out 5% of invested holdings every year. This would get me on a nice dinner party schedule, with some benefits to attend and give me some causes to work on and with other like-minded people. It doesn't have to be flashy, but it does have to be meaningful to me. This is how I'd meet people and pick up a social life.
I'd build a new house up in the mountains, with room for all my toys. I'd get an apartment in NYC and another house out in southern California. I'd probably move around between all three, through the year. I'd probably do a fair amount of traveling abroad as I felt the need.
I suppose, if my GF didn't care for this life, at some point I'd meet someone that would want to go along for the ride.
Honestly, I'd park most of the money in cash and securities and play it by ear.
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I'm a little confused by your response. The postal service is written into the constitution, but the laws for funding of the pension obligations was written by Fedex and UPS and passed by the congress after a little campaign cash got passed around. I'm struggling to remember a law that the postal service got written on their behalf. Can you furnish an example?
The security and dependability of the mail was a big deal to the founding fathers, because it ensured privacy, facilitated commerce and provided the handling for unfettered communications between the people and the government. The logistical conditions are different, today, but those same elements still apply. It's the infrastructure of a free society, in gross terms. Voter information, tax forms, subpoenas, government invoices, correspondence with government agencies and branches of government, benefit payouts all need a dependable and timely way to get to people that is not influenced by or unduly affected by private industry. Everyone needs that stuff, so a basic foundation of affordable service for all citizens is necessary.
Postage actually used to be a tax when I was a kid, but they changed it to a service back in the eighties, if I remember correctly, and this opened up the private letter delivery market for UPS and Fedex and the rest. It's really the exact opposite of your contention that the USPS took over a commercial niche. The postal service can still be sued for liability, so I don't know what kind of immunity you're talking about. What offenses are you thinking about?
This excellent explanation was a pleasure to read. Thank you for making it.
The TSA isn't needed anymore because the procedures around admittance to the cockpit, and reinforcement of the cockpit door, have been adopted. Nobody is walking onto planes with bombs. They're stashing them onboard when they're being serviced, and that points to focusing on the security of the airport and monitoring of personnel. When I was flying out of the Dominican Republic, there was a cop body-searching everybody that approached and walked away from every plane. That's all he did was scan IDs and do pat-downs. It's all taken care of. We can go back to treating passengers as we did before 2001.
Had I the mod points, I would mod you up.
This was magical. You are a scholar, an artist, and a wizard. Where do you find the time? Bravo!
If only the Instax film could give us the same size prints as the old 600-series films.
As someone who has handled hundreds and hundreds of photographs used as exhibits for trial, I can tell you that the polaroid is pretty much the gold standard for evidence photography precisely because it cannot be messed with. (It can, technically, but tampering is an incredibly delicate job and extremely hard to conceal in practice.) The "negative" for polaroids is also the print, and their origin (and the image) can be tied directly to a specific point in time. Film is a little more consistent because there's way less variability in the development chemistry as a result of temperature (one of the problems with a lot of polaroid chemical formulations), and the negative is the more compact source of truth about the image, but film still has a two-step process from capture-to-printed-image. Both analog methods beat digital. They deteriorate on known timescales, with known effects from humidity and temperature, too, so it's easier to assess provenance and chain of custody. Further, any modification of the image, for film, almost always needs to be done at printmaking time. Usually this means lightening or darkening or color correcting, but you have to be an exacting master of the darkroom and enlarger to perform the time-consuming kind of editing tricks with printmaking that someone can knock off in 10 minutes with photoshop. Those skills (and the time involved) applied to negatives are far more challenging because you have to work with the chemistry of the post-exposure emulsion and the physical surface of thesubstrate itself. It still leaves evidence behind, too, no matter how hard one might try. Watch the X-wing and TIE fighter scenes in the original analog film version of StarWars, and you'll see ghosty-framed tracking boxes around those models as they fly through space. Those were done with frame-by-frame cutouts of images, with emulsions hand-painted over the cuts after gluing, but the optical properties of the film substrate itself gave the trick away, and that was at the very peak of negative image manipulation technique at the time, and you'll get loads of analog camera people who will argue forever about the question of whether it's still the peak, never since surpassed.
Except that you're wrong. The peel-apart film that is now totally discontinued is for the Land rangefinder camera. The 8x10 stuff is sill very popular with portrait and landscape photographers, but it's not the same size, and it works with a different camera mechanism.
Those friggin' alien postmen STILL keep losing my mail.
I've had it. Let's contract it out to the postal service on Omichron Persei VIII and be done with it.
My GF's in Longmont and she got municipal fiber to her condo. It's amazingly fast. I'm really quite envious, but not to the point where I'm dying to get century link out to my house to install the commercial flavor. Municipal IS the way to go, I'm convinced.
Mod parent +1 Insightful! My kingdom for mod points!
I was glad to see this point made by someone here, and so succinctly. Thank you.
Adults get no benefit from the HPV vaccine. It needs to be given to pre-pubescent kids not because they have not yet become sexually active, but because the vaccine only causes the desired immune response when it's been given while the immune system itself is still evolving... that is, before it's fully developed. Also, both men and women can be exposed to HPV, and carry it without symptoms. It's a pesky little devil of a virus
Thank you for this informative, well-reasoned and insightful comment.
See, here's the thing: In order to get the benefit of the HPV vaccine, you have to get it when you are young, not so that you can get it before sexual activity, but because the immune system is still developing at that time, and can produce the most effective and continuing response to HPV. There is a non-zero chance that you and your wife will get HPV. All it takes a divorce, an affair or untimely death to cause new couplings and the risk is there.
Our standups take five minutes for a US-local team of nine. Occasionally, a conversation gets started, but usually the interested parties just meet up afterwards. I think your team is sufficiently small that there's not a lot of structure required, which is great, but not every team is so lucky.
Oh, my kingdom for mod points. +1 insightful. Mod parent up!
I manage a DevOps team, with lots of system administration work, and we were never able to get Scrum or Kanban to take off or get the results that were advertised. We dropped both, on our team, but we kept the daily standup (I actually wanted to kill it, but the team surprised me and said they wanted it). I still don't do anything for that meeting but read the roll-call, but if the team gets value from it, then it stays. The thing that agile seems to help in the broader organization (and I got this from a Scaled Agile training over the past couple weeks) is to help get diverse practitioners in the same room (testers, architects, project folks, execs), and helps give them a common language around expectations and timing, "Scaled Agile" calls these events "ceremonies", which is so syrupy that it makes me sick -- they're meetings -- but they do have very clear goals and opportunities to clear away misconceptions, so I think they're helpful. Agile also folds in the regular process of retrospectives, which I think are valuable as long as teams have the luxury of time to correct things that don't work well. Honestly, I think Agile is generally benign, and is helpful in chunking work into bits that can be worked iteratively, but teams need some degree of freedom to let go of the parts that don't work.
My kingdom for mod points! You have successfully described exactly what led me to avoid the show.
+10 bonus for bombastic use of colorful metaphors.
My kingdom for mod points! Had I any, this comment would be my insightful!
Well, while you can get by without meat and poultry inspections for a little bit, and without water quality monitoring for awhile, or game and fisheries monitoring for awhile, or atmospheric tracking and monitoring for awhile, or auditing financial institutions for legal compliance, there would be a time afterwards when stuff like that would become meaningful again. None of that stuff showed up in the government basket out of thin air. It's nice to think that it can all be burned down and nobody would care, but the truth of it is that there are things the government does (most of what it does, actually) which private industry does not or cannot do reliably or without undue influence. Yep, there's also a lot of paperwork and inefficiency, too.
... Maximum Lutz!
... and I mentioned it on one of the gawker blogs and I pretty much got denounced as an anti-science troll. It's an unpopular opinion, but sending squishy meat-bags to mars is a waste of time, money and other resources that can be directed to other, more pressing priorities on this planet, or to projects that use robotic probes for exploration.
It's a fascinating question, but let's just start with the assumption that I get a few billion and the tax man takes half. I have 1.5 billion to work with.
I'd probably start out with setting up a few small charitable trusts with 10 million each, for things that I care about in my community -- food banks, educational assistance for economically disadvantaged students, and housing & heating assistance for the elderly and disabled. They would pay out 5% of invested holdings every year. This would get me on a nice dinner party schedule, with some benefits to attend and give me some causes to work on and with other like-minded people. It doesn't have to be flashy, but it does have to be meaningful to me. This is how I'd meet people and pick up a social life.
I'd build a new house up in the mountains, with room for all my toys. I'd get an apartment in NYC and another house out in southern California. I'd probably move around between all three, through the year. I'd probably do a fair amount of traveling abroad as I felt the need.
I suppose, if my GF didn't care for this life, at some point I'd meet someone that would want to go along for the ride.
Honestly, I'd park most of the money in cash and securities and play it by ear.
Had I the mod points, I'd grant you +1 insightful. Thank you for this comment.