Off-topic, except for the demonstration of alternate explanations, but there is an alternative explanation for the cycling-helmet-uselessness statistics. The helmet may modify an individual cyclist's behavior, OR it may modify the behavior of cars around him (or her -- recall that this has been observed), OR it may modify the pool of people who choose to ride bicycles.
People make extravagant claims about the dangerousness of riding without a helmet; bicycle accidents are quite rare, and per-hour, a helmet is just as important in an automobile (head injury rates per hour are comparable). And in either case, the huge risk comes from not getting enough exercise; if legal or social pressure to wear a helmet causes someone to not bike at all, that is a net loss to health.
You surely cannot assert that things are both uncertain, AND that someone's CO2 reduction is a completely useless activity.
A consistent position is, "we don't know enough", and "we don't know if your reduction was useful or not".
The difficulty with waiting for certainty is that when that comes, it will be too late -- at least, according to theories of CO2 residence in the atmosphere, which you no doubt will say are ALSO uncertain.
Uncertainty-based inaction is also a largely American (US, Canada) sport -- the rest of the wealthy world already has a much smaller CO2 footprint, and are demonstrating that CO2 reduction is not especially costly.
Come on, did you Watch TF Video? Heat pipes, not novel, but this is not just heat pipes. Engineering it all to fit into a standard rack, with the modifications to bring the heat up to the top of each separate unit, and the "compliant heat conducting cover surface", that's interesting.
There are other things to worry about -- the mechanism of the anti-propagation gene, for example. If it is not a makes-no-pollen gene (natural mutations like this exist, useful in cut flowers to prevent messy pollen drops), then it can escape into the wild. What does that do to the fertility of the open-crossed corn?
OR, suppose you had a recessive makes-no-pollen gene, crossed some regular corn onto it (have to, to make corn) and then some of the resulting corn crop makes it into the seed stream? Those seeds will grow and make corn, but 1/4 of their children will make no pollen. Problem? Maybe, maybe not (there will be other pollinators).
We had a goat, who figured out how to get past an electric fence, by levering up the bottom wire with his horns, and getting most of the way under before getting zapped, and then only maybe, because it was one of those pulse fences that was not on continuously.
Not exactly aero in general. You figure a fully-faired bike can get up to 80-some mph (less than a horsepower), these guys have still got some engineering left to do.
Strictly speaking, it is not necessarily true that union membership is mandatory if represented, it is merely the case that such labor contracts are legal. There's nothing, except self-interest, stopping a union from negotiating a labor agreement without the mandatory membership clause. And even more strictly speaking, it is not union membership, as much as payment of union dues (that detail, from Wikipedia).
Interestingly, if you are a fan of government non-interference in contracts, "right-to-work" represents the greater interference.
In practice, I don't think it works that way. We've got a local paper, we've got some toxic anonymous commenters. It's local enough that the anonymous asshole knows who other commenters (using real names), makes personal remarks (accuses woman whose child has CP of being a "mooch" on the system, tasteful stuff like that). Newspaper editor is the corporate golden boy for all the controversy and fuss this causes, because hey, hits. Most people aren't smart enough to follow through on this, and don't boycott (I do).
And if you look, I've got a consistent pseudonym wherever I go, a relatively consistent political position, fine karma here at slashdot, and I try hard as heck to stick to facts, and avoid (well, minimize) use of dirty words -- that is, if you want to check my judgement on whether this guy is toxic or not.
And as a practical matter, we know that there are people out there who think like this, just as we know that pigs like mud. Doesn't mean we like muddy-pig-wrestling.
And there's the obvious right answer, there. He should have taken pictures, then wrapped it in a heavy layer of aluminum foil, and delivered it to his lawyer.
IF you have an insurance-based system, IF insurers are required to take all customers with no exclusions or preconditions, THEN insurance must be mandatory, OTHERWISE you get a market failure. I first read about this over 20 years ago in a microeconomics textbook (Kreps, my wife was taking a course from him) and it has been tested in the insurance market that I mentioned. We dodge that bullet in this country with group medical plans; private (single-customer) health insurance is expensive and has high deductibles.
This is true for "fire insurance" (house-on-fire = preexisting condition), this is true for medical insurance. If you are allowed to buy "fire insurance" after your house is on fire, then people will wait till their house is on fire, and then pay the fire department, and it will be very, very expensive. And if the fire department is an unregulated corporation, why, they may charge you quite a lot, because what choice do you have? (Yes, I know, in a free market, there will be many competing fire departments, bidding for your service -- so why didn't this happen in Tennessee? There's clearly a market opportunity for last-minute fire-fighting.)
There are several ways to get to universal health care; if you do it with insurance, this is how you do it. Yes, the insurance companies must be heavily regulated, there's no way around it. No, it's not the way I would have done it, but I am not king, and I cannot bribe senators as effectively as the medical and insurance industries can.
Note that under the new health care law, once it is fully in force, insurance is mandatory.
The insurance companies cannot turn you away, but you must purchase insurance, you cannot wait until you are sick. And, further, there are regulations in place to prevent the creation of cheap, useless, "health insurance for healthy people" that people switch away from the moment they get sick.
It's convoluted, but other countries (Germany and Switzerland) also do universal health care this way. (They spend less than we do, they live longer on average, and have lower infant mortality, so there is some reason to believe that even this Rube Goldbergian scheme will improve over what preceded it, once things settle down.)
There have been instances of non-mandatory, no-preconditions health insurance (I think there is a specialized insurance market in NY state that has/had this) and the end result is that only sick people buy insurance, and it is very expensive, because sick people are costly to insure.
It could be anyone who thinks that a well-targeted worm is a much less nasty weapon than a serious bombing attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. That would implicate virtually everyone who has the ability to launch such a worm.
You have to keep things in perspective. This is a really nasty worm, but by battlefield standards, it's pretty benign. As far as we know, nobody has even been injured.
And you do understand that reparations for slavery is one possible outcome of this reasoning -- since corporations can live forever, some from that era (I think) still exist in some form, some of those profited from slavery and/r the slave trade, and the descendants of slaves are owed money from their ancestors' estates. At least, I think that is how the dots are connected.
As I understand it (I just used teh Google to figure out whether this worm phones home), the worm does phone "somewhere", and worms on a network update among themselves in a peer-to-peer fashion.
So, perhaps it started as one thing, and has become another. In particular, if the party answering the "phone home" can tell who is calling, they might deliver different payloads to known-Iranian IP addresses and other addresses. (That's what *I* would do.)
Reality seems to be catching up to our more paranoid fantasies, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. I'm feeling better and better about cut-wire security, and it sounds like it would be a good idea to stuff the USB slot full of epoxy.
You're confusing some random definition of small business (where did you get it, by-the-way?) with the political definition (present in the WaPo article), which is (apparently) "pass-thru entities" (e.g., an LLC, and certain other corporations). These large companies that employ many people, can and will reorganize as necessary to minimize their tax burden, and the US is full of successful corporations that are not pass-thru entities. I have worked for such companies in the past, I even own a small piece of one, lucky me. When we thought we might get acquired, we re-org'd to a structure that was easier to acquire.
The use of the phrase "small business" is a misdirection designed to play on sympathies for Mom-N-Pop ventures, and actual small businesses employing FEWER THAN a few dozen people (not "five or more" -- yet another misdirection).
It takes money to run government. I don't know where you plan to get it. I have high hopes that my income taxes will go up next year (yes, I am in one of those brackets, yay me). And where I live, we pave streets when they are falling apart, which is far later than they should be paved. Regular repaving is much cheaper than a wholesale rip-N-replace (this has been studied).
Note that "five and more employees" also includes Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and so on. If you look here you'll read that only 2 or 3 percent of "small" businesses fall into the top two tax brackets ($250K or more, this article discussing the Obama plan). In that 2 or 3 percent, you find business like:
Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts
PricewaterhouseCoopers
the Tribune Corp.
Bechtel
This is NOT a tax on the "heart" of small business, as you claim.
I note, also, the implicit assumption that people who earn a lot, worked hard for it, in some sort of a positive sense of the word "work" (as opposed to the sort of work that a bank robber or an embezzler does). You did notice, surely, that the rocket surgeons on Wall Street who devised all this CDO madness that so thoroughly trashed our economy, were extremely well paid?
It's highly disruptive to be laid off the day after you close on a house -- happened to a friend of mine. It's highly disruptive to be laid off with a baby on the way -- happened to me. Workers get no protection from "highly disruptive" -- it's on our heads to have savings and backup plans, just in case. If a project is that valuable to a company, then they will find a way to compensate their employees (e.g., completion bonuses, and yes, I have even been paid one of these) so that they will be harder to peel away from the project.
And if their pay is "piddly" compared to their value (the "damage done to timelines" -- that is their value, right?) then they are underpaid.
I *DO* have the long version of Sharkey's Night. It's not on that record, but I have it, the one with extra bonus Burroughs: "Let's teach those robots how to play hardball. Let's teach those little fellas a little gratitude."
Heard it once as a DJ 25 years ago, wanted my own copy ever since. Bought it last year, in vinyl.
I lit up Ping last night, it seemed to only know about music I had bought from Apple (1.4% of my library), and said "That user hasn't written any reviews" when I clicked on "My Reviews". Hel-lo? Might you suggest to me, "here's how to write a review?" "would you like to write a review?"
Or maybe, an option to harvest ratings already made (1-5 stars) from my iTunes library, instead of asking me to go wandering through the store?
The route to "review an album" goes down an interesting rabbit hole that accidentally exposes their database organization into the UI. Take an album that is not in Apple's catalog (e.g., Anderson/Burroughs/Giorno, You're the Guy I Want to Share my Money With), you get to the "write a review page" by clicking on the arrow next to a song. This then takes you to a different album containing that song, not the one you might want to review.
I realize that Apple, like everyone else, is just trying to make a buck, but you're not supposed to give the game away quite so crudely. If you don't have the album, say "sorry, we don't have the album in our store. Do you think we should, and would you like to review it anyway?"
You could walk, take the bus, a cab, call a friend, or ride a bike. You might hurt yourself walking or riding a bike, but you wouldn't hurt anyone else.
And if everyone else was riding a bike (sober or drunk), your risks from walking/biking drunk also go down.
And if you were walking or biking, that would be exercise, and that would do even more to extend your life. Also burns some of those calories from the alcohol.
Slashdot Mirror
If cyclists are difficult to see, why don't you drive more slowly in general? Isn't not-hurting-others more important than minimizing travel time?
Off-topic, except for the demonstration of alternate explanations, but there is an alternative explanation for the cycling-helmet-uselessness statistics. The helmet may modify an individual cyclist's behavior, OR it may modify the behavior of cars around him (or her -- recall that this has been observed), OR it may modify the pool of people who choose to ride bicycles.
People make extravagant claims about the dangerousness of riding without a helmet; bicycle accidents are quite rare, and per-hour, a helmet is just as important in an automobile (head injury rates per hour are comparable). And in either case, the huge risk comes from not getting enough exercise; if legal or social pressure to wear a helmet causes someone to not bike at all, that is a net loss to health.
You surely cannot assert that things are both uncertain, AND that someone's CO2 reduction is a completely useless activity. A consistent position is, "we don't know enough", and "we don't know if your reduction was useful or not".
The difficulty with waiting for certainty is that when that comes, it will be too late -- at least, according to theories of CO2 residence in the atmosphere, which you no doubt will say are ALSO uncertain.
Uncertainty-based inaction is also a largely American (US, Canada) sport -- the rest of the wealthy world already has a much smaller CO2 footprint, and are demonstrating that CO2 reduction is not especially costly.
Come on, did you Watch TF Video? Heat pipes, not novel, but this is not just heat pipes. Engineering it all to fit into a standard rack, with the modifications to bring the heat up to the top of each separate unit, and the "compliant heat conducting cover surface", that's interesting.
There are other things to worry about -- the mechanism of the anti-propagation gene, for example. If it is not a makes-no-pollen gene (natural mutations like this exist, useful in cut flowers to prevent messy pollen drops), then it can escape into the wild. What does that do to the fertility of the open-crossed corn?
OR, suppose you had a recessive makes-no-pollen gene, crossed some regular corn onto it (have to, to make corn) and then some of the resulting corn crop makes it into the seed stream? Those seeds will grow and make corn, but 1/4 of their children will make no pollen. Problem? Maybe, maybe not (there will be other pollinators).
We had a goat, who figured out how to get past an electric fence, by levering up the bottom wire with his horns, and getting most of the way under before getting zapped, and then only maybe, because it was one of those pulse fences that was not on continuously.
Not exactly aero in general. You figure a fully-faired bike can get up to 80-some mph (less than a horsepower), these guys have still got some engineering left to do.
Strictly speaking, it is not necessarily true that union membership is mandatory if represented, it is merely the case that such labor contracts are legal. There's nothing, except self-interest, stopping a union from negotiating a labor agreement without the mandatory membership clause. And even more strictly speaking, it is not union membership, as much as payment of union dues (that detail, from Wikipedia).
Interestingly, if you are a fan of government non-interference in contracts, "right-to-work" represents the greater interference.
In practice, I don't think it works that way. We've got a local paper, we've got some toxic anonymous commenters. It's local enough that the anonymous asshole knows who other commenters (using real names), makes personal remarks (accuses woman whose child has CP of being a "mooch" on the system, tasteful stuff like that). Newspaper editor is the corporate golden boy for all the controversy and fuss this causes, because hey, hits. Most people aren't smart enough to follow through on this, and don't boycott (I do).
And if you look, I've got a consistent pseudonym wherever I go, a relatively consistent political position, fine karma here at slashdot, and I try hard as heck to stick to facts, and avoid (well, minimize) use of dirty words -- that is, if you want to check my judgement on whether this guy is toxic or not.
And as a practical matter, we know that there are people out there who think like this, just as we know that pigs like mud. Doesn't mean we like muddy-pig-wrestling.
THEN, posted about it on the internet.
IF you have an insurance-based system, IF insurers are required to take all customers with no exclusions or preconditions, THEN insurance must be mandatory, OTHERWISE you get a market failure. I first read about this over 20 years ago in a microeconomics textbook (Kreps, my wife was taking a course from him) and it has been tested in the insurance market that I mentioned. We dodge that bullet in this country with group medical plans; private (single-customer) health insurance is expensive and has high deductibles.
This is true for "fire insurance" (house-on-fire = preexisting condition), this is true for medical insurance. If you are allowed to buy "fire insurance" after your house is on fire, then people will wait till their house is on fire, and then pay the fire department, and it will be very, very expensive. And if the fire department is an unregulated corporation, why, they may charge you quite a lot, because what choice do you have? (Yes, I know, in a free market, there will be many competing fire departments, bidding for your service -- so why didn't this happen in Tennessee? There's clearly a market opportunity for last-minute fire-fighting.)
There are several ways to get to universal health care; if you do it with insurance, this is how you do it. Yes, the insurance companies must be heavily regulated, there's no way around it. No, it's not the way I would have done it, but I am not king, and I cannot bribe senators as effectively as the medical and insurance industries can.
Note that under the new health care law, once it is fully in force, insurance is mandatory. The insurance companies cannot turn you away, but you must purchase insurance, you cannot wait until you are sick. And, further, there are regulations in place to prevent the creation of cheap, useless, "health insurance for healthy people" that people switch away from the moment they get sick.
It's convoluted, but other countries (Germany and Switzerland) also do universal health care this way. (They spend less than we do, they live longer on average, and have lower infant mortality, so there is some reason to believe that even this Rube Goldbergian scheme will improve over what preceded it, once things settle down.)
There have been instances of non-mandatory, no-preconditions health insurance (I think there is a specialized insurance market in NY state that has/had this) and the end result is that only sick people buy insurance, and it is very expensive, because sick people are costly to insure.
You have to keep things in perspective. This is a really nasty worm, but by battlefield standards, it's pretty benign. As far as we know, nobody has even been injured.
Yeah, we're pretty much in "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line" territory here. My money is on the Gilderians.
And you do understand that reparations for slavery is one possible outcome of this reasoning -- since corporations can live forever, some from that era (I think) still exist in some form, some of those profited from slavery and/r the slave trade, and the descendants of slaves are owed money from their ancestors' estates. At least, I think that is how the dots are connected.
That will be quite a comfort to the relatives of the deceased.
As I understand it (I just used teh Google to figure out whether this worm phones home), the worm does phone "somewhere", and worms on a network update among themselves in a peer-to-peer fashion.
So, perhaps it started as one thing, and has become another. In particular, if the party answering the "phone home" can tell who is calling, they might deliver different payloads to known-Iranian IP addresses and other addresses. (That's what *I* would do.)
Reality seems to be catching up to our more paranoid fantasies, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. I'm feeling better and better about cut-wire security, and it sounds like it would be a good idea to stuff the USB slot full of epoxy.
You're confusing some random definition of small business (where did you get it, by-the-way?) with the political definition (present in the WaPo article), which is (apparently) "pass-thru entities" (e.g., an LLC, and certain other corporations). These large companies that employ many people, can and will reorganize as necessary to minimize their tax burden, and the US is full of successful corporations that are not pass-thru entities. I have worked for such companies in the past, I even own a small piece of one, lucky me. When we thought we might get acquired, we re-org'd to a structure that was easier to acquire.
The use of the phrase "small business" is a misdirection designed to play on sympathies for Mom-N-Pop ventures, and actual small businesses employing FEWER THAN a few dozen people (not "five or more" -- yet another misdirection).
It takes money to run government. I don't know where you plan to get it. I have high hopes that my income taxes will go up next year (yes, I am in one of those brackets, yay me). And where I live, we pave streets when they are falling apart, which is far later than they should be paved. Regular repaving is much cheaper than a wholesale rip-N-replace (this has been studied).
And that "rage", I think is in your head.
Note that "five and more employees" also includes Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and so on. If you look here you'll read that only 2 or 3 percent of "small" businesses fall into the top two tax brackets ($250K or more, this article discussing the Obama plan). In that 2 or 3 percent, you find business like:
Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts
PricewaterhouseCoopers
the Tribune Corp.
Bechtel
This is NOT a tax on the "heart" of small business, as you claim.
I note, also, the implicit assumption that people who earn a lot, worked hard for it, in some sort of a positive sense of the word "work" (as opposed to the sort of work that a bank robber or an embezzler does). You did notice, surely, that the rocket surgeons on Wall Street who devised all this CDO madness that so thoroughly trashed our economy, were extremely well paid?
Seriously, can I interest you in a bridge?
It's highly disruptive to be laid off the day after you close on a house -- happened to a friend of mine. It's highly disruptive to be laid off with a baby on the way -- happened to me. Workers get no protection from "highly disruptive" -- it's on our heads to have savings and backup plans, just in case. If a project is that valuable to a company, then they will find a way to compensate their employees (e.g., completion bonuses, and yes, I have even been paid one of these) so that they will be harder to peel away from the project.
And if their pay is "piddly" compared to their value (the "damage done to timelines" -- that is their value, right?) then they are underpaid.
That's ok, the tires are only compromised at higher temperatures, which is never a problem in Nevada.
I saw them working on a segment of the Autobahn some years back. They were laser-leveling poured concrete.
I *DO* have the long version of Sharkey's Night. It's not on that record, but I have it, the one with extra bonus Burroughs: "Let's teach those robots how to play hardball. Let's teach those little fellas a little gratitude."
Heard it once as a DJ 25 years ago, wanted my own copy ever since. Bought it last year, in vinyl.
I lit up Ping last night, it seemed to only know about music I had bought from Apple (1.4% of my library), and said "That user hasn't written any reviews" when I clicked on "My Reviews". Hel-lo? Might you suggest to me, "here's how to write a review?" "would you like to write a review?"
Or maybe, an option to harvest ratings already made (1-5 stars) from my iTunes library, instead of asking me to go wandering through the store?
The route to "review an album" goes down an interesting rabbit hole that accidentally exposes their database organization into the UI. Take an album that is not in Apple's catalog (e.g., Anderson/Burroughs/Giorno, You're the Guy I Want to Share my Money With), you get to the "write a review page" by clicking on the arrow next to a song. This then takes you to a different album containing that song, not the one you might want to review.
I realize that Apple, like everyone else, is just trying to make a buck, but you're not supposed to give the game away quite so crudely. If you don't have the album, say "sorry, we don't have the album in our store. Do you think we should, and would you like to review it anyway?"
You have other choices.
You could walk, take the bus, a cab, call a friend, or ride a bike. You might hurt yourself walking or riding a bike, but you wouldn't hurt anyone else.
And if everyone else was riding a bike (sober or drunk), your risks from walking/biking drunk also go down.
And if you were walking or biking, that would be exercise, and that would do even more to extend your life. Also burns some of those calories from the alcohol.