In the U.S. it's a particularly large one because as a country we've decided we want a huge military, whereas if we scaled that back we could provide better health coverage, even as unhealthy as we are as a population.
I whole heartedly agree with 99.99% of your post, but this part caught my eye.
The US Govt (at least on the Federal level) is mandated by the US Constitution to provide for defense...that is one of its few enumerated responsibilities and powers.
I don't really think it is anywhere in the constitution for the government (at least on the federal level) to provide healthcare for the citizens, at least not without a constitutional amendment.
Well, there's this thing called the GENERAL WELFARE CLAUSE. Article I, section 8 of the U. S. Constitution grants Congress the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defense and general Welfare of the United States." And opposition to that being used as wanted was pretty much put down in the 30's with Social Security. These days, the Commerce Clause has pretty much expanded to overshadow the General Welfare Clause. On top of that, funding for the Army, unlike the Navy, "but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years" which pretty much sums up their opinion of having a standing army at all. Still things change and they never probably foresaw a time when the federal government, in being able to declare the training standards of the militias would essentially make it 'join the Army'.
A single Exchange server should scale to 500 users pretty easily -- at $35 month, you're making a $175,000 commitment or $525,000 over 3 years. The office and Exchange licensing for on-prem isn't $525,000.
Seems that you'd spend that $175k/year just on your administrator, let alone also the actual hardware, power, data center space, etc. And you get server storage space too with OneDrive for Business and the user can manage their own permissions. Then it also includes Office suite plus user options to install on their personal computers and mobiles devices. Skype for Business works even if other things do work better, you have it also for everybody in the company. Add in that it is probably all tied into most business' volume licensing they are already getting.
HIPAA compliance needs a plan, confidentiality, and custody. Using cloud anything where the host can see what is going in, out, through, or stored in their own systems is not HIPAA compliant in regard to PHI. Can anyone see data that is being sent or stored in Office365 that is not explicitly allowed to do so by the patient? If that answer is yes then Office365 isn't complaint.
The answer is yes, but why let the law we are discussing stand in the way when you can post an unseasoned falsehood and get modded up instead?
The answer is that I work at a hospital that is using Office 365 for all employees and there are others I know of in the area also. Microsoft's Office 365 is HIPAA compliant and for cloud services they are more willing to sign off on those business agreements and HIPAA forms than others. The only issue was that their mobile Outlook app was not HIPAA compliant because it stored the password someplace it shouldn't. That was fixed a while back. Please AC, can you just stop trolling us? It's not like you even need to hide your identity on/. to spread false MS information.
Also - putting all your docs online is a risk - it means that M$ can read all your documents and get access to all your business strategies.
We've looked at cloud services and do use Office 365. One thing that Microsoft really stands out from many of the other cloud services is their willingness to sign business agreements as well as HIPAA agreements and follow those regulations as given to them by our legal. It seems that they'll sign off on what we require of them and be up and running using their services before any of the others, including smaller application vendors activity trying to sell us their wares, can hash out the agreements and sign a contract.
people were spending 6 months to a year at a job and then looking for something else
Are you talking a McDonalds job, or an actual job? My personal experience doesn't support that view, if you are talking about actual jobs.
It does mine with the.com boom and the companies that survived it. Amazon pretty much thrives on short term employment now averaging about 18 months. The thing is that its about padding your resume till you finally get a job you want to keep.
I think we even pioneered it. Late 90's up to around 2001 and then starting in 2003 people were spending 6 months to a year at a job and then looking for something else
Hardly. The reason the 50's are looked back so fondly on is because there was increasing labor wages and much job jumping to be done to get an effective raise. It was like a decade long.com boom.
Wait, I thought he was a Russian stooge. So difficult to keep up with this stuff.
Well, I'm actually still watching this. Ever since Trump got into office, I've been saying that if he really was a stooge of Russia, or just easily manipulated, you'll see two things: 1) Increased hostilities between USA and Russia; 2) easing of American economic sanctions on Russia. Let's not kid ourselves, Russia does not want to be buddy buddy with the USA, they want to be our counterpart. They are building up their sphere of influence and allies and desire to restore the world to a cold war version of the original 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world description. Russia will get a lot of status in being the nemesis of the USA. Economic sanctions hurt them and they would probably want them opened up, but I have read things saying even that can be used by them as they now control their nation because they control all domestic production. There are no outside sources to destabilize their control. They'd more than likely just settle for being able to export but not import goods.
If an employee gets sick too much to their likings, they just fire the employee and look for a new one.
It costs up to 1 year of a typical employee's wage to replace them, on board them, train them, and integrate them into the local system. Your idiotic approach is based on very poor understanding of how much it costs to deal with people.
The reason our parents could afford a house on a working class wage and we cannot is simply that we earn less than they did. Yes, I'm not kidding here, in buying power we're worse off than our parents were. Well, most of us at least. A select few are actually better off. Then again, it's that select few that probably don't even notice it.
I won't argue that the current generation doesn't earn less than the previous, but there is a bit more to housing than that. Housing coasts have gone up relatively also and there are multiple reasons for that. First, houses are bigger with more features than earlier generations, especially if talking my grandparents or farther back (50's or earlier). "Middle class" housing from that time period not only would not be acceptable to the average family these days, but probably wouldn't even but up to code. You had families of four or five in two bedroom houses the square footage of some living rooms I've seen. Go back to the 40's or earlier and you had shotgun shacks the like that were considered "middle class" back then. All that housing has been torn down and replaced with larger versions stuffed with appliances (which allows for less time homemaking that allows a two paycheck family). Then that housing that is in places that have jobs are getting so expensive because so many people want them, while housing in rural areas is not growing in worth because people aren't moving there because there are less jobs and living situations. The old industry could deal with small pools of slightly skilled workers producing simple products, while the current economy is seemingly demanding large pools of highly skilled workers capable of producing expensive products.
If I wanted to move back to where I grew up, I could just write a check for a house in my old hometown. I might even find a job, but it would require the one or two employers in the area needing my skill set, and few options except waiting for a spot to open up for me.
Part of me is jealous that you got to skate by, and part of me is grateful that schools like yours exist to distinguish schools like mine.
Wait till they start telling you about all the late nights playing video games and the drunken parties every weekend.
Still, pretty much universities already know what the title says and the early morning classes are the ones that you can show up for, get your syllabus, and have all the reading and homework written down for you to do on the first day of class. Then you can pretty much work on your own as these topics are usually the introductory ones that aren't too hard to learn. If you can sit down with a book and learn from it, you can pass these classes unless the teacher throws in attendance as a requirement (which plenty of them do).
Or gravity doesn't act the same over longer distances, thus there appears to be "unexplained" attraction. So yeah, either gravity is different to what we think, or dark matter exists. This "evidence" seems to suggest either option.
Ya, but if gravity is different, to fit the current observations, it would have to be so different that nobody has been able to come up with even theoretical set of rules that it would describe how it works, and it would probably have to be non-isotropic and turn out to have some sort of polarity like magnetic force.
These days, any cutting down on personal use of computers or phones just means employees will spend more time on their personal cell phones. Telling them they can't use cell phones will just typically be ignored or result in them using their work computers against policy. Either way, it's just going to cause headaches for the managers because they aren't going to use either against an employee unless they want them fired and need a policy to present as a clear cut reason, which hits morale of all the other employees because everybody is doing the same thing that other person got fired. Policy comes up for review and probably gets reversed till the next person gets fired and the cycle repeats.
They probably don't have those policies and procedures written up because they can't end up having that meeting, or at least one that comes up with a solution. Head Honcho wants everything deleted after 6 months because of possible liablities and reveal. Low down managers don't want anything deleted because they are looking to cover their asses in possible liabilities and reveals. IT states they only have enough of a budget to store everything for one year. Workers point out that many of their projects last longer than one year and even go multiple years and they'll need all that information well past those timelines just to get the job done and support it. Legal is going to pop up and explain that things can be deleted after 6 months, except for these three corner cases they know about where they are legally obligated to hold information for up to ten years to forever, and there might be more such cases, and dependancies due to contracts. By the end of several hours, they have several conflicting policies demanded by different parts of management and half a dozen problems that need to be looked at with legal and economic issues as to why they can or can't adhere to any policy. Eventually, the day long meeting ends with another, similar meeting scheduled in another few months.
I've always considered the military our biggest government "jobs program". Not only do we employ a lot of people who might not otherwise be immediately employable, but we also contract out to big companies for equipment. This gives jobs to more educated employees. This looks better than something like UBI or welfare.
In my experience through the people I know that have been through the military, the military makes a piss poor jobs program that doesn't give any applicable education or skills unless you re-enter the military industrial complex doing avionics on military aircraft or such. The GI Bill that exists seems useless unless one is able to go to college anyway, and it doesn't make the USA any money unless somebody attacks us or we take over a country that take their resources. We have more than enough military for the first and the second if politically unviable these days and probably economically unviable also. Somebody is getting rich I'm sure, but it isn't the US or its people. I feel the money would be better spent for a greater return to the nation if used for education, basic research, and building infrastructure.
If you think about it, you'll realize how stupid this whole thing is. Regardless of the form of taxation, the net result is the same - money diverted from the productivity generator (employee, company) to the government. So why do we need so many taxes?
Americans may pay less taxes, but we also get far fewer services.
We get plenty of services. We have more aircraft carriers at our disposal than the rest of the world combined. A fleet of nuclear weapons waiting to be launched. Probably more tanks and aircraft than any two other nations. We have a wealth of services we pay for.
It's a win-win for people who want/need to be in a dense city. It's a huge loss for those who dislike living in such a place. Dense populations have their good and bad features. It's not a clear "win-win".
Hey, look. Nobody is trying to go all Agenda 21 on you and force you to move to the big city and ride mass transit. For the city, it's what's needed for multiple reasons. And automation such as the article is talking about will probably help provide that. It will also have an effect in the rural areas. Tractors are already going towards GPS autodriving. Trucks will be next. For the last hundred years urbanization has been happening because of economic reasons and no reason to think it's going to stop as farms need less workers and industry switch from need of small pools of unskilled labor to larger pools of skilled laborers.
Let's say a plane has 100 seats. The airline knows on average there will be 4% no-shows. What if, instead of selling 104 tickets at full-price, they sold 100 tickets at full-price, and 4 at a discount? Those people with the discounted tickets would usually get to fly, but would understand they might get bumped.
My understanding is that is what they do except it's more like they have 100 seats, 4 people don't show up on average, and they sell 15 seats at a discount or otherwise with the condition of being standby. Standby include but are not limited to airline employees and their relatives, some business tickets, some airline miles tickets, tickets gained in airline credit or other methods. etc. On average, everybody gets to fly to where they are going but a few have to wait around for the next flight, which in a bad circumstance might be the next day. Now why do so many people not show up? According to the last time this subject came up, again, it's business' fault. While some people do just miss their flight, I got the feeling that there are business tickets that can be rescheduled, so somebody shows up in a different city for a meeting with a round trip ticket, but the meeting goes longer or they need more time for some reason, and while they have a flight associated with the ticket, if they miss that flight, they are allowed to reschedule. I also got the feeling that these are also a lot of the standby flyers also.
Maybe before Windows came about. But Win 95 was absolutely chock-full of useless shit.
Yep. I distinctly remember MS people bitching about having a GUI and mouse and how it just sucks up resources and was a stupid direction to take to Mac people like me.
Except for the massive amount of energy needed to operate the vacuum pumps 24/7 to maintain your vacuum pressure.
Thing is that the car moving down the tube will work like the world's largest mechanical pump during normal operation. Builds up a pressure in front of it that can be vented off at periodic stations along the way.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is not "MOAH CARS!" The answer is better city planning.
LA is not a city. It's just a collection of suburbs.
I whole heartedly agree with 99.99% of your post, but this part caught my eye.
The US Govt (at least on the Federal level) is mandated by the US Constitution to provide for defense...that is one of its few enumerated responsibilities and powers.
I don't really think it is anywhere in the constitution for the government (at least on the federal level) to provide healthcare for the citizens, at least not without a constitutional amendment.
Well, there's this thing called the GENERAL WELFARE CLAUSE. Article I, section 8 of the U. S. Constitution grants Congress the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defense and general Welfare of the United States." And opposition to that being used as wanted was pretty much put down in the 30's with Social Security. These days, the Commerce Clause has pretty much expanded to overshadow the General Welfare Clause. On top of that, funding for the Army, unlike the Navy, "but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years" which pretty much sums up their opinion of having a standing army at all. Still things change and they never probably foresaw a time when the federal government, in being able to declare the training standards of the militias would essentially make it 'join the Army'.
A single Exchange server should scale to 500 users pretty easily -- at $35 month, you're making a $175,000 commitment or $525,000 over 3 years. The office and Exchange licensing for on-prem isn't $525,000.
Seems that you'd spend that $175k/year just on your administrator, let alone also the actual hardware, power, data center space, etc. And you get server storage space too with OneDrive for Business and the user can manage their own permissions. Then it also includes Office suite plus user options to install on their personal computers and mobiles devices. Skype for Business works even if other things do work better, you have it also for everybody in the company. Add in that it is probably all tied into most business' volume licensing they are already getting.
HIPAA compliance needs a plan, confidentiality, and custody. Using cloud anything where the host can see what is going in, out, through, or stored in their own systems is not HIPAA compliant in regard to PHI. Can anyone see data that is being sent or stored in Office365 that is not explicitly allowed to do so by the patient? If that answer is yes then Office365 isn't complaint.
The answer is yes, but why let the law we are discussing stand in the way when you can post an unseasoned falsehood and get modded up instead?
The answer is that I work at a hospital that is using Office 365 for all employees and there are others I know of in the area also. Microsoft's Office 365 is HIPAA compliant and for cloud services they are more willing to sign off on those business agreements and HIPAA forms than others. The only issue was that their mobile Outlook app was not HIPAA compliant because it stored the password someplace it shouldn't. That was fixed a while back. Please AC, can you just stop trolling us? It's not like you even need to hide your identity on /. to spread false MS information.
Also - putting all your docs online is a risk - it means that M$ can read all your documents and get access to all your business strategies.
We've looked at cloud services and do use Office 365. One thing that Microsoft really stands out from many of the other cloud services is their willingness to sign business agreements as well as HIPAA agreements and follow those regulations as given to them by our legal. It seems that they'll sign off on what we require of them and be up and running using their services before any of the others, including smaller application vendors activity trying to sell us their wares, can hash out the agreements and sign a contract.
You realize that that "droned by clinton" story was fake, don't you?
Certainly. It was on the internet so it is most likely fake. For that matter, I'm pretty dubious of the "it was fake stories too".
people were spending 6 months to a year at a job and then looking for something else
Are you talking a McDonalds job, or an actual job? My personal experience doesn't support that view, if you are talking about actual jobs.
It does mine with the .com boom and the companies that survived it. Amazon pretty much thrives on short term employment now averaging about 18 months. The thing is that its about padding your resume till you finally get a job you want to keep.
I think we even pioneered it. Late 90's up to around 2001 and then starting in 2003 people were spending 6 months to a year at a job and then looking for something else
Hardly. The reason the 50's are looked back so fondly on is because there was increasing labor wages and much job jumping to be done to get an effective raise. It was like a decade long .com boom.
I have the original SC for Mac and it's an OS9 PPC program and doesn't run on OS X (anymore, they did away with Classic mode after 10.4).
10.6 I believe. I keep my first Intel Mac around running that just so I can play, er, run old PowerPC software (Like SMACX).
inflamed tensions with Russia
Wait, I thought he was a Russian stooge. So difficult to keep up with this stuff.
Well, I'm actually still watching this. Ever since Trump got into office, I've been saying that if he really was a stooge of Russia, or just easily manipulated, you'll see two things: 1) Increased hostilities between USA and Russia; 2) easing of American economic sanctions on Russia. Let's not kid ourselves, Russia does not want to be buddy buddy with the USA, they want to be our counterpart. They are building up their sphere of influence and allies and desire to restore the world to a cold war version of the original 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world description. Russia will get a lot of status in being the nemesis of the USA. Economic sanctions hurt them and they would probably want them opened up, but I have read things saying even that can be used by them as they now control their nation because they control all domestic production. There are no outside sources to destabilize their control. They'd more than likely just settle for being able to export but not import goods.
If an employee gets sick too much to their likings, they just fire the employee and look for a new one.
It costs up to 1 year of a typical employee's wage to replace them, on board them, train them, and integrate them into the local system. Your idiotic approach is based on very poor understanding of how much it costs to deal with people.
He must be a manager.
The Turks don't deny that bad things happened, nor do they deny that they were the ones that did it.
What they do deny is that it amounted to genocide.
The real trouble with that is that the term "genocide" was specifically created to describe what the Turks did.
American Astronaut
Cashern
Pi
The reason our parents could afford a house on a working class wage and we cannot is simply that we earn less than they did. Yes, I'm not kidding here, in buying power we're worse off than our parents were. Well, most of us at least. A select few are actually better off. Then again, it's that select few that probably don't even notice it.
I won't argue that the current generation doesn't earn less than the previous, but there is a bit more to housing than that. Housing coasts have gone up relatively also and there are multiple reasons for that. First, houses are bigger with more features than earlier generations, especially if talking my grandparents or farther back (50's or earlier). "Middle class" housing from that time period not only would not be acceptable to the average family these days, but probably wouldn't even but up to code. You had families of four or five in two bedroom houses the square footage of some living rooms I've seen. Go back to the 40's or earlier and you had shotgun shacks the like that were considered "middle class" back then. All that housing has been torn down and replaced with larger versions stuffed with appliances (which allows for less time homemaking that allows a two paycheck family). Then that housing that is in places that have jobs are getting so expensive because so many people want them, while housing in rural areas is not growing in worth because people aren't moving there because there are less jobs and living situations. The old industry could deal with small pools of slightly skilled workers producing simple products, while the current economy is seemingly demanding large pools of highly skilled workers capable of producing expensive products.
If I wanted to move back to where I grew up, I could just write a check for a house in my old hometown. I might even find a job, but it would require the one or two employers in the area needing my skill set, and few options except waiting for a spot to open up for me.
Part of me is jealous that you got to skate by, and part of me is grateful that schools like yours exist to distinguish schools like mine.
Wait till they start telling you about all the late nights playing video games and the drunken parties every weekend.
Still, pretty much universities already know what the title says and the early morning classes are the ones that you can show up for, get your syllabus, and have all the reading and homework written down for you to do on the first day of class. Then you can pretty much work on your own as these topics are usually the introductory ones that aren't too hard to learn. If you can sit down with a book and learn from it, you can pass these classes unless the teacher throws in attendance as a requirement (which plenty of them do).
Or gravity doesn't act the same over longer distances, thus there appears to be "unexplained" attraction. So yeah, either gravity is different to what we think, or dark matter exists. This "evidence" seems to suggest either option.
Ya, but if gravity is different, to fit the current observations, it would have to be so different that nobody has been able to come up with even theoretical set of rules that it would describe how it works, and it would probably have to be non-isotropic and turn out to have some sort of polarity like magnetic force.
These days, any cutting down on personal use of computers or phones just means employees will spend more time on their personal cell phones. Telling them they can't use cell phones will just typically be ignored or result in them using their work computers against policy. Either way, it's just going to cause headaches for the managers because they aren't going to use either against an employee unless they want them fired and need a policy to present as a clear cut reason, which hits morale of all the other employees because everybody is doing the same thing that other person got fired. Policy comes up for review and probably gets reversed till the next person gets fired and the cycle repeats.
They probably don't have those policies and procedures written up because they can't end up having that meeting, or at least one that comes up with a solution. Head Honcho wants everything deleted after 6 months because of possible liablities and reveal. Low down managers don't want anything deleted because they are looking to cover their asses in possible liabilities and reveals. IT states they only have enough of a budget to store everything for one year. Workers point out that many of their projects last longer than one year and even go multiple years and they'll need all that information well past those timelines just to get the job done and support it. Legal is going to pop up and explain that things can be deleted after 6 months, except for these three corner cases they know about where they are legally obligated to hold information for up to ten years to forever, and there might be more such cases, and dependancies due to contracts. By the end of several hours, they have several conflicting policies demanded by different parts of management and half a dozen problems that need to be looked at with legal and economic issues as to why they can or can't adhere to any policy. Eventually, the day long meeting ends with another, similar meeting scheduled in another few months.
I've always considered the military our biggest government "jobs program". Not only do we employ a lot of people who might not otherwise be immediately employable, but we also contract out to big companies for equipment. This gives jobs to more educated employees. This looks better than something like UBI or welfare.
In my experience through the people I know that have been through the military, the military makes a piss poor jobs program that doesn't give any applicable education or skills unless you re-enter the military industrial complex doing avionics on military aircraft or such. The GI Bill that exists seems useless unless one is able to go to college anyway, and it doesn't make the USA any money unless somebody attacks us or we take over a country that take their resources. We have more than enough military for the first and the second if politically unviable these days and probably economically unviable also. Somebody is getting rich I'm sure, but it isn't the US or its people. I feel the money would be better spent for a greater return to the nation if used for education, basic research, and building infrastructure.
If you think about it, you'll realize how stupid this whole thing is. Regardless of the form of taxation, the net result is the same - money diverted from the productivity generator (employee, company) to the government. So why do we need so many taxes?
Civilization.
Americans may pay less taxes, but we also get far fewer services.
We get plenty of services. We have more aircraft carriers at our disposal than the rest of the world combined. A fleet of nuclear weapons waiting to be launched. Probably more tanks and aircraft than any two other nations. We have a wealth of services we pay for.
It's a win-win for people who want/need to be in a dense city. It's a huge loss for those who dislike living in such a place. Dense populations have their good and bad features. It's not a clear "win-win".
Hey, look. Nobody is trying to go all Agenda 21 on you and force you to move to the big city and ride mass transit. For the city, it's what's needed for multiple reasons. And automation such as the article is talking about will probably help provide that. It will also have an effect in the rural areas. Tractors are already going towards GPS autodriving. Trucks will be next. For the last hundred years urbanization has been happening because of economic reasons and no reason to think it's going to stop as farms need less workers and industry switch from need of small pools of unskilled labor to larger pools of skilled laborers.
Let's say a plane has 100 seats. The airline knows on average there will be 4% no-shows. What if, instead of selling 104 tickets at full-price, they sold 100 tickets at full-price, and 4 at a discount? Those people with the discounted tickets would usually get to fly, but would understand they might get bumped.
My understanding is that is what they do except it's more like they have 100 seats, 4 people don't show up on average, and they sell 15 seats at a discount or otherwise with the condition of being standby. Standby include but are not limited to airline employees and their relatives, some business tickets, some airline miles tickets, tickets gained in airline credit or other methods. etc. On average, everybody gets to fly to where they are going but a few have to wait around for the next flight, which in a bad circumstance might be the next day. Now why do so many people not show up? According to the last time this subject came up, again, it's business' fault. While some people do just miss their flight, I got the feeling that there are business tickets that can be rescheduled, so somebody shows up in a different city for a meeting with a round trip ticket, but the meeting goes longer or they need more time for some reason, and while they have a flight associated with the ticket, if they miss that flight, they are allowed to reschedule. I also got the feeling that these are also a lot of the standby flyers also.
Maybe before Windows came about. But Win 95 was absolutely chock-full of useless shit.
Yep. I distinctly remember MS people bitching about having a GUI and mouse and how it just sucks up resources and was a stupid direction to take to Mac people like me.
And quit a bit cheaper in terms of energy.
Except for the massive amount of energy needed to operate the vacuum pumps 24/7 to maintain your vacuum pressure.
Thing is that the car moving down the tube will work like the world's largest mechanical pump during normal operation. Builds up a pressure in front of it that can be vented off at periodic stations along the way.