and the police in London declaring Occupy protesters a terrorist movement,
citation needed.
Or are you referring to their including info regarding the protests in their regular circular which is used primarily to inform local businesses of relevant threats? The circular is an obvious place to include it and in it they are referred to as "peaceful" and "activists". The alternative would have been to print a specific leaflet, even though it would be going to the same people and is on the same broad topic of security, contingency planning and so on.
Desk-based "protesters" love to repeat and hype up this drivel ad nauseam but anyone with the slightest bit of sense can't miss the stench of bullshit. This then taints the entire movement by putting doubt on the credibility of any claims.
Have a read up on Organisational structures - that Wiki link is very much introduction only, btw. Also the nomenclature isn't standard everywhere, for what you appear to desire, the wiki refers to "functional structure" which appears to be what I think of as "departmental structure".
An organization is just that - an entity that provides structure for organizing. Different structures have detailed and substantial strengths and weaknesses. Any change is a major undertaking and can be expected to have implications over time, many of which will not have been foreseen. The way people work, their goals, priorities, reporting lines... Everything changes - usually even the desk location.
Perhaps the most relevant issue with a departmental structure is the internal focus. An IT department is a service department, it exists to service the other departments. But it's budgets, reporting, goals etc are focused on... The IT department. Other departments become "service users" or "customers". These are the people that get in the way of IT department objectives. Marketing want new gear? Not in my budget and I don't want the hassle. Never-mind what the implications might be for the organisation as a whole, they need it signed off by IT but there's nothing in it for IT. This BOFH syndrome isn't (necessarily) due to some personal characteristic of the IT department manager, the departmental organisational structure actively pushes in this direction.
The IT "service centre" also means the IT "cost centre". Instead of being integral to the whole team and an important "value adding" factor in the money-making system, the focus becomes how much it costs. The number one objective becomes saving money.
People generally have difficulty adapting to a new structure, basically because it's a hugely different form of organising. People who have been at an organisation for a long time tend to think their way of doing it is "obvious" and have difficulty imagining anything else. People who come from another organisation can have difficulty adjusting and think that the way their previous employer did it is "obvious" even though they may struggle to explain why. This is part of the reason why a business restructuring or combination often involves significant changes in management.
I am having a bit of a rough time putting together the official proposal to justify this change, likely because it seems so obviously the way it should be and is done everywhere else.
This is a huge red flag, you've just told us you have no sound basis for the change nor do you really know what you are doing. That doesn't necessarily mean the underlying idea is wrong, but rather that you don't understand it. You need to think this through in a detailed, formal way. Articulating the proposal will then be straight forward.
To what purpose? Making sure people see that GM food is "different" and perpetuating the hysteria?
The potential for parallels between the GM food industry, the pharmaceutical industry and particularly the tobacco industry are obvious. Scepticism is an entirely appropriate response based on historic lessons. Scepticism is not hysteria - you are exaggerating even the sensationalised output of the media.
Regardless, are you seriously arguing in favour of denying factual information and denying choice? Would your rights be so affected that others should be denied theirs?
Volkswagen has agreed to stop its Blackberry servers sending emails to some of its employees when they are off-shift.
Blackberries use push email and the text states that they are stopping the outbound emails, implying you can still send in emails but they won't be received until working hours.
I would be fine with the $10 "pay as you go" (no monthly plan) phone I picked up as a spare. In many respects it's a better phone: battery life is probably measured in weeks, it gets a great signal, it's smaller/lighter and the cost means minimal concern from losing or damaging it. I'd save quite a chunk of money.
But about once a month I do need a smartphone. Or at least, I need satnav and the company pool car does not have it. Sure I could use the map under the seat but I don't really know the out-of-town geography very well and the relative convenience of the "satnav" isn't far off equating to modern "necessities" like, say, a microwave. I've been... Temporarily out of position, in darkness, in the middle of nowhere and all it took to get back on track was pulling over and a quick look at my phone.
Also nice to be able to get email, browse the web and maybe a bit of gaming if I'm waiting around somewhere. On a related note, is it me or do people seem suspicious of someone hanging around with no obvious distraction?
Economically competitive is just a cop out. What it really means, is that you have a limited commitment towards change. In my personal view, which has had heated debates, we are fucked already. Leave economics out of it and make the hard decisions now. That does mean start building as many nuclear reactors as possible right now because they are the most immediate solution to massive amounts of power generation that can be used immediately for heating, cooling, industry, etc.
I suspect you misunderstand economics. Throw out any ideas of economics being about $'s, the $ is only used in economics as a unit of measurement, and even then only a proxy. Economics is concerned with "the distribution of scarce resources", leading to the principle objectives being improving efficiency (of allocation) and/or increasing the availability of resources (i.e. reducing scarcity). There is no stated time constraint, the implication is you should consider the entire period that it is possible to do any kind of planning for.
When people try to argue against environmentalism using "economics", they generally either misrepresent the problem as being entirely the unrelated moral issues, or constrain economics into a short timeframe and selfish perspective. This is to totally ignore the problem. Aside from moral considerations, the entire human aspect of the environmental problem is an economic one.
Pure economic argument is almost entirely on the side of rational environmentalism (emphasis on rational, since "environmentalism" is a generalisation almost to the point of absurdity; there is no common standard of where the balance lies between pro and anti, there is no common standard of values).
If you consume 100 units of scarce resource now at the cost of 100u of same later it is a net nil on the "scarcity" objective, all you've done is decided the allocation. So what is the net position for allocation objective then? This is where it gets more interesting. If the future is going to be more plentiful then it is reasonable to assume the better allocation is to consume those resources now, but if the future is going to be bleak then we should save those resources. Everyone knows a tin of beans is more valuable to a starving man than the same tin is to a well-fed one. I dare say men of science agree that the future is looking relatively bleak.
Pretty much the entire situation can be thought of using that principle. Oil obviously fits easily into the above illustration, but it's fundamentally the same when we're talking about cooling data-centres now at a cost of fish in future. Cheap energy now at a cost of clean air and other pollution effects. "Resources" is meant very generally, encompassing all bringers-of-utility whether it be oil, fish, clean air or much less tangible things.
Now, there's two big caveats. Well, not caveats, but important factors that are bloody difficult to incorporate into the planning. Firstly, technological innovation. This can lead to both increased absolute availability of resources and improved allocation. For example, cheap, efficient solar panels may result in a greater power availability, particularly for dispersed settlements where plants are ill-suited, while freeing up oil for other uses. However innovation generally requires resource consumption now, not just consumption in the course of research but also for the economic conditions to spur research investment. While the Bush administration argued it to a ridiculous extreme, it's still totally valid to put some weight on the importance of the present over the future. The difficulty is how much weight to place on so much uncertainty?
Secondly, economic competitiveness. This is actually a valid factor for consideration, not just for selfish reasons but because it impacts both the allocation and scarcity of available resources. It's not so much economic competitiveness per se, but how it ties into economic efficiency. An economy that is not economically efficient is n
Putting a new plant in leads to fears about homes being devalued. The devaluation has already happened (or it's realised a devaluation does not happen) by the time the second plant comes along.
Maybe it's different in other countries, but here in UK where there is high ownership and properties are a relatively high investment, fears about home devaluation play a significant role. Even if a local was fully aware a plan is ultra safe, he'll be worried about ignorance among potential home buyers.
While nuclear may well be significantly better in pretty much every way, there's a lot of talking on/. about nuclear like it's the perfect clean option.
Genuine fears of a meltdown, however minute the probability, aren't to be written off, as Fukushima proves. Playing devil's advocate here: oh but designs are so much safer now? That's what they said back then, and even if they are better now why wasn't Fukushima upgraded or whatever? There's logical explanations but there's no getting past the point that a plant was operating that was thought to be perfectly safe, until it really wasn't. Or maybe they understood the risk but felt it was acceptable - I'm not sure which is worse. How are you going to convince a public that you're right now, when they have a perfect example that you were wrong for all that time before when you were telling them the same thing?
Anyway, given a perfect design, there's real risk - not of meltdown, but adverse consequences - from the day-to-day carelessness and cutting corners that you get at every organisation. Like Dounreay. You can release plans led by teams of brilliant people, design the safest plant possible, come up with safeties and procedures all you like, over the next 20 years you get a few Homer Simpson's working there.
Support for a budding enterprise might be worthwhile, but what socio-economic benefit is there from disbursing cremated ash in space? If I was a VA taxpayer I'd be wondering what I'm paying for.
Presumably the spaceport is primarily for putting up satellites, which can be useful infrastructure.
Why subsidise a frivolous use of rocket fuel instead of satellites?
I wasn't aware of it at the time and anyway I doubt he had the exact same issue. Maybe if we'd had free periods at the same times, or been BFF's or whatever, we might have been doing homework together or something, but that's not how it turned out.
More than that, it wasn't that I had some mental block on some topics - it was just that I'd never learnt them (or been taught them) properly in the first place. If I spent a bit of time looking at the type of question, rather than the specific question, stuff 'clicks'
I'd done fine at maths throughout school until mid-way through higher (roughly final year of highschool level) I was suddenly struggling. There were whole sections of the syllabus where I just couldn't see it. There'd be a question and I just couldn't grasp how to get from the info given to the solution required. I failed my mock exam, and not just marginally.
I was a "B maybe A" in all other classes. The teacher was pretty good and everything.
As luck would have it, my dad was friends with an engineer who offered some tutoring. First couple of sessions were straightforward and he said he didn't know what the problem was. He was giving me stuff that was as hard as it gets in the exam and I was able to solve them and explain it, not just following memorised procedures. Next session we came across something I just had no idea. He walked through solving it and one of the steps I was just what? I can't even remember what it was, some concept that once you have it you don't even think about it, like how you can multiply both sides of the equation to simplify. He'd barely started explaining it and I was like ooh - it just clicked.
We abandoned the sessions soon after that because I'd literally gone from being an D/E to a strong B student in but a moment of comprehension. I must have simply been off sick that day or something, and the specific weakness never picked up in marking - perhaps due to rather large class sizes. I suspect that's not the real root though. Mid-way through the year, the classes were shuffled and my desk partner was changed from a friend who I worked well with to someone I didn't know and pretty much didn't work with at all. It was probably about this time my grades began to fall and my friend's grades slipped as bad as mine (he was the other mock fail). But he wasn't as lucky as me, he didn't have a dad with an engineer friend, he failed the finals while I was a couple of points away from an A.
Few people actually have much idea what anyone else actually does. Even if they do know, it's a simplification of the concept, programming is like blogging in another language, just typing shit, right?
Sounds familiar. I work in accountancy practice. The first year someone does a good job, gains an understanding of the business, thinks about it, documents the prep file well and puts important long-term stuff into the permanent file. Takes say 100 units of time.
Second year, someone does a good job, mostly gets to follow last year's files but keep up the documentation, updates it and the permanent file. Takes maybe 60 units of time, which sets a realistic bar.
Third year, someone follows the previous year file but doesn't bother documenting their own and fuck the permanent file. Takes 40 units time and a pat on the back. Resets the bar at 40 units.
For it to have a massive effect, yes. But it still ups the level of organisation required to profit from the theft, may increase the number of people taking a cut, it still puts some limit on the marketability of the phone... Surely if it is so convenient for criminals to go over to France to sell their wares, people buying phones in France are taking trips the other way and finding that their phones don't work.
The vast majority of efforts to combat crime are an exercise in weakening the crime payoff table.
Brit here, wondering a) what's so special about IT workers that they need specific legislation banning overtime? b) why do you need legislation banning overtime?
Hang on, reading TFA and extracts of the Act, am I right in thinking this does not ban OT but rather include IT with exempt "professionals" from other general legislation that makes time-and-a-half OT rate mandatory? OK, now my question is why do you need any legislation specifying OT rates? Even here in the land of insane labour laws we don't have that, and in practice it is unusual for anyone making that kind of money to get any OT - or paid at all, even as time in lieu.
Bittersweet as it is, perhaps some congratulations may be in order? It seems IT is moving towards being recognised as "professional", which is nice. Continuing down that route won't lead to anything getting better though.
Maybe this is a UK thing but twice my card has been ripped off and both times Visa literally just read out each transaction one after the other and cancelled everything I replied "no" to. Took a matter of minutes with no kind of arguing. I didn't even have to queue for the handler. New card in the post day after next.
Kohlberg's scale has it's uses as an academic model but it's far too naive to apply in the real world.
Take the Heinz dilemma from the wiki. It is implied that stage six (universal human ethics) should be the only consideration despite there being 6 valid points made. Saving a life seems a clear win only in such a sharply defined, stark and simple example.
Conformity is implied to be little more than obedience to perceived expectations, while respecting law-and-order is obedience to a rule book. Obedient people who cannot or will not make a true ethical decision. Putting aside this ignorance for the true value of society and law, both of these are things which have evolved between a lot of people and a lot of time to be protector of rights and a shortcut for morality.
People can seek "universal human ethics", accept that it is impractical for them to make a fair judgement and default back to social expectations/law. People can accept they are ignorant of the full facts and implications, or that their stance on rights and ethics in the situation is too heavily influenced by their personal bias.
A justification based on rights or ethics does not make it a valid or true justification. Usually when politicians and people of power start gesturing excitedly and talking of rights and fundamental values I get concerned about what shit they're trying to pull now. These are the justifications and rationalisations given for decisions that were really made in self interest.
People can also accept that the ethics/rights issues at stake are truly pedantic and accept the law issues as more important. On more important issues, people can take a stand for rights and ethics yet still observe a law that runs to the contrary. Where is the category which said Heinz found a flaw in law and society therefore should seek to address it?
I notice comments promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony, and just how conformist Slashdot is?
Most stores around me here in UK have traditional manned checkouts and self-service. From my limited sample, the ratio is generally inversely proportional to the size of the store.
A supermarket once had 12 checkouts, usually 4-10 of them manned at any one time. They went down to 11 checkouts (3-9 manned) plus 4 self-service. Another store, a small "metro" had 6 manned tills (2-8 manned), now has 2-4 manned tills and 6 self service. These kind of numbers are fairly typical from my casual observation.
The impact has been significantly reduced queuing time whether at a manned or self-service checkout. The reduction is most noticeable at the self-service, but enough that the displacement of people from the manned tills is noticeable there too. People also get to use whichever they prefer.
While I was suspicious of them, my (however anecdotal) experience to date is that they are there for our convenience. After allowing for the extra staff to assist and secure the self-service, the net staff cost savings appear minimal. The real advantage is those 4 self-service use up the space of 1 manned checkout. That and they use the more logical queuing technique. One queue for all tills is more efficient and side-steps the "wrong queue" problem.
The costing quote isn't very useful as it doesn't make clear what they're counting or whether it's incremental.
Also, in the UK - and particularly for boutique shops - rent and other overheads can be a substantial proportion of costs. This results in a situation where scale makes things interesting. I can explain the situation faced by our shopkeeper and also why the figures do not appear to add up, but I only know how with an illustration. So, say:
normal sale price £26 average ingredients £7 average worker per batch £8 (remember these are boutique, the whole point is the time spent with the icing) contribution to overheads and profit per unit = £11 (appears to be 42% gross margin)
rent say £24k pa admin & other overheads say £50k pa therefore break-even point at (24k+50k)/11= 6,727 dozens.
Now at normal capacity 10,000 dozens, a reasonable £36,003 profit is made.
So what happens if you have a Groupon code, whereby maybe 2,000 extra cupcakes are sold at £6.50? I assume that existing customers don't notice the discount so normal sales are unaffected, quite plausable for a boutique shop. OK so overheads are fixed and already paid for right, so there's a loss of £11-£6.50=£4.50, * 2,000 = £9,000, right?
Nope. Really production wages are semi-fixed. Staff have contracted minimum hours and are only willing to do so much OT, there's a limit to how long cupcakes will store for, you always need to cover for sick time... In a big corporation this comes out through scale, in a small boutique shop it doesn't. So actually there's extra capacity to cover your 2,000 and the loss is actually £7-£6.50 = 50p, * 2,000 = £1,000. Maybe you need one or two extra shifts but a £2,000 loss is worst-case and still a bargain for the advertisement: you'll make that back plus some profit if 10% of them come back ONCE at full price.
And if those 10% of them actually come back ~3 times per year each, you can probably hang onto using up much of that excess capacity so you should be looking at £26-£7 * 200 units *3 = £11,400 per year. Nice.
But what happens when 8,500 new orders come in? All your excess capacity is burned by the first 2,000 units. The next 6,500 have the full 7+8=£15 cost per batch! Now you're losing ((15-6.50) * 6,500) + that £2,000 = £57,250. Actually it's probably worse than that because you're having to find temp labour fast, so they'll cost more, and frankly they won't be half as good as your regular staff, taking longer, more wastage...
Of course if 10% of those guys come back once you're laughing, but it's less likely. Those temp workers really couldn't do what makes your boutique shop special. Such a big influx is much more likely to be cannibalising sales too. It's also more likely to be coming from wider afield - people less often travelling nearby to buy from you, or who already shop at a local competitor.
This shop owner may well have made smart, well informed decisions all the way but for one critical one. I think we should forgive her that too, our hindsight is 20-20 but in her day-to-day an extra 8,500 orders would seem ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Is "[$$$] million" supposed to be some kind of fact?
and the police in London declaring Occupy protesters a terrorist movement,
citation needed.
Or are you referring to their including info regarding the protests in their regular circular which is used primarily to inform local businesses of relevant threats? The circular is an obvious place to include it and in it they are referred to as "peaceful" and "activists". The alternative would have been to print a specific leaflet, even though it would be going to the same people and is on the same broad topic of security, contingency planning and so on.
A bit of common sense from the police leads to headlines like "Police include Occupy movement on ‘terror’ list". Note the 'terror list' is an actual thing, and Occupy is not on it.
Desk-based "protesters" love to repeat and hype up this drivel ad nauseam but anyone with the slightest bit of sense can't miss the stench of bullshit. This then taints the entire movement by putting doubt on the credibility of any claims.
Have a read up on Organisational structures - that Wiki link is very much introduction only, btw. Also the nomenclature isn't standard everywhere, for what you appear to desire, the wiki refers to "functional structure" which appears to be what I think of as "departmental structure".
An organization is just that - an entity that provides structure for organizing. Different structures have detailed and substantial strengths and weaknesses. Any change is a major undertaking and can be expected to have implications over time, many of which will not have been foreseen. The way people work, their goals, priorities, reporting lines... Everything changes - usually even the desk location.
Perhaps the most relevant issue with a departmental structure is the internal focus. An IT department is a service department, it exists to service the other departments. But it's budgets, reporting, goals etc are focused on... The IT department. Other departments become "service users" or "customers". These are the people that get in the way of IT department objectives. Marketing want new gear? Not in my budget and I don't want the hassle. Never-mind what the implications might be for the organisation as a whole, they need it signed off by IT but there's nothing in it for IT. This BOFH syndrome isn't (necessarily) due to some personal characteristic of the IT department manager, the departmental organisational structure actively pushes in this direction.
The IT "service centre" also means the IT "cost centre". Instead of being integral to the whole team and an important "value adding" factor in the money-making system, the focus becomes how much it costs. The number one objective becomes saving money.
People generally have difficulty adapting to a new structure, basically because it's a hugely different form of organising. People who have been at an organisation for a long time tend to think their way of doing it is "obvious" and have difficulty imagining anything else. People who come from another organisation can have difficulty adjusting and think that the way their previous employer did it is "obvious" even though they may struggle to explain why. This is part of the reason why a business restructuring or combination often involves significant changes in management.
This is a huge red flag, you've just told us you have no sound basis for the change nor do you really know what you are doing. That doesn't necessarily mean the underlying idea is wrong, but rather that you don't understand it. You need to think this through in a detailed, formal way. Articulating the proposal will then be straight forward.
"But label the damn things so people can choose."
To what purpose? Making sure people see that GM food is "different" and perpetuating the hysteria?
The potential for parallels between the GM food industry, the pharmaceutical industry and particularly the tobacco industry are obvious. Scepticism is an entirely appropriate response based on historic lessons. Scepticism is not hysteria - you are exaggerating even the sensationalised output of the media.
Regardless, are you seriously arguing in favour of denying factual information and denying choice? Would your rights be so affected that others should be denied theirs?
The sub-title of TFA is:
Volkswagen has agreed to stop its Blackberry servers sending emails to some of its employees when they are off-shift.
Blackberries use push email and the text states that they are stopping the outbound emails, implying you can still send in emails but they won't be received until working hours.
Remind me again why the average US citizen is so violently opposed to the existence of trade unions, let alone joining one?
Here in UK most of the unions are less Snowball and more Napoleon & Squealer.
I would be fine with the $10 "pay as you go" (no monthly plan) phone I picked up as a spare. In many respects it's a better phone: battery life is probably measured in weeks, it gets a great signal, it's smaller/lighter and the cost means minimal concern from losing or damaging it. I'd save quite a chunk of money.
But about once a month I do need a smartphone. Or at least, I need satnav and the company pool car does not have it. Sure I could use the map under the seat but I don't really know the out-of-town geography very well and the relative convenience of the "satnav" isn't far off equating to modern "necessities" like, say, a microwave. I've been... Temporarily out of position, in darkness, in the middle of nowhere and all it took to get back on track was pulling over and a quick look at my phone.
Also nice to be able to get email, browse the web and maybe a bit of gaming if I'm waiting around somewhere. On a related note, is it me or do people seem suspicious of someone hanging around with no obvious distraction?
Economically competitive is just a cop out. What it really means, is that you have a limited commitment towards change. In my personal view, which has had heated debates, we are fucked already. Leave economics out of it and make the hard decisions now. That does mean start building as many nuclear reactors as possible right now because they are the most immediate solution to massive amounts of power generation that can be used immediately for heating, cooling, industry, etc.
I suspect you misunderstand economics. Throw out any ideas of economics being about $'s, the $ is only used in economics as a unit of measurement, and even then only a proxy. Economics is concerned with "the distribution of scarce resources", leading to the principle objectives being improving efficiency (of allocation) and/or increasing the availability of resources (i.e. reducing scarcity). There is no stated time constraint, the implication is you should consider the entire period that it is possible to do any kind of planning for.
When people try to argue against environmentalism using "economics", they generally either misrepresent the problem as being entirely the unrelated moral issues, or constrain economics into a short timeframe and selfish perspective. This is to totally ignore the problem. Aside from moral considerations, the entire human aspect of the environmental problem is an economic one.
Pure economic argument is almost entirely on the side of rational environmentalism (emphasis on rational, since "environmentalism" is a generalisation almost to the point of absurdity; there is no common standard of where the balance lies between pro and anti, there is no common standard of values).
If you consume 100 units of scarce resource now at the cost of 100u of same later it is a net nil on the "scarcity" objective, all you've done is decided the allocation. So what is the net position for allocation objective then? This is where it gets more interesting. If the future is going to be more plentiful then it is reasonable to assume the better allocation is to consume those resources now, but if the future is going to be bleak then we should save those resources. Everyone knows a tin of beans is more valuable to a starving man than the same tin is to a well-fed one. I dare say men of science agree that the future is looking relatively bleak.
Pretty much the entire situation can be thought of using that principle. Oil obviously fits easily into the above illustration, but it's fundamentally the same when we're talking about cooling data-centres now at a cost of fish in future. Cheap energy now at a cost of clean air and other pollution effects. "Resources" is meant very generally, encompassing all bringers-of-utility whether it be oil, fish, clean air or much less tangible things.
Now, there's two big caveats. Well, not caveats, but important factors that are bloody difficult to incorporate into the planning. Firstly, technological innovation. This can lead to both increased absolute availability of resources and improved allocation. For example, cheap, efficient solar panels may result in a greater power availability, particularly for dispersed settlements where plants are ill-suited, while freeing up oil for other uses. However innovation generally requires resource consumption now, not just consumption in the course of research but also for the economic conditions to spur research investment. While the Bush administration argued it to a ridiculous extreme, it's still totally valid to put some weight on the importance of the present over the future. The difficulty is how much weight to place on so much uncertainty?
Secondly, economic competitiveness. This is actually a valid factor for consideration, not just for selfish reasons but because it impacts both the allocation and scarcity of available resources. It's not so much economic competitiveness per se, but how it ties into economic efficiency. An economy that is not economically efficient is n
The Red Cross and others seem to want to build a war chest so that when a big disaster hits they will be prepared.
This is bad because..?
With disasters, the critical factor is speed of response. The Red Cross has supply drops touching down before donations have cleared the bank.
Putting a new plant in leads to fears about homes being devalued. The devaluation has already happened (or it's realised a devaluation does not happen) by the time the second plant comes along.
Maybe it's different in other countries, but here in UK where there is high ownership and properties are a relatively high investment, fears about home devaluation play a significant role. Even if a local was fully aware a plan is ultra safe, he'll be worried about ignorance among potential home buyers.
While nuclear may well be significantly better in pretty much every way, there's a lot of talking on /. about nuclear like it's the perfect clean option.
Genuine fears of a meltdown, however minute the probability, aren't to be written off, as Fukushima proves. Playing devil's advocate here: oh but designs are so much safer now? That's what they said back then, and even if they are better now why wasn't Fukushima upgraded or whatever? There's logical explanations but there's no getting past the point that a plant was operating that was thought to be perfectly safe, until it really wasn't. Or maybe they understood the risk but felt it was acceptable - I'm not sure which is worse. How are you going to convince a public that you're right now, when they have a perfect example that you were wrong for all that time before when you were telling them the same thing?
Anyway, given a perfect design, there's real risk - not of meltdown, but adverse consequences - from the day-to-day carelessness and cutting corners that you get at every organisation. Like Dounreay. You can release plans led by teams of brilliant people, design the safest plant possible, come up with safeties and procedures all you like, over the next 20 years you get a few Homer Simpson's working there.
Support for a budding enterprise might be worthwhile, but what socio-economic benefit is there from disbursing cremated ash in space? If I was a VA taxpayer I'd be wondering what I'm paying for.
Presumably the spaceport is primarily for putting up satellites, which can be useful infrastructure.
Why subsidise a frivolous use of rocket fuel instead of satellites?
I wasn't aware of it at the time and anyway I doubt he had the exact same issue. Maybe if we'd had free periods at the same times, or been BFF's or whatever, we might have been doing homework together or something, but that's not how it turned out.
I'd done fine at maths throughout school until mid-way through higher (roughly final year of highschool level) I was suddenly struggling. There were whole sections of the syllabus where I just couldn't see it. There'd be a question and I just couldn't grasp how to get from the info given to the solution required. I failed my mock exam, and not just marginally.
I was a "B maybe A" in all other classes. The teacher was pretty good and everything.
As luck would have it, my dad was friends with an engineer who offered some tutoring. First couple of sessions were straightforward and he said he didn't know what the problem was. He was giving me stuff that was as hard as it gets in the exam and I was able to solve them and explain it, not just following memorised procedures. Next session we came across something I just had no idea. He walked through solving it and one of the steps I was just what? I can't even remember what it was, some concept that once you have it you don't even think about it, like how you can multiply both sides of the equation to simplify. He'd barely started explaining it and I was like ooh - it just clicked.
We abandoned the sessions soon after that because I'd literally gone from being an D/E to a strong B student in but a moment of comprehension. I must have simply been off sick that day or something, and the specific weakness never picked up in marking - perhaps due to rather large class sizes. I suspect that's not the real root though. Mid-way through the year, the classes were shuffled and my desk partner was changed from a friend who I worked well with to someone I didn't know and pretty much didn't work with at all. It was probably about this time my grades began to fall and my friend's grades slipped as bad as mine (he was the other mock fail). But he wasn't as lucky as me, he didn't have a dad with an engineer friend, he failed the finals while I was a couple of points away from an A.
+5 Funny? More like +5 Insightful.
Few people actually have much idea what anyone else actually does. Even if they do know, it's a simplification of the concept, programming is like blogging in another language, just typing shit, right?
So... People are still sending private info through email?
Sounds familiar. I work in accountancy practice. The first year someone does a good job, gains an understanding of the business, thinks about it, documents the prep file well and puts important long-term stuff into the permanent file. Takes say 100 units of time.
Second year, someone does a good job, mostly gets to follow last year's files but keep up the documentation, updates it and the permanent file. Takes maybe 60 units of time, which sets a realistic bar.
Third year, someone follows the previous year file but doesn't bother documenting their own and fuck the permanent file. Takes 40 units time and a pat on the back. Resets the bar at 40 units.
Year 4, see year 1.
For it to have a massive effect, yes. But it still ups the level of organisation required to profit from the theft, may increase the number of people taking a cut, it still puts some limit on the marketability of the phone... Surely if it is so convenient for criminals to go over to France to sell their wares, people buying phones in France are taking trips the other way and finding that their phones don't work.
The vast majority of efforts to combat crime are an exercise in weakening the crime payoff table.
Brit here, wondering a) what's so special about IT workers that they need specific legislation banning overtime? b) why do you need legislation banning overtime?
Hang on, reading TFA and extracts of the Act, am I right in thinking this does not ban OT but rather include IT with exempt "professionals" from other general legislation that makes time-and-a-half OT rate mandatory? OK, now my question is why do you need any legislation specifying OT rates? Even here in the land of insane labour laws we don't have that, and in practice it is unusual for anyone making that kind of money to get any OT - or paid at all, even as time in lieu.
Bittersweet as it is, perhaps some congratulations may be in order? It seems IT is moving towards being recognised as "professional", which is nice. Continuing down that route won't lead to anything getting better though.
Very broadly, your waste and recycling is a community issue whereas your medical treatment is a personal issue.
Probably still 20 sitting in my old highschool with pupils having to code in COMAL.
Maybe this is a UK thing but twice my card has been ripped off and both times Visa literally just read out each transaction one after the other and cancelled everything I replied "no" to. Took a matter of minutes with no kind of arguing. I didn't even have to queue for the handler. New card in the post day after next.
Kohlberg's scale has it's uses as an academic model but it's far too naive to apply in the real world.
Take the Heinz dilemma from the wiki. It is implied that stage six (universal human ethics) should be the only consideration despite there being 6 valid points made. Saving a life seems a clear win only in such a sharply defined, stark and simple example.
Conformity is implied to be little more than obedience to perceived expectations, while respecting law-and-order is obedience to a rule book. Obedient people who cannot or will not make a true ethical decision. Putting aside this ignorance for the true value of society and law, both of these are things which have evolved between a lot of people and a lot of time to be protector of rights and a shortcut for morality.
People can seek "universal human ethics", accept that it is impractical for them to make a fair judgement and default back to social expectations/law. People can accept they are ignorant of the full facts and implications, or that their stance on rights and ethics in the situation is too heavily influenced by their personal bias.
A justification based on rights or ethics does not make it a valid or true justification. Usually when politicians and people of power start gesturing excitedly and talking of rights and fundamental values I get concerned about what shit they're trying to pull now. These are the justifications and rationalisations given for decisions that were really made in self interest.
People can also accept that the ethics/rights issues at stake are truly pedantic and accept the law issues as more important. On more important issues, people can take a stand for rights and ethics yet still observe a law that runs to the contrary. Where is the category which said Heinz found a flaw in law and society therefore should seek to address it?
I notice comments promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony, and just how conformist Slashdot is?
You know it's arty when the camera never stops moving. Enjoyed the concept and other elements of execution but the camera direction is irritating.
Most stores around me here in UK have traditional manned checkouts and self-service. From my limited sample, the ratio is generally inversely proportional to the size of the store.
A supermarket once had 12 checkouts, usually 4-10 of them manned at any one time. They went down to 11 checkouts (3-9 manned) plus 4 self-service. Another store, a small "metro" had 6 manned tills (2-8 manned), now has 2-4 manned tills and 6 self service. These kind of numbers are fairly typical from my casual observation.
The impact has been significantly reduced queuing time whether at a manned or self-service checkout. The reduction is most noticeable at the self-service, but enough that the displacement of people from the manned tills is noticeable there too. People also get to use whichever they prefer.
While I was suspicious of them, my (however anecdotal) experience to date is that they are there for our convenience. After allowing for the extra staff to assist and secure the self-service, the net staff cost savings appear minimal. The real advantage is those 4 self-service use up the space of 1 manned checkout. That and they use the more logical queuing technique. One queue for all tills is more efficient and side-steps the "wrong queue" problem.
The costing quote isn't very useful as it doesn't make clear what they're counting or whether it's incremental.
Also, in the UK - and particularly for boutique shops - rent and other overheads can be a substantial proportion of costs. This results in a situation where scale makes things interesting. I can explain the situation faced by our shopkeeper and also why the figures do not appear to add up, but I only know how with an illustration. So, say:
normal sale price £26
average ingredients £7
average worker per batch £8 (remember these are boutique, the whole point is the time spent with the icing)
contribution to overheads and profit per unit = £11 (appears to be 42% gross margin)
rent say £24k pa
admin & other overheads say £50k pa
therefore break-even point at (24k+50k)/11= 6,727 dozens.
Now at normal capacity 10,000 dozens, a reasonable £36,003 profit is made.
So what happens if you have a Groupon code, whereby maybe 2,000 extra cupcakes are sold at £6.50? I assume that existing customers don't notice the discount so normal sales are unaffected, quite plausable for a boutique shop. OK so overheads are fixed and already paid for right, so there's a loss of £11-£6.50=£4.50, * 2,000 = £9,000, right?
Nope. Really production wages are semi-fixed. Staff have contracted minimum hours and are only willing to do so much OT, there's a limit to how long cupcakes will store for, you always need to cover for sick time... In a big corporation this comes out through scale, in a small boutique shop it doesn't. So actually there's extra capacity to cover your 2,000 and the loss is actually £7-£6.50 = 50p, * 2,000 = £1,000. Maybe you need one or two extra shifts but a £2,000 loss is worst-case and still a bargain for the advertisement: you'll make that back plus some profit if 10% of them come back ONCE at full price.
And if those 10% of them actually come back ~3 times per year each, you can probably hang onto using up much of that excess capacity so you should be looking at £26-£7 * 200 units *3 = £11,400 per year. Nice.
But what happens when 8,500 new orders come in? All your excess capacity is burned by the first 2,000 units. The next 6,500 have the full 7+8=£15 cost per batch! Now you're losing ((15-6.50) * 6,500) + that £2,000 = £57,250. Actually it's probably worse than that because you're having to find temp labour fast, so they'll cost more, and frankly they won't be half as good as your regular staff, taking longer, more wastage...
Of course if 10% of those guys come back once you're laughing, but it's less likely. Those temp workers really couldn't do what makes your boutique shop special. Such a big influx is much more likely to be cannibalising sales too. It's also more likely to be coming from wider afield - people less often travelling nearby to buy from you, or who already shop at a local competitor.
This shop owner may well have made smart, well informed decisions all the way but for one critical one. I think we should forgive her that too, our hindsight is 20-20 but in her day-to-day an extra 8,500 orders would seem ridiculous.