My point was mostly that a non-vote is a form of vote. Some people choose to abstain. If you're forced to vote, you're being asked to give inaccurate polling data; you need a way to make your vote accurately reflect the abstain vote. I guess you found that.
Sure, hell, I can fool you into thinking a deck of cards changed color. have a look.
I hallucinate things on the road all the time when the sun is in my eyes. Peripheral vision, fast-moving scan (because I don't stare locked straight ahead), and dark spots caused by the sun being right-fucking-there will give enough data for my brain to imagine that smudge is that car skidding in front of me, and so render the car there, when in fact it hasn't moved. I have compensation systems to IGNORE THE EVIDENCE IN FRONT OF MY EYES because what's happening doesn't make logical sense.
Stunting the growth of the mind is criminal, yet the state supports it because minds stunted as such are easily-manipulated by NAMBLA and underground pedophile rings and so must be kept safe.
U.S. Census data is hella-useful. I use it for a lot of modeling, along with public record of the Federal Government's spending and of income sources from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Rich don't make jobs, and jobs don't come from businesses. Businesses employ people as an incidental matter of operation: those factories, cash registers, and fork lifts aren't going to run themselves.
When you open a small business, you're competing for limited resource. The economy grows each year: more people, more technology. More people means more flat buying power (due to more available labor and monetary growth--more money put into the system to keep up, backed by more labor to produce). More technology means fewer people working job X to produce good A, thus the difference in money filters over to buy good B requiring job Y. You're trying to capture some of that growth.
That's not quite true, is it?
When you operate *any* business, you're trying to capture that growth *and* pull business away from other businesses. Get those new Nikes out, be more popular than iPad. People don't care if you have a new iPad now; girls are impressed by new Jordans. Nikes get you laid. You have $200 for either an iPad or new Jordans; which do you think gets bought?
If your business is successful, some other business doesn't capture that success. Your business, of course, needs labor to produce the things you're selling, right? That's jobs. What about that other business that didn't grow, or that lost half its market? You just "created" 100,000 jobs, but that other business with 200,000 people lost half its sales, and now only needs to make half as much.... 100,000 of their employees get laid off.
Trickle-down economics dictates you get money by going out and getting a job. Trickle-down economics is bullshit; you go out and start selling something and NOBODY'S BUYING, you get POOR. You can't create jobs until somebody buys your product. That's demand-side economics.
Of course I can. The strongest case I can make is nobody is selling my private identifying information--bank accounts, social security numbers, credit cards--or my personal life. They're selling records of my public interaction, or aggregate statistics.
People get all up-in-arms about something like Facebook selling statistics that they have some number of users who, between certain hours, have interest in My Little Ponies *and* are 28-35. They sell advertising in blocks like that, and someone buys an ad, and you get shown an ad targeting you based on your behavior. Folks go, "OH MY GOD THEY'RE SELLING MY PERSONAL INFORMATION!"... well, yes. This matters how?
The answer is it only matters because it personally offends someone in some nebulous way. The practical impact on anyone's and everyone's privacy is NOTHING.
It's a bunch of noise from a bunch of idiots who have no idea what the fuck is going on, but want to brandish their nerd-cred by crying privacy for every fucking thing while they run personal web servers that log IP addresses.
If you were so concerned about privacy, maybe you'd lobby to make police body cameras illegal to protect the privacy of the officers, too; for that matter, people shouldn't be able to look at you when you're outside, and cars should be largely invisible and not have license plates because that's waving your privacy all over the place. Of course all of those things have concrete, identifiable leads back to someone's personal, individual activity; and they all occur in public, where the information is visible by many third-parties; and nobody actually cares, and will argue (finally with some sanity) that things like recording the police should be legal if for no other reason than because they're IN A PUBLIC PLACE AND CAN'T EXPECT PRIVACY--but HEAVEN HELP THEM if they have a PHOTOGRAPH of YOUR CAR driving down a PUBLIC ROAD, because that's INVADING YOUR PRIVACY!
You can't even identify most of the private information they must be selling; and the information you can identify, you can't figure out why it might impinge on your privacy. Like an asinine patent troll, all you can do is assert that metrics and numbers and ideals describing groups of people built up from individual sampling are magically dangerous to you now, somehow, because, although this has been done for literally hundreds of years, it's now being done "ON A COMPUTER".
I don't know why left-to-right is the standard for mental mathematics, to be honest. The more vs less argument is significant, but less-so than the procedural argument; it just happens to be easier to digest (most people aren't well-convinced that doing something millions of times means doing that thing 5 times is easier than doing some other thing once--even when they answer a text message while exiting their car and IMMEDIATELY LOCK THEIR KEYS INSIDE).
If you like paper methods, you could look into lattice multiplication as well. Not everyone can hold large-digit numbers in their heads, and most mental mathematics exhibitions use 3-5 digit numbers; to multiply wide numbers, you need to chunk and store a lot of intermediate values, which is even stressful on a PAO system or other prepared numeric mnemonic (PAO can store 6-digit chunks as complex images). Even then, exceeding your 7-9 item short-term memory limit slows your working memory (you have to store quickly into long-term memory with few associations--some people call this "mid-term memory"); and, eventually, you're juggling so many digits (which have to be stored as chunks--a 14-digit number isn't ONE short-term memory slot) that you can only do it by deliberately storing multiple chunks in long-term memory. It gets *slow*.
Lattice multiplication just writes out the two multiplicands on paper; multiplies every single-digit pair together; then sums results on diagonals and accumulates all of those results in a final output. It takes a while, but it's less-error-prone and much faster for multiplying many-figure numbers than doing it in your head. At a point, those functions in your head are basically eight megs and constantly swapping.
Your argument is that it's unethical to enable people to access things they couldn't otherwise access. Ethics are bullshit, man. Ethics are what you use to excuse "X is wrong, but my ethical guidelines say I must X, so I will X." Ethics are why you withhold life-saving medication and watch people die, slowly and painfully. After WW2, when the Nazis were put out of power, people came across all this documented medical research; they debated *not* using it because it would be *unethical*, because it was the result of human experimentation--they would rather commit the atrocity of letting people suffer and die than commit no atrocity while handling information derived from atrocities already committed.
If I point a gun at *you*, I'm firing before you realize it's a gun. I can't imagine a situation in which I'd have a gun (due to not being able to imagine a situation where I'd be best served by having a firearm), though, so whatever.
Well I mean, if the most dangerous job is 108 deaths per 100,000, and the 15th-most-dangerous job is 13 deaths per 100,000, and the absolutely-safest job is 9 deaths per 100,000, that #15 is almost the safest job for you to have. That's still poor methodology, since #2 is way less-dangerous than #1, thus #1 is an outlier.
Ranking has those problems. Statistically, driving a car is more dangerous than being a police officer, to the point that eliminating 98% of traffic fatalities would make driving slightly-safer than being a cop. If you rank these "more" and "less", you don't really get an idea of how much more--are you 1% more likely to die driving than serving a warrant, or 6,000% more likely to die?
Saying job A is the second-most-dangerous in the world doesn't reflect on job A when Job B--the safest job in the world, 98,000 steps down the rank--is 1% less dangerous, and job C--the most-dangerous job in the world--is 60 times as dangerous. "Second-most-dangerous" sounds really bad, until you look at the numbers and realize something is really fucked up with Job B.
So real numbers.
Logging: 111 per 100,000; police: 13.5 per 100,000; sales: 2 per 100,000.
Police face 12% of the fatality rate of loggers; loggers are 8.2 times as likely to die as police. Sales people face 15% the fatality rate of police; police are 6.75 times as likely to die as sales.
The span from 1-5 is 75.1 (67.8%); from 5-10 is 17.8 (49.7%); from 10-15 is 4.5 (25%); and from 15-20 is 3.5 (25.9%). Job rank #15 has gotten past the really big, dangerous jobs of society and into the long tail, where each next job is slightly-less-dangerous, but not ground-breakingly so. Go thousands of steps further that way and you can eliminate 85% of that risk, whereas you only had to go a dozen steps from the worst job to get that kind of reduction in danger.
This data shows that the major occupational risks in our society are concentrated somewhere above rank #10. In terms of absolute numbers (because some industries are bigger and so small gains multiply), ranks #8, #6, #12, #16, and #11 are interesting. Drivers have not only almost twice the risk, but around 4.5 times the total sample size as police; and non-occupational driving carries a high baseline risk in society as well.
So, yes, analysis shows active-duty police jobs are some of the safest jobs in America. More clearly, it shows that police jobs are not specially more-dangerous than the next safest jobs, while the next more-dangerous jobs going upward scale rapidly.
People don't understand *why* taxing the poor and middle-class is bad, though.
6% of 120/year? $7.20, okay, sure, nothing. 4.8 million households? $34 million. Well, there goes (theoretical maximum) 2,345 minimum-wage jobs.
How's that work?
There are only so many dollars of income every year. The Fed prints money, the bank loans dollars into existence, you buy things, and part of your money is divvied up as wages. Raising the costs a consumer pays means a bigger chunk of his money gets taken when he buys a given thing--which is backed by all the same jobs--and so he can't spend that money on some other thing. $34 million in one year is the income of 2,345 full-time minimum-wage jobs, or fewer jobs with higher salary; it's the amount of money which can't be spent by consumers in this cycle (year), and thus the amount of jobs which can no longer be supported by that spending.
Not to mention Best Buy's employees trying to con you into shit. People don't realize Best Buy puts their employees under enormous pressure; in the early 2000s, they started telling their sales people to proudly inform customers that Best Buy is a modern company operating without commission (because of high-pressure sales tactics commission employees engage in), while tracking employee sales numbers and punishing them for not making sales.
In 2006, Geek Squad employees had to get $245/day of sales to avoid disciplinary action--that applied whether you were a tech bench employee (front of store, one customer ends up paying $400 just for walking in) or a dedicated service add-on employee. In the latter case, every sales person gets credit for hardware sales, plus for attaching things like anti-virus and set-up services; if the sales person fails to attach anti-virus or other services, he passes the customer (who has already refused an add-on) to a Geek Squad tech whose job is to convince the customer to change his mind. The Geek Squad tech gets zero sales credit for attaching hardware (routers, etc.) if that occurs; he has to attach software (which the sales person has tried and failed to attach). Again: that add-on employee is often scheduled in that role 100% of the time, and has the same sales requirement as a front-bench employee.
Front tech-bench employees got into a routine of charging $60 for a diagnostic on any computer problem (non-refundable). For a virus, they'll run an anti-virus scan ($30), which fails to remove the virus, and cease trying (manual removal gets disciplinary action from the tech supervisor). They inform the user that he needs an OS reinstall. That incurs $70 for a back-up service and $60 for an OS re-install. Then it's $30 for each additional software--if you want your new OS to not die immediately, you'll pay $30 to install anti-virus and $30 to install anti-spyware, plus $30 if you wanted MS Office installed again. Everyone who walked in was $300 of sales.
Sales people would explain that the trial AV did nothing, and that a computer is 100% guaranteed to get a virus the instant it's on the Internet without shiny new AV. Failing that, they'd hand off to Geek Squad whose job depends on selling enough $50 anti-virus packages every day to hit $240, and who only gets people who were unconvinced by the portents of doom and credit card theft. High-pressure sales doesn't begin to describe it.
Everyone's angry at Comcast and AT&T and Tesla and ignoring Best Buy, I guess because if you're retarded enough to shop at Best Buy you deserve to be poor.
My brain isn't a floating-point processor and has different hardware.
As for how anyone with a brain would do it... the method I displayed is exactly the method used by mental mathematics world champions, was the method used by high-rated accountants in Japan for thousands of years, and is the method taught in schools in several Asian countries (Japan and some parts of Korea).
Your method requires pre-analysis to form a strategy, then a subtraction (1), three accumulating multiplications (3), and then three more accumulating multiplications (3), for a total of 7 operations after consideration of a plan. With the doubling variant, it requires a subtraction (1), three accumulating multiplications (3), three more accumulating multiplications to double 36.5 (3), a division (1), and two more accumulating multiplications (2), totaling 10 operations.
The method I showed requires applying isometric operations in repetition, like counting or walking. Overlearning these techniques allows for rapid results: some individuals have been capable of repeat-division of sets of 5 5 digit numbers (e.g. n = 103.29; n = n / 20.171; n = n / 0.73864; n = n / 104.11; n = n / 17.002; n = n / 13.176; return n) at rates of under 2 seconds per set. In general, people are barely fast enough to outperform a human operating a calculator (the calculator is faster; data entry takes more time than mental computation).
Further, the method I described itself represents an isometric strategy. Your brain overlearns this strategy, and is thus better-capable of storing intermediate values accurately during computation. Varying your strategy uses additional mental effort, causing short-term memory loss (you lose track of numbers) leading to slowdowns and errors in computation.
Imagine if you just said, "A person with a brain would consciously focus on his hip, shifting it toward the leg he's taking a step onto, thus distributing his weight onto it to hold his balance." Such a person would concentrate *extremely* hard on walking, versus someone who casually strolls along without really thinking about it. You described that sort of thinking, but with math.
Some French guy on Slashdot was talking about how he gets free mobile phone with 2 hours of talk and spends ~30 euros ($32) on 10Mbit DSL yesterday, and couldn't believe American internet was so expensive ($80).
Quantify "faster" and "about what we pay today" with numbers.
Comcast argues that a service costing $10 can be sold for >=$10, or sold for >=($10 - market_price_of_information). By extension, they claim a user has access to that service for a lower price through this exchange, and propose offering a decision: (pay <$10 AND have the service AND leak personal information) OR (pay $10 AND have the service AND NOT leak personal information) OR (pay $0 AND NOT have the service AND NOT leak personal information).
Summary makes a luxury option claim, arguing for the decision: (pay $10 AND have the service) OR (pay $0 AND NOT have the service).
The lack of competition argument is also tired and old. It's stated again and again, without data; meanwhile Comcast's actual, pre-tax profit margin (net profits after all costs and before taxes) is averaging roughly 10%, so that $80/month Blast! 150Mbit/s service could be a whole $7 cheaper if all of Comcast's services were given a proportionally-similar price reduction to cut their profit to $0.
You could argue that their internet service is particularly overpriced; that conflicts with the common notion that Comcast gives discounts on its package service (TV/Internet) because their Cable TV service is overpriced to subsidize their Internet service.
Interestingly enough, $30/mo in France will get you 10Mo down/1.5Mo up, about 0.33/0.05 Mo per dollar; $80/mo in America will get you 150Mo down/15Mo up, about 1.875/0.1875 Mo per dollar. For a given amount of throughput, Internet service is pretty fucking expensive in France; meanwhile Comcast is talking about bringing 2Gb service to the home here as the next evolution of their Blast 150Mb service.
Still a shit company with shitty service, but let's not go full-potato on economics and finances and just declare that competition magically drives prices down below costs, somehow, and that prices are way higher than costs simply because we don't know wtf the cost might actually be.
56. You should have that memorized. If you don't, the square of 8 is 64, and subtracting 8 gets you 56--because (8,2) gives 5[4+2] = 56, one straight look-up operation with a decrementing carry built-in so you don't have to count on your fingers.
Of course, having both the rote-memorized multiplication table (36 entries, including 8 perfect squares) and the two addition tables memorized (7 entries, including one reflexive (5,5) entry) means you can rapidly-multiply large numbers with arbitrary decimal places using an accumulating algorithm.
Algebra is hard enough without having to deal with the arithmetic involved. Even using a calculator turns into a major exercise in keeping track of what digits you've computed; best to make arithmetic a native function.
Every position is desperate. People with low battery are often plenty comfortable with their near-term access to a charging port; and, at the same time, cognizant of the low battery state. That applies stress, in the same way that being hungry applies stress (omg you might starve!... there's a 0% chance of that happening). That changes the way the brain makes decisions; it's not that you might go tapping on e-purchases in a desperate attempt to outrun impending battery failure, but rather that you've got a different mix of hormones and are now willing to pay $1.73 more for Tide laundry detergent that you're going to need in 2-3 weeks.
Is charging the extra $1.73 at that point unscrupulous? What about just setting your base price at a point where people avoid the purchase 90% of the time, but eventually come in and stock up as their supplies run low?
What about *lowering* the price? Peanut butter on sale, 50 cents off if you buy three big-ass bottles! People rush to buy peanut butter they wouldn't normally purchase. With the extra food in the house, a large proportion of this population is more comfortable eating more, and so they eat peanut butter faster, and end up having to buy more, and you profit.
Your high salary means your employer will go out of business unless they charge prices high enough to pay your salary. You make 15 hamburgers an hour and get paid $10/hr? That's going to be 67 cents per hamburger factored in. If you make $15/hr, that's $1 per hamburger factored in. People looking to eat have to fork over that extra cash; that means they have less to pay for the next service (and when you get your paycheck, it cycles around the same way: you have 50% more--taken from others--but it only goes 45% farther), and somebody gets bumped out so you can live better. Maybe we fix this by adding tools along the line so you can make 30 hamburgers an hour, and now you get $15/hr and that's 50 cents per hamburger factored in; and if we're not selling twice as many hamburgers, somebody else is redundant, and gets laid off.
Sounds like you're abusing people by not working 14-hour days for minimum wage, doesn't it?
I'm sure you can justify *yourself*, somehow. You need every little luxury more than someone else needs to eat. Maybe you'll make an incorrect statement about how more money coming to you means you get to spend it and create a multiplying effect, somehow, even though more total spending doesn't actually occur in a given time frame. Maybe you just *know* you've *earned* it, even if it hurts someone else.
Maybe you just have to concede the point and accept that, yes, you need a bit more of an ethical quandary than that before you can start claiming bad ethics.
To call profit-maximizing strategies "unscrupulous", we'd have to claim everyone who makes above bare subsistence income is an unscrupulous actor. Women complaining they don't get paid as much as men would be unscrupulous, trying to get more pay without doing more work.
You need a bit more of an ethical quandry than that before you can start claiming bad ethics.
Slashdot Mirror
My point was mostly that a non-vote is a form of vote. Some people choose to abstain. If you're forced to vote, you're being asked to give inaccurate polling data; you need a way to make your vote accurately reflect the abstain vote. I guess you found that.
Sure, hell, I can fool you into thinking a deck of cards changed color. have a look.
I hallucinate things on the road all the time when the sun is in my eyes. Peripheral vision, fast-moving scan (because I don't stare locked straight ahead), and dark spots caused by the sun being right-fucking-there will give enough data for my brain to imagine that smudge is that car skidding in front of me, and so render the car there, when in fact it hasn't moved. I have compensation systems to IGNORE THE EVIDENCE IN FRONT OF MY EYES because what's happening doesn't make logical sense.
Aren't they like two generations out of date? Maybe in 1980 folks cared about that crap.
Stunting the growth of the mind is criminal, yet the state supports it because minds stunted as such are easily-manipulated by NAMBLA and underground pedophile rings and so must be kept safe.
To be fair, a lot of people around here need medication.
This angry girlfriend read his text messages, you won't believe what happened next!
U.S. Census data is hella-useful. I use it for a lot of modeling, along with public record of the Federal Government's spending and of income sources from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Mandatory voting laws should be handled by writing yourself in.
Rich don't make jobs, and jobs don't come from businesses. Businesses employ people as an incidental matter of operation: those factories, cash registers, and fork lifts aren't going to run themselves.
When you open a small business, you're competing for limited resource. The economy grows each year: more people, more technology. More people means more flat buying power (due to more available labor and monetary growth--more money put into the system to keep up, backed by more labor to produce). More technology means fewer people working job X to produce good A, thus the difference in money filters over to buy good B requiring job Y. You're trying to capture some of that growth.
That's not quite true, is it?
When you operate *any* business, you're trying to capture that growth *and* pull business away from other businesses. Get those new Nikes out, be more popular than iPad. People don't care if you have a new iPad now; girls are impressed by new Jordans. Nikes get you laid. You have $200 for either an iPad or new Jordans; which do you think gets bought?
If your business is successful, some other business doesn't capture that success. Your business, of course, needs labor to produce the things you're selling, right? That's jobs. What about that other business that didn't grow, or that lost half its market? You just "created" 100,000 jobs, but that other business with 200,000 people lost half its sales, and now only needs to make half as much. ... 100,000 of their employees get laid off.
Trickle-down economics dictates you get money by going out and getting a job. Trickle-down economics is bullshit; you go out and start selling something and NOBODY'S BUYING, you get POOR. You can't create jobs until somebody buys your product. That's demand-side economics.
Of course I can. The strongest case I can make is nobody is selling my private identifying information--bank accounts, social security numbers, credit cards--or my personal life. They're selling records of my public interaction, or aggregate statistics.
People get all up-in-arms about something like Facebook selling statistics that they have some number of users who, between certain hours, have interest in My Little Ponies *and* are 28-35. They sell advertising in blocks like that, and someone buys an ad, and you get shown an ad targeting you based on your behavior. Folks go, "OH MY GOD THEY'RE SELLING MY PERSONAL INFORMATION!" ... well, yes. This matters how?
The answer is it only matters because it personally offends someone in some nebulous way. The practical impact on anyone's and everyone's privacy is NOTHING.
It's a bunch of noise from a bunch of idiots who have no idea what the fuck is going on, but want to brandish their nerd-cred by crying privacy for every fucking thing while they run personal web servers that log IP addresses.
If you were so concerned about privacy, maybe you'd lobby to make police body cameras illegal to protect the privacy of the officers, too; for that matter, people shouldn't be able to look at you when you're outside, and cars should be largely invisible and not have license plates because that's waving your privacy all over the place. Of course all of those things have concrete, identifiable leads back to someone's personal, individual activity; and they all occur in public, where the information is visible by many third-parties; and nobody actually cares, and will argue (finally with some sanity) that things like recording the police should be legal if for no other reason than because they're IN A PUBLIC PLACE AND CAN'T EXPECT PRIVACY--but HEAVEN HELP THEM if they have a PHOTOGRAPH of YOUR CAR driving down a PUBLIC ROAD, because that's INVADING YOUR PRIVACY!
You can't even identify most of the private information they must be selling; and the information you can identify, you can't figure out why it might impinge on your privacy. Like an asinine patent troll, all you can do is assert that metrics and numbers and ideals describing groups of people built up from individual sampling are magically dangerous to you now, somehow, because, although this has been done for literally hundreds of years, it's now being done "ON A COMPUTER".
Mass hysteria, because the masses are idiots.
I don't know why left-to-right is the standard for mental mathematics, to be honest. The more vs less argument is significant, but less-so than the procedural argument; it just happens to be easier to digest (most people aren't well-convinced that doing something millions of times means doing that thing 5 times is easier than doing some other thing once--even when they answer a text message while exiting their car and IMMEDIATELY LOCK THEIR KEYS INSIDE).
If you like paper methods, you could look into lattice multiplication as well. Not everyone can hold large-digit numbers in their heads, and most mental mathematics exhibitions use 3-5 digit numbers; to multiply wide numbers, you need to chunk and store a lot of intermediate values, which is even stressful on a PAO system or other prepared numeric mnemonic (PAO can store 6-digit chunks as complex images). Even then, exceeding your 7-9 item short-term memory limit slows your working memory (you have to store quickly into long-term memory with few associations--some people call this "mid-term memory"); and, eventually, you're juggling so many digits (which have to be stored as chunks--a 14-digit number isn't ONE short-term memory slot) that you can only do it by deliberately storing multiple chunks in long-term memory. It gets *slow*.
Lattice multiplication just writes out the two multiplicands on paper; multiplies every single-digit pair together; then sums results on diagonals and accumulates all of those results in a final output. It takes a while, but it's less-error-prone and much faster for multiplying many-figure numbers than doing it in your head. At a point, those functions in your head are basically eight megs and constantly swapping.
That happened a lot when eMachines were $250.
Your argument is that it's unethical to enable people to access things they couldn't otherwise access. Ethics are bullshit, man. Ethics are what you use to excuse "X is wrong, but my ethical guidelines say I must X, so I will X." Ethics are why you withhold life-saving medication and watch people die, slowly and painfully. After WW2, when the Nazis were put out of power, people came across all this documented medical research; they debated *not* using it because it would be *unethical*, because it was the result of human experimentation--they would rather commit the atrocity of letting people suffer and die than commit no atrocity while handling information derived from atrocities already committed.
If I point a gun at *you*, I'm firing before you realize it's a gun. I can't imagine a situation in which I'd have a gun (due to not being able to imagine a situation where I'd be best served by having a firearm), though, so whatever.
Nice to see anti-vaxxers, creationists, and flat-earth-society conspiracy theorists haven't completely displaced more-traditional idiots.
Well I mean, if the most dangerous job is 108 deaths per 100,000, and the 15th-most-dangerous job is 13 deaths per 100,000, and the absolutely-safest job is 9 deaths per 100,000, that #15 is almost the safest job for you to have. That's still poor methodology, since #2 is way less-dangerous than #1, thus #1 is an outlier.
Ranking has those problems. Statistically, driving a car is more dangerous than being a police officer, to the point that eliminating 98% of traffic fatalities would make driving slightly-safer than being a cop. If you rank these "more" and "less", you don't really get an idea of how much more--are you 1% more likely to die driving than serving a warrant, or 6,000% more likely to die?
Saying job A is the second-most-dangerous in the world doesn't reflect on job A when Job B--the safest job in the world, 98,000 steps down the rank--is 1% less dangerous, and job C--the most-dangerous job in the world--is 60 times as dangerous. "Second-most-dangerous" sounds really bad, until you look at the numbers and realize something is really fucked up with Job B.
So real numbers.
Logging: 111 per 100,000; police: 13.5 per 100,000; sales: 2 per 100,000.
Police face 12% of the fatality rate of loggers; loggers are 8.2 times as likely to die as police. Sales people face 15% the fatality rate of police; police are 6.75 times as likely to die as sales.
The span from 1-5 is 75.1 (67.8%); from 5-10 is 17.8 (49.7%); from 10-15 is 4.5 (25%); and from 15-20 is 3.5 (25.9%). Job rank #15 has gotten past the really big, dangerous jobs of society and into the long tail, where each next job is slightly-less-dangerous, but not ground-breakingly so. Go thousands of steps further that way and you can eliminate 85% of that risk, whereas you only had to go a dozen steps from the worst job to get that kind of reduction in danger.
This data shows that the major occupational risks in our society are concentrated somewhere above rank #10. In terms of absolute numbers (because some industries are bigger and so small gains multiply), ranks #8, #6, #12, #16, and #11 are interesting. Drivers have not only almost twice the risk, but around 4.5 times the total sample size as police; and non-occupational driving carries a high baseline risk in society as well.
So, yes, analysis shows active-duty police jobs are some of the safest jobs in America. More clearly, it shows that police jobs are not specially more-dangerous than the next safest jobs, while the next more-dangerous jobs going upward scale rapidly.
People don't understand *why* taxing the poor and middle-class is bad, though.
6% of 120/year? $7.20, okay, sure, nothing. 4.8 million households? $34 million. Well, there goes (theoretical maximum) 2,345 minimum-wage jobs.
How's that work?
There are only so many dollars of income every year. The Fed prints money, the bank loans dollars into existence, you buy things, and part of your money is divvied up as wages. Raising the costs a consumer pays means a bigger chunk of his money gets taken when he buys a given thing--which is backed by all the same jobs--and so he can't spend that money on some other thing. $34 million in one year is the income of 2,345 full-time minimum-wage jobs, or fewer jobs with higher salary; it's the amount of money which can't be spent by consumers in this cycle (year), and thus the amount of jobs which can no longer be supported by that spending.
Not to mention Best Buy's employees trying to con you into shit. People don't realize Best Buy puts their employees under enormous pressure; in the early 2000s, they started telling their sales people to proudly inform customers that Best Buy is a modern company operating without commission (because of high-pressure sales tactics commission employees engage in), while tracking employee sales numbers and punishing them for not making sales.
In 2006, Geek Squad employees had to get $245/day of sales to avoid disciplinary action--that applied whether you were a tech bench employee (front of store, one customer ends up paying $400 just for walking in) or a dedicated service add-on employee. In the latter case, every sales person gets credit for hardware sales, plus for attaching things like anti-virus and set-up services; if the sales person fails to attach anti-virus or other services, he passes the customer (who has already refused an add-on) to a Geek Squad tech whose job is to convince the customer to change his mind. The Geek Squad tech gets zero sales credit for attaching hardware (routers, etc.) if that occurs; he has to attach software (which the sales person has tried and failed to attach). Again: that add-on employee is often scheduled in that role 100% of the time, and has the same sales requirement as a front-bench employee.
Front tech-bench employees got into a routine of charging $60 for a diagnostic on any computer problem (non-refundable). For a virus, they'll run an anti-virus scan ($30), which fails to remove the virus, and cease trying (manual removal gets disciplinary action from the tech supervisor). They inform the user that he needs an OS reinstall. That incurs $70 for a back-up service and $60 for an OS re-install. Then it's $30 for each additional software--if you want your new OS to not die immediately, you'll pay $30 to install anti-virus and $30 to install anti-spyware, plus $30 if you wanted MS Office installed again. Everyone who walked in was $300 of sales.
Sales people would explain that the trial AV did nothing, and that a computer is 100% guaranteed to get a virus the instant it's on the Internet without shiny new AV. Failing that, they'd hand off to Geek Squad whose job depends on selling enough $50 anti-virus packages every day to hit $240, and who only gets people who were unconvinced by the portents of doom and credit card theft. High-pressure sales doesn't begin to describe it.
Everyone's angry at Comcast and AT&T and Tesla and ignoring Best Buy, I guess because if you're retarded enough to shop at Best Buy you deserve to be poor.
My brain isn't a floating-point processor and has different hardware.
As for how anyone with a brain would do it... the method I displayed is exactly the method used by mental mathematics world champions, was the method used by high-rated accountants in Japan for thousands of years, and is the method taught in schools in several Asian countries (Japan and some parts of Korea).
Your method requires pre-analysis to form a strategy, then a subtraction (1), three accumulating multiplications (3), and then three more accumulating multiplications (3), for a total of 7 operations after consideration of a plan. With the doubling variant, it requires a subtraction (1), three accumulating multiplications (3), three more accumulating multiplications to double 36.5 (3), a division (1), and two more accumulating multiplications (2), totaling 10 operations.
The method I showed requires applying isometric operations in repetition, like counting or walking. Overlearning these techniques allows for rapid results: some individuals have been capable of repeat-division of sets of 5 5 digit numbers (e.g. n = 103.29; n = n / 20.171; n = n / 0.73864; n = n / 104.11; n = n / 17.002; n = n / 13.176; return n) at rates of under 2 seconds per set. In general, people are barely fast enough to outperform a human operating a calculator (the calculator is faster; data entry takes more time than mental computation).
Further, the method I described itself represents an isometric strategy. Your brain overlearns this strategy, and is thus better-capable of storing intermediate values accurately during computation. Varying your strategy uses additional mental effort, causing short-term memory loss (you lose track of numbers) leading to slowdowns and errors in computation.
Imagine if you just said, "A person with a brain would consciously focus on his hip, shifting it toward the leg he's taking a step onto, thus distributing his weight onto it to hold his balance." Such a person would concentrate *extremely* hard on walking, versus someone who casually strolls along without really thinking about it. You described that sort of thinking, but with math.
Perhaps, yet that's still an unsubstantiated "I think they're lyin' and I think they're rich" argument, instead of a rational argument.
Some French guy on Slashdot was talking about how he gets free mobile phone with 2 hours of talk and spends ~30 euros ($32) on 10Mbit DSL yesterday, and couldn't believe American internet was so expensive ($80).
Quantify "faster" and "about what we pay today" with numbers.
Comcast argues that a service costing $10 can be sold for >=$10, or sold for >=($10 - market_price_of_information). By extension, they claim a user has access to that service for a lower price through this exchange, and propose offering a decision: (pay <$10 AND have the service AND leak personal information) OR (pay $10 AND have the service AND NOT leak personal information) OR (pay $0 AND NOT have the service AND NOT leak personal information).
Summary makes a luxury option claim, arguing for the decision: (pay $10 AND have the service) OR (pay $0 AND NOT have the service).
The lack of competition argument is also tired and old. It's stated again and again, without data; meanwhile Comcast's actual, pre-tax profit margin (net profits after all costs and before taxes) is averaging roughly 10%, so that $80/month Blast! 150Mbit/s service could be a whole $7 cheaper if all of Comcast's services were given a proportionally-similar price reduction to cut their profit to $0.
You could argue that their internet service is particularly overpriced; that conflicts with the common notion that Comcast gives discounts on its package service (TV/Internet) because their Cable TV service is overpriced to subsidize their Internet service.
Interestingly enough, $30/mo in France will get you 10Mo down/1.5Mo up, about 0.33/0.05 Mo per dollar; $80/mo in America will get you 150Mo down/15Mo up, about 1.875/0.1875 Mo per dollar. For a given amount of throughput, Internet service is pretty fucking expensive in France; meanwhile Comcast is talking about bringing 2Gb service to the home here as the next evolution of their Blast 150Mb service.
Still a shit company with shitty service, but let's not go full-potato on economics and finances and just declare that competition magically drives prices down below costs, somehow, and that prices are way higher than costs simply because we don't know wtf the cost might actually be.
56. You should have that memorized. If you don't, the square of 8 is 64, and subtracting 8 gets you 56--because (8,2) gives 5[4+2] = 56, one straight look-up operation with a decrementing carry built-in so you don't have to count on your fingers.
Of course, having both the rote-memorized multiplication table (36 entries, including 8 perfect squares) and the two addition tables memorized (7 entries, including one reflexive (5,5) entry) means you can rapidly-multiply large numbers with arbitrary decimal places using an accumulating algorithm.
36.5 * 192 = ? 3xxx, 27xx, 6x, 6xx, 54x, 12, 5x, 45, 1 => 7008, I think?
Algebra is hard enough without having to deal with the arithmetic involved. Even using a calculator turns into a major exercise in keeping track of what digits you've computed; best to make arithmetic a native function.
Every position is desperate. People with low battery are often plenty comfortable with their near-term access to a charging port; and, at the same time, cognizant of the low battery state. That applies stress, in the same way that being hungry applies stress (omg you might starve! ... there's a 0% chance of that happening). That changes the way the brain makes decisions; it's not that you might go tapping on e-purchases in a desperate attempt to outrun impending battery failure, but rather that you've got a different mix of hormones and are now willing to pay $1.73 more for Tide laundry detergent that you're going to need in 2-3 weeks.
Is charging the extra $1.73 at that point unscrupulous? What about just setting your base price at a point where people avoid the purchase 90% of the time, but eventually come in and stock up as their supplies run low?
What about *lowering* the price? Peanut butter on sale, 50 cents off if you buy three big-ass bottles! People rush to buy peanut butter they wouldn't normally purchase. With the extra food in the house, a large proportion of this population is more comfortable eating more, and so they eat peanut butter faster, and end up having to buy more, and you profit.
Your high salary means your employer will go out of business unless they charge prices high enough to pay your salary. You make 15 hamburgers an hour and get paid $10/hr? That's going to be 67 cents per hamburger factored in. If you make $15/hr, that's $1 per hamburger factored in. People looking to eat have to fork over that extra cash; that means they have less to pay for the next service (and when you get your paycheck, it cycles around the same way: you have 50% more--taken from others--but it only goes 45% farther), and somebody gets bumped out so you can live better. Maybe we fix this by adding tools along the line so you can make 30 hamburgers an hour, and now you get $15/hr and that's 50 cents per hamburger factored in; and if we're not selling twice as many hamburgers, somebody else is redundant, and gets laid off.
Sounds like you're abusing people by not working 14-hour days for minimum wage, doesn't it?
I'm sure you can justify *yourself*, somehow. You need every little luxury more than someone else needs to eat. Maybe you'll make an incorrect statement about how more money coming to you means you get to spend it and create a multiplying effect, somehow, even though more total spending doesn't actually occur in a given time frame. Maybe you just *know* you've *earned* it, even if it hurts someone else.
Maybe you just have to concede the point and accept that, yes, you need a bit more of an ethical quandary than that before you can start claiming bad ethics.
To call profit-maximizing strategies "unscrupulous", we'd have to claim everyone who makes above bare subsistence income is an unscrupulous actor. Women complaining they don't get paid as much as men would be unscrupulous, trying to get more pay without doing more work.
You need a bit more of an ethical quandry than that before you can start claiming bad ethics.