The pothead arguments bore me. I've heard all of them before and I hold this opinion. Surprise me. Tell me something I haven't heard before or confirm my bias.
Would you work with someone who takes adderall? Adderall is amphetamine salts. That's exactly what it is. It's speed. Many people get their amphetamine salts from the pharmacy using a doctor's prescription. The drug helps many people with various conditions, including ADHD, to function in society. Their brains have a problem, and this drug is effective in reducing the symptoms of that problem.
Some people cook up a similar drug, methamphetamine, in garages and basements, and take it recreationally. Obviously the quality, contaminants, and side effects are a lot less controlled compared to the mass-produced and heavily regulated product that pharmaceutical companies manufacture. People using this drug recreationally take a dose about 3-5 times higher than typical prescription doses.
Despite an enormous methamphetamine problem in this country, we allow amphetamine salts to be sold at pharmacies to patients with a legitimate medical need. We, as a society, allow this even though some people abuse the system. Without their prescription adderall, some people would be very poor workers. But with adderall, they can be normal.
I'm not the sort of person who claims cannabis is a cure-all. It is an almost certainty, however, that the drug can help at least some people with certain medical or mental health issues. As a manager, as long as someone can perform, I really could care less what they do in their evenings. Blanket bans of specific drugs seems a lot like book burning to me.
What do you mean? Nicotine is a mild cognitive stimulant -- just like caffeine. The only harmful part of cigarettes is the actual delivery mechanism (the smoke). Since e-cigarettes don't have tobacco smoke (they use water vapor), they are effectively a new form of nicotine gum or nicotine patch. The only reason they are being treated with suspicion is the believe that they will de-stigmatize smoking of actual cigarettes. This is literally trying to use a healthcare agency (FDA) to regulate an element of cultural perception.
Some of these products are actually nasty things like Spice/K2 and other related synthetic compounds. They are really bad stuff made in a chinese lab. Accidentally getting a dose of K2 is not an experience I would like to repeat. A little regulation and product testing is not a bad thing.
Analysts have been puzzled why inflation has been so low, compared to a typical recovery. Economies typically do best at roughly around 2.2 to 2.5 percent inflation per year. But we've been hovering around 1.7%.
It appears our GDP capability is expending due to automation and outsourcing, yet our money supply is not expending to match. Thus, we have too many idle people and factories.
"Printing money" is one way to make them match. You don't risk runaway inflation if the capacity to produce is expending.
Many dictatorships and non-democracies willingly subsidize the cost of their nation's labor because unemployed people riot and overthrow dictatorships. Thus, they keep their population busy and fed using various gimmicks to under-price their nation's labor (relative to consumption). Therefore, they are practically giving away free labor to protect their position of power.
Robots and de-facto slaves are available to make more stuff, if only the money supply is freed up to allow them.
(The morality of such de-facto slavery is perhaps an issue to be dealt with, but for here I'm focusing on just the economy and money supply.)
Is there something wrong with that? The North Korean army, for example, works mostly on infrastructure and farming projects. They are basically a big government labor pool to work on things that arguably need to be worked on. The only difference is that the USA is so mechanized that putting people to work like that would seem pointless. Even traditional WPA work like planting forests would probably be cheaper by machine.
The military pays for more than that already. I have a good number of friends who went into the military and got their entire schooling paid for. Granted you have a fixed amount of time to get your shit together and through school before the benefits run out but it is enough time to go to get all or part of the way through school. If you take some of the gen ed courses while enlisted they military will pay for those as well and it makes it easy to get done in plenty of time. As an added benefit they got an additional stipend while in school after their service. Some of them went to college right out of high school and then quit eventually signing up for various branches of the service, others went straight in, one even went in at 17 while still in high school (Minnesota national guard) and did basic between junior and senior year.
Unless you absolutely can't get loans any other way, this is one of the worst ways to pay for college. Some people may appreciate the other benefits, and may need some structure to whip them into a respectable adult, but anyone joining the military just for free college is bad at math.
Most people get enough iodine from table salt, since here in the west we've been adding it to that since the 1920's when they figured out it was a fast, easy and cheap way of fixing the problem. It's only the people who don't use salt at all that are really at risk. My mother had iodine deficiency as a kid(grew up in east germany), nothing like decades of problems with it and it's such a simple problem to fix.
Do not forget the trend towards "artisinal" salts (whatever that means), "organic" salt (redundant), and other greenwashing. Usually those salt products do NOT contain iodine.
We laugh, but failures are how one learns how to do things; we had many dozens of rockets fail before we perfected the technology.
Eventually they'll figure it out. Then what? I don't trust that crazy government with ICBMs.
Back up a little and ask why they are doing this. Is it because they want to invade the South? No. They aren't stupid or suicidal. When we vilify these people, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that way. But they want to continue their way of life the same as everyone else.
So why are they really doing this? Because they fear that the USA will invade THEM. That isn't an unreasonable assumption; the US has invade Iraq, Afghanistan, bombed Libya, and meddled in many other countries and toppled regimes. Just in the last 15 years. We hold huge military exercises in South Korea every year, including landing exercises. That's very scary for any country. North Korea is the animal in the corner baring their teeth. The US doesn't have a real interest in talking without the DPRK agreeing to a long list of preconditions, so being aggressive is the most reasonable option for them.
At a bare minimum, the two countries could discuss what to do about Americans who violate North Korean law while visiting the country. There is no process, informal or formal, since the two countries don't have diplomatic relations. That's why every time it happens it is such an ordeal. Even just having a single, official US diplomat in-country would be a huge help. It takes 2 parties to be at odds and the US is definitely not putting North Korean diplomacy on any sort of priority for peace. Instead, we play into their propaganda. There are written plans to invade, assassinate the leadership, and teams of people who work to maintain information current enough to do exactly that. It isn't paranoia if the man is actually out to get you.
We need to start treating Kim Jong Un the same as the Japanese Emperor in 1945. The US insisted for years on unconditional surrender. Eventually the US realized the importance of the man as a symbol, regardless of any bad deeds he may or may not have done. It was important to the Japanese people, therefore it was important to the USA. Kim Jong Un is extremely important to the North Korean people, perhaps even more so than the Japanese Emperor in 1945. We get nowhere by treating him with disrespect, despite how good it may feel to vilify an enemy. It only galvanizes the people against us. We need to soften that animal in the corner, not poke it with a stick. The US has all the power in this relationship. Obviously. It is time we used that power responsibly to make a deal where both parties can get what they want. Deals made at the end of a gun don't tend to last.
And consistency too. Usually when I'm in a new place where I do not know about the quality of local food I eat at Mc'Donnalds, because their process is so standardized that it is very difficult to make the sandwich the wrong way. It is not ideal of course, but you can rely that the sandwich will always be at least acceptable.
That is probably management's goal, but McDonalds is currently not consistent at all. There are big differences between franchise-owned restaurants and company-owned restaurants. There are enormous differences between McDonalds restaurants in good neighborhoods and those in bad neighborhoods. There are regional differences too.
McDonalds got to where they are today by selling total consistency and standardization. But they lost their way many years ago. It's a total crapshoot now.
You'd rather have the financial impact of swathes of the population being killed in easily-preventable ways, just so you can feel superior to them?
Technology moves fast. Infrastructure last decades or longer. In 10 or 20 years time, will we be carrying around a handheld device and looking down at it? Maybe we will be using something else. Audio cues seem like a better option to me. Cheaper and faster to implement, a single location that needs to be maintained, and they would help people with poor eyesight too.
If we really need another visual clue on the ground, painted textured tiles are a lot easier to maintain and will still work after a flood.
To a point. Bigger engines weigh more. If you keep making the engine larger and larger, the engine is more efficient, but the plane is carrying around a lot of extra weight it doesn't need. Additionally, gas turbines have efficiency curves which usually have a peak somewhere between 30% and 95% load, depending on the design. If that peak isn't where the engine would usually operate on a given aircraft, the engine would not be a particularly good fit for that aircraft. When considering efficiency, there is an ideal engine size/weight for any given aircraft. Larger is not always better.
What utter ignorant total bullshit. Most countries all over the world have had this as standard in everything from your local coffee shop to huge retailers for the last few years. It saves time and money for retailers, making checkouts faster, the hardware is cheap and reliable.
The way that the USA implemented it is very different from other countries. The USA implemented "Chip and Signature". Most of Europe implemented "Chip and Pin". I understand that many implementations in Europe of Chip and Pin can make transactions without contacting a central server. Not the case in the USA- the POS equipment has to contact a central server, which seems to take longer than a magswipe. Chip and Pin is a lot more secure compared to the Chip and Signature we have in the USA as well. I have also had some problems with the Chip readers not reading correctly, and the card readers are a lot more fussy about when you can insert the card, when you can remove it, etc. I might go back to cash for a lot of purchases because the chip and signature cards are just too much of a pain in the butt.
If you live in the USA, go to a store and watch (from far away, so you aren't a creep) how long it takes to use Chip and Signature vs Magstripe or any other payment method. In my experience, it is a lot slower, not faster as you claim.
Ultimately what is the goal of these lawsuits? Even if they get to a point at which it is discovered and comprehensively proven that the Saudi government did have some involvement in it what happens then? Is the US going to mount an incursion into a sovereign nation to arrest Saudi nationals on the basis of a US court ruling? Are the families just wanting an admission of guilt from somebody? Or are they chasing a financial payout?
I would just be happy if the outrage among the population gained enough momentum that the USA was forced to stop selling weapons to the Saudis. Saudi Arabia is not our buddy. We really need to stop treating them like one.
Then they turned the crazy up to 11. Trump is Mussolini, Stalin, Satan, Hitler. The Washington Post said Cthulhu [washingtonpost.com] supports Trump.
I really hope the news media loses a lot of their power this election cycle.
The media has tremendous power. This year more than most years.
Political candidates are basically professional salespeople. They need to sell the public on themselves, and they need to sell donors that they can win. Most of them are quite good at it. Presidential candidates should be the top-tier of salespeople. They have more sales tricks in their bags than any normal person can defend against. The only way to even have a chance is to ignore everything they say and focus only on their past actions, and how that correlates to the job they would be elected to do.
This election cycle, the media has focused almost entirely on what the candidates are saying. I can count on one hand the number of articles I have read or TV segments I have watched that even brush the surface of what these people have done in the past. That makes the media very powerful since they are basically a tool of the politicians to sell their ideas. The fact that the media is uncontrollable by the politicians is not a problem for them (the media). It makes them even more powerful since they will follow the ratings to whatever candidate causes the most controversy. The media created some of these monsters. Don't expect the media to slay them.
I don't like Trump and I am scaird to think of him as president. However protesting Amazon for selling his goods that he was selling before he ran as president sound more like stereotypical liberal intolerance to contending ideas. Don't target the store selling the goods where there is a population that seems to demand it. Use the energy to boycott trump products not pressure the store to not offer it. If the stores stop selling then these products will just be more valuable.
People in the USA have learned that pressuring politicians is completely futile. They don't listen. They listen only to rich people and large companies. The only logicial result is that rich people and large companies are now de-facto political middlemen. Putting pressure on them is one of the few working buttons for democratic change.
I don't like it either, but that's the country we live in now.
True story. A recall like this will NEVER be bad publicity when it's made as soon as the manufacturer realizes a problem exists and before anyone in the field has even seen anything. I've wanted a Tesla for awhile now, and if my current car can make it long enough, my next new car is going to be a Model 3... exactly BECAUSE of recalls like this. Tesla not only makes the safest cars on the road, but they have the safest organization as well. Clearly their management is more interested in making a safe car than turning a quick buck, and that's the kind of company that I want to do business with.
I think this may be more due to the fact that Tesla is a small company. This has 3 effects- their product line is small, their management structure is probably a lot more tighter and less compartmentalized, and their financials are not as strong.
The small product line lets them devote more time and resources to each model.
The tighter management structure better facilitates a larger portion of the management being involved and knowing what all the problems are.
Their comparatively weaker financials (compared to a larger auto manufacturer) likely makes them more careful about recallable defects. One good valid recall with multiple customer deaths could potentially sink them.
I think their attitude and culture is more reflective of big company vs small company than any sort of extraordinary altruism. Most people, including those at large auto companies, are not evil. However, the size of a company sometimes affects how it reacts to mistakes like this. A smaller company is typically better able to make decisions and implement them faster..
The ridiculous thing here is the labels get paid ANYWAY when you stream the music, regardless of whether it's on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, etc... It's in the contract.
What point is there to have an exclusive? They should be trying to get the music on as many services as possible, so the stream count is as high as possible (across all services) since they are paid by the stream.
The various different services are in heated competition. They are all offering mostly the same thing to people who mostly want the same product. Exclusivity is a negotiation point. In order for the artist to accept such a clause, they must have gotten something of equal value in return. Maybe that "something of equal value" was cash money up front, maybe it was higher rates, maybe it was satisfaction in helping a friend's company, maybe it was something else. But there are lots of reasons why an artist would accept exclusivity. These people are business folk. It isn't always about getting as many people as possible to hear their music.
Sounds like you have been out of touch with the Russian military, as the description you give corresponds to the 1990s or early 00s. Russian military has been undergoing a massive structural reform during the past 10 years, and it has been acquiring and renewing its weapons systems at a very fast pace. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the upgrades, like last year Russian air force received about 200 new 4+ or 4++ generation fighter jets. Currently they're testing, a 5th generation fighter jet and a next generation tank and IFV platform. Yes, Russian navy is the most neglected of all Russian military branches. Russia being more of a land power, has historically spent less money on its ships. But even in the Navy, there is quite a bit of new things happening. For example, the Black Sea Fleet is in the middle of receiving six new diesel submarines, three frigates, a number of corvettes and other ships. It's not a lot, but once you compare this progress to the fact that Black Sea fleet has not received any ships in the previous 20 years, this progress is obvious.
Also observe Syria. Before Russian military got involved there, Assad's government was basically on its last ropes. After Russians came, Assad's forces with Russian help reconquered much of Aleppo, Hops, and Palmyra. The "moderate" rebels begged for cease fire, and Assad is now advancing west onto ISIS held territory.
Russia has made great strides in modernization, but the money is running out and they were getting all of their ship turbines from Ukraine. Ukraine really isn't in the mood to sell them any more so they have some setbacks there. The economy is still very poor so that is another big problem. It will continue to be poor as long as oil prices are low (Russia's pre-2015 budget was ~40% funded by oil or something like that). Now that most of the gulf states are fighting each other, secretly and not-so-secretly, oil is going to stay low for some time. The navy was the last service scheduled to modernized and things aren't looking so great now.
You do realize that most of the South is going to pass these laws, right? And having locations in the South is much cheaper. So you're going to find that most corporations will just move from one state to another. Sorry, but that's corporations for you. Fine taking a stand until they have to lose money and explain it to the stockholders.
That's true but people (mostly younger people) have figured out that it is far, far easier to lobby corporations than it is to lobby their elected representatives. Corporations actually do give a damn when it comes to enticing millennials to buy their products. It is a sad state of affairs that we now have to lobby companies to get our elected officials to do anything, but that's the way the US seems to operate nowadays.
I was just in Washington D.C. and the security at EVERYTHING is airport crazy. Touring the house/senate galleries involves a backscatter X-ray machine, the Smithsonian museums have x-ray machines and metal detectors.
Yet there is no security AT ALL at the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials, and they're open 24/7. Really? The symbolic value of these targets is enormous.
I also wonder why shopping malls in the US haven't been targets, especially on the weekend after Thanksgiving. It would achieve a huge terror result as well as having a huge economic cost. Is our security that good against evildoers, or is there something else at work there?
It would be a much greater victory to strike America in our nation's capitol compared to almost anywhere else. It would almost certainly result in politicians going more apeshit compared to if an attack was in any other place. If the goal was to get a reaction, attacking a place where every senator, congressperson, and the president visit at least sometimes would generate the largest possible reaction.
The risk at the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials seems to me a lot lower than most of the other attractions in DC. They are both open to the outside air, so a chemical or biological attack would have a reduced effect due to wind. Explosives would similarly be less effective since a blast could dissipate to the outside easily, and there is little or no glass to cause injuries. My guess is that it would take a very large amount of explosives to damage either of these properties more than superficially. Additionally, both are surrounded by large areas of empty space, so there is time to spot anyone carrying large or unusual packages, assuming that there is adequate CCTV coverage and it is monitored. The actual building interiors are quite small compared to other buildings in DC. In the event of a shooting attack, victims have numerous potential escape paths since the buildings are open to the outside and have clear land around them 360 degrees around.
Buildings such as the Smithsonian are a much better target. The interior volume holds substantially more people, and the exit routes are predefined and probably not entirely adequate for a multiple-shooter type attack.
If it's American documents released, there would've been 50 comments in the first 5 minutes begging for military trials and how these leaks are damaging to the country, how we need to protect our military and their assets. People were crying out for the DoJ to arrest, prosecute, stow away in Guantanamo and even execute the leakers. Now that it's primarily about other countries, I don't see any of that outcry. I don't see any media, mobs or prosecutors demanding for these leakers to go through anything like what Assange, Swartz or Snowden are going through.
I hope they find a Hillary/Obama/Sanders threesome somewhere in there.
Bernie Sanders' personal wealth is actually very modest for a long-term US politician. There would be no reason for him to be dealing with international shell companies, because he has far too little money. Most such agencies won't even speak with you unless you have at least $1m in assets, which Bernie does not. He is firmly lumped in with the rest of us average people when it comes to his personal finances.
Yeah, I won't give AT&T my credit card number because I don't want them just reaching in and taking money whenever they feel like it. I certainly wouldn't give them my debit card money--then the money that they take is the money I'm using to, like, buy food and pay rent.
I use my bank's billpay thing to pay AT&T every month. I'm pretty sure I can set it up to be automated, but I just log in and check it each month to make sure nothing's changed, and then I push the button. Easy, and keeps AT&T from rummaging in my bank accounts.
I do exactly the same thing. I don't understand why companies do this to themselves. I want my customers to be my best buddies who trust me. There are ways to do that and still make a lot of money. But that requires skill. The MBAs in charge have no talent so squeezing a customer who doesn't have a choice looks like a good idea.
I can't imagine what North Koreans have done to deserve their government. The people seem to be the victim in that case.
They were a pawn in between Russia/China and the US during the cold war. A cold war that is still fairly frosty in that part of the world. North Korea exists because China doesn't want a US-friendly, democratic country on its border. Given the way that China has been grabbing up sea territory, the US doesn't want to deal with a "Great Crimean Heist" situation either. It is a convenient buffer in between superpowers. As such, they are greatly abused by both sides. Many North Koreans resent China more than the USA.
I just looked at her work in images.google. Do not want. They are not really that pleasing to look at. I like the Roman/Greek and large medieval/renaissance buildings - golden ratio, "perfect" aesthetics. These Zaha works are just ugly and trying to be different and lead to higher cost, hard to maintain with that comes leaks and I don't think they are aesthetically pleasing.
Completely agree. She always came across to me as a self-righteous individual who had no qualms about wasting other people's money. Based on her whining about losing the Tokyo stadium, I would guess she was a pain to work with as well.
Minimum wage increases killing jobs is a ridiculous notion - prices can always raise as well
Not true. You can't just arbitrarily raise prices when there are substitute goods available. Fast food is labor intensive. If the price goes up, more people will cook at home or purchase low-labor pre-packaged food at grocery stores (using the self-checkout line).
California already has a much higher minimum wage than the rest of the nation. If you go in a McDonalds in California, you don't see teenagers working there. You see adults, since the pay is enough to attract them. Adults are more productive than teenagers, so you need fewer of them. So California has removed an important rung on the economic ladder, by turning entry level jobs into permanent no-skill "careers" flipping burgers. This effect is worst in minority neighborhoods which already have extremely high teenage unemployment.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but the vast majority of my fast-food purchases are because I am away from home and under time pressure for one reason or another. Fast food is the option of last resort. The theory of substitute goods doesn't enter into that decision at all. If I had another option, I would have taken it already.
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00
That's about a 7% increase. We're talking a 50% increase here. The company I work for relies heavily on minimum wage-ish laborers for the manufacturing jobs, which are basically screwing caps on bottles, putting them in boxes. Real unskilled stuff, diploma and English not required. We're in Los Angeles, and when they announced the minimum wage hike, eyes immediately pointed just over the border to Ventura County, where no such increase was proposed. Now that this is looking to be a state-wide thing, a 50% increase in labor costs for the bulk of our production workers is going to make the automated fillers and cappers pretty much sell themselves. Either way it goes, it's going to drive the price per unit up. Labor isn't the main cost for producing products here, but when we price out to the tenth of a cent per unit, and we roll off hundreds of thousands of units per run, it begins to add up. This cost will either be passed on to the customer, or more likely, will lose us business as clients take their filling operations to states with lower labor costs and less distance to their distribution houses. Most of our min-wage laborers are day workers, so if there's no work, they don't show up or get paid. If work starts disappearing, the $15/hr doesn't mean a damn thing to them, and ultimately the whole scheme will hurt the very people it's supposedly helping.
I'm surprised you aren't doing automated fillers and cappers already. In most parts of the country, there was a strong economic case a long time ago. I visited a mineral water bottling facility in North Korea and they had automated filling and capping. Obviously that factory is mainly "for show", but this kind of equipment isn't that expensive or difficult to acquire.
The USA is an advanced high tech country. If you are relying on unskilled, lowly paid, disposable peons to manufacture/assemble product, China, India, and other developing countries are going to eat your lunch anyway. It is only a matter of time. Mechanizing is your only hope.
No kidding. To call this the 'fastest adoption of any release ever' is about as valid (and laughable) as some authoritarian dictatorship holding 'free elections' where there's only one candidate, and you're detained if you don't go and vote for him, then claiming a 'landslide victory' with 'record voter turnout'. It's a sham, it's a joke, it's a complete fabrication, it's utter bullshit, and it means NOTHING.
Some of these "elections" are more of a census than an election. Sometimes this is misinterpreted when the language is translated to English. In a country with only one main political party, obviously "election day" is going to have an expected result. The real political mechanisms happen behind closed doors, just like they do in the US. The US and some of these authoritarian dictatorships are really not that different.
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The pothead arguments bore me. I've heard all of them before and I hold this opinion. Surprise me. Tell me something I haven't heard before or confirm my bias.
Would you work with someone who takes adderall? Adderall is amphetamine salts. That's exactly what it is. It's speed. Many people get their amphetamine salts from the pharmacy using a doctor's prescription. The drug helps many people with various conditions, including ADHD, to function in society. Their brains have a problem, and this drug is effective in reducing the symptoms of that problem.
Some people cook up a similar drug, methamphetamine, in garages and basements, and take it recreationally. Obviously the quality, contaminants, and side effects are a lot less controlled compared to the mass-produced and heavily regulated product that pharmaceutical companies manufacture. People using this drug recreationally take a dose about 3-5 times higher than typical prescription doses.
Despite an enormous methamphetamine problem in this country, we allow amphetamine salts to be sold at pharmacies to patients with a legitimate medical need. We, as a society, allow this even though some people abuse the system. Without their prescription adderall, some people would be very poor workers. But with adderall, they can be normal.
I'm not the sort of person who claims cannabis is a cure-all. It is an almost certainty, however, that the drug can help at least some people with certain medical or mental health issues. As a manager, as long as someone can perform, I really could care less what they do in their evenings. Blanket bans of specific drugs seems a lot like book burning to me.
What do you mean? Nicotine is a mild cognitive stimulant -- just like caffeine. The only harmful part of cigarettes is the actual delivery mechanism (the smoke). Since e-cigarettes don't have tobacco smoke (they use water vapor), they are effectively a new form of nicotine gum or nicotine patch. The only reason they are being treated with suspicion is the believe that they will de-stigmatize smoking of actual cigarettes. This is literally trying to use a healthcare agency (FDA) to regulate an element of cultural perception.
Some of these products are actually nasty things like Spice/K2 and other related synthetic compounds. They are really bad stuff made in a chinese lab. Accidentally getting a dose of K2 is not an experience I would like to repeat. A little regulation and product testing is not a bad thing.
Analysts have been puzzled why inflation has been so low, compared to a typical recovery. Economies typically do best at roughly around 2.2 to 2.5 percent inflation per year. But we've been hovering around 1.7%.
It appears our GDP capability is expending due to automation and outsourcing, yet our money supply is not expending to match. Thus, we have too many idle people and factories.
"Printing money" is one way to make them match. You don't risk runaway inflation if the capacity to produce is expending.
Many dictatorships and non-democracies willingly subsidize the cost of their nation's labor because unemployed people riot and overthrow dictatorships. Thus, they keep their population busy and fed using various gimmicks to under-price their nation's labor (relative to consumption). Therefore, they are practically giving away free labor to protect their position of power.
Robots and de-facto slaves are available to make more stuff, if only the money supply is freed up to allow them.
(The morality of such de-facto slavery is perhaps an issue to be dealt with, but for here I'm focusing on just the economy and money supply.)
Is there something wrong with that? The North Korean army, for example, works mostly on infrastructure and farming projects. They are basically a big government labor pool to work on things that arguably need to be worked on. The only difference is that the USA is so mechanized that putting people to work like that would seem pointless. Even traditional WPA work like planting forests would probably be cheaper by machine.
The military pays for more than that already. I have a good number of friends who went into the military and got their entire schooling paid for. Granted you have a fixed amount of time to get your shit together and through school before the benefits run out but it is enough time to go to get all or part of the way through school. If you take some of the gen ed courses while enlisted they military will pay for those as well and it makes it easy to get done in plenty of time. As an added benefit they got an additional stipend while in school after their service. Some of them went to college right out of high school and then quit eventually signing up for various branches of the service, others went straight in, one even went in at 17 while still in high school (Minnesota national guard) and did basic between junior and senior year.
Unless you absolutely can't get loans any other way, this is one of the worst ways to pay for college. Some people may appreciate the other benefits, and may need some structure to whip them into a respectable adult, but anyone joining the military just for free college is bad at math.
Most people get enough iodine from table salt, since here in the west we've been adding it to that since the 1920's when they figured out it was a fast, easy and cheap way of fixing the problem. It's only the people who don't use salt at all that are really at risk. My mother had iodine deficiency as a kid(grew up in east germany), nothing like decades of problems with it and it's such a simple problem to fix.
Do not forget the trend towards "artisinal" salts (whatever that means), "organic" salt (redundant), and other greenwashing. Usually those salt products do NOT contain iodine.
We laugh, but failures are how one learns how to do things; we had many dozens of rockets fail before we perfected the technology.
Eventually they'll figure it out. Then what? I don't trust that crazy government with ICBMs.
Back up a little and ask why they are doing this. Is it because they want to invade the South? No. They aren't stupid or suicidal. When we vilify these people, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that way. But they want to continue their way of life the same as everyone else.
So why are they really doing this? Because they fear that the USA will invade THEM. That isn't an unreasonable assumption; the US has invade Iraq, Afghanistan, bombed Libya, and meddled in many other countries and toppled regimes. Just in the last 15 years. We hold huge military exercises in South Korea every year, including landing exercises. That's very scary for any country. North Korea is the animal in the corner baring their teeth. The US doesn't have a real interest in talking without the DPRK agreeing to a long list of preconditions, so being aggressive is the most reasonable option for them.
At a bare minimum, the two countries could discuss what to do about Americans who violate North Korean law while visiting the country. There is no process, informal or formal, since the two countries don't have diplomatic relations. That's why every time it happens it is such an ordeal. Even just having a single, official US diplomat in-country would be a huge help. It takes 2 parties to be at odds and the US is definitely not putting North Korean diplomacy on any sort of priority for peace. Instead, we play into their propaganda. There are written plans to invade, assassinate the leadership, and teams of people who work to maintain information current enough to do exactly that. It isn't paranoia if the man is actually out to get you.
We need to start treating Kim Jong Un the same as the Japanese Emperor in 1945. The US insisted for years on unconditional surrender. Eventually the US realized the importance of the man as a symbol, regardless of any bad deeds he may or may not have done. It was important to the Japanese people, therefore it was important to the USA. Kim Jong Un is extremely important to the North Korean people, perhaps even more so than the Japanese Emperor in 1945. We get nowhere by treating him with disrespect, despite how good it may feel to vilify an enemy. It only galvanizes the people against us. We need to soften that animal in the corner, not poke it with a stick. The US has all the power in this relationship. Obviously. It is time we used that power responsibly to make a deal where both parties can get what they want. Deals made at the end of a gun don't tend to last.
And consistency too. Usually when I'm in a new place where I do not know about the quality of local food I eat at Mc'Donnalds, because their process is so standardized that it is very difficult to make the sandwich the wrong way. It is not ideal of course, but you can rely that the sandwich will always be at least acceptable.
That is probably management's goal, but McDonalds is currently not consistent at all. There are big differences between franchise-owned restaurants and company-owned restaurants. There are enormous differences between McDonalds restaurants in good neighborhoods and those in bad neighborhoods. There are regional differences too.
McDonalds got to where they are today by selling total consistency and standardization. But they lost their way many years ago. It's a total crapshoot now.
You'd rather have the financial impact of swathes of the population being killed in easily-preventable ways, just so you can feel superior to them?
Technology moves fast. Infrastructure last decades or longer. In 10 or 20 years time, will we be carrying around a handheld device and looking down at it? Maybe we will be using something else. Audio cues seem like a better option to me. Cheaper and faster to implement, a single location that needs to be maintained, and they would help people with poor eyesight too.
If we really need another visual clue on the ground, painted textured tiles are a lot easier to maintain and will still work after a flood.
To a point. Bigger engines weigh more. If you keep making the engine larger and larger, the engine is more efficient, but the plane is carrying around a lot of extra weight it doesn't need. Additionally, gas turbines have efficiency curves which usually have a peak somewhere between 30% and 95% load, depending on the design. If that peak isn't where the engine would usually operate on a given aircraft, the engine would not be a particularly good fit for that aircraft. When considering efficiency, there is an ideal engine size/weight for any given aircraft. Larger is not always better.
What utter ignorant total bullshit. Most countries all over the world have had this as standard in everything from your local coffee shop to huge retailers for the last few years. It saves time and money for retailers, making checkouts faster, the hardware is cheap and reliable.
The way that the USA implemented it is very different from other countries. The USA implemented "Chip and Signature". Most of Europe implemented "Chip and Pin". I understand that many implementations in Europe of Chip and Pin can make transactions without contacting a central server. Not the case in the USA- the POS equipment has to contact a central server, which seems to take longer than a magswipe. Chip and Pin is a lot more secure compared to the Chip and Signature we have in the USA as well. I have also had some problems with the Chip readers not reading correctly, and the card readers are a lot more fussy about when you can insert the card, when you can remove it, etc. I might go back to cash for a lot of purchases because the chip and signature cards are just too much of a pain in the butt.
If you live in the USA, go to a store and watch (from far away, so you aren't a creep) how long it takes to use Chip and Signature vs Magstripe or any other payment method. In my experience, it is a lot slower, not faster as you claim.
Ultimately what is the goal of these lawsuits? Even if they get to a point at which it is discovered and comprehensively proven that the Saudi government did have some involvement in it what happens then? Is the US going to mount an incursion into a sovereign nation to arrest Saudi nationals on the basis of a US court ruling? Are the families just wanting an admission of guilt from somebody? Or are they chasing a financial payout?
I would just be happy if the outrage among the population gained enough momentum that the USA was forced to stop selling weapons to the Saudis. Saudi Arabia is not our buddy. We really need to stop treating them like one.
Then they turned the crazy up to 11. Trump is Mussolini, Stalin, Satan, Hitler. The Washington Post said Cthulhu [washingtonpost.com] supports Trump.
I really hope the news media loses a lot of their power this election cycle.
The media has tremendous power. This year more than most years.
Political candidates are basically professional salespeople. They need to sell the public on themselves, and they need to sell donors that they can win. Most of them are quite good at it. Presidential candidates should be the top-tier of salespeople. They have more sales tricks in their bags than any normal person can defend against. The only way to even have a chance is to ignore everything they say and focus only on their past actions, and how that correlates to the job they would be elected to do.
This election cycle, the media has focused almost entirely on what the candidates are saying. I can count on one hand the number of articles I have read or TV segments I have watched that even brush the surface of what these people have done in the past. That makes the media very powerful since they are basically a tool of the politicians to sell their ideas. The fact that the media is uncontrollable by the politicians is not a problem for them (the media). It makes them even more powerful since they will follow the ratings to whatever candidate causes the most controversy. The media created some of these monsters. Don't expect the media to slay them.
I don't like Trump and I am scaird to think of him as president. However protesting Amazon for selling his goods that he was selling before he ran as president sound more like stereotypical liberal intolerance to contending ideas. Don't target the store selling the goods where there is a population that seems to demand it. Use the energy to boycott trump products not pressure the store to not offer it. If the stores stop selling then these products will just be more valuable.
People in the USA have learned that pressuring politicians is completely futile. They don't listen. They listen only to rich people and large companies. The only logicial result is that rich people and large companies are now de-facto political middlemen. Putting pressure on them is one of the few working buttons for democratic change.
I don't like it either, but that's the country we live in now.
True story. A recall like this will NEVER be bad publicity when it's made as soon as the manufacturer realizes a problem exists and before anyone in the field has even seen anything. I've wanted a Tesla for awhile now, and if my current car can make it long enough, my next new car is going to be a Model 3... exactly BECAUSE of recalls like this. Tesla not only makes the safest cars on the road, but they have the safest organization as well. Clearly their management is more interested in making a safe car than turning a quick buck, and that's the kind of company that I want to do business with.
I think this may be more due to the fact that Tesla is a small company. This has 3 effects- their product line is small, their management structure is probably a lot more tighter and less compartmentalized, and their financials are not as strong.
The small product line lets them devote more time and resources to each model.
The tighter management structure better facilitates a larger portion of the management being involved and knowing what all the problems are.
Their comparatively weaker financials (compared to a larger auto manufacturer) likely makes them more careful about recallable defects. One good valid recall with multiple customer deaths could potentially sink them.
I think their attitude and culture is more reflective of big company vs small company than any sort of extraordinary altruism. Most people, including those at large auto companies, are not evil. However, the size of a company sometimes affects how it reacts to mistakes like this. A smaller company is typically better able to make decisions and implement them faster..
The ridiculous thing here is the labels get paid ANYWAY when you stream the music, regardless of whether it's on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, etc... It's in the contract.
What point is there to have an exclusive? They should be trying to get the music on as many services as possible, so the stream count is as high as possible (across all services) since they are paid by the stream.
The various different services are in heated competition. They are all offering mostly the same thing to people who mostly want the same product. Exclusivity is a negotiation point. In order for the artist to accept such a clause, they must have gotten something of equal value in return. Maybe that "something of equal value" was cash money up front, maybe it was higher rates, maybe it was satisfaction in helping a friend's company, maybe it was something else. But there are lots of reasons why an artist would accept exclusivity. These people are business folk. It isn't always about getting as many people as possible to hear their music.
Sounds like you have been out of touch with the Russian military, as the description you give corresponds to the 1990s or early 00s. Russian military has been undergoing a massive structural reform during the past 10 years, and it has been acquiring and renewing its weapons systems at a very fast pace. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the upgrades, like last year Russian air force received about 200 new 4+ or 4++ generation fighter jets. Currently they're testing, a 5th generation fighter jet and a next generation tank and IFV platform. Yes, Russian navy is the most neglected of all Russian military branches. Russia being more of a land power, has historically spent less money on its ships. But even in the Navy, there is quite a bit of new things happening. For example, the Black Sea Fleet is in the middle of receiving six new diesel submarines, three frigates, a number of corvettes and other ships. It's not a lot, but once you compare this progress to the fact that Black Sea fleet has not received any ships in the previous 20 years, this progress is obvious.
Also observe Syria. Before Russian military got involved there, Assad's government was basically on its last ropes. After Russians came, Assad's forces with Russian help reconquered much of Aleppo, Hops, and Palmyra. The "moderate" rebels begged for cease fire, and Assad is now advancing west onto ISIS held territory.
Russia has made great strides in modernization, but the money is running out and they were getting all of their ship turbines from Ukraine. Ukraine really isn't in the mood to sell them any more so they have some setbacks there. The economy is still very poor so that is another big problem. It will continue to be poor as long as oil prices are low (Russia's pre-2015 budget was ~40% funded by oil or something like that). Now that most of the gulf states are fighting each other, secretly and not-so-secretly, oil is going to stay low for some time. The navy was the last service scheduled to modernized and things aren't looking so great now.
You do realize that most of the South is going to pass these laws, right? And having locations in the South is much cheaper. So you're going to find that most corporations will just move from one state to another. Sorry, but that's corporations for you. Fine taking a stand until they have to lose money and explain it to the stockholders.
That's true but people (mostly younger people) have figured out that it is far, far easier to lobby corporations than it is to lobby their elected representatives. Corporations actually do give a damn when it comes to enticing millennials to buy their products. It is a sad state of affairs that we now have to lobby companies to get our elected officials to do anything, but that's the way the US seems to operate nowadays.
I was just in Washington D.C. and the security at EVERYTHING is airport crazy. Touring the house/senate galleries involves a backscatter X-ray machine, the Smithsonian museums have x-ray machines and metal detectors.
Yet there is no security AT ALL at the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials, and they're open 24/7. Really? The symbolic value of these targets is enormous.
I also wonder why shopping malls in the US haven't been targets, especially on the weekend after Thanksgiving. It would achieve a huge terror result as well as having a huge economic cost. Is our security that good against evildoers, or is there something else at work there?
It would be a much greater victory to strike America in our nation's capitol compared to almost anywhere else. It would almost certainly result in politicians going more apeshit compared to if an attack was in any other place. If the goal was to get a reaction, attacking a place where every senator, congressperson, and the president visit at least sometimes would generate the largest possible reaction.
The risk at the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials seems to me a lot lower than most of the other attractions in DC. They are both open to the outside air, so a chemical or biological attack would have a reduced effect due to wind. Explosives would similarly be less effective since a blast could dissipate to the outside easily, and there is little or no glass to cause injuries. My guess is that it would take a very large amount of explosives to damage either of these properties more than superficially. Additionally, both are surrounded by large areas of empty space, so there is time to spot anyone carrying large or unusual packages, assuming that there is adequate CCTV coverage and it is monitored. The actual building interiors are quite small compared to other buildings in DC. In the event of a shooting attack, victims have numerous potential escape paths since the buildings are open to the outside and have clear land around them 360 degrees around.
Buildings such as the Smithsonian are a much better target. The interior volume holds substantially more people, and the exit routes are predefined and probably not entirely adequate for a multiple-shooter type attack.
If it's American documents released, there would've been 50 comments in the first 5 minutes begging for military trials and how these leaks are damaging to the country, how we need to protect our military and their assets. People were crying out for the DoJ to arrest, prosecute, stow away in Guantanamo and even execute the leakers. Now that it's primarily about other countries, I don't see any of that outcry. I don't see any media, mobs or prosecutors demanding for these leakers to go through anything like what Assange, Swartz or Snowden are going through.
I hope they find a Hillary/Obama/Sanders threesome somewhere in there.
Bernie Sanders' personal wealth is actually very modest for a long-term US politician. There would be no reason for him to be dealing with international shell companies, because he has far too little money. Most such agencies won't even speak with you unless you have at least $1m in assets, which Bernie does not. He is firmly lumped in with the rest of us average people when it comes to his personal finances.
Yeah, I won't give AT&T my credit card number because I don't want them just reaching in and taking money whenever they feel like it. I certainly wouldn't give them my debit card money--then the money that they take is the money I'm using to, like, buy food and pay rent.
I use my bank's billpay thing to pay AT&T every month. I'm pretty sure I can set it up to be automated, but I just log in and check it each month to make sure nothing's changed, and then I push the button. Easy, and keeps AT&T from rummaging in my bank accounts.
I do exactly the same thing. I don't understand why companies do this to themselves. I want my customers to be my best buddies who trust me. There are ways to do that and still make a lot of money. But that requires skill. The MBAs in charge have no talent so squeezing a customer who doesn't have a choice looks like a good idea.
I can't imagine what North Koreans have done to deserve their government. The people seem to be the victim in that case.
They were a pawn in between Russia/China and the US during the cold war. A cold war that is still fairly frosty in that part of the world. North Korea exists because China doesn't want a US-friendly, democratic country on its border. Given the way that China has been grabbing up sea territory, the US doesn't want to deal with a "Great Crimean Heist" situation either. It is a convenient buffer in between superpowers. As such, they are greatly abused by both sides. Many North Koreans resent China more than the USA.
I just looked at her work in images.google. Do not want. They are not really that pleasing to look at. I like the Roman/Greek and large medieval/renaissance buildings - golden ratio, "perfect" aesthetics. These Zaha works are just ugly and trying to be different and lead to higher cost, hard to maintain with that comes leaks and I don't think they are aesthetically pleasing.
Completely agree. She always came across to me as a self-righteous individual who had no qualms about wasting other people's money. Based on her whining about losing the Tokyo stadium, I would guess she was a pain to work with as well.
Minimum wage increases killing jobs is a ridiculous notion - prices can always raise as well
Not true. You can't just arbitrarily raise prices when there are substitute goods available. Fast food is labor intensive. If the price goes up, more people will cook at home or purchase low-labor pre-packaged food at grocery stores (using the self-checkout line).
California already has a much higher minimum wage than the rest of the nation. If you go in a McDonalds in California, you don't see teenagers working there. You see adults, since the pay is enough to attract them. Adults are more productive than teenagers, so you need fewer of them. So California has removed an important rung on the economic ladder, by turning entry level jobs into permanent no-skill "careers" flipping burgers. This effect is worst in minority neighborhoods which already have extremely high teenage unemployment.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but the vast majority of my fast-food purchases are because I am away from home and under time pressure for one reason or another. Fast food is the option of last resort. The theory of substitute goods doesn't enter into that decision at all. If I had another option, I would have taken it already.
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00
That's about a 7% increase. We're talking a 50% increase here. The company I work for relies heavily on minimum wage-ish laborers for the manufacturing jobs, which are basically screwing caps on bottles, putting them in boxes. Real unskilled stuff, diploma and English not required. We're in Los Angeles, and when they announced the minimum wage hike, eyes immediately pointed just over the border to Ventura County, where no such increase was proposed. Now that this is looking to be a state-wide thing, a 50% increase in labor costs for the bulk of our production workers is going to make the automated fillers and cappers pretty much sell themselves. Either way it goes, it's going to drive the price per unit up. Labor isn't the main cost for producing products here, but when we price out to the tenth of a cent per unit, and we roll off hundreds of thousands of units per run, it begins to add up. This cost will either be passed on to the customer, or more likely, will lose us business as clients take their filling operations to states with lower labor costs and less distance to their distribution houses. Most of our min-wage laborers are day workers, so if there's no work, they don't show up or get paid. If work starts disappearing, the $15/hr doesn't mean a damn thing to them, and ultimately the whole scheme will hurt the very people it's supposedly helping.
I'm surprised you aren't doing automated fillers and cappers already. In most parts of the country, there was a strong economic case a long time ago. I visited a mineral water bottling facility in North Korea and they had automated filling and capping. Obviously that factory is mainly "for show", but this kind of equipment isn't that expensive or difficult to acquire.
The USA is an advanced high tech country. If you are relying on unskilled, lowly paid, disposable peons to manufacture/assemble product, China, India, and other developing countries are going to eat your lunch anyway. It is only a matter of time. Mechanizing is your only hope.
No kidding. To call this the 'fastest adoption of any release ever' is about as valid (and laughable) as some authoritarian dictatorship holding 'free elections' where there's only one candidate, and you're detained if you don't go and vote for him, then claiming a 'landslide victory' with 'record voter turnout'. It's a sham, it's a joke, it's a complete fabrication, it's utter bullshit, and it means NOTHING.
Some of these "elections" are more of a census than an election. Sometimes this is misinterpreted when the language is translated to English. In a country with only one main political party, obviously "election day" is going to have an expected result. The real political mechanisms happen behind closed doors, just like they do in the US. The US and some of these authoritarian dictatorships are really not that different.