The problem is the penalty for the crime is not enough.
Not true. Severity of punishment has modest value as a deterrence. Much more important is probability of getting caught.
3 strikes and a life sentence
Several states, including California, implemented 3 strikes laws during the 1990s. In the following decades, it had no effect on crime rates compared to states that did not implement such laws.
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, much much higher than China, Russia, Iran, etc. Our prison system is enormously expensive, and is mostly a waste of resources.
But SolarCity has studied that, in practice, the degradation is less than that, so they're adding an extra 10 years to their warrantee.
Sure, but they are selling the same generic panels from the same vendors as everyone else. So the implication in the summary that their panels are "better" is nonsense. Also, most SolarCity panels are leased with a power-purchase agreement, not owned by the homeowner.
Don't hate on humanity because you dealt with people at their most incompetent!
If I provide them with good service, I am just reinforcing their incompetence. If after being told multiple times to email me the error messages, they insist on spelling them out phonetically, then I have no compunctions about torturing them with long hold times while I "research" the problem, and then dropping the call. Every time I do that, I feel my stress levels fall. Eventually they will learn.
So you go back, find the user list, subscribe to that, where you post a message, get no response...
You are doing it wrong. Subscribe twice, using two different emails. Ask the question with one account, and then use the other account to reply with an answer that is contemptuous, insulting, and completely wrong. Then the knowledgeable users will fall over themselves trying to correct the presumptuous idiot, answering your question in the process.
Only the phones get you the full, real time attention of an agent.
The people put on phone support are at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy. They are the least knowledgeable about your problem, and the least empowered to do anything about. Oh, and they also hate you.
Email becomes unbearable if there are more than 1 or two rounds of back and forth.
Except that the email likely contains a cut-and-paste that may solve your problem, or at least a helpful web link. Likewise, with chat, you can send a cut-and-paste of your error message, or a screen shot. That is much more likely to lead to a solution. The people doing chat support have been promoted from the phones, and the people doing email support are higher still. These are the people that can actually solve your problem.
A telephone is a totally inappropriate medium for resolving technical support issues. Most intelligent customers are aware of that, and use email, web resources, or, as a last resort, text chat. Only complete morons pick up the phone and call. So that is what phone support reps deal with all day: idiots that are too lazy to read the manual for themselves. Oh, and yes, I was stuck doing phone support for the worst 6 months of my life. Why do you ask?
In my school district, the first thing they cut was the school buses. The result was maximum inconvenience for parents, and congested roads for commuters even without school aged kids.
If Uber is paying substandard wages to its drivers...
They don't. My sister drives for Uber several evenings every week to earn some extra cash. She makes about $18/hour after expenses. That is a pretty good wage for a near zero-skill job with flexible hours.
My brother is an author. How does he get paid for 'performing' his work?
He could go to Kickstarter and post his ideas, and only write the actual work when the funding is provided. Many authors have done that. I have chipped in to fund a few books that I was interested in. All were eventually published (either on paper or PDF) and I was happy with the result.
its a nasty (rather than celebratory) thing when a city/country is not economically diversified.
Tech companies tend to have few employees for their size. In the SF Bay Area, there isn't a single tech company in the top ten of the list of employers. The big employers include education (several big universities), health care, finance, and even the oil industry (Chevron is based in San Ramon).
I find it depends on who's driving the switching. If I'm doing it at my own pace it's much less annoying than when some asshat is wittering or interrupting.
Unlikely. Studies have found that people that think they are good at multitasking are actually the worst at it.
Just ban religion. Everyone would get along much better if there weren't issues with Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
The conflict has little to do with religion. Palestinians have historically been largely secular, and when Israel was founded about 20% of Palestinians were Christian (although many of them have since emigrated). The Israeli settlements are mostly populated and supported by secular Jews, including immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe who came to Israel for economic opportunity, not religion.
It is far from inconceivable that one of these substantially-artificial organisms could take over a large ecosystem niche from existing organisms
There are safeguards, such as the Terminator Gene, designed to keep this from happening. But those safeguards are NOT BEING USED because of objections from anti-GMO organizations, concerned that better safeguards would interfere with their scaremongering. It is hypocritical to complain that something is unsafe when you have actively campaigned to make it less safe.
This problem is due to a small percentage of the worlds population owning most of everything, AKA greed.
I see. Golden rice is unnecessary because the problem can be trivially solved by just eliminating human greed! That is a truly wonderful idea. I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
1) Lock-in, once you've planted a seed you can't go back because any remaining seeds could grow and the farmer can then be sued.
BS. The farmer can buy new seed and plant it. There is no "lock-in".
2) Suing neighbouring farmers when the seeds get into their crops (documented, google it)
More BS. Monsanto sued Perry Schmeiser for intentionally and repeatedly growing patented canola. They have never sued anyone for unintentional infringement. Next time you assert that something is "documented", you may want to confirm that it actually is.
3) Expense, no surprises that the GMO seeds are more expensive and require expensive pesticides etc from the company that sells the seeds.
Some GMO plants require no pesticides. The most widely used GMO crops are glyphosate tolerant. Glyphosate herbicide is cheap, is not patented, and is manufactured by many companies.
You can go to Craigslist or TaskRabbit, and make $50 an hour unclogging toilets, or $30/hour cleaning kitchens. We are installing a new bathroom in our house, and we had to push it back a month because no one was available to do the plumbing work, and they made it clear that they were unavailable before I had a chance to mention what I was willing to pay. So now I am doing all the work myself, learning from Youtube videos as I go.
The millions unemployed are actively looking for work.
I don't think so. If you really believe that no work is available, then go try to find a worker willing to work.
Technically, she knows how to get the car to parallel-park for her.
The important thing is that I no longer have to get out of the car and switch to the driver's seat so I can park the car for her, especially when it is raining.
This is a societal issue. Either we take care of families or we don't.
We need to take care of people that can't afford to eat. We don't need to take care of an engineer who insists he "needs" a salary $150k when a 25 years old with more relevant skills will accept $90k.
Working for a company was once a deeper commitment then today
This is mostly a myth. Average job tenure is higher today than it was in the 1960s. Most companies offer better benefits today than they did then.
There was more mutual respect and satisfaction between workers and the c- level staff.
You are suffering from false nostalgia. The "good ole' days" were not as good as you think.
unpaid internships are a thing, and even seen as the best way to get a foot in the door of competitive environments.
Unpaid internships are illegal in America, and are pretty much non-existent in tech. My daughter is doing an internship this summer, and is being paid $18/hour.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is the penalty for the crime is not enough.
Not true. Severity of punishment has modest value as a deterrence. Much more important is probability of getting caught.
3 strikes and a life sentence
Several states, including California, implemented 3 strikes laws during the 1990s. In the following decades, it had no effect on crime rates compared to states that did not implement such laws.
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, much much higher than China, Russia, Iran, etc. Our prison system is enormously expensive, and is mostly a waste of resources.
But SolarCity has studied that, in practice, the degradation is less than that, so they're adding an extra 10 years to their warrantee.
Sure, but they are selling the same generic panels from the same vendors as everyone else. So the implication in the summary that their panels are "better" is nonsense. Also, most SolarCity panels are leased with a power-purchase agreement, not owned by the homeowner.
Don't hate on humanity because you dealt with people at their most incompetent!
If I provide them with good service, I am just reinforcing their incompetence. If after being told multiple times to email me the error messages, they insist on spelling them out phonetically, then I have no compunctions about torturing them with long hold times while I "research" the problem, and then dropping the call. Every time I do that, I feel my stress levels fall. Eventually they will learn.
So you go back, find the user list, subscribe to that, where you post a message, get no response ...
You are doing it wrong. Subscribe twice, using two different emails. Ask the question with one account, and then use the other account to reply with an answer that is contemptuous, insulting, and completely wrong. Then the knowledgeable users will fall over themselves trying to correct the presumptuous idiot, answering your question in the process.
Only the phones get you the full, real time attention of an agent.
The people put on phone support are at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy. They are the least knowledgeable about your problem, and the least empowered to do anything about. Oh, and they also hate you.
Email becomes unbearable if there are more than 1 or two rounds of back and forth.
Except that the email likely contains a cut-and-paste that may solve your problem, or at least a helpful web link. Likewise, with chat, you can send a cut-and-paste of your error message, or a screen shot. That is much more likely to lead to a solution. The people doing chat support have been promoted from the phones, and the people doing email support are higher still. These are the people that can actually solve your problem.
A telephone is a totally inappropriate medium for resolving technical support issues. Most intelligent customers are aware of that, and use email, web resources, or, as a last resort, text chat. Only complete morons pick up the phone and call. So that is what phone support reps deal with all day: idiots that are too lazy to read the manual for themselves. Oh, and yes, I was stuck doing phone support for the worst 6 months of my life. Why do you ask?
That is how these things usually go.
In America, it is called the Washington Monument Syndrome.
Schools increase staff/child ratios
In my school district, the first thing they cut was the school buses. The result was maximum inconvenience for parents, and congested roads for commuters even without school aged kids.
If Uber is paying substandard wages to its drivers ...
They don't. My sister drives for Uber several evenings every week to earn some extra cash. She makes about $18/hour after expenses. That is a pretty good wage for a near zero-skill job with flexible hours.
When they let the taxi business run unregulated it was dangerous and bad for the cities residents.
Do you have a citation for this assertion?
So they introduce controls on the market and it's too corrupt for you.
How do medallion fees make taxis safer?
My brother is an author. How does he get paid for 'performing' his work?
He could go to Kickstarter and post his ideas, and only write the actual work when the funding is provided. Many authors have done that. I have chipped in to fund a few books that I was interested in. All were eventually published (either on paper or PDF) and I was happy with the result.
its a nasty (rather than celebratory) thing when a city/country is not economically diversified.
Tech companies tend to have few employees for their size. In the SF Bay Area, there isn't a single tech company in the top ten of the list of employers. The big employers include education (several big universities), health care, finance, and even the oil industry (Chevron is based in San Ramon).
My understanding is they did sue for the unintentional infringement
If you spent 30 seconds reading about the case, you would realize that your "understanding" is complete hogwash.
Would they sue unintentional infringement again if it applied, who knows.
Millions of farmers have unintentionally infringed, via pollen blowing in the wind. Number that have been sued for that: zero.
Nice fallacy there, finding a case that was not what I was referring too and using it to dismiss my argument.
The why don't you post a case that is what you are referring to? Of course you can't, because there isn't one.
6) Loss of organic certification due to contamination. http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/12...
It is not Monsanto's fault that Australia has stupid laws (driven by anti-GMO hysteria).
I find it depends on who's driving the switching. If I'm doing it at my own pace it's much less annoying than when some asshat is wittering or interrupting.
Unlikely. Studies have found that people that think they are good at multitasking are actually the worst at it.
Just ban religion. Everyone would get along much better if there weren't issues with Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
The conflict has little to do with religion. Palestinians have historically been largely secular, and when Israel was founded about 20% of Palestinians were Christian (although many of them have since emigrated). The Israeli settlements are mostly populated and supported by secular Jews, including immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe who came to Israel for economic opportunity, not religion.
How about you try to correlate it with number of VR sets in those countries.
That at least might give you some interesting numbers.
California is the biggest consumer of furry pornography in America, followed by Texas, Florida, and New York.
It is far from inconceivable that one of these substantially-artificial organisms could take over a large ecosystem niche from existing organisms
There are safeguards, such as the Terminator Gene, designed to keep this from happening. But those safeguards are NOT BEING USED because of objections from anti-GMO organizations, concerned that better safeguards would interfere with their scaremongering. It is hypocritical to complain that something is unsafe when you have actively campaigned to make it less safe.
This problem is due to a small percentage of the worlds population owning most of everything, AKA greed.
I see. Golden rice is unnecessary because the problem can be trivially solved by just eliminating human greed! That is a truly wonderful idea. I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
1) Lock-in, once you've planted a seed you can't go back because any remaining seeds could grow and the farmer can then be sued.
BS. The farmer can buy new seed and plant it. There is no "lock-in".
2) Suing neighbouring farmers when the seeds get into their crops (documented, google it)
More BS. Monsanto sued Perry Schmeiser for intentionally and repeatedly growing patented canola. They have never sued anyone for unintentional infringement. Next time you assert that something is "documented", you may want to confirm that it actually is.
3) Expense, no surprises that the GMO seeds are more expensive and require expensive pesticides etc from the company that sells the seeds.
Some GMO plants require no pesticides. The most widely used GMO crops are glyphosate tolerant. Glyphosate herbicide is cheap, is not patented, and is manufactured by many companies.
There are no jobs available
You can go to Craigslist or TaskRabbit, and make $50 an hour unclogging toilets, or $30/hour cleaning kitchens. We are installing a new bathroom in our house, and we had to push it back a month because no one was available to do the plumbing work, and they made it clear that they were unavailable before I had a chance to mention what I was willing to pay. So now I am doing all the work myself, learning from Youtube videos as I go.
The millions unemployed are actively looking for work.
I don't think so. If you really believe that no work is available, then go try to find a worker willing to work.
Technically, she knows how to get the car to parallel-park for her.
The important thing is that I no longer have to get out of the car and switch to the driver's seat so I can park the car for her, especially when it is raining.
Google should fork Java (and rename it)
Microsoft already did that. They named it C#.
This is a societal issue. Either we take care of families or we don't.
We need to take care of people that can't afford to eat. We don't need to take care of an engineer who insists he "needs" a salary $150k when a 25 years old with more relevant skills will accept $90k.
Working for a company was once a deeper commitment then today
This is mostly a myth. Average job tenure is higher today than it was in the 1960s. Most companies offer better benefits today than they did then.
There was more mutual respect and satisfaction between workers and the c- level staff.
You are suffering from false nostalgia. The "good ole' days" were not as good as you think.
So... what are you going to do when you do have 2-3 kids and commitments?
This is the problem with old people: they think they should get the job because of their "needs" rather than their value.
unpaid internships are a thing, and even seen as the best way to get a foot in the door of competitive environments.
Unpaid internships are illegal in America, and are pretty much non-existent in tech. My daughter is doing an internship this summer, and is being paid $18/hour.