Yes, the healthcare system that congress implemented has had an effect on the economy. Congress-care, as it were.
Obama suggested single-payer. Congress made very sure he didn't get it.
Instead we got welfare for the insurance companies.
Same story, different day.
The president's own limited power can only really come into effect WRT foreign policy (which options include a broad, thought not unlimited, palette of military actions.) On other matters, you should probably think of him as the "suggester-in-chief."
Isn't one of the attributes you want in a politician a "flip flop" position based on popular opinion ?
The USA's political system is intentionally based on something else.
Isn't that the point of a democracy, representing popular opinion?
Yes, it is. But the USA isn't a democracy. It's a constitutional republic. So the highest level concern isn't what the majority wants, instead, it is the constitutionality of the "want.". A concrete example: if the popular opinion, say 75% of the electorate, wants deep south-style-1800's style slavery, the government is prohibited from implementing it even so, by the over-riding authority of the constitution.
Democracy has been very accurately described as "3 wolves and 2 sheep voting on what's for dinner."
A republic such as ours is also vulnerable to this kind of problem if the representatives are poorly chosen. The USA is presently deep in the throes of exactly that; in fact, so deep in it that it has also infected the non-elected agencies and bureaus that the politicians control; and further, now the control inputs to the politicians are coming from a relatively small set of moneyed and otherwise powerful interests. This has turned the USA into a de-facto oligarchy.
Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users.
Really? Like charging them for a service that you won't fix the bugs in? (base) Really? Like forcing everyone to remove their copyright info from images so you can use those images to benefit competitors who pay you more (base, again) Really? Like never adding the most basic, 1990s-old commonly used features to GMail? Really? Like classing websites according to your anti-sex moralistic bullshit and then locking those people out of earning a living?
It appears to me that not only do you (Google, Google employees) not apply "those words", you have no bloody idea what they mean.
You can go back to making your money-driven search results now. Cuz, hey, THAT is "serving your users" (up on a platter, that is.)
ok, what circumstances are... "certain", in your view? Honestly curious. Can't think of any, myself, and I consider myself both open-minded and a creative thinker. Please elaborate.
To many Millennials, a "code of conduct" isn't something to help keep social interaction civil. It's actually a weapon that they use against those whom they dislike.
Power corrupts. It's always been true, and it's still true. That's why a focus on personal and consensual choice, "your right to swing stops at my face", and liberty in general is needed to keep the error rate down to a dull roar -- just about every committee or action of a legislature is an act of exerting power. Far too often, that power is inappropriately construed, far too often that power is inappropriately applied. Classing is another wielding of power that consistently proves to be used as a means of harm and revenge. I can think of numerous examples in the technical realm, from ridiculous and irrelevant "certifications" to college degree requirements regardless of your knowledge and experience, to portions of the GPL.
As for millennials, this didn't start with them, not even close. As a 60-year old fellow, I could go on for pages with accurate stories about social codes of conduct that were (and in many cases still are) used as attempts to bludgeon people into compliance with everything from superstition (by which I primarily mean various aspects of religion), to the red scare, to the 'Murica mindset, to the ridiculously exaggerated "sex trafficking" nonsense, to drug use and the drug war, slut shaming, gangsterism, terrorism, and so on. Seems to me that you're probably just finding the millennials more annoying because for whatever reason, their behavior has clashed with your outlook -- which is not to say anyone is right or wrong, just that there's an up-front conflict.
It's like the premium charged for snotty foods at upscale supermarkets. People will lay it.
Well.... cucumbers and corn on the cob, perhaps, but good luck getting someone to lay a pineapple or a live lobster. This is by no means a universal solution for snotty food purchases.
I need more than 300 miles, I live in a very rural, isolated area. Nearest city worthy of the name is 280 miles away (and it's not the one I'd pick as my first choice to visit, either. The air is seriously polluted there. Outright stank.) 600 miles -- more or less what he's talking about -- would be awesome. I'd buy one of those in a heartbeat if it was under $60k.
From ignoring and perverting the constitution to outright blowing the revenue from taxpayers on boondoggles, we've definitely gotten the government the special interest groups and rich people have purchased.
Yay. (waves flag feebly)
Hey - I wonder which brown people are we going to pretend are a "real threat" to us today? "Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System" Cuz, you know, there must be camels carrying cruise missiles aimed at the USA RIGHT NOW!
Kim Davis is a batshit crazy superstitionist who allowed herself to be elected to a position she wasn't, and isn't, qualified to hold. Identifying her as a "Democrat" or "Republican" is about as relevant to what she's been up to as identifying a serial killer as a stamp collector.
All varieties of IC vehicles will be gone soon enough, NG, diesel and gasoline. Not because they pollute. Because they're enormously less efficient than electrical vehicles. The only benefit IC vehicles have right now is that gasoline, NG and diesel store larger amounts of energy by volume and weight than electrical storage does, and offer less maintainance of the energy supply for the vehicle. But those advantages continue to erode. Eventually the benefits will fall the other side of the line, and that'll be the end of that.
One of the obvious consequences of this inevitability is that the very small amount of extra exhaust products generated by VW's software methodology in actual vehicle use isn't likely to make an actual difference to anyone in terms of pollution.
Which puts an entirely different light on the willingness, or lack thereof, of anyone to do something like this, and thereby certain aspects of integrity -- or lack thereof.
The law doesn't always encode a good solution or methodology. Sometimes, it formalizes procedures and limits that are outright harmful and/or counterproductive. Obvious examples include enforcement of slavery, repression of women, the drug war, extremely numerous constitutional violations, age "lines in the sand", transport of various goods over state lines, usurpation of and punishment for personal or consensual choices, failure to allow experimental drug use by those who are already dying, the mis-classification of Synsepalum dulcificum, and so on.
Things often aren't quite as black and white as they seem.
Are you asserting that only software engineers can know how to design a test? It sure seems to me like that is what you are saying so far.
One would hope that the people who designed the test for "how much pollution does this vehicle generate" understand that the amount of pollution generated depends on how the machine is operated, and that the operation of the machine not only varies under load, but also because of input from its control systems, regardless if those are comprised of software and sensors or gears, floats and rubber bands.
I just can't take seriously the idea that one would have to be a software engineer to design the test well. But perhaps that's because I am a software engineer, among other things.:)
Lean code is always an issue. If your code incurs a x2 to x10 overhead associated with the virtual machine,
No. "Lean" does not mean "fast" (nor does it mean "slow.") Lean means low-ish byte count. Fast means fast. Slow means slow. Lean means a smaller executable/dataset. There are many instances where a lean program will be slower than a heavyweight one. For instance, a precalculated table of complex formulat results typically takes much more space than the actual calculation. The precalculating program will be faster, but less lean, than the one that does the calculations every time they are needed. Further, this kind of thing can be an excellent use of resources if higher speed is desirable, which it usually is -- because while memory has become relatively inexpensive, CPU speed remains a scarce and hard-limited resource. Virtual or otherwise.
It amounts to exactly the same thing. If you make the test trivially detectable, then your test depends entirely on trust, and if you actually have that kind of trust, you don't need the test anyway. If you don't have that kind of trust, then your test is ridiculously inadequate.
And you missed the part about demonstrating that they have done anything even remotely significant WRT "affecting people's health."
VW's rule-exceeding engines are, in fact, not significant contributors to the overall levels of the pollutants that are relevant to this. So you are barking up entirely the wrong tree here. We're pretty much all living longer, and better, than yesterday here in the developed countries. The problem -- and there is a problem -- is something else entirely, and that is the system for testing for emissions can be gamed, which opens up the potentiality for many more vehicles to test one way, and operate another, which is a lot more likely to actually result in serious consequences.
If you actually want this fixed, what needs fixing far more than anything else is the testing regime itself.
it's a widespread bit of fraud, committed by sociopaths who felt it's OK to game the test and break the rules.
When slavery was legal, would it have been unethical to not report a runaway slave, pretending you knew nothing about it?
If your answer is yes, then you have described ethics-in-place as at times both dangerous and antisocial rather than a universal good, and therefore something that should be subject to further analysis before being blindly complied with.
If your answer is no, then you have (correctly) determined that following law/rules is not always the correct thing to do, and that those who choose not to follow the law/rules are not always in the wrong.
The important question here is what harm, if any, was done to the consumer and to the environment; and this must be balanced against what benefits were obtained. It's not inherently a matter of "sociopathy."
Most people -- or in other words, people, in a widespread manner -- choose not to follow one law or another; be it spitting on the sidewalk, underage drinking, indulging in wackyweed, exceeding the speed limit, "forgetting" to declare this or that when crossing a national border, not throwing back that not-quite-big-enough trout, picking up vertebrate fossils on public land, not "getting around" to changing one's snow tires quite on time, installing an aftermarket exhaust system, indulging in various kinds of consensual sex play that isn't permitted by law, not reporting out-of-state transactions to the tax authorities, keeping more cats than the law allows, etc., etc., etc.
We often do this because we find the rules to be less than compelling in their rationale(s) and/or enforcement and/or their very existence. Not always because we're "sociopaths", but because the "rules", as it were, are not the be-all and end-all of what is good and righteous. The "ethics" that underlie our actual rules are often less than worthy of our attention outside of our derision. The same goes for the rules they spawn.
From my POV, if you want to convince me that VW is really guilty of being "bad" here, then you have to point to significant harm(s) that outweigh the benefit(s.) Aside from one ridiculous and scale-ignorant polemic about NOX above, nothing I've seen yet has described, much less demonstrated, any particular harm, aside from the actual act of "breaking the rules", which I just don't care about. And frankly, until the rules are shown to be rational and appropriate to the circumstance (not likely in the case of these particular emissions rules), I can't really see you doing so.
Also, as I mentioned in a comment above, I think it's pretty silly that the item under test was informed, or able to tell, that it was under test. Either way, the testing setup was pathologically stupid and unrealistic.
Slashdot Mirror
No. The secretary of the treasury that congress approves influences monetary policy on a non-trivial plane.
Again: The president is effectively Suggester-In-Chief for domestic matters.
Yes, the healthcare system that congress implemented has had an effect on the economy. Congress-care, as it were.
Obama suggested single-payer. Congress made very sure he didn't get it.
Instead we got welfare for the insurance companies.
Same story, different day.
The president's own limited power can only really come into effect WRT foreign policy (which options include a broad, thought not unlimited, palette of military actions.) On other matters, you should probably think of him as the "suggester-in-chief."
Then again, there are executive orders, sigh.
The USA's political system is intentionally based on something else.
Yes, it is. But the USA isn't a democracy. It's a constitutional republic. So the highest level concern isn't what the majority wants, instead, it is the constitutionality of the "want.". A concrete example: if the popular opinion, say 75% of the electorate, wants deep south-style-1800's style slavery, the government is prohibited from implementing it even so, by the over-riding authority of the constitution.
Democracy has been very accurately described as "3 wolves and 2 sheep voting on what's for dinner."
A republic such as ours is also vulnerable to this kind of problem if the representatives are poorly chosen. The USA is presently deep in the throes of exactly that; in fact, so deep in it that it has also infected the non-elected agencies and bureaus that the politicians control; and further, now the control inputs to the politicians are coming from a relatively small set of moneyed and otherwise powerful interests. This has turned the USA into a de-facto oligarchy.
Really? Like charging them for a service that you won't fix the bugs in? (base)
Really? Like forcing everyone to remove their copyright info from images so you can use those images to benefit competitors who pay you more (base, again)
Really? Like never adding the most basic, 1990s-old commonly used features to GMail?
Really? Like classing websites according to your anti-sex moralistic bullshit and then locking those people out of earning a living?
It appears to me that not only do you (Google, Google employees) not apply "those words", you have no bloody idea what they mean.
You can go back to making your money-driven search results now. Cuz, hey, THAT is "serving your users" (up on a platter, that is.)
ok, what circumstances are... "certain", in your view? Honestly curious. Can't think of any, myself, and I consider myself both open-minded and a creative thinker. Please elaborate.
Power corrupts. It's always been true, and it's still true. That's why a focus on personal and consensual choice, "your right to swing stops at my face", and liberty in general is needed to keep the error rate down to a dull roar -- just about every committee or action of a legislature is an act of exerting power. Far too often, that power is inappropriately construed, far too often that power is inappropriately applied. Classing is another wielding of power that consistently proves to be used as a means of harm and revenge. I can think of numerous examples in the technical realm, from ridiculous and irrelevant "certifications" to college degree requirements regardless of your knowledge and experience, to portions of the GPL.
As for millennials, this didn't start with them, not even close. As a 60-year old fellow, I could go on for pages with accurate stories about social codes of conduct that were (and in many cases still are) used as attempts to bludgeon people into compliance with everything from superstition (by which I primarily mean various aspects of religion), to the red scare, to the 'Murica mindset, to the ridiculously exaggerated "sex trafficking" nonsense, to drug use and the drug war, slut shaming, gangsterism, terrorism, and so on. Seems to me that you're probably just finding the millennials more annoying because for whatever reason, their behavior has clashed with your outlook -- which is not to say anyone is right or wrong, just that there's an up-front conflict.
Well.... cucumbers and corn on the cob, perhaps, but good luck getting someone to lay a pineapple or a live lobster. This is by no means a universal solution for snotty food purchases.
Worse than that, he's his own grandmother.
No, no. It is "Moor's Law." It's what holds the monoliths at Stonehenge up.
a legal loophole?
found by corporate lawyers?
I'm shocked. SHOCKED.
I'm going to go home, re-evaluate my life, and stop selling death sticks.
What? Hardly. I've done it in the back of a VW Rabbit. You don't need a Honda.
I need more than 300 miles, I live in a very rural, isolated area. Nearest city worthy of the name is 280 miles away (and it's not the one I'd pick as my first choice to visit, either. The air is seriously polluted there. Outright stank.) 600 miles -- more or less what he's talking about -- would be awesome. I'd buy one of those in a heartbeat if it was under $60k.
My native FLEX / 6809 machine emulator (for Windows XP and at least several Windows versions on up... don't use Windows any more, so I dunno. :)
Late-70s / early-80's machine era.
Front panel, graphics card, single stepping, lots of software including assemblers and compilers. Stable.
If you ever used 6809 Flex, you'll be right at home. Otherwise, probably don't bother.
The US government is massively corrupt.
From ignoring and perverting the constitution to outright blowing the revenue from taxpayers on boondoggles, we've definitely gotten the government the special interest groups and rich people have purchased.
Yay. (waves flag feebly)
Hey - I wonder which brown people are we going to pretend are a "real threat" to us today? "Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System" Cuz, you know, there must be camels carrying cruise missiles aimed at the USA RIGHT NOW!
Kim Davis is a batshit crazy superstitionist who allowed herself to be elected to a position she wasn't, and isn't, qualified to hold. Identifying her as a "Democrat" or "Republican" is about as relevant to what she's been up to as identifying a serial killer as a stamp collector.
We simply have this again, albeit not by Obama
All varieties of IC vehicles will be gone soon enough, NG, diesel and gasoline. Not because they pollute. Because they're enormously less efficient than electrical vehicles. The only benefit IC vehicles have right now is that gasoline, NG and diesel store larger amounts of energy by volume and weight than electrical storage does, and offer less maintainance of the energy supply for the vehicle. But those advantages continue to erode. Eventually the benefits will fall the other side of the line, and that'll be the end of that.
One of the obvious consequences of this inevitability is that the very small amount of extra exhaust products generated by VW's software methodology in actual vehicle use isn't likely to make an actual difference to anyone in terms of pollution.
Which puts an entirely different light on the willingness, or lack thereof, of anyone to do something like this, and thereby certain aspects of integrity -- or lack thereof.
The law doesn't always encode a good solution or methodology. Sometimes, it formalizes procedures and limits that are outright harmful and/or counterproductive. Obvious examples include enforcement of slavery, repression of women, the drug war, extremely numerous constitutional violations, age "lines in the sand", transport of various goods over state lines, usurpation of and punishment for personal or consensual choices, failure to allow experimental drug use by those who are already dying, the mis-classification of Synsepalum dulcificum, and so on.
Things often aren't quite as black and white as they seem.
That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
Are you asserting that only software engineers can know how to design a test? It sure seems to me like that is what you are saying so far.
One would hope that the people who designed the test for "how much pollution does this vehicle generate" understand that the amount of pollution generated depends on how the machine is operated, and that the operation of the machine not only varies under load, but also because of input from its control systems, regardless if those are comprised of software and sensors or gears, floats and rubber bands.
I just can't take seriously the idea that one would have to be a software engineer to design the test well. But perhaps that's because I am a software engineer, among other things. :)
No. "Lean" does not mean "fast" (nor does it mean "slow.") Lean means low-ish byte count. Fast means fast. Slow means slow. Lean means a smaller executable/dataset. There are many instances where a lean program will be slower than a heavyweight one. For instance, a precalculated table of complex formulat results typically takes much more space than the actual calculation. The precalculating program will be faster, but less lean, than the one that does the calculations every time they are needed. Further, this kind of thing can be an excellent use of resources if higher speed is desirable, which it usually is -- because while memory has become relatively inexpensive, CPU speed remains a scarce and hard-limited resource. Virtual or otherwise.
It amounts to exactly the same thing. If you make the test trivially detectable, then your test depends entirely on trust, and if you actually have that kind of trust, you don't need the test anyway. If you don't have that kind of trust, then your test is ridiculously inadequate.
And you missed the part about demonstrating that they have done anything even remotely significant WRT "affecting people's health."
VW's rule-exceeding engines are, in fact, not significant contributors to the overall levels of the pollutants that are relevant to this. So you are barking up entirely the wrong tree here. We're pretty much all living longer, and better, than yesterday here in the developed countries. The problem -- and there is a problem -- is something else entirely, and that is the system for testing for emissions can be gamed, which opens up the potentiality for many more vehicles to test one way, and operate another, which is a lot more likely to actually result in serious consequences.
If you actually want this fixed, what needs fixing far more than anything else is the testing regime itself.
Did (whatever part of) VW do this? No, they most certainly did not. Absurd hyperbole does not serve to make any sort of valid case.
When slavery was legal, would it have been unethical to not report a runaway slave, pretending you knew nothing about it?
If your answer is yes, then you have described ethics-in-place as at times both dangerous and antisocial rather than a universal good, and therefore something that should be subject to further analysis before being blindly complied with.
If your answer is no, then you have (correctly) determined that following law/rules is not always the correct thing to do, and that those who choose not to follow the law/rules are not always in the wrong.
The important question here is what harm, if any, was done to the consumer and to the environment; and this must be balanced against what benefits were obtained. It's not inherently a matter of "sociopathy."
Most people -- or in other words, people, in a widespread manner -- choose not to follow one law or another; be it spitting on the sidewalk, underage drinking, indulging in wackyweed, exceeding the speed limit, "forgetting" to declare this or that when crossing a national border, not throwing back that not-quite-big-enough trout, picking up vertebrate fossils on public land, not "getting around" to changing one's snow tires quite on time, installing an aftermarket exhaust system, indulging in various kinds of consensual sex play that isn't permitted by law, not reporting out-of-state transactions to the tax authorities, keeping more cats than the law allows, etc., etc., etc.
We often do this because we find the rules to be less than compelling in their rationale(s) and/or enforcement and/or their very existence. Not always because we're "sociopaths", but because the "rules", as it were, are not the be-all and end-all of what is good and righteous. The "ethics" that underlie our actual rules are often less than worthy of our attention outside of our derision. The same goes for the rules they spawn.
From my POV, if you want to convince me that VW is really guilty of being "bad" here, then you have to point to significant harm(s) that outweigh the benefit(s.) Aside from one ridiculous and scale-ignorant polemic about NOX above, nothing I've seen yet has described, much less demonstrated, any particular harm, aside from the actual act of "breaking the rules", which I just don't care about. And frankly, until the rules are shown to be rational and appropriate to the circumstance (not likely in the case of these particular emissions rules), I can't really see you doing so.
Also, as I mentioned in a comment above, I think it's pretty silly that the item under test was informed, or able to tell, that it was under test. Either way, the testing setup was pathologically stupid and unrealistic.
Skills, yes. But credentials do not an engineer make, kiddo.