While the names you've listed are race and class neutral, there are definitely names that hint at a person's race or their family's social status when they were born. While there are exceptions, a man with the name Jamal or Shakim is likely to be black. When I was growing up in the '60s, Leroy was usually a black name. If a man was named Leroy Washington or Otis Jefferson there was a high probability he was black. A woman named Amber or Crystal is more likely to have come from a lower middle class or poor white family. My daughter went to a private college that was mostly attended by white people from middle class or upper middle class families. Most of the women in her dorm seemed to be named Sarah, Amanda, Rebecca, Emma or Danielle. There were so many Sarahs that they started assuming other names so you could tell them apart. Her roommate went from Sarah to Shane. Her next door neighbor went from Sarah to Sasha. My manager forwarded some resumes to me a few weeks ago. One of them was from a woman named Sarah. Before I got any further on the application I thought 'white middle class'.
Just wondering. If someone wanted an easy way to snoop on a business' computer and network, they could send it a letter that purports to be from the BSA, demanding an audit. If the business permits the 'audit' they could be opening themselves to all sorts of mischief. Some of the most egregious intrusions are the result of good social engineering, not great technical skills. As others have said, contact an attorney. Just having them send a reply could put the matter to rest and cost less than you think.
There's a roundabout near where I live in NY state. It used to be difficult to navigate and have a high accident rate. After some analysis it was determined that most of the traffic was between two roads that were ninety degrees apart on the roundabout. This was probably what you are referring to as a dominant flow of traffic. A flyover was built so that drivers could bypass the roundabout for those two roads. The number of accidents declined dramatically, traffic flows much more smoothly, and the whole arrangement is much more pedestrian and bicycle friendly.
It is July 4th, a major US holiday. On 1776-07-04, the second Continental Congress of the thirteen colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence. The gp printed the entire text of it. Hardly a racist act considering the day.
Many large retailers that have a physical presence in many states and also operate online retail outlets seem to have no problem determining the tax rate for the person purchasing something online. One large retailer I did some work for subscribed to a service that tracked all the changes in tax rates and provided a look up table to the retailer. For the retailer it was a simple look up during checkout to determine the correct rate for the purchase. Amazon could do the same thing.
Lots of big retailers who have a physical presence in many states and also have online retail outlets (JCPenney, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Lowes, and etc.) manage to collect taxes that vary zip code. I worked for one such company and they subscribed to a service that provided the information for them. It was a simple look up during the checkout process to determine the appropriate sales tax rate. The company downloaded the latest tax rates nightly. I'm sure Amazon could implement this relatively easily.
Social security currently brings in more than it costs. It runs enough of a surplus that it lends money to the federal government. The federal government owes more to social security than it does to China. Social security will eventually need for those loans to be repaid, but for the time being it can hardly be considered a drag on the budget, and you should look elsewhere to balance the budget. Significant contributors to the increase in the deficit since 2001 have been the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, Medicare part D, a decline in revenue due to the great recession, and an increase in costs also due to the recession. Due largely to the improving economy the deficit is projected to shrink by over $600 billion from 2011 to 2012. Ending or greatly curtailing the US wars in in Iraq and Afghanistan will also help to shrink the deficit. Medicare part D was an unfunded entitlement program pushed through congress in 2003. It's basically a subsidy program for the US insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and does need to be trimmed. Not extending the Bush tax cuts would put a big dent in the deficit.
I think from a politician's perspective the law of thermodynamics is that money burned within your district generates votes for you and money burned outside of your district doesn't.
I can't help but notice that the republican party advocates cutting subsidies to non-profits because of "free market" concerns, yet is amazingly quiet about government subsidies going to profitable industries (eg. oil).
You're quite mistaken. Republicans have been quite vocal in their support of oil. To be fair, subsidies for the petroleum industry is not exclusively a Republican cause. There are also a fair number idiot Democrats who seem to think oil being over $100 isn't enough incentive for companies to go out and drill for oil.
I don't know about business or medicine, but graduating from law school is not the ticket to the good life that it once was. The number of law school graduates that are not able to land a position as a lawyer is legion. There's no shortage of tales of people graduating from law school with $100, 000 in debt and not being able to find employment that will enable them to pay off that debt. The statistics that law schools provide on the number of their graduates that are employed after nine months and the salaries they are making are widely considered to be inflated. Law schools are generating more graduates that the legal profession can absorb, while new law schools continue to open.
Typical, pinning the blame on anti-regulation. When various governments are actually what is protecting these gas companies from lawsuit damages.
Just as it's difficult or impossible to attribute individual cases of lung cancer to smoking tobacco products, it's usually difficult to impossible to prove that the contamination of an individual well that provides drinking water came from fracking. When you don't know who caused a well to go bad, who do you sue? The protection that the drilling companies are receiving from government comes in the form of lack of oversight and transparency lobbied for by the drilling companies and land owners who stand to make more money if there is a less oversight and transparency. NY state has delayed issuing drilling permits for fracking pending the release of a study by the EPA. Drilling companies and land owners have been poring money into the state capital in an attempt to persuade government officials to permit drilling to start as soon as possible, regardless of the outcome of the report. Many small towns in NY state that rely on centralized wells for the entire community are surrounded by land owners who want to start drilling as soon as possible. If the community's water well goes bad, who gets sued? Is it possible to determine which land owner or drilling company among many is to blame? Best practices, based on the most up to date research and enforced by good regulation and oversight, will do more to prevent ground water contamination than any number of after the fact lawsuits.
A space station on the other hand, is something they are interested in investing in, an investment in themselves (or at least an investment in sabre rattling).
I hope they do a better job with their space station than they did with their high speed rail system.
Yeah, the billion dollar profits over each of the last 5 years shows they've clearly overpriced themselves in the market, and won't survive long.
The USPS has been operating at a loss. They lost $8.5 billion in 2010. It's about to deplete its $15 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury by borrowing the remaining $3.5 billion At this rate it will go broke at the end of 2011. Congress refuses to let the USPS run in a sensible fashion. They are mandated to deliver mail on Saturdays and they are required to keep open every rinky dink little post office in existance, except in exception circumstances. If FedEx and UPS had to operate in a similar manner they'd go bankrupt or be charging substantially more per delivery.
Re:own an artificial sweetener patent?
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
The push to kill sugar is really the push to make artificial sweeteners more lucrative.
Or it might just be a push to get people to consume less fructose. The alternative to less sugar doesn't have to be artificial sweeteners. Not everything is about money for everyone.
If large quantities of vitamin D were added to food and drink that you consume throughout the day, then yes, it could well be toxic. Same thing with vitamin A. Lustig's point is that sugar is so pervasive in the American diet, in what would have been considered large doses several decades ago, that it's having toxic effects on a significant portion of the population. I don't know if he's right, but he does make a good case for his point of view.
And generally speaking, healthy people don't need to consume sugar in order to prevent hypoglycemia.
I'm a developer and I've been working remotely from other people for the last 12 years. Nowadays, I rarely work on a project that has co-located people. We may occasionally meet each other in person, if we happen to be onsite at a client's location, but we never have physical team meetings just to meet. I haven't physically met any of my managers in ten years. What I've noticed about successful remote teams is that they adhere to a process, they have good project managers, and they've got kick ass coders who know how to keep to a schedule and know how to produce effective written communication. We tend to arrange work to take advantage of differences in time zones, so that one person or team can pick up where another left off. The project I'm on now has coders in the US, in four time zones, and the test team is in China. The testers test while the coders sleep. This sometimes isn't possible, and late evening or early morning meetings are sometimes necessary, but this is the exception, not the rule. The company I work for is a Lotus shop as far as online group collaboration tools go. We use Lotus Notes (please, no rants, it's not perfect but it works), Lotus SameTime (instant messaging), Lotus Live (desktop sharing). Lotus Connections (wikis and sharing documents), and IRC. Quite a few of my co-workers have toll free conference numbers that we use for group meetings.
In 1999, when I first started working from home it was difficult. Most of the people worked together at the same physical location and the way that they approached working on a team reflected this. For instance, it used to be that when everyone was co-located, and only one or two of the team members were remote, a lot of information was not communicated to the remote people in an effective and timely manner. I've found that good communication skills are more important on distributed teams. As time has gone on, and more and more of the company works remotely from one another, it has become much easier to work in distributed teams.
I've come to prefer working on distributed teams. On longer projects I make it a point of getting to know my team members as more than just resources. This means that meetings are not always all business. Sometimes we discuss the weather, each other's home life, and other non-work related items. When people know more about each other and spend time casually chatting they tend to back each other up more. We cover for each other on vacation and emergency situations. Working from home leaves me a lot of flexibility in my schedule. No one cares if I take an hour for lunch and go for a bike ride. Mid afternoon naps in the recliner are great. What's important to the company is that my work is delivered on schedule and that it works as promised.
Making the building more energy efficient and adding the solar cells are not mutually exclusive. Why can't other energy efficiency be implemented in addition to adding the solar cells? The article doesn't mention anything else that's been done for efficiency, but that doesn't mean that a lot hasn't been done or isn't in the works. In addition to generating electricity these cells will also lower cooling costs. It would have been nice if they could have provided an estimate of how much power will be saved through reduced cooling needs.
You're thinking of Centralia, Pennsylvania. I drove through it in the early '90s. It was bizarre. The whole town was abandoned. Coal mining in the US used to be incredibly hazardous, now it's just very hazardous. It still causes terrible environmental dammage. And that's before the mined coal is transported and burned. I'd willingly trade the occasional nuclear crisis for the death by a thousand cuts that we're suffering from coal.
Our local paper is owned by Gannet, and while the national and international coverage is worthless, it does provide excellent local coverage and reasonable coverage of state issues that affect our area. Almost all the Google news links to articles about my area that are worth reading originate at the local paper.
When I did a search to find how much mercury was in CFLs I found this page, http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf. There's a lot less mercury in CFLs than I thought. On average, there's 4 mg of mercury in a CFL. More than 100 times less than in a mercury thermometer. The page claims that some manufacturers have reduced this to as low as 1 mg per CFL bulb. Furthermore, over time the mercury in a CFL binds to the glass. It doesn't seem like the amount of mercury in CFLs will harm a person unless they are spending time in an enclosed area with a large number of broken CFLs. I can understand why people might not want to use CFLs, they're not ideal in a lot of circumstances. But the presence of mercury in the bulbs as a reason to avoid CFLs seems to be about as valid as avoiding vaccinations because of thimerosal.
would she be fired? I seem to recall many people lauding the labor board's decision against an employer who took action against an upset employee who bad mouthed her employer.
Or do we need to pass a certain threshold of being mean?
There's a difference between saying your workplace sucks and your company's products suck.
The farmers of Kansas should oppose HSR. If more people take a train it will mean less of a market for the crappy gas that contains the ethanol they get subsidized to produce.
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While the names you've listed are race and class neutral, there are definitely names that hint at a person's race or their family's social status when they were born. While there are exceptions, a man with the name Jamal or Shakim is likely to be black. When I was growing up in the '60s, Leroy was usually a black name. If a man was named Leroy Washington or Otis Jefferson there was a high probability he was black. A woman named Amber or Crystal is more likely to have come from a lower middle class or poor white family. My daughter went to a private college that was mostly attended by white people from middle class or upper middle class families. Most of the women in her dorm seemed to be named Sarah, Amanda, Rebecca, Emma or Danielle. There were so many Sarahs that they started assuming other names so you could tell them apart. Her roommate went from Sarah to Shane. Her next door neighbor went from Sarah to Sasha. My manager forwarded some resumes to me a few weeks ago. One of them was from a woman named Sarah. Before I got any further on the application I thought 'white middle class'.
Just wondering. If someone wanted an easy way to snoop on a business' computer and network, they could send it a letter that purports to be from the BSA, demanding an audit. If the business permits the 'audit' they could be opening themselves to all sorts of mischief. Some of the most egregious intrusions are the result of good social engineering, not great technical skills. As others have said, contact an attorney. Just having them send a reply could put the matter to rest and cost less than you think.
There's a roundabout near where I live in NY state. It used to be difficult to navigate and have a high accident rate. After some analysis it was determined that most of the traffic was between two roads that were ninety degrees apart on the roundabout. This was probably what you are referring to as a dominant flow of traffic. A flyover was built so that drivers could bypass the roundabout for those two roads. The number of accidents declined dramatically, traffic flows much more smoothly, and the whole arrangement is much more pedestrian and bicycle friendly.
It is July 4th, a major US holiday. On 1776-07-04, the second Continental Congress of the thirteen colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence. The gp printed the entire text of it. Hardly a racist act considering the day.
Walmart manages to handle all these rules online. I'm sure Amazon can too.
Many large retailers that have a physical presence in many states and also operate online retail outlets seem to have no problem determining the tax rate for the person purchasing something online. One large retailer I did some work for subscribed to a service that tracked all the changes in tax rates and provided a look up table to the retailer. For the retailer it was a simple look up during checkout to determine the correct rate for the purchase. Amazon could do the same thing.
Lots of big retailers who have a physical presence in many states and also have online retail outlets (JCPenney, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Lowes, and etc.) manage to collect taxes that vary zip code. I worked for one such company and they subscribed to a service that provided the information for them. It was a simple look up during the checkout process to determine the appropriate sales tax rate. The company downloaded the latest tax rates nightly. I'm sure Amazon could implement this relatively easily.
Social security currently brings in more than it costs. It runs enough of a surplus that it lends money to the federal government. The federal government owes more to social security than it does to China. Social security will eventually need for those loans to be repaid, but for the time being it can hardly be considered a drag on the budget, and you should look elsewhere to balance the budget. Significant contributors to the increase in the deficit since 2001 have been the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, Medicare part D, a decline in revenue due to the great recession, and an increase in costs also due to the recession. Due largely to the improving economy the deficit is projected to shrink by over $600 billion from 2011 to 2012. Ending or greatly curtailing the US wars in in Iraq and Afghanistan will also help to shrink the deficit. Medicare part D was an unfunded entitlement program pushed through congress in 2003. It's basically a subsidy program for the US insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and does need to be trimmed. Not extending the Bush tax cuts would put a big dent in the deficit.
I think from a politician's perspective the law of thermodynamics is that money burned within your district generates votes for you and money burned outside of your district doesn't.
I can't help but notice that the republican party advocates cutting subsidies to non-profits because of "free market" concerns, yet is amazingly quiet about government subsidies going to profitable industries (eg. oil).
You're quite mistaken. Republicans have been quite vocal in their support of oil. To be fair, subsidies for the petroleum industry is not exclusively a Republican cause. There are also a fair number idiot Democrats who seem to think oil being over $100 isn't enough incentive for companies to go out and drill for oil.
Would you trust a 15 year old WiFi with outdated software, on a poorly maintained vehicle?
Maybe more than my 85 year old neighbor in her poorly maintained vehicle.
I don't know about business or medicine, but graduating from law school is not the ticket to the good life that it once was. The number of law school graduates that are not able to land a position as a lawyer is legion. There's no shortage of tales of people graduating from law school with $100, 000 in debt and not being able to find employment that will enable them to pay off that debt. The statistics that law schools provide on the number of their graduates that are employed after nine months and the salaries they are making are widely considered to be inflated. Law schools are generating more graduates that the legal profession can absorb, while new law schools continue to open.
Typical, pinning the blame on anti-regulation. When various governments are actually what is protecting these gas companies from lawsuit damages.
Just as it's difficult or impossible to attribute individual cases of lung cancer to smoking tobacco products, it's usually difficult to impossible to prove that the contamination of an individual well that provides drinking water came from fracking. When you don't know who caused a well to go bad, who do you sue? The protection that the drilling companies are receiving from government comes in the form of lack of oversight and transparency lobbied for by the drilling companies and land owners who stand to make more money if there is a less oversight and transparency. NY state has delayed issuing drilling permits for fracking pending the release of a study by the EPA. Drilling companies and land owners have been poring money into the state capital in an attempt to persuade government officials to permit drilling to start as soon as possible, regardless of the outcome of the report. Many small towns in NY state that rely on centralized wells for the entire community are surrounded by land owners who want to start drilling as soon as possible. If the community's water well goes bad, who gets sued? Is it possible to determine which land owner or drilling company among many is to blame? Best practices, based on the most up to date research and enforced by good regulation and oversight, will do more to prevent ground water contamination than any number of after the fact lawsuits.
I know its not popular, but pedophiles dont do much harm in the big picture.
Poor parenting does a lot more harm than pedophiles.
A space station on the other hand, is something they are interested in investing in, an investment in themselves (or at least an investment in sabre rattling).
I hope they do a better job with their space station than they did with their high speed rail system.
Yeah, the billion dollar profits over each of the last 5 years shows they've clearly overpriced themselves in the market, and won't survive long.
The USPS has been operating at a loss. They lost $8.5 billion in 2010. It's about to deplete its $15 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury by borrowing the remaining $3.5 billion At this rate it will go broke at the end of 2011. Congress refuses to let the USPS run in a sensible fashion. They are mandated to deliver mail on Saturdays and they are required to keep open every rinky dink little post office in existance, except in exception circumstances. If FedEx and UPS had to operate in a similar manner they'd go bankrupt or be charging substantially more per delivery.
The push to kill sugar is really the push to make artificial sweeteners more lucrative.
Or it might just be a push to get people to consume less fructose. The alternative to less sugar doesn't have to be artificial sweeteners. Not everything is about money for everyone.
Is Vitamin D toxic now?
If large quantities of vitamin D were added to food and drink that you consume throughout the day, then yes, it could well be toxic. Same thing with vitamin A. Lustig's point is that sugar is so pervasive in the American diet, in what would have been considered large doses several decades ago, that it's having toxic effects on a significant portion of the population. I don't know if he's right, but he does make a good case for his point of view.
And generally speaking, healthy people don't need to consume sugar in order to prevent hypoglycemia.
I'm a developer and I've been working remotely from other people for the last 12 years. Nowadays, I rarely work on a project that has co-located people. We may occasionally meet each other in person, if we happen to be onsite at a client's location, but we never have physical team meetings just to meet. I haven't physically met any of my managers in ten years. What I've noticed about successful remote teams is that they adhere to a process, they have good project managers, and they've got kick ass coders who know how to keep to a schedule and know how to produce effective written communication. We tend to arrange work to take advantage of differences in time zones, so that one person or team can pick up where another left off. The project I'm on now has coders in the US, in four time zones, and the test team is in China. The testers test while the coders sleep. This sometimes isn't possible, and late evening or early morning meetings are sometimes necessary, but this is the exception, not the rule. The company I work for is a Lotus shop as far as online group collaboration tools go. We use Lotus Notes (please, no rants, it's not perfect but it works), Lotus SameTime (instant messaging), Lotus Live (desktop sharing). Lotus Connections (wikis and sharing documents), and IRC. Quite a few of my co-workers have toll free conference numbers that we use for group meetings.
In 1999, when I first started working from home it was difficult. Most of the people worked together at the same physical location and the way that they approached working on a team reflected this. For instance, it used to be that when everyone was co-located, and only one or two of the team members were remote, a lot of information was not communicated to the remote people in an effective and timely manner. I've found that good communication skills are more important on distributed teams. As time has gone on, and more and more of the company works remotely from one another, it has become much easier to work in distributed teams.
I've come to prefer working on distributed teams. On longer projects I make it a point of getting to know my team members as more than just resources. This means that meetings are not always all business. Sometimes we discuss the weather, each other's home life, and other non-work related items. When people know more about each other and spend time casually chatting they tend to back each other up more. We cover for each other on vacation and emergency situations. Working from home leaves me a lot of flexibility in my schedule. No one cares if I take an hour for lunch and go for a bike ride. Mid afternoon naps in the recliner are great. What's important to the company is that my work is delivered on schedule and that it works as promised.
Distributed teams can and do work very well.
Making the building more energy efficient and adding the solar cells are not mutually exclusive. Why can't other energy efficiency be implemented in addition to adding the solar cells? The article doesn't mention anything else that's been done for efficiency, but that doesn't mean that a lot hasn't been done or isn't in the works. In addition to generating electricity these cells will also lower cooling costs. It would have been nice if they could have provided an estimate of how much power will be saved through reduced cooling needs.
You're thinking of Centralia, Pennsylvania. I drove through it in the early '90s. It was bizarre. The whole town was abandoned. Coal mining in the US used to be incredibly hazardous, now it's just very hazardous. It still causes terrible environmental dammage. And that's before the mined coal is transported and burned. I'd willingly trade the occasional nuclear crisis for the death by a thousand cuts that we're suffering from coal.
Our local paper is owned by Gannet, and while the national and international coverage is worthless, it does provide excellent local coverage and reasonable coverage of state issues that affect our area. Almost all the Google news links to articles about my area that are worth reading originate at the local paper.
When I did a search to find how much mercury was in CFLs I found this page, http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf. There's a lot less mercury in CFLs than I thought. On average, there's 4 mg of mercury in a CFL. More than 100 times less than in a mercury thermometer. The page claims that some manufacturers have reduced this to as low as 1 mg per CFL bulb. Furthermore, over time the mercury in a CFL binds to the glass. It doesn't seem like the amount of mercury in CFLs will harm a person unless they are spending time in an enclosed area with a large number of broken CFLs. I can understand why people might not want to use CFLs, they're not ideal in a lot of circumstances. But the presence of mercury in the bulbs as a reason to avoid CFLs seems to be about as valid as avoiding vaccinations because of thimerosal.
would she be fired? I seem to recall many people lauding the labor board's decision against an employer who took action against an upset employee who bad mouthed her employer.
Or do we need to pass a certain threshold of being mean?
There's a difference between saying your workplace sucks and your company's products suck.
The farmers of Kansas should oppose HSR. If more people take a train it will mean less of a market for the crappy gas that contains the ethanol they get subsidized to produce.