Moving surgery to Thursday does not immediately make Friday a day off for surgeons. Thinking that cutting people open with a knife is the only thing a surgeon does is like thinking that typing in code is all that a software developer does.
I am one of those people that would be directly forced to subsidize this "worthless" crowd. I would happily do so out of self interest. If there was a minimum income, we would not necessarily spend any more on the poor than we currently do, but I wouldn't have to deal with bums begging for money at gas stations and in front of grocery stores. It is the same reason I want their to be government funded mental health institutions. Leaving crazy people to wander the streets as the homeless isn't just bad for them. It is bad form me. It is bad for you.
I would support a guaranteed minimum income for the same reason I support the existence of public education, even though I home school my children. Like homeschooling, capitalism offers the opportunity to make things far better, or far worse. It simply puts more power in the hands of the individual, so you move outside of the bell curve.
Public school offers a floor that the bad side of the education bell curve has a hard time moving past. A determined parent can homeschool their kids and get them a worse education that what the child would get in public school, but it requires a determined parent that also has their child's worst interest at heart. (Yes, these people do exist) On the other hand, parents that are apathetic towards their child's education will virtually always just send their kids to public school where the state will give them at least the kind of education that the state offers. Not what I would call great, but good enough that the child can exist in society.
In the same way, a minimum income would offer a floor to how poor the poor can be. It wouldn't prevent anyone from amassing wealth (which is really a different argument all together), but it would keep people from having to live on the streets. It would also weed out the mentally ill homeless from those who have fallen on bad luck as well as from those who are just lazy.
That just addresses the problems of today. Even more important is to recognize that we are on the cusp of simply not needing most people to work. When we can produce what we need, and don't need people to do it, we need an economic system that recognizes this. We need a system that works in that reality.
The problem with PRT is that it still doesn't address the "Who the hell wants to walk 2 miles from the nearest stop to their destination?" question. The solution to mass transit is to accept that people need to go where the transit lines don't go, and a big enough percentage of the population uses their vehicle as an extension of their home or business that expecting people to carry everything they bring this them is unrealistic. The PRT must move a vehicle for it to even start displacing cars.
SkyTran is a good example of why these things don't get done. People focus on ideas that just won't work. Ideas that claim to solve problems by not even acknowledging that the problems exist. The idea has been out there for years. I don't know when I saw it for the first time, but I'm thinking it as been in the decade range. Even with it being out there for a decade, the site doesn't address significant issues:
How does it handle people using the pods as toilets?
How does it handle carrying everything that doesn't fit in that little cab?
How does it handle fitting 100 fifteen foot pods in 1000 feet of track?
How does it get people the last mile to their actual destination?
How does it handle letting people keep their personal belongings in close proximity without having to carry them around?
Etc...
SkyTran is an idea to improve public transportation. It is not an idea to replace cars. As it stands, public transportation is only "good" in places that cars are so popular that the system starts to collapse. As the joke goes "No one drives in New York. There's too much traffic.".
Some of these problems could be mitigate. The ability to call a "Hauler" sized pod when needed could mitigate the problem of the pods being too small to carry your shopping. Other problems really can't with this system. E.g. Last mile.
The biggest problem for these kinds of ideas is that the people pushing them take the stance that all of society should rearrange itself to fit their half baked solution instead of finding a solution that really solves the problem.
Right off the bat, I could point out how to solve most of the SkyTrans problems, but the idea would not be considered by those pushing it. Instead of having pods, have platforms. Make a platform that people can drive their car onto with gates that lift to keep anything from falling off. This way, instead of riding in a piss filled capsule where forgetting to pick your phone up off the seat means you no longer have a phone; you take your 'pod' with you. You can actually get that last 1 or 2 miles to your destination, and the system has a built in transition system. Of course, people pushing SkyTrans would generally balk at this idea. Why? Because they are not really trying to solve the transportation problem. They are trying to solve the 'car problem'. The thing is, cars are not the problem. Cars are just the best solution for personal transportation that has yet been devised.
You cannot make lasting changes to a person's behavior through threats, manipulation, guilt, and shame.
Whether it is a good idea or not doesn't change the fact that you most certainly can make lasting changes to a person's behavior through threats, manipulation, guilt, and shame. Given that a majority of the population has had lasting changes in behavior do to these things makes it strange that you would even suggest that it can't happen.
"The rest" covers an awful lot. Did they really control for the correlation between people who are anti c-section and various other lifestyle choices vs. people who are pro c-section and their lifestyle choices? I have a hard time believing that they really covered the hundreds of thousands of lifestyle choices that could lead to introduction of bacteria.
Speak for yourself. All it takes is dating the wrong girl, parking in the wrong spot, or making the wrong political statement at a party to become the target of people with enough resources to start tracking you for the purpose of causing you trouble.
Searching thousands of hours of video is quickly becoming a trivial process.
If you run into your ex-girlfriend while in public, there is no real problem. No harm, no foul. It was a chance meeting. If you run into your ex-girlfriend at every single public place you ever go, it is a problem. Your favorite restaurant, your doctor's office, in front of your new girlfriends house, outside your new girlfriend's children's school. This would be very bad and deserving of complaint even though they are all in public places.
The complaint about being photographed and filmed pervasively in public is like complaining that you are being stalked by an ex-girlfriend.
That really is a stereo type that, like many stereo types, had a foundation in truth, but has long since lost it's validity. People really like to hang on to stereo types though.
In my case, I dealt with a stuffed up nose for ~7 years. Every time I would mention it to the doctor, they would tell me that "it was allergies". It didn't matter that it never got better or worse no matter what city I lived in or what time of the year it was. Turns out that 2 months of ultra low carb eating, and my nose cleared up. When I started eating carbohydrates again, it didn't come back. I can't say for sure what the problem was, but I suspect that I had some kind of infection that couldn't survive when I cut out the sugar.
No matter what the problem was, the doctors were completely uninterested in figuring it out.
If I lost the weight my doctor recommended, I would die. Not figuratively. Literally. My doctor recommended that I achieve the weight shown by the BMI chart for my height. That would put my body fat % between 5% (dangerous) and -30% (long dead). EMEL is bumper sticker medicine along with the BMI that goes with it.
There are objective tests. Doctors with a bias won't give them. I went and got hydro-statically weighed. I know that my lean body mass is 169 lbs. My height is 5'11" and at my last physical I was 212 lbs. That put my body fat percentage at 21%. This is at the high end of "ideal". On the other hand, the BMI put me at the high end of "over weight" and only 3 lbs shy of "obese". According to the BMI I should not weigh more than 178 lbs. That would be 5% body fat. This is the point that you start eating into your essential body fat. So, according to the BMI my body fat should be between 5% and -30% body fat. That is right. The BMI says I should be between sick and dead.
At this physical, my doctor is telling me that I need to lose weight because 212 is "a lot of weight". He didn't car that my body fat % was fine. He just kept pointing out that BMI is "the best indicator of healthy weight". He has a bias against fat people. Even worse, his definition of "fat" is completely twisted and dangerous.
Even worse is that I have been 5 lbs over weight. 5 lbs overweight isn't even close to obese. It also isn't "some buff slav". But, what I hear is from dumbasses saying "Your not Mr. Universe, so the BMI is correct."
The hourly vs. deliverable is likely the biggest conflict he is facing. I have found that virtually 100% of the time customers want hourly if the project is done early and by deliverable if it runs late. This problem gets way worse when the customer is another contractor sub-contracting out their own work. The fact that he didn't mention whether his rates are hourly or by deliverable implies that he is playing this game.
Comparing house contractors to software contractors isn't really fair. The reason is the every house is filled with uncountable numbers of 'bugs'. One of the primary skills of housing contractors is to make flaws look like they are 'supposed to be that way'.
I don't have any arguments against pertussis vaccines. My point is to the sub-thread where people lump all vaccines together. The pro-vaccine "nut-jobs" can be just as irrational as the anti-vaccine "nut-jobs". If you read through these threads, most people are not arguing that the pertussis vaccine is a good idea. They are arguing that all vaccines are a inherently a good idea by virtue of being a vaccine.
To repeat, I do not have an argument against the pertussis vaccine. My child has had it. My second child will have it as soon as it comes up to his vaccination schedule, and both I and my wife have had it. Yeah pertussis vaccination!
The chicken pox vaccine happens to be a good example of a bad vaccine. Really, it isn't even the vaccine that is bad. It is the way it is administered. Since it only offers temporary protection, it's use to prevent children from getting chicken pox is likely to produce more suffering and death than it solves by pushing the disease out of the childhood stage and into adulthood where it is 10x more dangerous. Of course, your argument that it can prevent shingles is true. But, the same protection against shingles can be gained by giving the vaccine to people after they have gained natural immunity. It can also be given to people who have not had chicken pox when they become adults, since this is the time that chicken pox increases in deadliness by 10x.
It is sad that your sister died of the disease, but it is still less dangerous than a home cooked meal. Someone's sister has also died of drinking too much water. That doesn't mean that drinking water is a serous threat. Your sister was a tragic edge case. Chicken pox IS something to be taken lightly. That doesn't make your loss less tragic, but it also doesn't make it a serous threat to the general population either.
Rainbow 100! Man I hated that machine. Not because it was a bad machine. It was actually pretty good. I hated it because it was 95% IBM PC compatible. This meant that 30-40% of IBM software would run on it. Too much to ignore, but a constant disappointment when things failed.
The funny thing about that site is that a bunch of the things that it claims made (past tense. It was from a decade ago) are things that are common now in many pieces of software that people rave about the UI.
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of synchronous plans on DSL and cable are business decisions, not technical ones.
Moving surgery to Thursday does not immediately make Friday a day off for surgeons. Thinking that cutting people open with a knife is the only thing a surgeon does is like thinking that typing in code is all that a software developer does.
I am one of those people that would be directly forced to subsidize this "worthless" crowd. I would happily do so out of self interest. If there was a minimum income, we would not necessarily spend any more on the poor than we currently do, but I wouldn't have to deal with bums begging for money at gas stations and in front of grocery stores. It is the same reason I want their to be government funded mental health institutions. Leaving crazy people to wander the streets as the homeless isn't just bad for them. It is bad form me. It is bad for you.
I would support a guaranteed minimum income for the same reason I support the existence of public education, even though I home school my children. Like homeschooling, capitalism offers the opportunity to make things far better, or far worse. It simply puts more power in the hands of the individual, so you move outside of the bell curve.
Public school offers a floor that the bad side of the education bell curve has a hard time moving past. A determined parent can homeschool their kids and get them a worse education that what the child would get in public school, but it requires a determined parent that also has their child's worst interest at heart. (Yes, these people do exist) On the other hand, parents that are apathetic towards their child's education will virtually always just send their kids to public school where the state will give them at least the kind of education that the state offers. Not what I would call great, but good enough that the child can exist in society.
In the same way, a minimum income would offer a floor to how poor the poor can be. It wouldn't prevent anyone from amassing wealth (which is really a different argument all together), but it would keep people from having to live on the streets. It would also weed out the mentally ill homeless from those who have fallen on bad luck as well as from those who are just lazy.
That just addresses the problems of today. Even more important is to recognize that we are on the cusp of simply not needing most people to work. When we can produce what we need, and don't need people to do it, we need an economic system that recognizes this. We need a system that works in that reality.
The problem with PRT is that it still doesn't address the "Who the hell wants to walk 2 miles from the nearest stop to their destination?" question. The solution to mass transit is to accept that people need to go where the transit lines don't go, and a big enough percentage of the population uses their vehicle as an extension of their home or business that expecting people to carry everything they bring this them is unrealistic. The PRT must move a vehicle for it to even start displacing cars.
SkyTran is a good example of why these things don't get done. People focus on ideas that just won't work. Ideas that claim to solve problems by not even acknowledging that the problems exist. The idea has been out there for years. I don't know when I saw it for the first time, but I'm thinking it as been in the decade range. Even with it being out there for a decade, the site doesn't address significant issues:
How does it handle people using the pods as toilets?
How does it handle carrying everything that doesn't fit in that little cab?
How does it handle fitting 100 fifteen foot pods in 1000 feet of track?
How does it get people the last mile to their actual destination?
How does it handle letting people keep their personal belongings in close proximity without having to carry them around?
Etc...
SkyTran is an idea to improve public transportation. It is not an idea to replace cars. As it stands, public transportation is only "good" in places that cars are so popular that the system starts to collapse. As the joke goes "No one drives in New York. There's too much traffic.".
Some of these problems could be mitigate. The ability to call a "Hauler" sized pod when needed could mitigate the problem of the pods being too small to carry your shopping. Other problems really can't with this system. E.g. Last mile.
The biggest problem for these kinds of ideas is that the people pushing them take the stance that all of society should rearrange itself to fit their half baked solution instead of finding a solution that really solves the problem.
Right off the bat, I could point out how to solve most of the SkyTrans problems, but the idea would not be considered by those pushing it. Instead of having pods, have platforms. Make a platform that people can drive their car onto with gates that lift to keep anything from falling off. This way, instead of riding in a piss filled capsule where forgetting to pick your phone up off the seat means you no longer have a phone; you take your 'pod' with you. You can actually get that last 1 or 2 miles to your destination, and the system has a built in transition system. Of course, people pushing SkyTrans would generally balk at this idea. Why? Because they are not really trying to solve the transportation problem. They are trying to solve the 'car problem'. The thing is, cars are not the problem. Cars are just the best solution for personal transportation that has yet been devised.
You cannot make lasting changes to a person's behavior through threats, manipulation, guilt, and shame.
Whether it is a good idea or not doesn't change the fact that you most certainly can make lasting changes to a person's behavior through threats, manipulation, guilt, and shame. Given that a majority of the population has had lasting changes in behavior do to these things makes it strange that you would even suggest that it can't happen.
"The rest" covers an awful lot. Did they really control for the correlation between people who are anti c-section and various other lifestyle choices vs. people who are pro c-section and their lifestyle choices? I have a hard time believing that they really covered the hundreds of thousands of lifestyle choices that could lead to introduction of bacteria.
Speak for yourself. All it takes is dating the wrong girl, parking in the wrong spot, or making the wrong political statement at a party to become the target of people with enough resources to start tracking you for the purpose of causing you trouble.
Searching thousands of hours of video is quickly becoming a trivial process.
I always find it funny when stores have a sign saying no photos, and other signs that have QR codes on them. Stores don't know what they want.
If you run into your ex-girlfriend while in public, there is no real problem. No harm, no foul. It was a chance meeting. If you run into your ex-girlfriend at every single public place you ever go, it is a problem. Your favorite restaurant, your doctor's office, in front of your new girlfriends house, outside your new girlfriend's children's school. This would be very bad and deserving of complaint even though they are all in public places.
The complaint about being photographed and filmed pervasively in public is like complaining that you are being stalked by an ex-girlfriend.
That really is a stereo type that, like many stereo types, had a foundation in truth, but has long since lost it's validity. People really like to hang on to stereo types though.
In my case, I dealt with a stuffed up nose for ~7 years. Every time I would mention it to the doctor, they would tell me that "it was allergies". It didn't matter that it never got better or worse no matter what city I lived in or what time of the year it was. Turns out that 2 months of ultra low carb eating, and my nose cleared up. When I started eating carbohydrates again, it didn't come back. I can't say for sure what the problem was, but I suspect that I had some kind of infection that couldn't survive when I cut out the sugar.
No matter what the problem was, the doctors were completely uninterested in figuring it out.
If I lost the weight my doctor recommended, I would die. Not figuratively. Literally. My doctor recommended that I achieve the weight shown by the BMI chart for my height. That would put my body fat % between 5% (dangerous) and -30% (long dead). EMEL is bumper sticker medicine along with the BMI that goes with it.
Go to a GP with any general illness and 99999 times out of 100000 they will diagnose it as either the flu or allergies.
There are objective tests. Doctors with a bias won't give them. I went and got hydro-statically weighed. I know that my lean body mass is 169 lbs. My height is 5'11" and at my last physical I was 212 lbs. That put my body fat percentage at 21%. This is at the high end of "ideal". On the other hand, the BMI put me at the high end of "over weight" and only 3 lbs shy of "obese". According to the BMI I should not weigh more than 178 lbs. That would be 5% body fat. This is the point that you start eating into your essential body fat. So, according to the BMI my body fat should be between 5% and -30% body fat. That is right. The BMI says I should be between sick and dead.
At this physical, my doctor is telling me that I need to lose weight because 212 is "a lot of weight". He didn't car that my body fat % was fine. He just kept pointing out that BMI is "the best indicator of healthy weight". He has a bias against fat people. Even worse, his definition of "fat" is completely twisted and dangerous.
Even worse is that I have been 5 lbs over weight. 5 lbs overweight isn't even close to obese. It also isn't "some buff slav". But, what I hear is from dumbasses saying "Your not Mr. Universe, so the BMI is correct."
The way I heard it, it was more like two drunk guys trying to hold each other up.
This is a problem that the software industry faces. A level of perfection is expected that doesn't exist in any other industry.
The hourly vs. deliverable is likely the biggest conflict he is facing. I have found that virtually 100% of the time customers want hourly if the project is done early and by deliverable if it runs late. This problem gets way worse when the customer is another contractor sub-contracting out their own work. The fact that he didn't mention whether his rates are hourly or by deliverable implies that he is playing this game.
Comparing house contractors to software contractors isn't really fair. The reason is the every house is filled with uncountable numbers of 'bugs'. One of the primary skills of housing contractors is to make flaws look like they are 'supposed to be that way'.
So, in other words, it is available to you, but you don't want to pay the price of getting it.
I don't have any arguments against pertussis vaccines. My point is to the sub-thread where people lump all vaccines together. The pro-vaccine "nut-jobs" can be just as irrational as the anti-vaccine "nut-jobs". If you read through these threads, most people are not arguing that the pertussis vaccine is a good idea. They are arguing that all vaccines are a inherently a good idea by virtue of being a vaccine.
To repeat, I do not have an argument against the pertussis vaccine. My child has had it. My second child will have it as soon as it comes up to his vaccination schedule, and both I and my wife have had it. Yeah pertussis vaccination!
The chicken pox vaccine happens to be a good example of a bad vaccine. Really, it isn't even the vaccine that is bad. It is the way it is administered. Since it only offers temporary protection, it's use to prevent children from getting chicken pox is likely to produce more suffering and death than it solves by pushing the disease out of the childhood stage and into adulthood where it is 10x more dangerous. Of course, your argument that it can prevent shingles is true. But, the same protection against shingles can be gained by giving the vaccine to people after they have gained natural immunity. It can also be given to people who have not had chicken pox when they become adults, since this is the time that chicken pox increases in deadliness by 10x.
It is sad that your sister died of the disease, but it is still less dangerous than a home cooked meal. Someone's sister has also died of drinking too much water. That doesn't mean that drinking water is a serous threat. Your sister was a tragic edge case. Chicken pox IS something to be taken lightly. That doesn't make your loss less tragic, but it also doesn't make it a serous threat to the general population either.
Rainbow 100! Man I hated that machine. Not because it was a bad machine. It was actually pretty good. I hated it because it was 95% IBM PC compatible. This meant that 30-40% of IBM software would run on it. Too much to ignore, but a constant disappointment when things failed.
The funny thing about that site is that a bunch of the things that it claims made (past tense. It was from a decade ago) are things that are common now in many pieces of software that people rave about the UI.