Whether or not you "need" a lawyer is largely defined by how you live today. If you reach a certain level of wealth, people will target you with legal actions to take some of that away, and thus you need lawyers to handle that noise, but you pay parasites to represent your interests unless you enjoy spending your time in court.
If you're not in the top 5-10% of the wealth strata, this tends not to happen (all generalizations, of course), we seem to be living a little below that level and have had a bottom feeder target us over a matter of $200... the people "above" me have similar stuff happen all the time, people living more modestly seem not to have it happen much at all.
Of course, there are also "people's court" people out there who go around having small claims conflicts all the time... those mostly seem to be a matter of choice, doing business with people who don't make good on their contracts being one of the prime choices that lands those people in court... in my experience you can generally tell before getting into a business relationship whether or not the other party is going to do something so blatantly out of line that court action might make things better, and in my experience there's rarely been a compelling reason to get into one of those situations. Also generalizations, of course, and some people live the majority of their lives in that mess of bad actors - though from where I stand it looks like a choice they could choose not to make in the first place.
Agreed, though I notice that at most levels of higher administration (e.g. when you start to pass the level of having 100 or so reports) the art of the job is in knowing what to ignore, when to trust your direct reports and when to call BS and dig deeper. Representation is not as demanding as administration, but how this can possibly work when you represent ~800,000, or millions in the federal senate, is beyond my understanding.
I think the system would be improved with simplification, and I would vote for people who want to do that, but the very process of simplification would create enough change that it would be heavily swayed by special interests pushing to make the simplifications benefit themselves.
Read some Kissinger, or at least Roosevelt's big stick doctrine. The US uses its armed forces to project force and influence international politics and policy.
Not everybody is influenced by the threat of nuclear annihilation.
>There should also be no need for lawyers to interpret the law and the processes of justice
Except that lawyers have a vested interest to perpetuate their value to society, and so they keep the system obscure and complex.
500 years ago, most people absolutely needed a lawyer because they lacked the education and exposure to concepts of the law. Today, we should be actively working to reduce the need for lawyers, but I don't see it happening in the courts, or any arena where "specialists" make money by representing people's interests (especially Real Estate sales).
The service of publishing proposed legislation on the internet? It's definitely cheaper that way than shuttling paper copies to all concerned, and probably cheaper than whatever they're doing now to exchange the changes behind closed doors before the vote.
Only 223 pages? That's a tiny fraction of the legislation that will be put to vote in a single session. Our system is like a black hole, and it's beginning to accrete mass at an alarming rate.
There isn't enough time in a Federal session to read a single big bill aloud. I agree, though, legislation shouldn't be so complex and frankly obscure as it is today.
I don't know about California state legislation, but Federal bills are literally unreadable. You'd need a staff of dozens, all experienced in the subject matter, studying the bill to have a chance of understanding it within 72 hours.
Do not replace them! The new ones are much more fragile than the original iPads and minis. We let our 8 year olds have free reign with an original iPad and a mini, the original iPad never broke (except by Apple updating its software into non-functionality), the original mini lasted through drops, kicks, dirt, and every form of abuse except dunking. After a bath around year three, we replaced it, new one was cheaper to purchase, but only lasted a couple of months before it was cracked into oblivion. New replacement is no longer given to the children to use without full-time supervision.
There's a story here, why? Because you're talking about it... people are reading it, some percentage will dismiss it as garbage, some percentage won't.
Perceived basis in fact isn't necessary to make an impression on (persuade) people, it helps lend weight to an impression (persuade more effectively) with some, but in my experience, the majority don't know or even care about hard data and logical conclusions backing up assertions.
Obvious, perhaps - factored into TCO? Probably not. Cleaning high pitch roofs (as would be good solar collectors in upper latitudes) is non-trivial work, ergo costly.
Lower pitch roofs can be walked on and thus more easily cleaned, but walking on glass? I know it's not recommended for ceramic tile.
Leaves piled on a solar collector may actually extend its ability to produce power, by protecting it from the harmful rays of the sun, but it's not adding value to its output.
If you're going to sell a premium product at a premium price, you'll have to do these kind of "toughness" demos to have any chance in the marketplace.
Give it 20 years or so, when competing manufacturers enter the market they'll start cheaping out the panels until they last more or less just as long as "conventional" roofing.
There's also all kinds of hail - I used to get caught outside in Florida afternoon thunderstorms waiting to be picked up after school - those were usually more slush-balls than stones, though some of them were hard enough to bounce off the asphalt.
It's also a matter of scale - the metal panels of cars are quite thin compared to their glass. And then there's the classic flexible vs brittle contrast - metal will flex and permanently deform, while glass will flex and rebound - until it flexes so far that it shatters.
Hit a glass panel with a big (fast) enough hailstone and it will break - it's just a matter of making the glass strong enough to survive the typical hailstones encountered within a 50 or 100 or 500 year period (depending on how much you are willing to pay now to not have to replace your roof later.)
The fun part of this is changing weather patterns, how accurately can we predict the size and speed of hailstones 50 years from now? Since Elon's shingles are a brand new concept with essentially no competition, if he's got any class at all he'll over-design them so that they are more robust than they need to be. 15-20 years after they gain significant adoption in the marketplace, competition will shave their structural integrity down and down, saving a few cents on production costs in order to be the low price leader in the marketplace and simultaneously creating a shingle replacement labor market which actually costs far more than stronger (thicker) glass shingles that last twice as long would.
It's not about the face in the camera, it's about the entourage of political appointees who are going to get choice postings after the election. Who has a better string of lackeys following them?
My assessment is that Clinton's lackeys are more experienced and will lead to a smoother transition from Obama's... Trump will be putting in a lot of people who have absolutely no idea what they are doing, in over their heads, and a few who shake things up for the better - on balance, risky and unlikely to lead to a better outcome overall.
Neither of them are humans, at least not of the 99.9% variety. Attempting to judge them as such is a waste of time.
Or, you know, vet the vendors your are buying from before doing that patented "one click to buy and ship."
Amazon (as the name implies) has a wide variety of vendors - if you're getting Disney DVDs for $4 a piece from Hong Kong Joe, it doesn't take too much insight to predict that they're going to be rips. Might take a little more sophistication for cable selection, and in the Apple space, there may just not be good 3rd party cables out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether or not you "need" a lawyer is largely defined by how you live today. If you reach a certain level of wealth, people will target you with legal actions to take some of that away, and thus you need lawyers to handle that noise, but you pay parasites to represent your interests unless you enjoy spending your time in court.
If you're not in the top 5-10% of the wealth strata, this tends not to happen (all generalizations, of course), we seem to be living a little below that level and have had a bottom feeder target us over a matter of $200... the people "above" me have similar stuff happen all the time, people living more modestly seem not to have it happen much at all.
Of course, there are also "people's court" people out there who go around having small claims conflicts all the time... those mostly seem to be a matter of choice, doing business with people who don't make good on their contracts being one of the prime choices that lands those people in court... in my experience you can generally tell before getting into a business relationship whether or not the other party is going to do something so blatantly out of line that court action might make things better, and in my experience there's rarely been a compelling reason to get into one of those situations. Also generalizations, of course, and some people live the majority of their lives in that mess of bad actors - though from where I stand it looks like a choice they could choose not to make in the first place.
Agreed, though I notice that at most levels of higher administration (e.g. when you start to pass the level of having 100 or so reports) the art of the job is in knowing what to ignore, when to trust your direct reports and when to call BS and dig deeper. Representation is not as demanding as administration, but how this can possibly work when you represent ~800,000, or millions in the federal senate, is beyond my understanding.
I think the system would be improved with simplification, and I would vote for people who want to do that, but the very process of simplification would create enough change that it would be heavily swayed by special interests pushing to make the simplifications benefit themselves.
As it was, as it should be, and as it will be when society falls again.
Read some Kissinger, or at least Roosevelt's big stick doctrine. The US uses its armed forces to project force and influence international politics and policy.
Not everybody is influenced by the threat of nuclear annihilation.
>There should also be no need for lawyers to interpret the law and the processes of justice
Except that lawyers have a vested interest to perpetuate their value to society, and so they keep the system obscure and complex.
500 years ago, most people absolutely needed a lawyer because they lacked the education and exposure to concepts of the law. Today, we should be actively working to reduce the need for lawyers, but I don't see it happening in the courts, or any arena where "specialists" make money by representing people's interests (especially Real Estate sales).
The service of publishing proposed legislation on the internet? It's definitely cheaper that way than shuttling paper copies to all concerned, and probably cheaper than whatever they're doing now to exchange the changes behind closed doors before the vote.
Oh, you want actual transparency? That's several iterations into a brighter future than I think we're actually heading for.
Only 223 pages? That's a tiny fraction of the legislation that will be put to vote in a single session. Our system is like a black hole, and it's beginning to accrete mass at an alarming rate.
There isn't enough time in a Federal session to read a single big bill aloud. I agree, though, legislation shouldn't be so complex and frankly obscure as it is today.
I don't know about California state legislation, but Federal bills are literally unreadable. You'd need a staff of dozens, all experienced in the subject matter, studying the bill to have a chance of understanding it within 72 hours.
Unbelievable.
Giant drums could provide the booms...
Do not replace them! The new ones are much more fragile than the original iPads and minis. We let our 8 year olds have free reign with an original iPad and a mini, the original iPad never broke (except by Apple updating its software into non-functionality), the original mini lasted through drops, kicks, dirt, and every form of abuse except dunking. After a bath around year three, we replaced it, new one was cheaper to purchase, but only lasted a couple of months before it was cracked into oblivion. New replacement is no longer given to the children to use without full-time supervision.
They are stacking up around here - more than one tablet per person, and that's not counting phones/phablets.
The new ones no longer do anything the old ones wouldn't do, except break more easily.
There's a story here, why? Because you're talking about it... people are reading it, some percentage will dismiss it as garbage, some percentage won't.
Perceived basis in fact isn't necessary to make an impression on (persuade) people, it helps lend weight to an impression (persuade more effectively) with some, but in my experience, the majority don't know or even care about hard data and logical conclusions backing up assertions.
Obvious, perhaps - factored into TCO? Probably not. Cleaning high pitch roofs (as would be good solar collectors in upper latitudes) is non-trivial work, ergo costly.
Lower pitch roofs can be walked on and thus more easily cleaned, but walking on glass? I know it's not recommended for ceramic tile.
Leaves piled on a solar collector may actually extend its ability to produce power, by protecting it from the harmful rays of the sun, but it's not adding value to its output.
And the dirt and mildew and everything else that occurs on roofs that blocks sunlight.
If you're going to sell a premium product at a premium price, you'll have to do these kind of "toughness" demos to have any chance in the marketplace.
Give it 20 years or so, when competing manufacturers enter the market they'll start cheaping out the panels until they last more or less just as long as "conventional" roofing.
There's also all kinds of hail - I used to get caught outside in Florida afternoon thunderstorms waiting to be picked up after school - those were usually more slush-balls than stones, though some of them were hard enough to bounce off the asphalt.
It's also a matter of scale - the metal panels of cars are quite thin compared to their glass. And then there's the classic flexible vs brittle contrast - metal will flex and permanently deform, while glass will flex and rebound - until it flexes so far that it shatters.
Hit a glass panel with a big (fast) enough hailstone and it will break - it's just a matter of making the glass strong enough to survive the typical hailstones encountered within a 50 or 100 or 500 year period (depending on how much you are willing to pay now to not have to replace your roof later.)
The fun part of this is changing weather patterns, how accurately can we predict the size and speed of hailstones 50 years from now? Since Elon's shingles are a brand new concept with essentially no competition, if he's got any class at all he'll over-design them so that they are more robust than they need to be. 15-20 years after they gain significant adoption in the marketplace, competition will shave their structural integrity down and down, saving a few cents on production costs in order to be the low price leader in the marketplace and simultaneously creating a shingle replacement labor market which actually costs far more than stronger (thicker) glass shingles that last twice as long would.
I sincerely hope he's too old for the US public to consider electing him in 2020.
Only a fool would take that job, there are far better ways to spend 4-8 years of a life.
I think Trump is purposely throwing the election in order to cry foul, spew outrage, and sell his memoirs.
It's not about the face in the camera, it's about the entourage of political appointees who are going to get choice postings after the election. Who has a better string of lackeys following them?
My assessment is that Clinton's lackeys are more experienced and will lead to a smoother transition from Obama's... Trump will be putting in a lot of people who have absolutely no idea what they are doing, in over their heads, and a few who shake things up for the better - on balance, risky and unlikely to lead to a better outcome overall.
Neither of them are humans, at least not of the 99.9% variety. Attempting to judge them as such is a waste of time.
Or, you know, vet the vendors your are buying from before doing that patented "one click to buy and ship."
Amazon (as the name implies) has a wide variety of vendors - if you're getting Disney DVDs for $4 a piece from Hong Kong Joe, it doesn't take too much insight to predict that they're going to be rips. Might take a little more sophistication for cable selection, and in the Apple space, there may just not be good 3rd party cables out there.