others just put them on display by the hostess podium and sell them so fast it doesn't matter that they're slowly dying in the air-conditioning/dim artificial light.
Well, I guess relative to how much it did the same thing in a box inside a dark, refrigerated shipping-container travelling half way around the world is an important consideration.
"Slowly dying" when it was harvested yesterday instead of, oh, a few weeks ago is a hell of an improvement.
Oh, that and e coli and listeria and other nasty crap is far less likely to creep in along the way due to industrial processing.
Of course there are working poor who are even more time-poor than the middle class, it's hard to characterize a whole society of hundreds of millions of people in a 25 word or less sound bite.
The only middle-class I know who have time to game the system are single earner partnerships; unfortunately, I am in a single earner partnership where the non-earning partner has more time sucking responsibilities at home with the kids than the money earner does with work, so we don't get to game the system too much.
We've got a local (Florida) company that grows salad greens in portable containers that are shipped living to the restaurant - so the greens aren't harvested until the salad is prepared. The "better" restaurants keep the greens in plant-friendly sunlit / well watered locations, others just put them on display by the hostess podium and sell them so fast it doesn't matter that they're slowly dying in the air-conditioning/dim artificial light.
I see this "choices you made in the past put you where you are now" attitude a lot, especially in political debate. This is, of course, true - and it is also true that choices (or circumstances) of your parents, their parents, etc. also influence your starting point and therefore your chances of "a good life."
What I think is lacking in today's "American Dream," is the ability for anyone - regardless of present circumstance - to pick themselves up and realistically turn their life around to achieve "middle class" or better status within the next 10 years. Too many people are too held down by poverty to realistically do anything about it before they die, and this can happen to them before they even reach the age of high school graduation.
If you have to work 40+ hours a week to keep a safe roof over your head with decent clothing and food to eat, there's no realistic capacity to also pay for a valuable education that opens doors to a better job. I'm not saying that a higher education should be a requirement for a decent paying middle class job, high school or equivalent should be enough, but it mostly isn't. Throw in a couple of children, part time jobs that require travel expenses to/from work and have dynamic/unpredictable schedules, medical expenses and the other realities of living poor and the idea of night school becomes less and less realistic.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, people hit the lottery every week, and get other fortunate breaks much more often, but it's not something that people can just "put their mind to" and make happen on any kind of realistic/regular basis.
But driving is fun, it makes people feel powerful and rich, classless and free (but, to quote John Lennon: they're still f-ing peasants as far as I can see) in comparison, chopping vegetables in the kitchen makes people feel like their peasant parents - better to go have some kid "serve them" fries than to peel their own potatoes.
I've seen a few (precious few) TV/movie portrayals of super-rich/powerful characters who take the time to cook their own food - simple ingredients in a simple (elegant/expensive, but simple) kitchen. If the media would reinforce this more, and playboy spies in exotic sports cars less, it might help to shape perception of cooking as something desirable for everyone, and not just the assigned task of the servant class.
I agree on all points, and add that: the poor have free time in which to game the system, the rich have paid advocates who spend all their time gaming the system, the middle class are too busy working to take the time to game the system.
Our grocery store periodically mails out $5 unrestricted coupons (just buy $30 or more of _anything_ during a two week time window), and we regularly spend $500 a month in that store, but we don't have the spare time and energy to remember to grab the coupon off the refrigerator half the time before it expires. This is our life - we have enough money to meet our needs, but not enough time to take advantage of complex schemes.
Do you want those eggs from factory chickens, or "free range birds"? Is that flour GMO and pesticide free? How many residual growth hormones are in that butter? What's the ammonia/chlorine/heavy metal content of that tap water?Whole chickens are cheap because they are raised in factories pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, genetically selected for fast growth (check how long it takes to grow a "roaster" chicken today vs. 1965). Beef and bones run the same antibiotic/growth hormone problems already mentioned above. Commercial bananas are a monoculture crop that is teetering on the edge of global failure, again.
I'll give you bulk rice and beans, onions and local vegetables - that is still a cheap and healthy diet for people who have the time and resources to cook them, but you need to be careful how you do it if you're not supplementing with protein from actual meat.
The farm bureau has been tracking "national food day" for many years, that day of the year when the average family has earned enough money to pay for their average food requirement for the year - if I recall correctly, it used to be out in March or April in the 1950s and I think it has pushed back to mid January now. That's a clear marker of economic progress in the delivery of quantity calories, but fails to account for the quality of those calories and the healthiness of how they get delivered. If you shop around today and only buy food with the same healthy quality as was "average" in the 1950s, you'll probably be paying the average family income until June or July to get that food.
This is progress, yes, but people are still dying of starvation and malnutrition related disease - even in the "first world."
Now that food science has made the resources sufficiently plentiful, it seems high time to develop the political/economic science to distribute them better.
It was clear enough, they were just going for all or none, which seems to be a common business strategy among those who can afford to live with no income for a few years - better to try for the private island and jet and fail than to eek along and manage a stable, profitable enterprise in the community.
Tips are a funny thing, when I travel solo internationally tipping 20%+ on food/drink is such a trivial thing compared to the cost of the travel/room that I don't really think about it or mind - and it does seem to surprise and please the staff in places like Europe... when I'm eating out with the family (4) and we're ordering water to drink and getting the kids meals free combined with adult meals from the cheaper end of the menu, again 20%+ only seems fair for local wait staff who work for tips. On the other hand, when we go out as a family of 4 and order a couple of drinks and appetizers and a dessert and pay for all the entrees - 15% on that meal can be more than twice as much as 20% on the cheaper approach, and the wait staff isn't really working much more to bring the extra food.
All in all, I wish that the staff earned a decent living without tips and that a $5 or $10 tip would be presented only rarely, for exceptional service, rather than a $7 to $15 tip expected just for showing up and failing to insult you to your face.
In that particular location, there were 7 fast food restaurants - though the present local market only supported about 5 profitably, so a couple of times a year one would go out of business, then another, then someone would come along and open a new restaurant in one of the empty buildings - snatch business from the 5 survivors because they were new, followed a few months later by another newbie in the other vacancy, then a couple of the older restaurants would go out of business within a few months - this cycle repeated for decades. My "open late" restaurant was trying to become one of the survivors with their "open to 10" in a town that rolled up the sidewalks at 8... they went down about a year later.
The efficiency of fast food restaurants (basically: number of customers per hour) varies dramatically. I worked in one years ago that did so little business in the last 2 hours before closing (8-10) that you could do a head count, multiply by minimum wage, and see that the labor cost already exceeded the gross income - then you can add in the cost of electricity to run the A/C, lights and fryer, cost of food, etc. and they probably should have been closing that place around 7pm, if they were interested in operating at a profit.
I guess I was implying that: if you haven't noticed this asteroid falling from the sky toward the mobile development picnic, you're obviously not doing serious mobile development and therefore should not care.
Also, there's the "if you can't Google a name like Xamarin and come up with a relevant description of what it is and why you should care" that, again, Xamarin is irrelevant to you.
Wait staff works for tips, and I doubt a change in minimum wage will change this. If a restaurant turns $3K/night in income, an increase in back room labor costs from $60 to $170 shouldn't hit the cost of a $15 entree too hard, as you say: maybe $0.30.
However, in places that operate entirely on minimum wage workers, tripling the cost of labor is going to have a noticeable effect on the cost of served food - your $4 value meal might have to jump to $5.
One of the chain "sit down" restaurants around here has started putting tablet-like things on the tables. A waiter/waitress still comes around (and balloon artists circulate and make animals for the kids on weekends), but this tablet allows you to do things like enter orders for dessert, additional food, check your bill, and swipe and pay without waiting for the waitress to "come and serve you." All in all, I think it's an improvement - now, service times are maddeningly slow in most restaurants like this (5 minutes wait to ask for the check, 5 minutes wait for the check, 5 minutes wait to get the check picked up after you look it over, 5 minutes wait to get the credit card slip back to sign, replaced with 30 seconds of "self service" on the tablet) Certainly, it would be nice to have more wait staff, bigger spacing between tables, and faster human service instead, but that will come at a price - the automated option will get you the same food you get today for less money and less waiting on your part.
A lot of this boils down to reporter bias... crime dropped dramatically in just 2 years in the city of Miami, due to a shift in reporting methods, actual crime probably increased during that same time.
Yes, jobs are created (including mine) but do we really want this kind of economic activity? It's like saying that the VA Hospital system is an economic boon because of all the people employed there, so let's go have some more messy wars with lots of amputations and chronic psychological problems.
The poor don't have Sharper Image ionizing air filters pumping ozone into their bedroom at night, while HEPA filters on the A/C system pull out larger particles...
That's what NUCs are good for, in my book. This one is a little bigger with that 9" dimension, and I'd be concerned about the 45W TDP - I like the 15W Skylake i7s much better, but if you need more gaming horsepower...
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Well, I guess relative to how much it did the same thing in a box inside a dark, refrigerated shipping-container travelling half way around the world is an important consideration.
"Slowly dying" when it was harvested yesterday instead of, oh, a few weeks ago is a hell of an improvement.
Oh, that and e coli and listeria and other nasty crap is far less likely to creep in along the way due to industrial processing.
Yep, they're quite tasty too.
Of course there are working poor who are even more time-poor than the middle class, it's hard to characterize a whole society of hundreds of millions of people in a 25 word or less sound bite.
The only middle-class I know who have time to game the system are single earner partnerships; unfortunately, I am in a single earner partnership where the non-earning partner has more time sucking responsibilities at home with the kids than the money earner does with work, so we don't get to game the system too much.
We've got a local (Florida) company that grows salad greens in portable containers that are shipped living to the restaurant - so the greens aren't harvested until the salad is prepared. The "better" restaurants keep the greens in plant-friendly sunlit / well watered locations, others just put them on display by the hostess podium and sell them so fast it doesn't matter that they're slowly dying in the air-conditioning/dim artificial light.
I see this "choices you made in the past put you where you are now" attitude a lot, especially in political debate. This is, of course, true - and it is also true that choices (or circumstances) of your parents, their parents, etc. also influence your starting point and therefore your chances of "a good life."
What I think is lacking in today's "American Dream," is the ability for anyone - regardless of present circumstance - to pick themselves up and realistically turn their life around to achieve "middle class" or better status within the next 10 years. Too many people are too held down by poverty to realistically do anything about it before they die, and this can happen to them before they even reach the age of high school graduation.
If you have to work 40+ hours a week to keep a safe roof over your head with decent clothing and food to eat, there's no realistic capacity to also pay for a valuable education that opens doors to a better job. I'm not saying that a higher education should be a requirement for a decent paying middle class job, high school or equivalent should be enough, but it mostly isn't. Throw in a couple of children, part time jobs that require travel expenses to/from work and have dynamic/unpredictable schedules, medical expenses and the other realities of living poor and the idea of night school becomes less and less realistic.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, people hit the lottery every week, and get other fortunate breaks much more often, but it's not something that people can just "put their mind to" and make happen on any kind of realistic/regular basis.
But driving is fun, it makes people feel powerful and rich, classless and free (but, to quote John Lennon: they're still f-ing peasants as far as I can see) in comparison, chopping vegetables in the kitchen makes people feel like their peasant parents - better to go have some kid "serve them" fries than to peel their own potatoes.
I've seen a few (precious few) TV/movie portrayals of super-rich/powerful characters who take the time to cook their own food - simple ingredients in a simple (elegant/expensive, but simple) kitchen. If the media would reinforce this more, and playboy spies in exotic sports cars less, it might help to shape perception of cooking as something desirable for everyone, and not just the assigned task of the servant class.
I agree on all points, and add that: the poor have free time in which to game the system, the rich have paid advocates who spend all their time gaming the system, the middle class are too busy working to take the time to game the system.
Our grocery store periodically mails out $5 unrestricted coupons (just buy $30 or more of _anything_ during a two week time window), and we regularly spend $500 a month in that store, but we don't have the spare time and energy to remember to grab the coupon off the refrigerator half the time before it expires. This is our life - we have enough money to meet our needs, but not enough time to take advantage of complex schemes.
Do you want those eggs from factory chickens, or "free range birds"? Is that flour GMO and pesticide free? How many residual growth hormones are in that butter? What's the ammonia/chlorine/heavy metal content of that tap water?Whole chickens are cheap because they are raised in factories pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, genetically selected for fast growth (check how long it takes to grow a "roaster" chicken today vs. 1965). Beef and bones run the same antibiotic/growth hormone problems already mentioned above. Commercial bananas are a monoculture crop that is teetering on the edge of global failure, again.
I'll give you bulk rice and beans, onions and local vegetables - that is still a cheap and healthy diet for people who have the time and resources to cook them, but you need to be careful how you do it if you're not supplementing with protein from actual meat.
The farm bureau has been tracking "national food day" for many years, that day of the year when the average family has earned enough money to pay for their average food requirement for the year - if I recall correctly, it used to be out in March or April in the 1950s and I think it has pushed back to mid January now. That's a clear marker of economic progress in the delivery of quantity calories, but fails to account for the quality of those calories and the healthiness of how they get delivered. If you shop around today and only buy food with the same healthy quality as was "average" in the 1950s, you'll probably be paying the average family income until June or July to get that food.
This is progress, yes, but people are still dying of starvation and malnutrition related disease - even in the "first world."
Now that food science has made the resources sufficiently plentiful, it seems high time to develop the political/economic science to distribute them better.
It was clear enough, they were just going for all or none, which seems to be a common business strategy among those who can afford to live with no income for a few years - better to try for the private island and jet and fail than to eek along and manage a stable, profitable enterprise in the community.
Tips are a funny thing, when I travel solo internationally tipping 20%+ on food/drink is such a trivial thing compared to the cost of the travel/room that I don't really think about it or mind - and it does seem to surprise and please the staff in places like Europe... when I'm eating out with the family (4) and we're ordering water to drink and getting the kids meals free combined with adult meals from the cheaper end of the menu, again 20%+ only seems fair for local wait staff who work for tips. On the other hand, when we go out as a family of 4 and order a couple of drinks and appetizers and a dessert and pay for all the entrees - 15% on that meal can be more than twice as much as 20% on the cheaper approach, and the wait staff isn't really working much more to bring the extra food.
All in all, I wish that the staff earned a decent living without tips and that a $5 or $10 tip would be presented only rarely, for exceptional service, rather than a $7 to $15 tip expected just for showing up and failing to insult you to your face.
In that particular location, there were 7 fast food restaurants - though the present local market only supported about 5 profitably, so a couple of times a year one would go out of business, then another, then someone would come along and open a new restaurant in one of the empty buildings - snatch business from the 5 survivors because they were new, followed a few months later by another newbie in the other vacancy, then a couple of the older restaurants would go out of business within a few months - this cycle repeated for decades. My "open late" restaurant was trying to become one of the survivors with their "open to 10" in a town that rolled up the sidewalks at 8... they went down about a year later.
The efficiency of fast food restaurants (basically: number of customers per hour) varies dramatically. I worked in one years ago that did so little business in the last 2 hours before closing (8-10) that you could do a head count, multiply by minimum wage, and see that the labor cost already exceeded the gross income - then you can add in the cost of electricity to run the A/C, lights and fryer, cost of food, etc. and they probably should have been closing that place around 7pm, if they were interested in operating at a profit.
I guess I was implying that: if you haven't noticed this asteroid falling from the sky toward the mobile development picnic, you're obviously not doing serious mobile development and therefore should not care.
Also, there's the "if you can't Google a name like Xamarin and come up with a relevant description of what it is and why you should care" that, again, Xamarin is irrelevant to you.
What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?
If you have to ask, you shouldn't care.
Vendomats came out in the 1950s, with people behind the doors, but there are fewer and fewer people needed as time goes on.
Wait staff works for tips, and I doubt a change in minimum wage will change this. If a restaurant turns $3K/night in income, an increase in back room labor costs from $60 to $170 shouldn't hit the cost of a $15 entree too hard, as you say: maybe $0.30.
However, in places that operate entirely on minimum wage workers, tripling the cost of labor is going to have a noticeable effect on the cost of served food - your $4 value meal might have to jump to $5.
One of the chain "sit down" restaurants around here has started putting tablet-like things on the tables. A waiter/waitress still comes around (and balloon artists circulate and make animals for the kids on weekends), but this tablet allows you to do things like enter orders for dessert, additional food, check your bill, and swipe and pay without waiting for the waitress to "come and serve you." All in all, I think it's an improvement - now, service times are maddeningly slow in most restaurants like this (5 minutes wait to ask for the check, 5 minutes wait for the check, 5 minutes wait to get the check picked up after you look it over, 5 minutes wait to get the credit card slip back to sign, replaced with 30 seconds of "self service" on the tablet) Certainly, it would be nice to have more wait staff, bigger spacing between tables, and faster human service instead, but that will come at a price - the automated option will get you the same food you get today for less money and less waiting on your part.
Write a grant and go do it.
A lot of this boils down to reporter bias... crime dropped dramatically in just 2 years in the city of Miami, due to a shift in reporting methods, actual crime probably increased during that same time.
Yes, jobs are created (including mine) but do we really want this kind of economic activity? It's like saying that the VA Hospital system is an economic boon because of all the people employed there, so let's go have some more messy wars with lots of amputations and chronic psychological problems.
The poor don't have Sharper Image ionizing air filters pumping ozone into their bedroom at night, while HEPA filters on the A/C system pull out larger particles...
Call it "dark net, home of criminals and terrorists" and what do you _think_ public opinion will be.
Call it virtual private networks, home to banking transactions, corporate and personal communications - then what's the response?
Both are encrypted and impenetrable to normal eavesdropping methods.
It's about liability exposure - cars expose their owners, buses expose municipalities and large corporations.
PoE?
That's what NUCs are good for, in my book. This one is a little bigger with that 9" dimension, and I'd be concerned about the 45W TDP - I like the 15W Skylake i7s much better, but if you need more gaming horsepower...