Agreed. Even worse, Slashdot's comment system effectively removed the troll from the thread, but the result is that the troll responses now look like they are responses to my post. It actually took me a bit to figure out why it seemed like someone was so angry with me.
They need assurances because the executive branch has a history of holding "unconventional interpretations" of our own laws, then avoiding judicial oversight by slapping gag orders on all potential defendants so no one has standing in court. The also invented a parallel court system for these cases, where no judge ever says no to anything.
Then they're shocked when one or two operatives grow a conscience and find a way to shine a light on the situation - so they pursue them to the ends of the earth and threaten them with the death penalty.
Me saying that you have to show up to work and not be half-naked if you want to continue to be a sub-contractor is NOT outrageous. It's the norm.
That's still within the boundaries of "getting it done" as a form of risk management. A worker that shows up inappropriately clothed is at risk of being arrested or being kicked off site by a helicopter mom. That's similar to a requirement for a contractor to have proper insurance. The insurance doesn't affect the result of a typical job, but is does affect the result of a job that has gone wrong.
Also, as I said earlier, there are a lot of subjective areas to contract law in almost all jurisdictions. Since the penalty for imposing a restriction that isn't allowed is so great, it's best to steer very clear of the line.
If you only want them cleaned to your satisfaction - no. If you want them to wear gloves manufactured by your brother-in-law's company - yes. Any messing in the "how it gets done" is out of bounds unless it directly relates to the results. Sometimes there are grey areas - it's best to stay out of those or you could end up paying someone contractor rates and then providing benefits anyways.
But a client specifying tools seems like a strange thing to determine contractor vs something else on.
A contractor produces results for a fee. If the purchaser of the service wishes to retain control over anything other than the results, then they need an employee, not a contractor.
This might be true. However, the MythBusters episode that's cited in the article shows that total fuel consumption goes down even though distance increases. UPS didn't do this to get routes done faster, they did it to save fuel. If there were some secondary effects, great, but those effects should have been enumerated.
Even the number cited seem to be misleading. Simply driving 747000km less and saving 190000l of fuel implies no per mile fuel savings if the fleet averages 25l/100km (or about 9.4 US mpg). That looks like a reasonable number, adding to the confusion about what they are actually saying. Come to think of it, given the previous calculation, it seems nearly all of the savings had to come from reducing total miles, which contradicts the Mythbusters experimental results and other anecdotal evidence.
Due to the nature of humanity, the rest of us also have things to hide. Some are bad but not illegal, like cheating on a partner, some are benign but still secret, like whether or not you are bluffing in a game of poker, and some and simply personal, like what the person looks like naked.
Things the FBI legitimately needs to hide aren't subject to FOIA requests, so the question is still irrelevant. They're going to withhold the information no matter what the answer is.
There is a subset of people that must run a Microsoft OS for whatever reason. These people need to run that OS on a computer. Today, many of them are paying Microsoft money (above the licensing fee) to run that OS on Azure. If they move to Google, Microsoft gets less revenue. That qualifies as "Google is going after a core part of Microsoft's cloud business".
This shouldn't be the dawn of mistrust. Anyone who trusted the government was being, at the very least, gullible.
This is the surprise development of the information age... It was long thought that more information would give people a basis to make better decisions. The truth turned out to be that more information gave people more opportunity to discover facts that align with their beliefs. People trust data that says what they already think, they distrust data that says otherwise. It's always been that way.
The end result is that the trustworthiness of data is irrelevant in the public sphere. Regular people are simply discussing their opinion and hiding that opinion behind a "fact" they discovered.
Among experts in a field, data trustworthiness is important. However, experts are much better at validating data than the general public, so this usually isn't a problem.
Both could be true. Uber can be screwing people while taxi companies are trying to keep their comfortable status quo. There's also differences between markets - it's possible that taxi medallions in New York are an insurmountable barrier to free competition at the same time small-town Uber drivers are living below the poverty line.
Tip - blueberries are cheap twice a year in the US. Once when the US harvest comes in (exactly when depends on your latitude) and once when the South American harvest comes in (around now). They drop from $10 per pound to $3.25 per pound and the quality goes way up. Stop mold growth with a vinegar/water rinse and dry thoroughly and they'll keep for a week. Freeze them and they'll be good enough to use for cooking until the next season comes around - but don't expect them to be suitable for snacking.
Also, for anything but snacking, consider buying frozen. I always buy the cherries I use in my breakfast frozen. I can get big, sweet, pitted cherries for $3 per pound any time of the year.
Consider an apple. Unlike a peach (if you've never had an actual ripe peach off the tree you don't know what you're missing), apples ship and store extremely well. So it's not particularly remarkable that a Red Delicious apple cost only 25% as much on a weight basis as a boneless pork chop if you consider the labor inputs. It ought to cost even less.
The real problem is that "Red Delicious" as a term is a triumph of marketing mendacity. A Red Delicious is indeed red, but it tastes like Styrofoam. If you want a good eating apple, say a Honey Crisp, you'll be paying as much on a weight basis as you would for a pork chop. Last year Honey Crisps hit $4.50 a pound.
Learn what's in season. In the fall, Honey Crisps are available for around $1.00 a pound. There's almost always something in season. When there isn't, pineapples travel well, so they're decent all year long. On the vegetable side, you can always fall back on broccoli and carrots when there's no other produce in season. Also, canned tomatoes are better than whole during the off season.
Apparently, it is. I used to work at a warehouse that shipped Class 2 Pharmaceuticals (Hydrocode, Xanax, etc...). We sent all of them "Addressee Signature Required". For packages sent to California, we were required to keep records of the proof of delivery receipts, so we got a chance to look at a lot of them. A good ten percent either said stuff like "left with girl", or had no signature at all.
Because of EITC, the negative federal tax rate offsets FICA for incomes under $10,000. So, even factoring in FICA, most students pay no net income tax.
In the US, low income citizens pay negative tax. We call it Earned Income Tax Credit. If you live alone and make no money (and therefore pay no income taxes), you get back a few hundred at tax return time. If you have kids, you get several thousand.
Also, the first ten thousand or so of income is non-taxable. Combined with the Earned Income Tax Credit, families with children usually don't pay taxes on the first twenty to thirty thousand dollars of income. 45 percent of the US pays no federal income tax.
Since video can't actually be binary embedded into HTML, all websites that present video are simply markup constructs that tell the browser to go get a video. Whether the browser uses the iframe, video, or object tag is what's irrelevant. The question here is how far copyright law goes in limiting other's use of presenting content. Unfortunately, this is destined to come down to intent and to become a gray area that will be expensive to litigate.
I just watched James Randi's documentary this past weekend and I recall a story about how he put together a press packet for a fake channeler that called himself "Carlos". This was 35 years ago, and he was on a lot of major news programs and in a lot of publications. Not one of the staffers of any of these shows/publications checked his references - as they were all fake. The public bought every word he said. Fake news is a very old phenomenon and every generation has fallen for it.
Not anecdotal, that's the city I was born in. They once tore up a park that was cleaned up by volunteers because they felt the city should have hired union workers to do it.
A third idea was to have the president elected by a direct popular vote. Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution doubted public intelligence but rather because they feared that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their own State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the smaller ones.
I read the summary. They used the popular vote result of this and previous elections to come to the conclusion that future election could be made better by changing the rules. That's a flawed analysis, because the rule change they propose will make the election an entirely different contest and the data they used to arrive at their conclusions will no longer be applicable. In other words, the popular vote results from an electoral college election won't be predictive of the popular vote results for a future popular vote election. Since the data referenced doesn't apply to the future they propose, without other data or theories, any conclusions are purely pulled out of their ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Even worse, Slashdot's comment system effectively removed the troll from the thread, but the result is that the troll responses now look like they are responses to my post. It actually took me a bit to figure out why it seemed like someone was so angry with me.
They need assurances because the executive branch has a history of holding "unconventional interpretations" of our own laws, then avoiding judicial oversight by slapping gag orders on all potential defendants so no one has standing in court. The also invented a parallel court system for these cases, where no judge ever says no to anything.
Then they're shocked when one or two operatives grow a conscience and find a way to shine a light on the situation - so they pursue them to the ends of the earth and threaten them with the death penalty.
Me saying that you have to show up to work and not be half-naked if you want to continue to be a sub-contractor is NOT outrageous. It's the norm.
That's still within the boundaries of "getting it done" as a form of risk management. A worker that shows up inappropriately clothed is at risk of being arrested or being kicked off site by a helicopter mom. That's similar to a requirement for a contractor to have proper insurance. The insurance doesn't affect the result of a typical job, but is does affect the result of a job that has gone wrong.
Also, as I said earlier, there are a lot of subjective areas to contract law in almost all jurisdictions. Since the penalty for imposing a restriction that isn't allowed is so great, it's best to steer very clear of the line.
If you only want them cleaned to your satisfaction - no. If you want them to wear gloves manufactured by your brother-in-law's company - yes. Any messing in the "how it gets done" is out of bounds unless it directly relates to the results. Sometimes there are grey areas - it's best to stay out of those or you could end up paying someone contractor rates and then providing benefits anyways.
But a client specifying tools seems like a strange thing to determine contractor vs something else on.
A contractor produces results for a fee. If the purchaser of the service wishes to retain control over anything other than the results, then they need an employee, not a contractor.
No, but they have a bus-sized chassis to hang batteries under.
This might be true. However, the MythBusters episode that's cited in the article shows that total fuel consumption goes down even though distance increases. UPS didn't do this to get routes done faster, they did it to save fuel. If there were some secondary effects, great, but those effects should have been enumerated.
Even the number cited seem to be misleading. Simply driving 747000km less and saving 190000l of fuel implies no per mile fuel savings if the fleet averages 25l/100km (or about 9.4 US mpg). That looks like a reasonable number, adding to the confusion about what they are actually saying. Come to think of it, given the previous calculation, it seems nearly all of the savings had to come from reducing total miles, which contradicts the Mythbusters experimental results and other anecdotal evidence.
Can't be. The summary says the total distance covered by their trucks was reduced by 747,000km.
Due to the nature of humanity, the rest of us also have things to hide. Some are bad but not illegal, like cheating on a partner, some are benign but still secret, like whether or not you are bluffing in a game of poker, and some and simply personal, like what the person looks like naked.
Things the FBI legitimately needs to hide aren't subject to FOIA requests, so the question is still irrelevant. They're going to withhold the information no matter what the answer is.
There is a subset of people that must run a Microsoft OS for whatever reason. These people need to run that OS on a computer. Today, many of them are paying Microsoft money (above the licensing fee) to run that OS on Azure. If they move to Google, Microsoft gets less revenue. That qualifies as "Google is going after a core part of Microsoft's cloud business".
This shouldn't be the dawn of mistrust. Anyone who trusted the government was being, at the very least, gullible.
This is the surprise development of the information age... It was long thought that more information would give people a basis to make better decisions. The truth turned out to be that more information gave people more opportunity to discover facts that align with their beliefs. People trust data that says what they already think, they distrust data that says otherwise. It's always been that way.
The end result is that the trustworthiness of data is irrelevant in the public sphere. Regular people are simply discussing their opinion and hiding that opinion behind a "fact" they discovered.
Among experts in a field, data trustworthiness is important. However, experts are much better at validating data than the general public, so this usually isn't a problem.
Both could be true. Uber can be screwing people while taxi companies are trying to keep their comfortable status quo. There's also differences between markets - it's possible that taxi medallions in New York are an insurmountable barrier to free competition at the same time small-town Uber drivers are living below the poverty line.
So you want someone to invent the Moto Z?
Tip - blueberries are cheap twice a year in the US. Once when the US harvest comes in (exactly when depends on your latitude) and once when the South American harvest comes in (around now). They drop from $10 per pound to $3.25 per pound and the quality goes way up. Stop mold growth with a vinegar/water rinse and dry thoroughly and they'll keep for a week. Freeze them and they'll be good enough to use for cooking until the next season comes around - but don't expect them to be suitable for snacking.
Also, for anything but snacking, consider buying frozen. I always buy the cherries I use in my breakfast frozen. I can get big, sweet, pitted cherries for $3 per pound any time of the year.
Consider an apple. Unlike a peach (if you've never had an actual ripe peach off the tree you don't know what you're missing), apples ship and store extremely well. So it's not particularly remarkable that a Red Delicious apple cost only 25% as much on a weight basis as a boneless pork chop if you consider the labor inputs. It ought to cost even less.
The real problem is that "Red Delicious" as a term is a triumph of marketing mendacity. A Red Delicious is indeed red, but it tastes like Styrofoam. If you want a good eating apple, say a Honey Crisp, you'll be paying as much on a weight basis as you would for a pork chop. Last year Honey Crisps hit $4.50 a pound.
Learn what's in season. In the fall, Honey Crisps are available for around $1.00 a pound. There's almost always something in season. When there isn't, pineapples travel well, so they're decent all year long. On the vegetable side, you can always fall back on broccoli and carrots when there's no other produce in season. Also, canned tomatoes are better than whole during the off season.
I often get Prime stuff in one day, sometimes on Sunday. I've never had a package not arrive within the promised two days.
Honestly, this isn't that hard.
Apparently, it is. I used to work at a warehouse that shipped Class 2 Pharmaceuticals (Hydrocode, Xanax, etc...). We sent all of them "Addressee Signature Required". For packages sent to California, we were required to keep records of the proof of delivery receipts, so we got a chance to look at a lot of them. A good ten percent either said stuff like "left with girl", or had no signature at all.
Because of EITC, the negative federal tax rate offsets FICA for incomes under $10,000. So, even factoring in FICA, most students pay no net income tax.
In the US, low income citizens pay negative tax. We call it Earned Income Tax Credit. If you live alone and make no money (and therefore pay no income taxes), you get back a few hundred at tax return time. If you have kids, you get several thousand.
Also, the first ten thousand or so of income is non-taxable. Combined with the Earned Income Tax Credit, families with children usually don't pay taxes on the first twenty to thirty thousand dollars of income. 45 percent of the US pays no federal income tax.
Since video can't actually be binary embedded into HTML, all websites that present video are simply markup constructs that tell the browser to go get a video. Whether the browser uses the iframe, video, or object tag is what's irrelevant. The question here is how far copyright law goes in limiting other's use of presenting content. Unfortunately, this is destined to come down to intent and to become a gray area that will be expensive to litigate.
I feel wrong disagreeing with you, but...
I just watched James Randi's documentary this past weekend and I recall a story about how he put together a press packet for a fake channeler that called himself "Carlos". This was 35 years ago, and he was on a lot of major news programs and in a lot of publications. Not one of the staffers of any of these shows/publications checked his references - as they were all fake. The public bought every word he said. Fake news is a very old phenomenon and every generation has fallen for it.
Not anecdotal, that's the city I was born in. They once tore up a park that was cleaned up by volunteers because they felt the city should have hired union workers to do it.
Nah.. they'll just blow the competition's cars up. Not joking.
Did the founding fathers want that?
Yes, they specifically said they wanted that. Below is an excerpt from Origins of the Electoral College
A third idea was to have the president elected by a direct popular vote. Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution doubted public intelligence but rather because they feared that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their own State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the smaller ones.
I read the summary. They used the popular vote result of this and previous elections to come to the conclusion that future election could be made better by changing the rules. That's a flawed analysis, because the rule change they propose will make the election an entirely different contest and the data they used to arrive at their conclusions will no longer be applicable. In other words, the popular vote results from an electoral college election won't be predictive of the popular vote results for a future popular vote election. Since the data referenced doesn't apply to the future they propose, without other data or theories, any conclusions are purely pulled out of their ass.