a calm cow is easy to handle and still just as tasty
In fact, probably more tasty. Something I read long ago about deer-hunting talked about making sure you had a quick, clean kill, because triggering the animal's fight-or-flight response would release lots of hormones and stuff, making the meat taste more gamy.
So there might be sound culinary reasons to kill humanely.
I have a solution to all of our immigration problems:
Completely co-opt government in the favor of corporations' short-term profits. Once the USA's economy collapses and we become a third-world country, then the line of people waiting to get in will get a lot shorter.
The H-1B process is so costly, time-consuming, and unreliable
I've always wondered this - why do employers do it, then? You have all these costs and paperwork headaches that come along with it, and you're required to pay them the same as equivalent American workers.
I can't imagine that there really is nobody already in the US (to take an example from the dozen or so H1B's at my day job), willing to relocate to Raleigh, who can do router development.
Should we start some shareholder lawsuits? Because obviously the companies hiring H1B's are wasting shareholders' money.
There's a third alternative to the choices of revolt or vote for the least corrupt politician.
Run yourself.
Currently, in my home state of NC, candidates can run independently with petition signatures of 4% of registered voters in their constituency. Currently, nobody does this and wins. However, it seems to me that getting together a large enough group to run a reform candidate and win would be much easier than getting a large enough group together to forcibly overthrow the government.
How many people actually bother to pay "use taxes"
Me. I don't know if anyone else does.
My home state of NC has a line on their income tax returns for use tax. Thanks to GnuCash, I have records of all purchases of anything. Thanks to the fact I do my online shopping with a different credit card than my B&M shopping, it's not too hard for me to collate all my online purchases. Since the first year they had this line (when it took me by surprise), I note in GnuCash whether a purchase collected sales tax or not.
It's my style of taxes - very conservative. I like being able to file a tax form that I could effortlessly defend against an audit, rather than file with dodgy figures and worry about being audited.
(NC allows, if you don't have records of your purchases, you can use a method that approximates your purchases by some percentage of your income. I imagine if you were to put 0, it would look suspect, and you'd best be prepared to defend that).
I bet the people who wrote COPA knew full well it wouldn't pass constitutional muster in a court challenge. This way the legislators get to look like they're "protecting the children", and can blame "activist judges" for the failure of the law to be enforced. Win-win, right?
My wife has a job, but it's part time and mostly done from home, so she spends my work days at home with our 6-month-old.
It doesn't bring in that much money (we could do without the income without much trouble), but in my mind the big benefit is redundancy. When I get laid off (and, like most US techies, that's just the right hire in India away), she can up her hours and bring in some money to augment my unemployment compensation, while I try to find another job. Much better than both of us job-hunting at the same time.
The only reason I can think of, is the non-realistic behaviors.
Imagine you were a 12-year-old boy, having no experience with real-world women, except through porn. You might learn:
Normal women are just a couple of drinks away from a girl-on-girl adventure.
If you blackmail/force a woman into sex, she'll end up enjoying it so much that she eventually thanks you.
(corollary) Prudes and/or lesbians just haven't had a good-enough-in-bed guy yet.
Group sex is common, and unlikely to tear apart one's primary relationship. Ditto cheating.
From the way porn is marketed, you might learn that sex is "dirty" or "nasty", and that women with a high sex drive are "out-of-control sluts".
Not that all of these things don't have a place in healthy fantasies, but you need enough real-world experience to know where this differs from reality. Even if these kinds of ideas aren't learned overtly, they still could color a person's thinking if exposed to them enough in formative years.
This kind of debate actually has non-academic applications for me. I have a 6-month-old daughter.
My dilemma: Should I try to impart "good" values to her, or should I attempt to teach her to be a selfish sociopath, for better success in a cruel world? What if the world gets a lot crueler than today (e.g. by economic collapse)? One might have to be "evil" just to scratch out a living.
I've read the theory that there is indeed a precursor to religion in ape behavior. This was in "The Naked Ape", a classic of evolutionary biology written in the sixties IIRC. It goes something like this:
Apes have a hierarchical social structure with an alpha-male at the top. Humans replicate this, of course, but remnants of that may also lead to us wanting to believe in a big alpha-male in the sky, ruling above all mortals.
It would be so much more motivating to be paid by the hour. If the company wanted you to work long hours, they would have to pay extra for the privilege. The only tangible thing salaried employees get for working overtime is "maybe this will put you slightly higher on the list for raises next year, if there's money for raises at all".
It's a healthier attitude, I think. My employer would pay a fixed amount of money per unit of my time / effort. Of course, employers don't want that because they want you to donate a bunch of work to them, saving them some money. Of course, it never saves enough money to make your job safe from offshoring.
the people really running this country WANT THIS TO HAPPEN
I'm as cynical and pessimistic as the next/.er (check my posting history), but that's one point I can't figure out.
Why would those running the country want the economy and/or the rule of law to collapse? If you assume it's "American corporate executives" running the country, as I do, the market for their products would collapse. The world economy is still (even in this post-offshoring world) interdependent enough that a collapse of the USA would cause at least a major recession worldwide, so jumping to "other markets" might not even help.
Certainly the oil industry would benefit from quadruple oil prices as first, but the resulting economic collapse would seriously eat into their profits. Everything sells better in a society where there are more than a few people with money to spend, and those people don't have to worry about getting shot for the food in their pantry by roving mobs of starving poor people.
Do The Powers That Be(tm) think this won't happen? Why, otherwise, would we go down that course? How would They benefit?
Certainly living close to work would have significant environmental impact. I think that's even what the Union of Concerned Scientists tells people that want to go green.
It doesn't work so well in the tech industry, though, where jobs only last a year or so. You'd have to be moving all the time. I can't imagine job security getting better for anyone in the future, so this option might be less feasible over time.
One of the interesting things about Galactica, besides the made-up all-purpose swear word (I thought that was frelling cool in Farscape as well), is another bit of swearing they can get away with.
Because that society is polytheistic, they swear "godsdamn". This is fine with the TV censors. The singular "goddamn" would get them bleeped, or a higher rating, though. Brilliant!
Wasn't there a/. article several months ago about a study saying it will cost the economy significantly less to mitigate global warming than to deal with its aftereffects? Done by a former leader of the World Bank IIRC, hardly a socialist bastion.
I tend to think that the problem is not so much business-school philosophies, but the market.
You could have a company with the most clueful CIO in existence. He could plan everything for best long-term effect (even if it's harder or more expensive in the short term!), and give everyone the resources they need to get their jobs done effectively.
Unfortunately that company would very quickly have its lunch eaten by a competitor who does everything half-assed, as is the current standard.
I had the "friends & family" (non-certification) CPR course about a year ago, while our first child was gestating.
They said, when alone, if CPRing a child or infant, to do 1 set of 5x(30 compressions + 2 breaths) before calling 911. However, when CPRing an adult, to call 911 first, then get started.
The reason? CPR alone can sometimes (often?) restart an infant's or child's heart. However, an adult's heart is not very likely to restart without getting a shock.
If others are around, they said to pick someone to call 911 (don't just ask "somebody do it", because of bystander effect), and pick another person to try to find an AED (because, as above, sometimes only a shock will do).
I see this accusation a lot on/. whenever drugs come up as a topic, that drug companies would rather make treatments than cures, for business reasons.
I don't think those reasons are behind it. I'm no capitalist apologist (see my post history), either. I think it's because, for most conditions out there, there's no way to cure them with the kinds of drugs we have now. IANABiochemist, but:
Many drugs simply tweak the body's feedback systems to produce more or less of some thing. For example, SSRI antidepressants work by binding to serotonin receptors, causing more serotonin to be floating about, which elevates one's mood. However, serotonin production and uptake is a continuous process; remove these drugs, and the serotonin level drops.
How would you increase serotonin production permanently, without having to keep ingesting something? Maybe with a genetic therapy applied with a virus, or something like that. That technology is still in its infancy.
Likewise, take type 1 diabetes (low insulin production). How would you get insulin production up permanently? There's the option of dropping in a new pancreas, which is fraught with problems. We can try to grow more islet cells on the existing one, and research is ongoing there IIRC, but that's pretty complicated. Much simpler to just drop in more insulin. Of course, insulin production is a continuous process, so that has to be a continuous therapy.
It's probably only necessary to pay in cash. I don't know if you could do it without giving your name; lots of tests need doctors' prescriptions.
There are some exceptions. When I was in college, the Student Health Center had a sign up about HIV testing, and mentioned you could get it anonymously at the county health department. I asked someone there why they recommended the anonymous testing, and the answer was "so insurance companies won't find out."
I pay my shrink and therapist with personal checks. I've always gotten the meds through my prescription drug plan though. I send the therapy sessions to insurance for reimbursement. If I did all of those things without insurance or flex-account participation, nobody would know I was doing them, even though my name is attached. Technically, employers and insurers make you sign away access to "your medical records", but those aren't centralized; how would such entities know to ask that particular shrink / therapist / pharmacy?
On the other hand, I went to get life insurance and they asked point-blank, in the usual raft of medical questions, if I'd been treated for depression in the prior 6 months. I answered yes, gave them the name / address / etc. of the shrink, told them about the meds. I knew this wouldn't deny me coverage (life insurance already has a suicide limitation for 2 years), and didn't want them to find a reason to not pay anything if they found out (I obviously haven't went to too much trouble to keep it all confidential).
I've always tried to have that attitude, as well. If I'm really so important to the company that they can't get by without my being on call 24/7, then why don't I have a contract and a golden parachute?
If more people realized that they're really not that important to the company, and if the company can find a way to save $0.50/year without them, then they're out on the street, then we might have healthier attitudes towards work. On the other hand, we'd have an awful lot of depressives.
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In fact, probably more tasty. Something I read long ago about deer-hunting talked about making sure you had a quick, clean kill, because triggering the animal's fight-or-flight response would release lots of hormones and stuff, making the meat taste more gamy.
So there might be sound culinary reasons to kill humanely.
I have a solution to all of our immigration problems:
Completely co-opt government in the favor of corporations' short-term profits. Once the USA's economy collapses and we become a third-world country, then the line of people waiting to get in will get a lot shorter.
I've always wondered this - why do employers do it, then? You have all these costs and paperwork headaches that come along with it, and you're required to pay them the same as equivalent American workers.
I can't imagine that there really is nobody already in the US (to take an example from the dozen or so H1B's at my day job), willing to relocate to Raleigh, who can do router development.
Should we start some shareholder lawsuits? Because obviously the companies hiring H1B's are wasting shareholders' money.
There's a third alternative to the choices of revolt or vote for the least corrupt politician.
Run yourself.
Currently, in my home state of NC, candidates can run independently with petition signatures of 4% of registered voters in their constituency. Currently, nobody does this and wins. However, it seems to me that getting together a large enough group to run a reform candidate and win would be much easier than getting a large enough group together to forcibly overthrow the government.
Me. I don't know if anyone else does.
My home state of NC has a line on their income tax returns for use tax. Thanks to GnuCash, I have records of all purchases of anything. Thanks to the fact I do my online shopping with a different credit card than my B&M shopping, it's not too hard for me to collate all my online purchases. Since the first year they had this line (when it took me by surprise), I note in GnuCash whether a purchase collected sales tax or not.
It's my style of taxes - very conservative. I like being able to file a tax form that I could effortlessly defend against an audit, rather than file with dodgy figures and worry about being audited.
(NC allows, if you don't have records of your purchases, you can use a method that approximates your purchases by some percentage of your income. I imagine if you were to put 0, it would look suspect, and you'd best be prepared to defend that).
Don't they usually make up a subject, like Doctor of Letters or something? From Wikipedia's entry on Kermit The Frog:
Kermit was awarded an honorary doctorate of Amphibious Letters on May 19, 1996 at Southampton College, where he also gave a commencement speech.Remember, with sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.
I agree, I'd rather see less violence on TV (and more sex - make love, not war!)
I bet the people who wrote COPA knew full well it wouldn't pass constitutional muster in a court challenge. This way the legislators get to look like they're "protecting the children", and can blame "activist judges" for the failure of the law to be enforced. Win-win, right?
My wife has a job, but it's part time and mostly done from home, so she spends my work days at home with our 6-month-old.
It doesn't bring in that much money (we could do without the income without much trouble), but in my mind the big benefit is redundancy. When I get laid off (and, like most US techies, that's just the right hire in India away), she can up her hours and bring in some money to augment my unemployment compensation, while I try to find another job. Much better than both of us job-hunting at the same time.
The only reason I can think of, is the non-realistic behaviors.
Imagine you were a 12-year-old boy, having no experience with real-world women, except through porn. You might learn:
Not that all of these things don't have a place in healthy fantasies, but you need enough real-world experience to know where this differs from reality. Even if these kinds of ideas aren't learned overtly, they still could color a person's thinking if exposed to them enough in formative years.
This kind of debate actually has non-academic applications for me. I have a 6-month-old daughter.
My dilemma: Should I try to impart "good" values to her, or should I attempt to teach her to be a selfish sociopath, for better success in a cruel world? What if the world gets a lot crueler than today (e.g. by economic collapse)? One might have to be "evil" just to scratch out a living.
I've read the theory that there is indeed a precursor to religion in ape behavior. This was in "The Naked Ape", a classic of evolutionary biology written in the sixties IIRC. It goes something like this:
Apes have a hierarchical social structure with an alpha-male at the top. Humans replicate this, of course, but remnants of that may also lead to us wanting to believe in a big alpha-male in the sky, ruling above all mortals.
It would be so much more motivating to be paid by the hour. If the company wanted you to work long hours, they would have to pay extra for the privilege. The only tangible thing salaried employees get for working overtime is "maybe this will put you slightly higher on the list for raises next year, if there's money for raises at all".
It's a healthier attitude, I think. My employer would pay a fixed amount of money per unit of my time / effort. Of course, employers don't want that because they want you to donate a bunch of work to them, saving them some money. Of course, it never saves enough money to make your job safe from offshoring.
I'm as cynical and pessimistic as the next /.er (check my posting history), but that's one point I can't figure out.
Why would those running the country want the economy and/or the rule of law to collapse? If you assume it's "American corporate executives" running the country, as I do, the market for their products would collapse. The world economy is still (even in this post-offshoring world) interdependent enough that a collapse of the USA would cause at least a major recession worldwide, so jumping to "other markets" might not even help.
Certainly the oil industry would benefit from quadruple oil prices as first, but the resulting economic collapse would seriously eat into their profits. Everything sells better in a society where there are more than a few people with money to spend, and those people don't have to worry about getting shot for the food in their pantry by roving mobs of starving poor people.
Do The Powers That Be(tm) think this won't happen? Why, otherwise, would we go down that course? How would They benefit?
Certainly living close to work would have significant environmental impact. I think that's even what the Union of Concerned Scientists tells people that want to go green.
It doesn't work so well in the tech industry, though, where jobs only last a year or so. You'd have to be moving all the time. I can't imagine job security getting better for anyone in the future, so this option might be less feasible over time.
One of the interesting things about Galactica, besides the made-up all-purpose swear word (I thought that was frelling cool in Farscape as well), is another bit of swearing they can get away with.
Because that society is polytheistic, they swear "godsdamn". This is fine with the TV censors. The singular "goddamn" would get them bleeped, or a higher rating, though. Brilliant!
Wasn't there a /. article several months ago about a study saying it will cost the economy significantly less to mitigate global warming than to deal with its aftereffects? Done by a former leader of the World Bank IIRC, hardly a socialist bastion.
Certainly, if it saves $0.50 a month or more. Cost of downtime? That doesn't show up on quarterly reports.
That's true of every company I've ever seen, anyway.
I tend to think that the problem is not so much business-school philosophies, but the market.
You could have a company with the most clueful CIO in existence. He could plan everything for best long-term effect (even if it's harder or more expensive in the short term!), and give everyone the resources they need to get their jobs done effectively.
Unfortunately that company would very quickly have its lunch eaten by a competitor who does everything half-assed, as is the current standard.
Yep. Make love, not war!
I had the "friends & family" (non-certification) CPR course about a year ago, while our first child was gestating.
They said, when alone, if CPRing a child or infant, to do 1 set of 5x(30 compressions + 2 breaths) before calling 911. However, when CPRing an adult, to call 911 first, then get started.
The reason? CPR alone can sometimes (often?) restart an infant's or child's heart. However, an adult's heart is not very likely to restart without getting a shock.
If others are around, they said to pick someone to call 911 (don't just ask "somebody do it", because of bystander effect), and pick another person to try to find an AED (because, as above, sometimes only a shock will do).
I see this accusation a lot on /. whenever drugs come up as a topic, that drug companies would rather make treatments than cures, for business reasons.
I don't think those reasons are behind it. I'm no capitalist apologist (see my post history), either. I think it's because, for most conditions out there, there's no way to cure them with the kinds of drugs we have now. IANABiochemist, but:
Many drugs simply tweak the body's feedback systems to produce more or less of some thing. For example, SSRI antidepressants work by binding to serotonin receptors, causing more serotonin to be floating about, which elevates one's mood. However, serotonin production and uptake is a continuous process; remove these drugs, and the serotonin level drops.
How would you increase serotonin production permanently, without having to keep ingesting something? Maybe with a genetic therapy applied with a virus, or something like that. That technology is still in its infancy.
Likewise, take type 1 diabetes (low insulin production). How would you get insulin production up permanently? There's the option of dropping in a new pancreas, which is fraught with problems. We can try to grow more islet cells on the existing one, and research is ongoing there IIRC, but that's pretty complicated. Much simpler to just drop in more insulin. Of course, insulin production is a continuous process, so that has to be a continuous therapy.
It's probably only necessary to pay in cash. I don't know if you could do it without giving your name; lots of tests need doctors' prescriptions.
There are some exceptions. When I was in college, the Student Health Center had a sign up about HIV testing, and mentioned you could get it anonymously at the county health department. I asked someone there why they recommended the anonymous testing, and the answer was "so insurance companies won't find out."
I pay my shrink and therapist with personal checks. I've always gotten the meds through my prescription drug plan though. I send the therapy sessions to insurance for reimbursement. If I did all of those things without insurance or flex-account participation, nobody would know I was doing them, even though my name is attached. Technically, employers and insurers make you sign away access to "your medical records", but those aren't centralized; how would such entities know to ask that particular shrink / therapist / pharmacy?
On the other hand, I went to get life insurance and they asked point-blank, in the usual raft of medical questions, if I'd been treated for depression in the prior 6 months. I answered yes, gave them the name / address / etc. of the shrink, told them about the meds. I knew this wouldn't deny me coverage (life insurance already has a suicide limitation for 2 years), and didn't want them to find a reason to not pay anything if they found out (I obviously haven't went to too much trouble to keep it all confidential).
I've always tried to have that attitude, as well. If I'm really so important to the company that they can't get by without my being on call 24/7, then why don't I have a contract and a golden parachute?
If more people realized that they're really not that important to the company, and if the company can find a way to save $0.50/year without them, then they're out on the street, then we might have healthier attitudes towards work. On the other hand, we'd have an awful lot of depressives.