Seriously, why can't Amazon just work with their shipping partners to implement a user preference that gets passed on to the delivery truck operator. When I check out online, let me choose between "only deliver to a live person", "ring/knock but heave package on porch" and "leave package quietly".
They actually don't know if you are paying the correct amount unless you are flagged for an audit; it's up to the taxpayer to ensure that they're calculating their tax correctly. And you're legally liable for penalties if you screw up in a way that doesn't work out in their favor. Sure, they have algorithms that compare some of the data they receive from your employer(s), investment accounts, and other sources like your health insurance provider, and wild discrepancies can be a red flag that gets you marked for an audit, but they don't calculate your tax owed automatically.
If you ever get audited, it sucks. Basically YOU have to do all the work to prove that you paid the correct amount of tax, and the burden is on you to provide extensive documentation to back up every penny, even information they already have. Can't find the documentation for that deduction? Estimated your income from savings account interest because you didn't want to look it up but you were a few dollars off? Claimed you donated so much to a charity but threw away the thank you letter they sent you at the end of the year? You're screwed.
That's the whole complaint with these for-profit tax preparers; the tax code is so complex, it's virtually impossible for the average American to accurately calculate what they actually owe. So in many people's minds it's better to spend a few $$ for a guarantee that if the TurboTax screws up your taxes (assuming you provided the correct info), they'll help cover the penalties for you.
...neither Sr-90 or Cs-137 last longer than 300 years...
Um... that's not how half-life works. Both of those isotopes have half-lives around 28 and 30 years, respectively. A 30-year half-life means that every 30 years, half of the atoms decay. So if you start with 120 grams, you have 60 grams left once 30 years elapse, 30 grams at year 60, 15 grams at year 90, and so on. After 300 years you will only have a small fraction of the original isotope left, but some very small number of atoms will certainly last longer than that.
Sr-90 is actually not "highly" radioactive; it has a half-life of 28 years. The true danger with this isotope is that it is chemically very similar to calcium, being directly below it on the periodic table, and is easily incorporated into bone tissue. Once there, it remains for years and undergoes beta particle decay, making it a known cause of bone cancers and leukemia.
I'm with you on this one. Maybe it's just my particular usage case, but I personally find 4G speeds to be more than enough for all of the many things that I use my phone for (and I use it very heavily). At some point not too many years ago the carriers switched from expanding their area (remember being bombarded with all those coverage maps in marketing materials?) to a focus on FAST! FAST! FAST!...but only in certain urban centers and heavily populated areas.
The rest of us, who live in moderately sized suburbs around average sized cities, are left with pockets of crappy to no coverage along our commutes or even have to deal with shrinking coverage area as the carriers decide not to replace failing hardware. About 3 years ago, we had to switch from AT&T because we suddenly got no signal at our house... 4 miles from the center of a town of 60,000... and came to find out that they had decided to decommission a nearby tower rather than replace the equipment when it failed.
Sure, it's nice to sit in some international airport in a big city and watch a 500MB download complete at blazing speed, but my reaction is never "damn, that was fast" but instead, "damn, I just blew through half a gigabyte of data in a few minutes." I suppose there are users out there who want to be able to watch HD video streams, or who enjoy reaching their data cap within an hour, but what I want to see is more reliable, stable coverage in more places as I travel. Or, at the very least, to be able to rely on some "just enough" level of service without having to live within an urban center to get it.
What extensions do you use that wouldn't require access to the whole page?
This. The whole POINT of running the few extensions I do is that I want them to be functional on any site I visit, and thus I have to trust them well enough to have access to all of my browsing data.
- uBlock Origin: absolutely essential for browsing these days, and I trust Raymond Hill. You just have to be careful of the various clones/forks out there, which are often NOT trustworthy.
- Noscript: Just as essential. I don't know much about the developer, but from what I've seen I do know that the community can vouch for them.
- Greasemonkey: Used to load a few scripts that I wrote myself, as well as some scripts from people I know personally, to change the functionality of some very specific pages.
- LastPass: Eh, I'm a bit leery of this one, but it's widespread enough that if there's some major privacy breech, I hope that news would spread quickly.
A clarification: I mean that most people who enter the US with illegal intent, or who overstay their visa, do so via a port of entry, NOT by jumping a fence. I'd cite a source, but nah, I'm too lazy to. Stories of families running across open stretches of desert or crews building tunnels under the border to ferry drugs are not as common as some would want you to think, although both do happen.
Someone once explained the physics to me, and from what I understand it's advantageous to launch a rocket eastward, and as close to the equator as possible, because you're using the earth's spin to give you a little extra speed. Otherwise you have to expend more fuel to generate enough speed for low earth orbit.
Now, you don't want to build your facility in a location where if a rocket fails, pieces could fall onto populated areas, so you want to build near water. And most of the lower Rio Grande valley is either agricultural land, developed suburbs, or is marshy and easily flooded, so those make poor locations to build a launch facility. But there's a large river delta east of Brownsville that is undeveloped, has areas of relatively "high ground" (low gravel sandbars a few feet above sea level) and is not suitable for agriculture, so land is fairly cheap.
As for security? A CBP agent stationed there told me that although you could wade across the Rio Grande (it's 50 feet wide and very shallow), almost nobody wants to... they'd have to cross miles of marshland north of Playa Bagdad and then bushwhack across a heavily monitored wildlife refuge, and nobody wants to do that. Somebody who is trying to cross the border outside of a port of entry (which is actually how most people with illegal intent enter the US) will generally avoid facilities with chain link fences and surveillance, because they don't want to draw attention to themselves... they just go to Matamoros and find an easier crossing close to the city where they can quickly disappear into the suburbs.
While that's often true for many lighter nuclei (think, for example, carbon-12 or nitrogen-14, which are the most common isotopes of those particular elements), the band of stability for most neutron:proton ratios is actually closer to 1.5:1. Stable isotopes of most elements from period 4 onward almost always have more neutrons than protons, and oddly, about 99% of hydrogen atoms have no neutrons, the nucleus being composed of just a single proton.
Anecdotal, I know, but I can say that in the decades I've been using electronics with 3.5mm headphone jacks, I've never had a single connector fail due to metal fatigue or failure of a weld between the connector and the board. Now, I've certainly had my share of wires become frayed or wear out, both cheap and supposedly high end ones, but I've never seen a failure of the actual connector.
Now if only I could say the same about USB micro B connectors; those seem to be designed to fail after a few hundred uses...
Of course they are leaving details out. Because the details about what happened wouldn't contribute any more toward their argument. By their own admission, GP did something worse than get "caught with a joint" and yet their punishment was much less severe than that hypothetical kid would have received for a much lesser infraction. I assume by the way they worded their post that GP was able to enter a plea deal, which is an opportunity that might be denied to someone who is determined by an algorithm to be more of a "risk" - and that's exactly the issue at hand.
Note that TFA uses language such as "defendant" and not "convicted criminal"; the problem is that one does not have to be convicted of a crime to have their life ruined. Actually, one doesn't even have to be charged with a crime. Imagine a scenario where someone is detained for a day or two then released without being charged with any crime, because an algorithm decides that they might be a risk, and in the meantime because they don't show up to work they lose their job. Whereas if another person, say someone charged with a crime, is let go within a very short timeframe on promise of making a phone call the next morning, or is allowed to post bail while awaiting trial, they might not suffer any major life interruption.
The Fire stick already serves ads; it just advertises Amazon's own media content (both directly through interstitial trailers, and by mixing free and paid media together in the same listings). We have one because it was the cheapest way to get Netflix to our dumb TV, and because we already have Prime so we get access to the free content if we can find it. But if Amazon went to a true ad-supported model (showing third party ads) and their existing service went to crap, we'd find another way to consume content.
No, they're only about 2x the cost (for a single bulb) these days. Halogen bulbs are typically those special-purpose, smaller sized, and often expensive bulbs that are used for special applications like range hoods. As a homeowner, I HATE them because they burn out after 1-2 years with typical use, are hard to get to, and cost about $2-10 to replace. The LED alternatives cost about $5-12 a piece for the same style bulb, but have much longer life and don't get as hot.
Even better would be the ability to edit the hosts file, or an application firewall to block specific domains by app or system wide.
Yes, I realize that's a power user feature that can likely break functionality. But there's no reason why every little app should be able to siphon up analytics data every time I use it. We can already control some aspects of what an app has access to (contacts, microphone, etc) but should be able to decide "this is a solitaire game, it shouldn't need internet access".
Unlike email, there actually ARE technical solutions to caller ID spoofing, it's just that the carriers don't want to put the money/effort into developing things like authentication technologies.
Exactly this. That's why in many places you see things like weight limits, commercial vehicle restrictions, and "trucks follow marked/state routes" type laws. Road wear scales exponentially with weight, and most residential streets are not built to the same level of durability that arterial roads are. A few inches of asphalt, meant to be replaced every 20 years, will do just fine if a road only sees a few hundred small vehicles a day, but a couple dozen semis daily can cause visible damage to a neighborhood street within months. That's why freeways are usually constructed with multiple layers of thick asphalt or concrete, and are much more expensive to maintain per mile... and often need to be resurfaced more frequently.
I could post endless quotes from naysayers over the last 200 years about how the automobile will never outcompete the horse, radio is a useless novelty, everything that's possible to know has already been discovered, planes won't be able to travel faster than the speed of sound, 640K of memory... but, you get the idea.
We're terrible at predicting how an emerging technology will impact the future, but exceptionally good at finding novel ways to apply that technology in ways that nobody could have ever guessed.
Besides, your olympic athlete analogy is horribly flawed.
You first. Post your name, job title, and employer's address here.
It's not unreasonable to use a pseudonym on this site and to expect some bit of separation from real life and online persona. Besides, whether or not they really are a published scientist has no bearing on the point they were making. I might just as well claim that I have read many scientific papers that interchange the two words and the point still stands.
On the other hand...this is basically a "common knowledge" study which serves no purpose and tells me nothing at all.
Welcome to science. A vast majority of research takes place simply to collect additional data to test a hypothesis... very few "groundbreaking" discoveries in a given field are made on a daily basis, and those that do happen must then be further tested with repeatable, verifiable experiments before they can be considered more than just a statistical anomaly.
Nearly everything that we consider "common knowledge" was once not so, and had to be backed by the weight of scientific evidence observed over a vast number of experiments. For example, less than a century ago, smoking and red meat were considered healthy, but now it's common knowledge that we know better. It's because of the hard work of many, many scientists that we now know this, but you never hear about the countless hours of labor that the research takes, or the endless experiments that have to be repeated simply to verify that the results are consistent. You do read about the "breakthrough" stuff in the news quite often, but there are two reasons why: 1) there are so many different fields of scientific research going on simultaneously, and 2) many news outlets jump the gun by using a single publication as the basis for an article about how "a scientific study suggests!" before the experimental results can be verified through repetition by other scientists.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. What proponents of privatization often fail to account for is that large infrastructure projects don't lend themselves well to free market competition.
Read up on all the controversies around the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Ontario... and get ready for owners of private infrastructure to pull that same crap hundreds of times over across hundreds of other bridges, roads, and waterways across America.
Want to build a competitor to DCA within reasonable distance of the Washington DC metro area? Good luck. In many places it's not just a question of land acquisition... there are many locations where local geography limits where airports can be built or where bridges can cross rivers. Look at the terrain around Pittsburgh... want to build another international airport there, maybe closer to the city? I'd like to see someone try.
I HATE planning roadtrips across Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma... not because of all the stereotypes about flyover country (I actually love the scenery), but because of all the damn toll roads. For each road, I have to figure out: do they take cash, are they toll by plate (with a hefty surcharge for being unregistered), or do they use any of a number of incompatible tolling systems? If I register my rental car's tags in one city will my registration be valid in another? And avoiding the tolls in places like Kansas just to cross the state means you have to go MILES out of your way on two lane roads. Is it reasonable to expect that someone will be able to raise enough money to build a competing toll road, parallel to an existing one? In contrast, I can drive anywhere in a dozen northeastern states and know that any toll road will take EZpass.
There's a big lake near my house that TVA sold off to a private company some years ago. Sure, the buyers spent money fixing up boat ramps and picnic areas... but then they decided to drain the lake for a year to do some maintenance on the dam. Now, if this were still government land it would be common sense to expect that you explore the lake bed at your own risk (people do that anyway when the lake is drawn down for the winter), but since the lake was now private property, the company used trespassing laws to enforce a complete closure of the entire lake and all adjacent land. And who did they use to enforce the closure? The local sheriff's department.
I'll provide a little context, as someone from the US who used to ride a bike to work every day. The "bad reputation" that cyclists get in this country is due in large part to three factors:
1) Our car culture means that outside of urban areas and college campuses, riding a bike for your daily commute is generally looked down upon. A common attitude is... why ride for 30 minutes when you can drive less than 10 and arrive to work without breaking a sweat? Clearly if you had enough money and prestige, you'd buy a car.
2) When it comes to infrastructure planning in suburbs and rural areas, bikes are generally left out of the picture, so it's uncommon to see things like dedicated bike lanes or even a place to lock up your bike at your destination. Our state senator even went on the record as saying that he strongly opposes spending any money to build greenways or bike lanes, because he feels that funds would be better spent on roads that carry vehicles full of goods which, apparently, boost commerce. This means that more bikes are forced onto lanes shared by cars.
3) Quite a few recreational cyclists have taken the mantra "share the road" to such an extreme that they feel their right to ride on the roadways means that they're entitled to act like complete assholes to car drivers. This means doing things like intentionally impeding traffic by riding in the center of the lane in the name of "safety" (that car might hit you as it passes, so be sure it doesn't get a chance to), blowing through stop signs and traffic lights (you can't let that red light slow down your cadence), and refusing to use pullout lanes where they are available (because god forbid you have to stop and unclip while you wait for all that piled up traffic to go by). Now, I'm into road cycling myself, and I can say that it's only a very small percentage of cyclists who act this way, but the actions of a few give a reputation to the whole bunch.
Senior discounts are typically a very soft policy, and I've never actually seen one strictly enforced (a reasonable request refused or ID checked, for example). It's the same with military discounts, or college student discounts. I'm in my early 30's yet I've been given a "senior" discount many times for a variety of reasons: because I was nice to a cashier, showed patience while they dealt with a belligerent customer ahead of me, commented on a cashier's haircut, because I was neighbors with the cashier, or because it was easier than waiting for a manager to fix a pricing error. I've also seen cashiers "forget" to offer the discount to a senior who was rude.
Many folks in their 40's or 50's, if they mention the senior discount, will have their request honored, since it's generally considered bad manners to question someone's age. Now, if I were to ask for the same discount, I'd probably get some dirty looks, and I'd feel like I was taking advantage. But if the cashier was in the right mood they'd probably, more often than not, roll their eyes and give me the discount anyway, since that's easier than arguing with an unreasonable customer request.
I never served in the military, but I've noticed that sometimes if a cashier asks if I qualify for that discount, and I reply with a laugh that no, only my parents did so I was a military brat who decided they'd had enough of living on base as a kid, they'll sometimes give me the discount anyway.
If Tinder had phrased this as a "college student discount", it would have been allowed to stand; instead they not only chose to use one of the legally protected classes (age) as a factor, they strictly enforced the pricing scheme based on birthdate.
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Seriously, why can't Amazon just work with their shipping partners to implement a user preference that gets passed on to the delivery truck operator. When I check out online, let me choose between "only deliver to a live person", "ring/knock but heave package on porch" and "leave package quietly".
They actually don't know if you are paying the correct amount unless you are flagged for an audit; it's up to the taxpayer to ensure that they're calculating their tax correctly. And you're legally liable for penalties if you screw up in a way that doesn't work out in their favor. Sure, they have algorithms that compare some of the data they receive from your employer(s), investment accounts, and other sources like your health insurance provider, and wild discrepancies can be a red flag that gets you marked for an audit, but they don't calculate your tax owed automatically.
If you ever get audited, it sucks. Basically YOU have to do all the work to prove that you paid the correct amount of tax, and the burden is on you to provide extensive documentation to back up every penny, even information they already have. Can't find the documentation for that deduction? Estimated your income from savings account interest because you didn't want to look it up but you were a few dollars off? Claimed you donated so much to a charity but threw away the thank you letter they sent you at the end of the year? You're screwed.
That's the whole complaint with these for-profit tax preparers; the tax code is so complex, it's virtually impossible for the average American to accurately calculate what they actually owe. So in many people's minds it's better to spend a few $$ for a guarantee that if the TurboTax screws up your taxes (assuming you provided the correct info), they'll help cover the penalties for you.
...neither Sr-90 or Cs-137 last longer than 300 years...
Um... that's not how half-life works. Both of those isotopes have half-lives around 28 and 30 years, respectively. A 30-year half-life means that every 30 years, half of the atoms decay. So if you start with 120 grams, you have 60 grams left once 30 years elapse, 30 grams at year 60, 15 grams at year 90, and so on. After 300 years you will only have a small fraction of the original isotope left, but some very small number of atoms will certainly last longer than that.
Sr-90 is actually not "highly" radioactive; it has a half-life of 28 years. The true danger with this isotope is that it is chemically very similar to calcium, being directly below it on the periodic table, and is easily incorporated into bone tissue. Once there, it remains for years and undergoes beta particle decay, making it a known cause of bone cancers and leukemia.
I'm with you on this one. Maybe it's just my particular usage case, but I personally find 4G speeds to be more than enough for all of the many things that I use my phone for (and I use it very heavily). At some point not too many years ago the carriers switched from expanding their area (remember being bombarded with all those coverage maps in marketing materials?) to a focus on FAST! FAST! FAST! ...but only in certain urban centers and heavily populated areas.
The rest of us, who live in moderately sized suburbs around average sized cities, are left with pockets of crappy to no coverage along our commutes or even have to deal with shrinking coverage area as the carriers decide not to replace failing hardware. About 3 years ago, we had to switch from AT&T because we suddenly got no signal at our house... 4 miles from the center of a town of 60,000... and came to find out that they had decided to decommission a nearby tower rather than replace the equipment when it failed.
Sure, it's nice to sit in some international airport in a big city and watch a 500MB download complete at blazing speed, but my reaction is never "damn, that was fast" but instead, "damn, I just blew through half a gigabyte of data in a few minutes." I suppose there are users out there who want to be able to watch HD video streams, or who enjoy reaching their data cap within an hour, but what I want to see is more reliable, stable coverage in more places as I travel. Or, at the very least, to be able to rely on some "just enough" level of service without having to live within an urban center to get it.
What extensions do you use that wouldn't require access to the whole page?
This. The whole POINT of running the few extensions I do is that I want them to be functional on any site I visit, and thus I have to trust them well enough to have access to all of my browsing data.
- uBlock Origin: absolutely essential for browsing these days, and I trust Raymond Hill. You just have to be careful of the various clones/forks out there, which are often NOT trustworthy.
- Noscript: Just as essential. I don't know much about the developer, but from what I've seen I do know that the community can vouch for them.
- Greasemonkey: Used to load a few scripts that I wrote myself, as well as some scripts from people I know personally, to change the functionality of some very specific pages.
- LastPass: Eh, I'm a bit leery of this one, but it's widespread enough that if there's some major privacy breech, I hope that news would spread quickly.
A clarification: I mean that most people who enter the US with illegal intent, or who overstay their visa, do so via a port of entry, NOT by jumping a fence. I'd cite a source, but nah, I'm too lazy to. Stories of families running across open stretches of desert or crews building tunnels under the border to ferry drugs are not as common as some would want you to think, although both do happen.
I actually visited the site last year...
Someone once explained the physics to me, and from what I understand it's advantageous to launch a rocket eastward, and as close to the equator as possible, because you're using the earth's spin to give you a little extra speed. Otherwise you have to expend more fuel to generate enough speed for low earth orbit.
Now, you don't want to build your facility in a location where if a rocket fails, pieces could fall onto populated areas, so you want to build near water. And most of the lower Rio Grande valley is either agricultural land, developed suburbs, or is marshy and easily flooded, so those make poor locations to build a launch facility. But there's a large river delta east of Brownsville that is undeveloped, has areas of relatively "high ground" (low gravel sandbars a few feet above sea level) and is not suitable for agriculture, so land is fairly cheap.
As for security? A CBP agent stationed there told me that although you could wade across the Rio Grande (it's 50 feet wide and very shallow), almost nobody wants to... they'd have to cross miles of marshland north of Playa Bagdad and then bushwhack across a heavily monitored wildlife refuge, and nobody wants to do that. Somebody who is trying to cross the border outside of a port of entry (which is actually how most people with illegal intent enter the US) will generally avoid facilities with chain link fences and surveillance, because they don't want to draw attention to themselves... they just go to Matamoros and find an easier crossing close to the city where they can quickly disappear into the suburbs.
While that's often true for many lighter nuclei (think, for example, carbon-12 or nitrogen-14, which are the most common isotopes of those particular elements), the band of stability for most neutron:proton ratios is actually closer to 1.5:1. Stable isotopes of most elements from period 4 onward almost always have more neutrons than protons, and oddly, about 99% of hydrogen atoms have no neutrons, the nucleus being composed of just a single proton.
Anecdotal, I know, but I can say that in the decades I've been using electronics with 3.5mm headphone jacks, I've never had a single connector fail due to metal fatigue or failure of a weld between the connector and the board. Now, I've certainly had my share of wires become frayed or wear out, both cheap and supposedly high end ones, but I've never seen a failure of the actual connector.
Now if only I could say the same about USB micro B connectors; those seem to be designed to fail after a few hundred uses...
Of course they are leaving details out. Because the details about what happened wouldn't contribute any more toward their argument. By their own admission, GP did something worse than get "caught with a joint" and yet their punishment was much less severe than that hypothetical kid would have received for a much lesser infraction. I assume by the way they worded their post that GP was able to enter a plea deal, which is an opportunity that might be denied to someone who is determined by an algorithm to be more of a "risk" - and that's exactly the issue at hand.
Note that TFA uses language such as "defendant" and not "convicted criminal"; the problem is that one does not have to be convicted of a crime to have their life ruined. Actually, one doesn't even have to be charged with a crime. Imagine a scenario where someone is detained for a day or two then released without being charged with any crime, because an algorithm decides that they might be a risk, and in the meantime because they don't show up to work they lose their job. Whereas if another person, say someone charged with a crime, is let go within a very short timeframe on promise of making a phone call the next morning, or is allowed to post bail while awaiting trial, they might not suffer any major life interruption.
The Fire stick already serves ads; it just advertises Amazon's own media content (both directly through interstitial trailers, and by mixing free and paid media together in the same listings). We have one because it was the cheapest way to get Netflix to our dumb TV, and because we already have Prime so we get access to the free content if we can find it. But if Amazon went to a true ad-supported model (showing third party ads) and their existing service went to crap, we'd find another way to consume content.
You want to watch ads with my wife for one night? Sure, let me get you my address so you can send me the money.
I have to admit, I spent 20 minutes on that site and couldn't decide whether it was truly serious or a really good parody.
No, they're only about 2x the cost (for a single bulb) these days. Halogen bulbs are typically those special-purpose, smaller sized, and often expensive bulbs that are used for special applications like range hoods. As a homeowner, I HATE them because they burn out after 1-2 years with typical use, are hard to get to, and cost about $2-10 to replace. The LED alternatives cost about $5-12 a piece for the same style bulb, but have much longer life and don't get as hot.
You think you're anonymous just because you're not signed in?
Even better would be the ability to edit the hosts file, or an application firewall to block specific domains by app or system wide.
Yes, I realize that's a power user feature that can likely break functionality. But there's no reason why every little app should be able to siphon up analytics data every time I use it. We can already control some aspects of what an app has access to (contacts, microphone, etc) but should be able to decide "this is a solitaire game, it shouldn't need internet access".
Unlike email, there actually ARE technical solutions to caller ID spoofing, it's just that the carriers don't want to put the money/effort into developing things like authentication technologies.
Exactly this. That's why in many places you see things like weight limits, commercial vehicle restrictions, and "trucks follow marked/state routes" type laws. Road wear scales exponentially with weight, and most residential streets are not built to the same level of durability that arterial roads are. A few inches of asphalt, meant to be replaced every 20 years, will do just fine if a road only sees a few hundred small vehicles a day, but a couple dozen semis daily can cause visible damage to a neighborhood street within months. That's why freeways are usually constructed with multiple layers of thick asphalt or concrete, and are much more expensive to maintain per mile... and often need to be resurfaced more frequently.
I could post endless quotes from naysayers over the last 200 years about how the automobile will never outcompete the horse, radio is a useless novelty, everything that's possible to know has already been discovered, planes won't be able to travel faster than the speed of sound, 640K of memory... but, you get the idea.
We're terrible at predicting how an emerging technology will impact the future, but exceptionally good at finding novel ways to apply that technology in ways that nobody could have ever guessed.
Besides, your olympic athlete analogy is horribly flawed.
You first. Post your name, job title, and employer's address here.
It's not unreasonable to use a pseudonym on this site and to expect some bit of separation from real life and online persona. Besides, whether or not they really are a published scientist has no bearing on the point they were making. I might just as well claim that I have read many scientific papers that interchange the two words and the point still stands.
On the other hand...this is basically a "common knowledge" study which serves no purpose and tells me nothing at all.
Welcome to science. A vast majority of research takes place simply to collect additional data to test a hypothesis... very few "groundbreaking" discoveries in a given field are made on a daily basis, and those that do happen must then be further tested with repeatable, verifiable experiments before they can be considered more than just a statistical anomaly.
Nearly everything that we consider "common knowledge" was once not so, and had to be backed by the weight of scientific evidence observed over a vast number of experiments. For example, less than a century ago, smoking and red meat were considered healthy, but now it's common knowledge that we know better. It's because of the hard work of many, many scientists that we now know this, but you never hear about the countless hours of labor that the research takes, or the endless experiments that have to be repeated simply to verify that the results are consistent. You do read about the "breakthrough" stuff in the news quite often, but there are two reasons why: 1) there are so many different fields of scientific research going on simultaneously, and 2) many news outlets jump the gun by using a single publication as the basis for an article about how "a scientific study suggests!" before the experimental results can be verified through repetition by other scientists.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. What proponents of privatization often fail to account for is that large infrastructure projects don't lend themselves well to free market competition.
Read up on all the controversies around the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Ontario... and get ready for owners of private infrastructure to pull that same crap hundreds of times over across hundreds of other bridges, roads, and waterways across America.
Want to build a competitor to DCA within reasonable distance of the Washington DC metro area? Good luck. In many places it's not just a question of land acquisition... there are many locations where local geography limits where airports can be built or where bridges can cross rivers. Look at the terrain around Pittsburgh... want to build another international airport there, maybe closer to the city? I'd like to see someone try.
I HATE planning roadtrips across Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma... not because of all the stereotypes about flyover country (I actually love the scenery), but because of all the damn toll roads. For each road, I have to figure out: do they take cash, are they toll by plate (with a hefty surcharge for being unregistered), or do they use any of a number of incompatible tolling systems? If I register my rental car's tags in one city will my registration be valid in another? And avoiding the tolls in places like Kansas just to cross the state means you have to go MILES out of your way on two lane roads. Is it reasonable to expect that someone will be able to raise enough money to build a competing toll road, parallel to an existing one? In contrast, I can drive anywhere in a dozen northeastern states and know that any toll road will take EZpass.
There's a big lake near my house that TVA sold off to a private company some years ago. Sure, the buyers spent money fixing up boat ramps and picnic areas... but then they decided to drain the lake for a year to do some maintenance on the dam. Now, if this were still government land it would be common sense to expect that you explore the lake bed at your own risk (people do that anyway when the lake is drawn down for the winter), but since the lake was now private property, the company used trespassing laws to enforce a complete closure of the entire lake and all adjacent land. And who did they use to enforce the closure? The local sheriff's department.
I'll provide a little context, as someone from the US who used to ride a bike to work every day. The "bad reputation" that cyclists get in this country is due in large part to three factors:
1) Our car culture means that outside of urban areas and college campuses, riding a bike for your daily commute is generally looked down upon. A common attitude is... why ride for 30 minutes when you can drive less than 10 and arrive to work without breaking a sweat? Clearly if you had enough money and prestige, you'd buy a car.
2) When it comes to infrastructure planning in suburbs and rural areas, bikes are generally left out of the picture, so it's uncommon to see things like dedicated bike lanes or even a place to lock up your bike at your destination. Our state senator even went on the record as saying that he strongly opposes spending any money to build greenways or bike lanes, because he feels that funds would be better spent on roads that carry vehicles full of goods which, apparently, boost commerce. This means that more bikes are forced onto lanes shared by cars.
3) Quite a few recreational cyclists have taken the mantra "share the road" to such an extreme that they feel their right to ride on the roadways means that they're entitled to act like complete assholes to car drivers. This means doing things like intentionally impeding traffic by riding in the center of the lane in the name of "safety" (that car might hit you as it passes, so be sure it doesn't get a chance to), blowing through stop signs and traffic lights (you can't let that red light slow down your cadence), and refusing to use pullout lanes where they are available (because god forbid you have to stop and unclip while you wait for all that piled up traffic to go by). Now, I'm into road cycling myself, and I can say that it's only a very small percentage of cyclists who act this way, but the actions of a few give a reputation to the whole bunch.
Senior discounts are typically a very soft policy, and I've never actually seen one strictly enforced (a reasonable request refused or ID checked, for example). It's the same with military discounts, or college student discounts. I'm in my early 30's yet I've been given a "senior" discount many times for a variety of reasons: because I was nice to a cashier, showed patience while they dealt with a belligerent customer ahead of me, commented on a cashier's haircut, because I was neighbors with the cashier, or because it was easier than waiting for a manager to fix a pricing error. I've also seen cashiers "forget" to offer the discount to a senior who was rude.
Many folks in their 40's or 50's, if they mention the senior discount, will have their request honored, since it's generally considered bad manners to question someone's age. Now, if I were to ask for the same discount, I'd probably get some dirty looks, and I'd feel like I was taking advantage. But if the cashier was in the right mood they'd probably, more often than not, roll their eyes and give me the discount anyway, since that's easier than arguing with an unreasonable customer request.
I never served in the military, but I've noticed that sometimes if a cashier asks if I qualify for that discount, and I reply with a laugh that no, only my parents did so I was a military brat who decided they'd had enough of living on base as a kid, they'll sometimes give me the discount anyway.
If Tinder had phrased this as a "college student discount", it would have been allowed to stand; instead they not only chose to use one of the legally protected classes (age) as a factor, they strictly enforced the pricing scheme based on birthdate.