I find that for our business users, they put a high value on "thin and light" -- BUT they also care a lot about lots of fast disk storage space. Most of our laptops originally spec'd with 256GB SSDs have been upgraded to 512GB or even 1TB SSDs now, as people kept running out of space and screaming for more.
The "big lie" in recent years was that Cloud computing would mean a reduced need for local disk space. Doesn't happen..... Apps like DropBox keep cached local copies of all those folders people create or get invited to share. Big video presentations get downloaded and saved locally so they can play back smoothly, when needed to show them to clients, regardless of Internet connectivity at the site. Mainstream software like Office 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud keep installing more and more on the local computer with upgrades and additional apps they add to the collection.
The big "Ace in the hole" Tesla has over everyone else is their extensive Supercharging network. You can drive a Tesla on a road trip, even if you're going into parts of Mexico or Canada from the U.S., and the GPS automatically routes you to the Supercharging stations along the route, as needed, to keep you going.
With everyone else, you're relying on a hodge-podge network of mostly slower charging stations that make you sign up for accounts with each of them, in order to activate the charger and pay for it. I don't think the traditional auto-makers can really compete, even IF they build a superior EV to Tesla's offerings, unless they solve that problem -- building out their own fast charging networks that allow free charging (at least up to a certain amount per year).
Maybe I'm being totally clueless here, but I'm sure some of you more well versed in system security than I am can provide insight.
What I don't get about 2 factor is, it seems like only the "second step" provides the true security? I mean, considering you already have the additional hassle of having to enter a randomly generated key code, produced on your piece of hardware you're carrying around, why even bother with the first part; the traditional password, anymore?
Passwords are regularly getting hacked or stolen from databases containing them, so they're failing at serving as good security. So why even bother with them anymore? Wouldn't it be just as secure, really, to log in as a user and immediately ask for that randomized, rotating code that the owner's device displays for them to enter?
I'd agree that a lot of these salary rates look approximately correct to me. But you only know so much from a job title.
For example? According to this chart, a Network Administrator gets paid about $58,873 yet a Network and Computer Systems Administrator gets $86,430. I bet if you actually talked to a number of people who were given each of those job titles, you'd find a big mish-mash of what people holding either title actually did as job responsibilities. Arguably, someone purely doing "Network Administration" might be the one getting paid MORE, because he/she was purely responsible for high-end Cisco switches and networking gear, firewalls, etc. -- which require more specialized skills and certifications than someone just doing Windows PC workstation support or taking care of user account setup via Active Directory or what-not.
And heck, my own job title is "Support Analyst" -- which seems to be a completely made up name, created by pulling from a couple of different job titles and pasting words together. I can't ever find a salary match for my particular title -- and I'm quite sure that was done on purpose.
I hate these types of "studies", because it's inevitably just someone trying to think up another reason the environment is getting destroyed, without looking at the bigger picture.
Whether you use "expedited shipping" or not, the shipper gets paid their negotiated rate to deliver that box. Part of the way the shipper makes it cost effective is by ensuring the delivery truck is as full as possible. There are enough packages going around so they're going to accomplish that consistently, regardless of if your particular order has been consolidated into one box or not.
If you're simply arguing that receiving your order in separate boxes creates more waste? I'd say that first of all, the Amazon boxes I've seen are typically put into recycling bins, so they're not just adding to landfills. (If they are, then you need to take that up with the recycling company, who is apparently not really doing what they say they're doing.) But second? I suspect many, many people do what I do with these boxes; hang onto most of them to re-use them when we ship things back out! Before Amazon, I sometimes had to actually pay for a shipping box before I could send a product out to a buyer on eBay or elsewhere. Now, I almost always have a suitably sized box on-hand from the Prime boxes I saved in my garage. I reuse the packing material inside the boxes too.
Seems to me the correct answer is that they're a "free for all" as far as resource collection goes. If you're able to get there, mine the resources, and bring them back to Earth -- they're your resources to resell.
They "belong to humanity as a whole", to the extent that any or all of us are able to get there. The trip is still quite risky, costly and technically difficult to make -- so whoever invests all of that towards going there deserves to be able to profit from it on our planet, if they can.
I disagree. One of the interesting things about Tesla is the tendency to incrementally improve the cars as they're produced, vs. cranking out large numbers of them with flawed parts because they aren't ready to officially change the design on some scheduled calendar date.
When they can make a change via software, they do it, in a continuous rollout of firmware updates. Win-win for everybody, really.
When it involves actual part revisions? It ensures the least number of Teslas were sold to customers with the lesser-quality part in them, and the parts that fail in warranty will get swapped with the latest and greatest update. (Even out of warranty, it's at least a "case by case" thing that you stand a chance of getting the part replaced free as a "good will" gesture. Tesla tries to be a little bit like Apple used to be, in that sense. They don't want to commit to anything on paper that they don't have to.... but if you're friendly and reasonable with the service center folks, they have some leeway to give you a break when you have issues, too.)
The fact that A.I. requires human labor doesn't really justify or explain why they'd start paying everyone who contributed to the data that was gathered. The only people really making a given A.I. project useful are the people already employed and presumably getting well paid for writing the data collection processes, ensuring they're running successfully and making the decisions on which information will be prioritized vs. discarded, as they guide the A.I. to make the decisions they're wanting of it.
It might be nice to think that, "Hey.... someone might pay me just for collecting data on my driving habits as I drive around." But it's not gonna happen when the info of where YOU personally drove and how you drove on a subset of the total number of roads is such a small part of the whole of the data they're trying to gather for self-driving vehicles or what-not.
At best, a push for this would result in higher prices for everything while you'd have to manage some sort of micro-transaction fund for all the thousands of one cent payments you'd get as your share for talking in public, walking around, making purchasing decisions in stores, or whatever else they might collect about you.
I've read about similar scams going on where it's far more organized. People have been taking large SUV's, blacking out the rear windows, and turning the whole rear of the vehicle into a giant fuel tank. Then they're able to steal hundreds of gallons of gas at a time, or with just a few stops (since people might actually notice if you sat at a pump long enough to get 500-600 gallons of fuel out of it).
It creates one highly dangerous vehicle on the road.... but they do it.
I mean, a total household income of $78,000 qualifies you as in the "top quantile"? I know this gets a bit off-topic of how good an iPhone is as an indicator of being part of that group.... but I find it a bit depressing that our collective incomes have dropped enough to make this a reality.
This isn't talking about individual incomes, mind you - but total household income. 2 parent families with kids and so forth.
That means a husband and wife could each have jobs paying less than $40,000/yr. and yet they're among the "richest" in America that these marketing people are interested in zeroing in on?
I know..... differences in cost of living by geography and all that. But STILL? My very first "career job" in the early 2000's was doing computer support/helpdesk type work for a small to mid-sized family owned business and I was earning $40,000-ish/yr. pay back then, in the midwest where cost of living was low.
If you're married and the two of you, together, aren't earning at least this "top quantile" of income or darn close to it? It's not even realistic to imagine you can handle paying the typical mortgage for a small home, a couple of car payments so the two of you have vehicles to get to/from work, and paying everything else while saving the minimum recommended amount towards retirement. (If I'm way off base, please explain! I keep reading the economic advice from the people telling us we shouldn't be putting down more than X% of our income on a car payment, and Y% on a mortgage payment, and yet should be putting Z% into a 401K or IRA... and none of that adds up as possible with a $78K household income, from what I've seen.)
That's irrelevant. Seriously... Lots of things "work" in other countries, despite oppressive or sub-optimal systems of central governance there.
I can go to many Communist / Socialist nations and see that they have perfectly serviceable road systems in place. I can see that even dictatorships in corrupt nations might have some sort of public school system established for people.
The point here is, the USA has the *only* attempt at running a Democratic Republic, which rejects the idea that government operates and funds anything beyond the basics outlined in our Constitution. An increasingly number of people seem to just want to throw their hands in the air over our challenges and problems, and decide we should just copy the European countries, embracing socialism and tossing our existing system out. They're rambling on about free college educations for everybody and free healthcare for all, etc.
You know? We *do* have government provided healthcare for certain situations, such as our war veterans. Ask anyone how great the care is at the VA hospitals though. Yeah, kind of pathetic. But hey, our veterans can say they get free healthcare and medications!
I believe the free market and practicing Capitalism actually works pretty well. It's never been "perfect", but nothing ever will be, because human nature. It's funny how with medical care and production of medications though, it's this ONE area where none of that has a chance of working properly so only government can make it right? I think we just need to do a little more "out of the box" thinking about how to manage healthcare within the existing structure. Single-payer healthcare/Socialized medicine won't encourage any doctors to excel at what they do. It'll drive many of the good ones out of the field. It'll ensure everyone gets SOME kind of care, but it's probably not going to be that great. We have a whole civilization brought up on the idea that you earn money based on the quality of the work you do... not that you get a fixed pay rate, decided by government, for as long as you promise to fill an opening they've got.
Kind of a narrow-minded assumption that it would be another car on each side making the space tight, though, isn't it?
I love how all the Tesla haters jumped on this to rant about keying the car or ruining its whole paint job....
I'm thinking more of situations I've been in, in the past, where there might have been just enough space to fit my car between a concrete wall on one side and something like a trash dumpster on the other. Nobody parked there, even though the rest of the lot was packed, because it was too difficult to get out. But if you can slot the car in there automatically, cool.... You just took advantage of the space.
Well, sure.... that's ONE possible outcome (wild, random weather swings with short notice). I don't know that there's really any more evidence we'll get that than there is the climate will stabilize at a higher overall temperature?
The "climate change deniers" are really the least of the problem, IMO. Some people deny the Earth is round. Others deny we ever went to the moon. Doesn't really make a difference, since people holding those opinions are a minority who aren't involved in any science, engineering or technology related fields actually DOING things requiring knowing those facts.
The whole question of what to make of the observations of overall warming is the important one. And as you say, the supercomputer models really just wind up conflicting each other and providing guesses and incomplete data, right now. Personally, I think politics needs to stay out of the climate change issue until we have actual facts and workable solutions, if indeed they're needed. Too much fear-mongering going on right now -- which leads to government wasting money to try to appease worked-up people.
Switching to alternative forms of energy to burning fossil fuels? We're getting there already. But the BEST way to do that is showing people reasons it benefits them directly. If you can't sell someone solar panels and give them a true cost savings using them, then it's not really the right technology solution for them. Just shoving, "Do it to save the planet!" down their throat isn't the right way to fix any of this.
I wonder if it's a bit telling that you chose to post anonymously here? Will you even read my reply to your comments? Probably not....
But doctors losing out with single-payer actually DOES bother me, quite a bit. Just writing off the fact that a rockstar doc won't get rewarded anymore for his superior skills is the most un-American thing I can think of. That goes against every fiber of what our Capitalist system is about.
Sure, we're an outlier by doing things the way we do. We're also an outlier by having a Democratic Republic as our governmental system.
It disturbs me that so many people can't seem to think outside the box on healthcare, and are convinced that the preferred single-payer healthcare plan operated by socialist governments is the only way we could possible solve healthcare issues we've got today.
Healthcare is different because my taxes were never supposed to pay for it in the first place! Things like the criminal justice system are basic components of our government itself. We established that government would play that role of not only making but enforcing laws and that we'd run a court system to determine guilt or innocence of those accused of breaking said laws. That's referred to in our Constitution itself.
There was never a right to government paid healthcare in America.
And that's not for the Founders just not thinking of it. There were arguments made about that idea as America was being put together as a nation. But ultimately, it didn't happen.
I see a trend, every time we decide to give government a role of "caretaker" over something we don't wish to pay for ourselves. It winds up making everything less efficient than it was before they meddled in it. A lot of the problems we have now with over-prescribing expensive pills is thanks to government collision with big pharma, already. I don't relish the thought of that same government calling all the shots on people's healthcare options.
I've seen a number of Model S owners complain that there was really no use-case for summon except the "gee whiz" factor of showing off your car entering or exiting the garage without you in it first.... until they needed to park in a really tight space. Saves you from having to worry about opening your door and hitting something next to you.
I've got to step in and make a comment here.... One of my best friends is a divorced mom with 3 kids who has struggled to make ends meet by working full-time and stretching the little bit of child support she gets. Occasionally, she still winds up having to beg her mom for a loan. A while ago, she took a job doing health and life insurance sales. After dealing with all of the people on medicare/medicaid, folks on Obamacare plans, and everything else? She's concluded that Americans' biggest problem with healthcare is themselves.
The ones who are SO concerned about all the healthcare they need, and constantly wrangle for a plan that gives them as much for free as possible? Almost every time, they're the ones who were/are cigarette chain smokers, very overweight, and are taking as many as 8-15 different prescription meds at the same time. At what point do you stop and think, "Hey... maybe my doctor is wrong for just prescribing me ANOTHER pill to take every day? Maybe all these drugs I'm swallowing already are doing as much harm as good?" And just how much insurance money should you really be entitled to receiving to care for all of your issues you brought on yourself with a lifetime of poor choices?
I can't see "single payer" healthcare doing anything besides causing a huge spike in taxes we'd have to pay to cover the high costs to provide it to everyone.
I agree that most modern chat clients lack the traditional "Away" message and mechanism. But you can still do things like set "Do Not DIsturb" on your iPhone or Mac (complete with the ability for selected people to punch through that anyway, if needed).
And like someone else pointed out.... simply not responding is like letting your telephone ring and not picking it up. You didn't have to have a recorded message pick up to tell them you're not available to talk. A lack of a response is sufficient.
Seriously, this just sounds like more Federal govt. B.S. Over-promising they're going to get tough on something that's not practical or even clearly necessary.
Pirate radio?! This is the era where terrestrial radio is a dying thing in America. I know a surprisingly number of people who upgraded factory stereos in their vehicles and didn't even bother to reattach the antenna because they "never use the radio part anyway".
If the pirate stations are really interfering with reception of legitimate ones, then I'm sure complaints will get filed and they can go after those specific offenders. But it makes no sense to turn this into a crusade? The few times I've heard a pirate station operating near where I lived, it was someone running really low wattage on a frequency between a couple legitimate ones. They had a small group of fans who would go out to certain store parking lots just to tune them in, because they were unable to hear them from their homes. We're talking maybe a 2 mile radius.....
I may be one of the "old timers" who I'm told is thinking about things in an "old school" way when I say this. But I've *always* warned people that "The Cloud" just means you're giving somebody else the responsibility of handling your data and the systems it runs on.
That makes sense sometimes. I'm not "anti cloud". But for anything really critically important to a business, I feel you should have it running locally and THEN consider cloud options as hot-failover sites, backup sites, etc. With cloud hosting, the whole thing is off limits to you as soon as your Internet circuit goes down, for one thing. With it running locally, you can still use it just fine anywhere on your LAN.
But additionally, if the provider hosting your stuff goes bankrupt or merges with someone else, or just plain decides it's not profitable enough without some pricing changes -- where does that leave you? Technically, they can just disappear with your whole software and data configuration overnight. Or they can put trained apes in charge of maintaining things so it suddenly has huge security holes. Who knows?
When you run things yourself, YOU are where the buck stops if things go wrong. If you're good at what you do, that should be more of a comforting thing than a scary thing. I've seen too many shops trying to cut corners on the I.T. hiring budget by bringing in less experienced people who really can't properly run the systems they're supposed to be caring for. The cloud for them is a crutch... a way to get things done that are beyond their abilities. But that's not an ideal situation for a business to put itself in.
I ran across a particularly devious malware tactic recently. The malware was purposely setting the NTFS "dirty" flag repeatedly, so the filesystem was flagged as needing repair. That, in turn, prevented most of the bootable virus cleanup/recovery discs from cleaning the system. They'd boot up but report they could only mount the target filesystem as "read only" because it was damaged and needed to be repaired first!
This situation has only escalated to this point in recent times.
I used to have a business on the side doing PC service and upgrading work, on call. About half of my calls were from small businesses or individuals who needed malware and virus cleanups.
Back then, it was definitely possible to clean a system so it was back to normal working condition again, although sometimes it was VERY time consuming. You had to run multiple tools on the system, including ones that booted from recovery OS's you had on bootable CD, DVD or USB stick. Admittedly, you couldn't PROVE you had a system 100% clean, but when over a dozen scanning tools say it's clean and you no longer see any excessive CPU usage or disk chatter, and you can't find anything acting abnormally or showing up in the task manager? It's clean enough to make a paying customer happy.
The best answer was ALWAYS to wipe and reinstall from scratch. But sometimes that's not even viable. (EG. Customer has numerous apps installed that he or she no longer has license keys or installation media for and doesn't want to lose them.) If you really CAN'T get it clean, then you can tell them they're screwed and have to start over fresh -- but they're NOT gonna pay you for that answer.
What's crazy, now, is how these rootkits have gotten so advanced, they're really winning the battle for the first time in computing history. I fought for days to remove malware on a PC for a friend, last month, and despite throwing everything I knew of at it and manually poring over all possible registry locations that can start an app on boot or login? I never did feel confident I had it fully cleaned. It was better/usable instead of freezing up and running so slowly, it was useless. And everything reported it clean. But to me, it just didn't feel quite right. I just saw too many little pauses or hesitations that MAY have been his CPU being too old and slow. But not having used his laptop before the infection, I couldn't say for certain. I wound up advising him to wipe the machine and use it as an opportunity to upgrade to a new SSD.
Except the problem is, the claim they should have paid their workers better doesn't tend to matter much if that CEO walked away with 10 million a year by letting things go down the tubes with all the IP stolen. He or she got a good run of highly paid years and chance are, will be in a short list considered for hire by the next big corporation.
I'm not big on chain restaurants on the whole. Usually, I think they're good for providing a consistent, adequate dining experience -- but rarely one you think of as excellent.
Smokey Bones used to have a location over in Illinois when I lived in St. Louis, though - and it was worth the drive for us. Always served really good BBQ compared to a lot of the overpriced "mom and pop" BBQ joints in the area that thought more of themselves than they were worth. And at least in the St. Louis area, the other BBQ chains were FAR below Smokey Bones in quality.
That was years ago, before they did this tablet stuff. But I did have an early experience with the tablets at the table at a different chain -- and it wasn't good. We had a discount coupon we wanted to use and their computer system couldn't seem to properly handle it. The manager had to come out and mess with the point of sale system for a long time to get it credited to us, since it was all updated to work only with the pricing in the system and on the fancy tablet. We were kind of disgusted with it.
It reminds me of the AWFUL ones you get from car dealerships. They ask you to rate your sales advisor or serviceperson from 1 to 10 on a number of things, and then they get penalized by corporate if they score anything less than perfect 10's.
What happens is people just fill in a 10 for everything, regardless of what they think, if they find out how it all works and they don't want to punish the people they worked with. Everyone else is honest and can almost never fill it all out as a 10, since it's rare there's no room for improvement. In any sane survey, someone who scored a lot of 8's or 9's would be a superior employee.
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I find that for our business users, they put a high value on "thin and light" -- BUT they also care a lot about lots of fast disk storage space. Most of our laptops originally spec'd with 256GB SSDs have been upgraded to 512GB or even 1TB SSDs now, as people kept running out of space and screaming for more.
The "big lie" in recent years was that Cloud computing would mean a reduced need for local disk space. Doesn't happen..... Apps like DropBox keep cached local copies of all those folders people create or get invited to share. Big video presentations get downloaded and saved locally so they can play back smoothly, when needed to show them to clients, regardless of Internet connectivity at the site. Mainstream software like Office 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud keep installing more and more on the local computer with upgrades and additional apps they add to the collection.
The big "Ace in the hole" Tesla has over everyone else is their extensive Supercharging network. You can drive a Tesla on a road trip, even if you're going into parts of Mexico or Canada from the U.S., and the GPS automatically routes you to the Supercharging stations along the route, as needed, to keep you going.
With everyone else, you're relying on a hodge-podge network of mostly slower charging stations that make you sign up for accounts with each of them, in order to activate the charger and pay for it. I don't think the traditional auto-makers can really compete, even IF they build a superior EV to Tesla's offerings, unless they solve that problem -- building out their own fast charging networks that allow free charging (at least up to a certain amount per year).
Maybe I'm being totally clueless here, but I'm sure some of you more well versed in system security than I am can provide insight.
What I don't get about 2 factor is, it seems like only the "second step" provides the true security? I mean, considering you already have the additional hassle of having to enter a randomly generated key code, produced on your piece of hardware you're carrying around, why even bother with the first part; the traditional password, anymore?
Passwords are regularly getting hacked or stolen from databases containing them, so they're failing at serving as good security. So why even bother with them anymore? Wouldn't it be just as secure, really, to log in as a user and immediately ask for that randomized, rotating code that the owner's device displays for them to enter?
I'd agree that a lot of these salary rates look approximately correct to me. But you only know so much from a job title.
For example? According to this chart, a Network Administrator gets paid about $58,873 yet a Network and Computer Systems Administrator gets $86,430. I bet if you actually talked to a number of people who were given each of those job titles, you'd find a big mish-mash of what people holding either title actually did as job responsibilities. Arguably, someone purely doing "Network Administration" might be the one getting paid MORE, because he/she was purely responsible for high-end Cisco switches and networking gear, firewalls, etc. -- which require more specialized skills and certifications than someone just doing Windows PC workstation support or taking care of user account setup via Active Directory or what-not.
And heck, my own job title is "Support Analyst" -- which seems to be a completely made up name, created by pulling from a couple of different job titles and pasting words together. I can't ever find a salary match for my particular title -- and I'm quite sure that was done on purpose.
I hate these types of "studies", because it's inevitably just someone trying to think up another reason the environment is getting destroyed, without looking at the bigger picture.
Whether you use "expedited shipping" or not, the shipper gets paid their negotiated rate to deliver that box. Part of the way the shipper makes it cost effective is by ensuring the delivery truck is as full as possible. There are enough packages going around so they're going to accomplish that consistently, regardless of if your particular order has been consolidated into one box or not.
If you're simply arguing that receiving your order in separate boxes creates more waste? I'd say that first of all, the Amazon boxes I've seen are typically put into recycling bins, so they're not just adding to landfills. (If they are, then you need to take that up with the recycling company, who is apparently not really doing what they say they're doing.) But second? I suspect many, many people do what I do with these boxes; hang onto most of them to re-use them when we ship things back out! Before Amazon, I sometimes had to actually pay for a shipping box before I could send a product out to a buyer on eBay or elsewhere. Now, I almost always have a suitably sized box on-hand from the Prime boxes I saved in my garage. I reuse the packing material inside the boxes too.
Seems to me the correct answer is that they're a "free for all" as far as resource collection goes. If you're able to get there, mine the resources, and bring them back to Earth -- they're your resources to resell.
They "belong to humanity as a whole", to the extent that any or all of us are able to get there. The trip is still quite risky, costly and technically difficult to make -- so whoever invests all of that towards going there deserves to be able to profit from it on our planet, if they can.
I disagree. One of the interesting things about Tesla is the tendency to incrementally improve the cars as they're produced, vs. cranking out large numbers of them with flawed parts because they aren't ready to officially change the design on some scheduled calendar date.
When they can make a change via software, they do it, in a continuous rollout of firmware updates. Win-win for everybody, really.
When it involves actual part revisions? It ensures the least number of Teslas were sold to customers with the lesser-quality part in them, and the parts that fail in warranty will get swapped with the latest and greatest update. (Even out of warranty, it's at least a "case by case" thing that you stand a chance of getting the part replaced free as a "good will" gesture. Tesla tries to be a little bit like Apple used to be, in that sense. They don't want to commit to anything on paper that they don't have to .... but if you're friendly and reasonable with the service center folks, they have some leeway to give you a break when you have issues, too.)
The fact that A.I. requires human labor doesn't really justify or explain why they'd start paying everyone who contributed to the data that was gathered.
The only people really making a given A.I. project useful are the people already employed and presumably getting well paid for writing the data collection processes, ensuring they're running successfully and making the decisions on which information will be prioritized vs. discarded, as they guide the A.I. to make the decisions they're wanting of it.
It might be nice to think that, "Hey.... someone might pay me just for collecting data on my driving habits as I drive around." But it's not gonna happen when the info of where YOU personally drove and how you drove on a subset of the total number of roads is such a small part of the whole of the data they're trying to gather for self-driving vehicles or what-not.
At best, a push for this would result in higher prices for everything while you'd have to manage some sort of micro-transaction fund for all the thousands of one cent payments you'd get as your share for talking in public, walking around, making purchasing decisions in stores, or whatever else they might collect about you.
I've read about similar scams going on where it's far more organized. People have been taking large SUV's, blacking out the rear windows, and turning the whole rear of the vehicle into a giant fuel tank. Then they're able to steal hundreds of gallons of gas at a time, or with just a few stops (since people might actually notice if you sat at a pump long enough to get 500-600 gallons of fuel out of it).
It creates one highly dangerous vehicle on the road .... but they do it.
I mean, a total household income of $78,000 qualifies you as in the "top quantile"? I know this gets a bit off-topic of how good an iPhone is as an indicator of being part of that group.... but I find it a bit depressing that our collective incomes have dropped enough to make this a reality.
This isn't talking about individual incomes, mind you - but total household income. 2 parent families with kids and so forth.
That means a husband and wife could each have jobs paying less than $40,000/yr. and yet they're among the "richest" in America that these marketing people are interested in zeroing in on?
I know ..... differences in cost of living by geography and all that. But STILL? My very first "career job" in the early 2000's was doing computer support/helpdesk type work for a small to mid-sized family owned business and I was earning $40,000-ish/yr. pay back then, in the midwest where cost of living was low.
If you're married and the two of you, together, aren't earning at least this "top quantile" of income or darn close to it? It's not even realistic to imagine you can handle paying the typical mortgage for a small home, a couple of car payments so the two of you have vehicles to get to/from work, and paying everything else while saving the minimum recommended amount towards retirement. (If I'm way off base, please explain! I keep reading the economic advice from the people telling us we shouldn't be putting down more than X% of our income on a car payment, and Y% on a mortgage payment, and yet should be putting Z% into a 401K or IRA ... and none of that adds up as possible with a $78K household income, from what I've seen.)
That's irrelevant. Seriously ... Lots of things "work" in other countries, despite oppressive or sub-optimal systems of central governance there.
I can go to many Communist / Socialist nations and see that they have perfectly serviceable road systems in place. I can see that even dictatorships in corrupt nations might have some sort of public school system established for people.
The point here is, the USA has the *only* attempt at running a Democratic Republic, which rejects the idea that government operates and funds anything beyond the basics outlined in our Constitution. An increasingly number of people seem to just want to throw their hands in the air over our challenges and problems, and decide we should just copy the European countries, embracing socialism and tossing our existing system out. They're rambling on about free college educations for everybody and free healthcare for all, etc.
You know? We *do* have government provided healthcare for certain situations, such as our war veterans. Ask anyone how great the care is at the VA hospitals though. Yeah, kind of pathetic. But hey, our veterans can say they get free healthcare and medications!
I believe the free market and practicing Capitalism actually works pretty well. It's never been "perfect", but nothing ever will be, because human nature. It's funny how with medical care and production of medications though, it's this ONE area where none of that has a chance of working properly so only government can make it right? I think we just need to do a little more "out of the box" thinking about how to manage healthcare within the existing structure. Single-payer healthcare/Socialized medicine won't encourage any doctors to excel at what they do. It'll drive many of the good ones out of the field. It'll ensure everyone gets SOME kind of care, but it's probably not going to be that great. We have a whole civilization brought up on the idea that you earn money based on the quality of the work you do ... not that you get a fixed pay rate, decided by government, for as long as you promise to fill an opening they've got.
Kind of a narrow-minded assumption that it would be another car on each side making the space tight, though, isn't it?
I love how all the Tesla haters jumped on this to rant about keying the car or ruining its whole paint job....
I'm thinking more of situations I've been in, in the past, where there might have been just enough space to fit my car between a concrete wall on one side and something like a trash dumpster on the other. Nobody parked there, even though the rest of the lot was packed, because it was too difficult to get out. But if you can slot the car in there automatically, cool .... You just took advantage of the space.
Well, sure .... that's ONE possible outcome (wild, random weather swings with short notice). I don't know that there's really any more evidence we'll get that than there is the climate will stabilize at a higher overall temperature?
The "climate change deniers" are really the least of the problem, IMO. Some people deny the Earth is round. Others deny we ever went to the moon. Doesn't really make a difference, since people holding those opinions are a minority who aren't involved in any science, engineering or technology related fields actually DOING things requiring knowing those facts.
The whole question of what to make of the observations of overall warming is the important one. And as you say, the supercomputer models really just wind up conflicting each other and providing guesses and incomplete data, right now. Personally, I think politics needs to stay out of the climate change issue until we have actual facts and workable solutions, if indeed they're needed. Too much fear-mongering going on right now -- which leads to government wasting money to try to appease worked-up people.
Switching to alternative forms of energy to burning fossil fuels? We're getting there already. But the BEST way to do that is showing people reasons it benefits them directly. If you can't sell someone solar panels and give them a true cost savings using them, then it's not really the right technology solution for them. Just shoving, "Do it to save the planet!" down their throat isn't the right way to fix any of this.
I wonder if it's a bit telling that you chose to post anonymously here? Will you even read my reply to your comments? Probably not ....
But doctors losing out with single-payer actually DOES bother me, quite a bit. Just writing off the fact that a rockstar doc won't get rewarded anymore for his superior skills is the most un-American thing I can think of. That goes against every fiber of what our Capitalist system is about.
Sure, we're an outlier by doing things the way we do. We're also an outlier by having a Democratic Republic as our governmental system.
It disturbs me that so many people can't seem to think outside the box on healthcare, and are convinced that the preferred single-payer healthcare plan operated by socialist governments is the only way we could possible solve healthcare issues we've got today.
Healthcare is different because my taxes were never supposed to pay for it in the first place! Things like the criminal justice system are basic components of our government itself. We established that government would play that role of not only making but enforcing laws and that we'd run a court system to determine guilt or innocence of those accused of breaking said laws. That's referred to in our Constitution itself.
There was never a right to government paid healthcare in America.
And that's not for the Founders just not thinking of it. There were arguments made about that idea as America was being put together as a nation. But ultimately, it didn't happen.
I see a trend, every time we decide to give government a role of "caretaker" over something we don't wish to pay for ourselves. It winds up making everything less efficient than it was before they meddled in it. A lot of the problems we have now with over-prescribing expensive pills is thanks to government collision with big pharma, already. I don't relish the thought of that same government calling all the shots on people's healthcare options.
I've seen a number of Model S owners complain that there was really no use-case for summon except the "gee whiz" factor of showing off your car entering or exiting the garage without you in it first .... until they needed to park in a really tight space. Saves you from having to worry about opening your door and hitting something next to you.
I've got to step in and make a comment here.... One of my best friends is a divorced mom with 3 kids who has struggled to make ends meet by working full-time and stretching the little bit of child support she gets. Occasionally, she still winds up having to beg her mom for a loan. A while ago, she took a job doing health and life insurance sales. After dealing with all of the people on medicare/medicaid, folks on Obamacare plans, and everything else? She's concluded that Americans' biggest problem with healthcare is themselves.
The ones who are SO concerned about all the healthcare they need, and constantly wrangle for a plan that gives them as much for free as possible? Almost every time, they're the ones who were/are cigarette chain smokers, very overweight, and are taking as many as 8-15 different prescription meds at the same time. At what point do you stop and think, "Hey ... maybe my doctor is wrong for just prescribing me ANOTHER pill to take every day? Maybe all these drugs I'm swallowing already are doing as much harm as good?" And just how much insurance money should you really be entitled to receiving to care for all of your issues you brought on yourself with a lifetime of poor choices?
I can't see "single payer" healthcare doing anything besides causing a huge spike in taxes we'd have to pay to cover the high costs to provide it to everyone.
I agree that most modern chat clients lack the traditional "Away" message and mechanism. But you can still do things like set "Do Not DIsturb" on your iPhone or Mac (complete with the ability for selected people to punch through that anyway, if needed).
And like someone else pointed out .... simply not responding is like letting your telephone ring and not picking it up. You didn't have to have a recorded message pick up to tell them you're not available to talk. A lack of a response is sufficient.
Seriously, this just sounds like more Federal govt. B.S. Over-promising they're going to get tough on something that's not practical or even clearly necessary.
Pirate radio?! This is the era where terrestrial radio is a dying thing in America. I know a surprisingly number of people who upgraded factory stereos in their vehicles and didn't even bother to reattach the antenna because they "never use the radio part anyway".
If the pirate stations are really interfering with reception of legitimate ones, then I'm sure complaints will get filed and they can go after those specific offenders. But it makes no sense to turn this into a crusade? The few times I've heard a pirate station operating near where I lived, it was someone running really low wattage on a frequency between a couple legitimate ones. They had a small group of fans who would go out to certain store parking lots just to tune them in, because they were unable to hear them from their homes. We're talking maybe a 2 mile radius.....
I may be one of the "old timers" who I'm told is thinking about things in an "old school" way when I say this. But I've *always* warned people that "The Cloud" just means you're giving somebody else the responsibility of handling your data and the systems it runs on.
That makes sense sometimes. I'm not "anti cloud". But for anything really critically important to a business, I feel you should have it running locally and THEN consider cloud options as hot-failover sites, backup sites, etc. With cloud hosting, the whole thing is off limits to you as soon as your Internet circuit goes down, for one thing. With it running locally, you can still use it just fine anywhere on your LAN.
But additionally, if the provider hosting your stuff goes bankrupt or merges with someone else, or just plain decides it's not profitable enough without some pricing changes -- where does that leave you? Technically, they can just disappear with your whole software and data configuration overnight. Or they can put trained apes in charge of maintaining things so it suddenly has huge security holes. Who knows?
When you run things yourself, YOU are where the buck stops if things go wrong. If you're good at what you do, that should be more of a comforting thing than a scary thing. I've seen too many shops trying to cut corners on the I.T. hiring budget by bringing in less experienced people who really can't properly run the systems they're supposed to be caring for. The cloud for them is a crutch ... a way to get things done that are beyond their abilities. But that's not an ideal situation for a business to put itself in.
I ran across a particularly devious malware tactic recently. The malware was purposely setting the NTFS "dirty" flag repeatedly, so the filesystem was flagged as needing repair. That, in turn, prevented most of the bootable virus cleanup/recovery discs from cleaning the system. They'd boot up but report they could only mount the target filesystem as "read only" because it was damaged and needed to be repaired first!
This situation has only escalated to this point in recent times.
I used to have a business on the side doing PC service and upgrading work, on call. About half of my calls were from small businesses or individuals who needed malware and virus cleanups.
Back then, it was definitely possible to clean a system so it was back to normal working condition again, although sometimes it was VERY time consuming. You had to run multiple tools on the system, including ones that booted from recovery OS's you had on bootable CD, DVD or USB stick. Admittedly, you couldn't PROVE you had a system 100% clean, but when over a dozen scanning tools say it's clean and you no longer see any excessive CPU usage or disk chatter, and you can't find anything acting abnormally or showing up in the task manager? It's clean enough to make a paying customer happy.
The best answer was ALWAYS to wipe and reinstall from scratch. But sometimes that's not even viable. (EG. Customer has numerous apps installed that he or she no longer has license keys or installation media for and doesn't want to lose them.) If you really CAN'T get it clean, then you can tell them they're screwed and have to start over fresh -- but they're NOT gonna pay you for that answer.
What's crazy, now, is how these rootkits have gotten so advanced, they're really winning the battle for the first time in computing history. I fought for days to remove malware on a PC for a friend, last month, and despite throwing everything I knew of at it and manually poring over all possible registry locations that can start an app on boot or login? I never did feel confident I had it fully cleaned. It was better/usable instead of freezing up and running so slowly, it was useless. And everything reported it clean. But to me, it just didn't feel quite right. I just saw too many little pauses or hesitations that MAY have been his CPU being too old and slow. But not having used his laptop before the infection, I couldn't say for certain. I wound up advising him to wipe the machine and use it as an opportunity to upgrade to a new SSD.
Except the problem is, the claim they should have paid their workers better doesn't tend to matter much if that CEO walked away with 10 million a year by letting things go down the tubes with all the IP stolen. He or she got a good run of highly paid years and chance are, will be in a short list considered for hire by the next big corporation.
I'm not big on chain restaurants on the whole. Usually, I think they're good for providing a consistent, adequate dining experience -- but rarely one you think of as excellent.
Smokey Bones used to have a location over in Illinois when I lived in St. Louis, though - and it was worth the drive for us. Always served really good BBQ compared to a lot of the overpriced "mom and pop" BBQ joints in the area that thought more of themselves than they were worth. And at least in the St. Louis area, the other BBQ chains were FAR below Smokey Bones in quality.
That was years ago, before they did this tablet stuff. But I did have an early experience with the tablets at the table at a different chain -- and it wasn't good. We had a discount coupon we wanted to use and their computer system couldn't seem to properly handle it. The manager had to come out and mess with the point of sale system for a long time to get it credited to us, since it was all updated to work only with the pricing in the system and on the fancy tablet. We were kind of disgusted with it.
It reminds me of the AWFUL ones you get from car dealerships. They ask you to rate your sales advisor or serviceperson from 1 to 10 on a number of things, and then they get penalized by corporate if they score anything less than perfect 10's.
What happens is people just fill in a 10 for everything, regardless of what they think, if they find out how it all works and they don't want to punish the people they worked with. Everyone else is honest and can almost never fill it all out as a 10, since it's rare there's no room for improvement. In any sane survey, someone who scored a lot of 8's or 9's would be a superior employee.