I know around the metro D.C. area, you definitely have a decline in the popularity of golf courses. This area used to be loaded with them, and one by one, they're closing down.
Meanwhile, cycling is *huge*. The area has always had very good trails for cyclists, so that probably doesn't hurt either.... But I've seen an increasing number of people getting involved in various cycling races or just riding nice mountain bikes along the side of roads on the weekends.
The traditional country club catered to the "old rich", IMO. The "new rich" tend to be people who are more "showy" with their money (driving fancy luxury cars, wearing designer clothes in public, etc. etc.). I think for the traditional, old money types, the wealth was viewed more as something inappropriate to flaunt in the general public. Rather, it let you buy into an exclusive social group of people with similar wealth. The younger, affluent people would rather just go out in public with their nice things.
If you remove the exclusivity factor from golf, you're left with something that doesn't seem like it has a lot of value for the dollar. The skills required (mostly about skillful estimating of trajectories and the power needed to land a ball where you want it) are pretty similar to the skills needed to be a good billiards player.... a pastime which costs FAR less and likely draws a larger audience too (if you're good at it while playing on a table at a local bowling alley, bar, or pool hall).
You might have a point, except owning a reliable car tends to tie in to other factors.
For example, the majority of people in the U.S. don't live in one of the big cities where mass transit is truly practical as an alternative to driving to get to and from work each day. Even for many who DO live in such cities, mass transit imposes too many limitations. (For example, if you work as some sort of on-site service technician -- for computers or copiers perhaps? A good, reliable vehicle may be a requirement to perform the job.)
When you purchase a vehicle brand new and finance it, you usually get a better interest rate than lenders will give you on a used one, for starters. And then, you have a consistent payment every month for the next 5 or 6 years, as you pay it off. That consistency is "key" for most people earning those "under 6 figure" salaries. Surprises like a cheaper, used car suddenly having a transmission failure outside the warranty period, are a much bigger problem to tackle.
When your new car, under a factory warranty, has a problem -- you're generally given a loaner to drive while it gets repaired. That means no interruptions with your work.
The trick is to buy only a new vehicle that offers a warranty as long as your financing period. That "3 year, 36,000 mile" stuff they used to sell everyone wasn't such a good value at all.
The funny thing is, I'm hearing the exact opposite complaint coming from some of the people with many years of actual work experience in their fields. They're saying that recently, the college grads with a B.S. or Masters in the field are getting hired over those with real experience.
I don't know? Personally, I suspect the REAL issue is just a high unemployment rate overall. We're all stuck in a "buyer's market" when it comes to those doing the hiring, so expectations and requirements are very high, and opportunity to get hired is low. No matter where you're at on the education and/or skills ladder, it's difficult to get hired right now. So people begin tossing out accusations, trying to explain why they can't get jobs.
I've worked in I.T. for over 25 years myself, and yet I don't have a degree. (I'm one of those people with "some college", meaning a few classes shy of an Associates' degree.) I've *definitely* encountered my share of jobs I was passed over for because someone really considered the degree of prime importance. Yet I don't think my track record for employment is really any worse than my counterparts who did have the 4 year degrees. Yeah, some of them earned $20K - $50K/yr. more than I did, especially during the dot-com boom era.... but in the long-haul? A lot of them lost those high-paying jobs when budget cuts or corporate mergers came around and they had to accept less to get back into the ranks of the employed. Others just got burnt out on I.T. completely and changed careers.
Meanwhile, I don't have all the college debt they had to pay off, and since my salary has been relatively steady for the last decade or more, I didn't get so caught up in the thing of moving to a more expensive area, buying a large house, etc. -- only to have to give it all up when times got rough.
There's a key difference though between the "old guys" like myself and people trying to get a start in I.T. today. I think most of us who lived and breathed computers in the 80's really got into it when it was still a hobbyist's world. Corporate America wasn't even really looking at home computers as more than a passing fad, or something to just "keep an eye on, in case it eventually became useful". When you bought a computer,you got a 200-300 page manual you had to read, cover to cover, to learn how to make it work. You might have shared knowledge with a few friends you made who owned the same machine, or joined some computer club in town. But all in all, you had to be really motivated to learn it, hands-on. Otherwise, why even waste time with it? My college courses in anything resembling I.T. were largely a joke. Either I knew way more than the professors did, or the courses went in depth on something I didn't know much about because truthfully, it DIDN'T MATTER in the grand scheme of I.T.
These days, I think colleges have figured out much more about what people actually need to know to be successful in I.T. -- and you actually *can* take classes and learn really useful material. At the same time, I see a lot of younger people who seem to be just as "into computers" as I was growing up, but they focus on much different things; social media, web sites, mobile device apps, and MMORPGs that can really suck up a LOT of one's time. It's all pretty cool and entertaining stuff -- but won't translate that well to a career doing network or systems administration, working as a PC support specialist, or systems analyst.
That's partially the case, but especially with certain categories of items, there are demonstrably "better" and "worse" time periods to have purchased them.
For example, when it comes to homes, you can find a large number of people in real estate or aspects of home repair/improvement who will tell you that in general, in the USA, the best built homes are from the late 1800's through the 1920's. (Among other things, the wood framing typically used old growth forest lumber, which you just won't ever see in use on more modern homes. Many also had such features as corrugated, galvanized steel sheet roofing -- which was designed to last around 100 years, vs. the typical asphalt shingles which are rated for as little as a 10 year lifespan.)
With computer technology, it's not that difficult to compare and contrast the early personal computers of the 1980's with what's typically sold today, and see a BIG difference in build quality. Who builds keyboards with steel frames around the keycaps these days? Look at the difference in sturdiness of the typical enclosure. Heck, the entire case of the Apple//e was metal! Look at the old dot matrix printers from companies like Epson or Okidata.... I'd say the majority of them you run across these days still work, 30 years or more after they were manufactured. Most were simply cast aside as completely obsolete before they actually broke down. (I used to know a guy who loved buying them cheap just to rip the servo motors out of them for robotics projects.)
Ok, thanks for the info. That's one of the things I really do like about Slashdot. People from a WIDE variety of backgrounds are here, and can share first-hand information the rest of us wouldn't have.
I imagined the cows would pretty much just ignore such things as solar panel installations, since they're stationary objects and they can graze around their perimeter. Still, building fences around them doesn't seem like a bad idea anyway -- as you probably don't want random people climbing around on them, vandalizing them, etc. etc.
It doesn't necessarily mean someone is making a dumb decision. This can be a perfectly legitimate, sensible option, IMO.
I knew people who moved to Mexico in the past, with similar motivations. If you can earn enough money there, you can easily afford to build yourself a fortress of a house and hire people to go out and run errands for you, etc. It might not make sense for someone with a whole family to take care of. But a younger, single person who might tend to be more of an introvert in the first place might be happy to "go where the money is" and spend a portion of it to buy the security that's lacking in the environment otherwise.
I keep seeing news clips from sources like MSNBC who are apparently on a mission to frame Bundy in that light (thief, welfare mooch, etc. etc.).
If you look at it a little further though, I don't think it's quite that clear....
First off, the entire argument centers around his letting his cattle roam and graze on the grass on all of the otherwise unused land that the Feds are NOW putting up a fuss about. Do animals not roam and graze on land in nature anyway? This isn't a case of Bundy building physical structures on govt. land, or even so much as parking vehicles on it. The government's main defense here is a claim that he owes them a large amount of money for unpaid "grazing rights". Ok... except if you look at the history of grazing rights? All they were was a way for ranchers to avoid having to deal with the hassles of maintaining grazing lands themselves -- repairing broken fences and so forth. A govt. agency offered to make things easier on them by performing those services centrally and collecting grazing fees to fund it, and they agreed. Bundy was actually doing the fence repairs and maintenance himself... so his failure to pay these fees is little more than a technicality.
Additionally, I think many folks supported him primarily as a way to "poke a proverbial stick in the eye of big government", as opposed to a direct interest in seeing justice done for Bundy and his family/relatives/friends. As a taxpayer myself, I have a big problem with government buying up large tracts of land and then just sitting on them, as they clearly did here. That's a huge waste of our money! Government's purpose is to serve the public -- so any land it purchases should be clearly towards that end. In this case, Bundy's ancestors had cattle grazing on the same land for over 100 years... and it didn't bother anybody. Only *now* is it such a big deal, govt. felt the need to use helicopters, vans with SWAT teams and more, to basically invade the area and put on a show of force -- even attempting to seize the man's cattle.
Lastly, there's the issue of govt. clearly lying about its intentions. A claim was initially made about the land being purchased for the purpose of preserving an endangered species of tortoise. Interestingly enough, there are records showing the boundaries of the protected land were re-drawn in the past, to accommodate other government projects - when they were found inconvenient. So the idea Bundy has to go for endangering these animals now is ludicrous.
Bottom line? If the guy owes the IRS back taxes and keeps refusing to pay, fine... Collect it from him the usual way. Seize his bank account or garnish some of his income. If the govt. *really* wants to FINALLY do something constructive with the land they sat on for over a century? Again, fine... but do it in a sensible way. Inform people of exactly what's going on (not LYING about it), and if it's something like a solar project? Why not just build it there and leave the cattle alone? I don't see why they couldn't co-exist and keep everyone happy.
Like other people said, it's too bad these artists disrespect the property rights of others.
It takes some practice to fly these drones well, even though they have such high-tech features as on-board GPS systems and smartphone or tablet software as control devices in many cases. They're usually smart enough to do things like stop moving and hover in place, when they lose a control signal, until you catch back up with them. But flying one precisely enough to draw actual paintings with spray paint is surely not something everyone can just run out and do well.
I'd like to see this become a new "thing"... but in a more acceptable setting. I think people would enjoy watching or even pay to see good artists creating art with flying drones -- but spraying it on places where they were ALLOWED to do it!
When I first got interested in running a computer bulletin board system, around 1986-87, I had a Tandy Color Computer 2 (with a whopping 64K of RAM) and a 300 baud auto-dial/auto-answer modem. What I didn't have was any good software to use for the purpose. Back then, the only BBS package I really knew of for the platform was a commercial one called Colorama (typically sold in "Rainbow" magazine, a Tandy Color Computer publication). As a kid who had a LOT more time than money, I was pretty uninterested in trying to buy that one.
A buddy of mine who was learning to do assembly language coding for the Motorola 6809e processor in the Color Computer started working on a device driver which could translate screen output to modem output, and intercept the results of BASIC INPUT statements, taking them as input received from the modem. That was the missing piece of the puzzle for me, allowing me to code the rest of my own BBS package using BASIC.
(As a side note... one of the limitations of the Color Computer 2 was the fact it couldn't display any lowercase letters. It knew about the ASCII codes for them, but would only show them on screen as inverse video; essentially looked like the usual uppercase text, except with black blocks behind each letter. Eventually, my friend enhanced his device driver to put the machine into a graphics mode and draw all of the text in a graphical font giving true lowercase and more characters per line than the 32 you got with the original Color Computer text font. It was a little sluggish, but worked and looked great!)
Due to lack of suitable mass storage devices back then, I wrote the message forum portion of the BBS to store each line of text in DIM variables. Rather limiting, but looking back, it was kind of amazing it worked as well as it did. (I gave people a 15 or 20 line limit per message, I believe.)
That's one theory -- but I'd say previous experience shows it wasn't the case.
For example, there were quite a few people who hung onto Windows '98SE *long* after it was discontinued, yet they never really ran into any new security threats of significance. (The biggest problem for some of them was finding anti-virus software that would still install and run on the platform, after a while. But a few packages still supported it, and downloaded AV signature updates just as well as they did on other OS's.)
In that situation, the hackers quit focusing on anything Win '98 and concerned themselves only with exploiting the more recent code out there, which had an ever increasing market-share, not a decreasing one.
We saw this again with Windows 2000 Server, where security updates stopped -- yet many businesses kept on using it in production, in situations where older and complex applications were already running well on it, and redoing the whole thing on a newer server version was a big and costly undertaking. (I know my previous employer still uses Win2K server for a custom written app developed in the PROGRESS language. It's a virtual machine now, instead of a physical server -- but there's simply no need to go through the hassle that would be involved to move it to Windows Server 2008 or 2012.)
I'm not sure where your 98% statistic comes from, but I suspect you pulled it out of thin air. Many of the old exploits and bugs affecting XP systems had to do with aspects of its design which were changed considerably in Vista and later. (We're talking everything from restricted areas of the system registry that random apps aren't allowed to change anymore, to issues related to Active-X and the older versions of IE which XP users are forced to use since the new ones won't install on it.) I doubt hackers, moving forward, will put a huge effort into finding new exploits for IE version 6,7, and 8 that weren't already patched, or trying to write malware that wouldn't be effective in the first place on any Windows version with UAC?
The primary reason you don't see the real upward mobility in America is primarily a function of the proverbial "crab bucket". If you're surrounded by people who lack the motivation to try to do more or to "rise above" the situation they're in, they tend to see you climbing past them and attempt to pull you back down to their level again -- just like a crab escaping a bucket full of crabs.
When you're the son or daughter of successful/wealthy parents, you already have higher expectations placed on you, as a rule. You probably live in a place where most of those you go to school with or have as friends are in a similar economic status. You don't want to be the "odd one out" in your peer group who doesn't maintain that same level of success, AND you're repeatedly told there's no reason you CAN'T maintain it.
Who you know will always be as important as what you know.... but many of the successful entrepreneurs I've read about don't appear to have been handed a "free success" ticket by their family members, even if those family members had the financial means to do it?
I'm constantly thinking of places where more software development is needed. The problem is, most of those places aren't the "sexy" ones. The kids in school are all about being the next video game coding superstar, which only makes sense when you consider they're raised on titles like Minecraft.
To be a successful developer right now, you almost need to run away from anything that's being hyped. If it smacks of "social networking" -- pretend you never saw that! Video gaming? Saturated... avoid it.
Niches that aren't really being adequately addressed yet?
1. Home automation. Yes, there are complete "systems" on the high-end, but that's stuff that nobody but the very wealthy even bother with. The real money is going to be with inexpensive, mass-produced systems that "John Q. Public" can go out and buy, piecemeal, and build his own "smart home / apartment" with on a budget. This was basically done before with the X10 controllers, a couple decades ago. But that was all "pre Internet" and "pre wi-fi" -- yet they STILL sell some of it today, because there's nothing more modern that's roughly equivalent in price and functionality. The Nest thermostat and smoke alarm are, by most counts, big "hits" - yet they're just stand-alone smart devices that don't integrate into a whole! There's big money to be made if someone does all of this right... maybe using Arduino gear as a base?
2. Automotive systems. The auto-makers are starting to show they have a clue about this stuff, at LAST... but they're still in the early stages of really "getting it right", IMO. Cadillac has the CUE system now, while Ford outsourced to Microsoft (with rather mixed results). It's probably difficult to get a foot in the door with these places -- but maybe there's room for a 3rd. party to engineer replacement stereo systems that make serious improvements on the factory designs? I don't see why I can't, for example, buy a replacement stereo that has a custom plate on it so it's a direct fit replacement for a specific make/model of vehicle, instead of buying some "single DIN' or "double DIN" stereo and then paying $25 for a company like Metra to sell me a crappy plastic "dash kit" to make it fit -- and netting a result that looks like I yanked the factory radio out? The replacement should integrate with the vehicle's steering wheel controls, out of the box, and do everything the factory unit did. It should also be able to talk to the OBDII system in the car, showing me any vehicle fault codes on screen, letting me get a readout of things like the fuel-air mixture while I drive and more! Integrate a GPS and navigation system that actually works well, like Waze, and let people with cellular data connections submit updates in real-time! There's so much to do here!
Well, obviously, I'm not Mr. Tesla and I'm just throwing the general idea out there, for people more knowledgeable than myself to argue the details / merits of it.
But his original oscillator was steam powered and quite small in size. The whole point was that it would continually amplify the initial frequency with each repetitive slamming of the piston into the ground, making an initially small wave very large. It doesn't sound like it would require all that much energy, even if you built it much larger in size? How many would you need? I don't have any idea.... I would guess that even large magnitude earthquakes start out in a similar fashion -- with waves that increase in energy as they build in energy over the first few seconds? If so, maybe timing is the most critical thing.... cancelling some of it out before it has that chance to amplify?
I wonder if, rather than relying on these "metametals" in special soil, one could station units similar to these at strategic locations along fault lines, designed to pick up an earthquake's resonant frequency and generate a corresponding one tuned to cancel it out?
The problem the U.S. has is *corporatism"; meaning a situation where the biggest businesses managed to buy influence into government and co-mingle with it.
We've become a government by the corporation, for the corporation (which still tosses around the "By the people, for the people!" paperwork as propaganda to keep the citizenry content).
As I've pointed out to people before, the Star Trek: TNG universe really only works because of the imaginary technologies in the series which make real-world constraints vanish. You've got the replicator which eliminates the entire "supply and demand" concept for goods. Anything someone might wish for is just "ordered up" and assembled instantly out of atoms floating around in space. You've also got the teleporter and the warp drive technologies, which bypass the constraints people have in the real world of limitations on travel. (EG. I would see advantages X, Y and Z if I was able to be over there right now instead of here, but that's realistically impossible due to the time required to travel, not to mention the cost of said travel!) And interestingly, even in the Star Trek universe, there still seems to be central government of sorts (Starfleet Command) which isn't appreciated by all inhabitants of said universe. That would seem to be tied to the one constraint left; limited availability of energy. The Dilithium crystals are supposedly rare and only found on certain planets, meaning whoever controls those planets controls the energy source practically all the starships rely on. (I guess in the Star Trek IV movie, Spock supposedly found a way to synthesize these, but only by using extinct fission reactor technology from the 20th. century. Still doesn't sound like a reliable and unlimited energy source for them.)
Many forms of government are "good" and "workable" in theory..... It's usually the constraints of the real world we live in which make most of them fall flat.
If you look to what other countries are doing, you see an awful lot of people involved in assembly of new products by hand. (For example, every time Apple comes out with a new iPhone, they pay workers in Chinese factories to hand-assemble them. Would robots produce more consistent results and be far more efficient? Sure... except I suspect the initial set-up cost to get the robot assembling them correctly is still a fairly involved and costly undertaking. If you're going to release a new model of phone every 6 months to a year, how much of an ongoing cost will there be to keep redesigning the assembly robots for the new product?)
I guess I'm thinking that's also a possible glimpse of where all these "low skilled laborers" might end up in an automated future America? No matter how much the cost of robots come down, it seems likely that for businesses not producing huge quantities of a product, or for businesses constantly changing products, humans would still be the cheaper option. And as long as we place a certain value on human rights and everyone entitled to a "fair wage", we'll probably continue to apply legal pressure to businesses to pay them at least some sort of minimum "living wage". (After all, the alternative is letting them stay unemployed and existing completely on government hand-outs, or cutting off the hand-outs and letting them fend for themselves -- which encourages crime.)
American society (generally) maintains the idea that Socialism is bad/evil not simply because of your "Communism == Socialism == Hitler == bad" equation.
The core problem we have with the concept is the idea it provides no incentives for "going above and beyond". By design, it pretends that there's a way to centrally determine what a "fair wage" is for all manner of job positions, and to dictate that wage is paid. There's no recognition of the reality that some people are more motivated than others.... that some people care more about a job well done than others do. Mediocrity is rewarded instead. In fact, it tries to ensure that people who utterly lack motivation to work will never wind up in a bad situation due to their own laziness or unwillingness to learn something new.
Forced wealth redistribution runs counter to every reason the United States was founded in the first place.
IMO, our nation has already done a considerable amount of compromising of these beliefs. Labor unions, for example, add a socialist angle to American Capitalism; basically offering an avenue by which someone can voluntarily choose to become part of a collective where certain standards are guaranteed for the whole. Raises are only given out based on length of service or graduation to a new job function where the standard pay rate is deemed higher.
Partially correct, but IMO, not the whole picture.....
A job really is only created when an employer decides to offer it.
Even if someone has more people wanting to use his/her service than he can handle, he has other options besides creating a new job to hire extra help. I see this every day.... Many people decide that thanks to all the government "red tape", it's not desirable to grow the business larger than the sole proprietorship level it's at. (As soon as you hire that first employee, you're mired in a mess of payroll taxes, questions about health insurance and benefits, worker's comp, etc. etc. You're practically committing to hiring at least TWO people, right off the bat, because you need an accountant to make sure all of that is done properly!)
You also see this all the time in the restaurant industry. Someone will be perfectly happy running a restaurant that gets so crowded, people have to wait 60 minutes or more just to get seated, and people who didn't call ahead with reservations are turned away. Whenever you witness that, you see potential additional jobs right there not being realized. This place is losing business right before your eyes, yet they're not trying to change it by hiring more waitstaff, leasing a larger place, hiring extra chefs, etc.
You're correct that nobody creates a new job out of purely altruistic motivations. But neither are they ever "forced" to do it, just because their business is a success. If you're earning enough money so you're content, and business is steady enough so you're not overly worried about income randomly dropping off -- you don't really have a reason to hire more people at all. You *might* do it, if greed is a motivator for you and you're always looking for ways to make MORE money. But then we bad-mouth and crucify those types when they go after that motivation and build a huge corporation, hiring MANY people, and finally get themselves those huge salaries.
I think you're absolutely right about the trend in news shifting towards immediacy vs. verification of content. Maybe professional journalism has a marketing problem, in that regard? I think the general public, especially in the "Internet age" where everything seems to be available at the click of a mouse, might need reminders of the value of fact-checked, accurate news reporting?
Really, there's no true need to be first, if doing so means only having part of the story, or an inaccurate one. The *perceived* need to do so only comes from the content consuming public who is trained to make the assumption that whatever news they get is already properly verified as accurate. There's a perception out there that, "If it comes from a name-brand news source, it's good content. So whichever of those professional source gives it to me first, consistently, must be the best at doing it."
I don't think most of us are anxious to see another negative ad campaign attacking the competition for doing things wrong.... but emphasis on a news team going the extra mile every time to ensure you get complete and verified news reporting, "even if it takes us a little longer" might help change peoples' priorities?
"Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."
Well, Karen Lewis.... I'd rather see companies concentrate on what they do best, and then share some of that for free with schools when they see fit to do so!
The typical union mentality of "Pay more taxes! Give us more money!" doesn't necessarily solve a thing, except insuring raises for overpaid school administrators.
Maybe so, but I think the argument made in the original article is still valid. If you're going to copyright your color scheme, you better list a *specific* color shade. Simply declaring "yellow" or any other primary color to be "your copyrighted color" is far too broad a statement.
People who pay a premium price for a Fluke meter are usually well aware of what they're paying for. Just because a Chinese knock-off comes out with similar colors doesn't mean people would be fooled into thinking it was equivalent to a Fluke.
I know with OneNote 2013 for Windows, it stores the "master" copy of your data wherever you configure it to go. It could be on a local drive, a network share, or the cloud (if you default it to SkyDrive or DropBox or Google Drive or whatever).
Then, it always keeps a cached copy on your C: drive in a big cache file for improved performance. (For Windows users, it's found under C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0)
It seems to me that almost all of this concern over running short of water centers around having enough available clean drinking water; a very different issue than actually not having water at all.
California is a *coastal* state, up against an ocean full of water, yet they're seriously entertaining such elaborate ideas as pumping water from an aquifer far below the desert, to areas around L.A. (Never mind the strong possibility that once they drain it, it won't refill for quite a long time again.)
People keep discussing desalination as too costly and inefficient a process... as something that's "not Green enough". IMO, that's ridiculous. The clear answer is to do more R&D to make that process more feasible! When you're short on drinkable water but you sit up against an ocean full of it, and removing the salt is the only real obstacle? Figure out a good way to remove the salt!
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I know around the metro D.C. area, you definitely have a decline in the popularity of golf courses. This area used to be loaded with them, and one by one, they're closing down.
Meanwhile, cycling is *huge*. The area has always had very good trails for cyclists, so that probably doesn't hurt either .... But I've seen an increasing number of people getting involved in various cycling races or just riding nice mountain bikes along the side of roads on the weekends.
The traditional country club catered to the "old rich", IMO. The "new rich" tend to be people who are more "showy" with their money (driving fancy luxury cars, wearing designer clothes in public, etc. etc.). I think for the traditional, old money types, the wealth was viewed more as something inappropriate to flaunt in the general public. Rather, it let you buy into an exclusive social group of people with similar wealth. The younger, affluent people would rather just go out in public with their nice things.
If you remove the exclusivity factor from golf, you're left with something that doesn't seem like it has a lot of value for the dollar. The skills required (mostly about skillful estimating of trajectories and the power needed to land a ball where you want it) are pretty similar to the skills needed to be a good billiards player .... a pastime which costs FAR less and likely draws a larger audience too (if you're good at it while playing on a table at a local bowling alley, bar, or pool hall).
You might have a point, except owning a reliable car tends to tie in to other factors.
For example, the majority of people in the U.S. don't live in one of the big cities where mass transit is truly practical as an alternative to driving to get to and from work each day. Even for many who DO live in such cities, mass transit imposes too many limitations. (For example, if you work as some sort of on-site service technician -- for computers or copiers perhaps? A good, reliable vehicle may be a requirement to perform the job.)
When you purchase a vehicle brand new and finance it, you usually get a better interest rate than lenders will give you on a used one, for starters. And then, you have a consistent payment every month for the next 5 or 6 years, as you pay it off. That consistency is "key" for most people earning those "under 6 figure" salaries. Surprises like a cheaper, used car suddenly having a transmission failure outside the warranty period, are a much bigger problem to tackle.
When your new car, under a factory warranty, has a problem -- you're generally given a loaner to drive while it gets repaired. That means no interruptions with your work.
The trick is to buy only a new vehicle that offers a warranty as long as your financing period. That "3 year, 36,000 mile" stuff they used to sell everyone wasn't such a good value at all.
The funny thing is, I'm hearing the exact opposite complaint coming from some of the people with many years of actual work experience in their fields. They're saying that recently, the college grads with a B.S. or Masters in the field are getting hired over those with real experience.
I don't know? Personally, I suspect the REAL issue is just a high unemployment rate overall. We're all stuck in a "buyer's market" when it comes to those doing the hiring, so expectations and requirements are very high, and opportunity to get hired is low. No matter where you're at on the education and/or skills ladder, it's difficult to get hired right now. So people begin tossing out accusations, trying to explain why they can't get jobs.
I've worked in I.T. for over 25 years myself, and yet I don't have a degree. (I'm one of those people with "some college", meaning a few classes shy of an Associates' degree.) I've *definitely* encountered my share of jobs I was passed over for because someone really considered the degree of prime importance. Yet I don't think my track record for employment is really any worse than my counterparts who did have the 4 year degrees. Yeah, some of them earned $20K - $50K/yr. more than I did, especially during the dot-com boom era.... but in the long-haul? A lot of them lost those high-paying jobs when budget cuts or corporate mergers came around and they had to accept less to get back into the ranks of the employed. Others just got burnt out on I.T. completely and changed careers.
Meanwhile, I don't have all the college debt they had to pay off, and since my salary has been relatively steady for the last decade or more, I didn't get so caught up in the thing of moving to a more expensive area, buying a large house, etc. -- only to have to give it all up when times got rough.
There's a key difference though between the "old guys" like myself and people trying to get a start in I.T. today. I think most of us who lived and breathed computers in the 80's really got into it when it was still a hobbyist's world. Corporate America wasn't even really looking at home computers as more than a passing fad, or something to just "keep an eye on, in case it eventually became useful". When you bought a computer ,you got a 200-300 page manual you had to read, cover to cover, to learn how to make it work. You might have shared knowledge with a few friends you made who owned the same machine, or joined some computer club in town. But all in all, you had to be really motivated to learn it, hands-on. Otherwise, why even waste time with it? My college courses in anything resembling I.T. were largely a joke. Either I knew way more than the professors did, or the courses went in depth on something I didn't know much about because truthfully, it DIDN'T MATTER in the grand scheme of I.T.
These days, I think colleges have figured out much more about what people actually need to know to be successful in I.T. -- and you actually *can* take classes and learn really useful material. At the same time, I see a lot of younger people who seem to be just as "into computers" as I was growing up, but they focus on much different things; social media, web sites, mobile device apps, and MMORPGs that can really suck up a LOT of one's time. It's all pretty cool and entertaining stuff -- but won't translate that well to a career doing network or systems administration, working as a PC support specialist, or systems analyst.
That's partially the case, but especially with certain categories of items, there are demonstrably "better" and "worse" time periods to have purchased them.
For example, when it comes to homes, you can find a large number of people in real estate or aspects of home repair/improvement who will tell you that in general, in the USA, the best built homes are from the late 1800's through the 1920's. (Among other things, the wood framing typically used old growth forest lumber, which you just won't ever see in use on more modern homes. Many also had such features as corrugated, galvanized steel sheet roofing -- which was designed to last around 100 years, vs. the typical asphalt shingles which are rated for as little as a 10 year lifespan.)
With computer technology, it's not that difficult to compare and contrast the early personal computers of the 1980's with what's typically sold today, and see a BIG difference in build quality. Who builds keyboards with steel frames around the keycaps these days? Look at the difference in sturdiness of the typical enclosure. Heck, the entire case of the Apple //e was metal! Look at the old dot matrix printers from companies like Epson or Okidata.... I'd say the majority of them you run across these days still work, 30 years or more after they were manufactured. Most were simply cast aside as completely obsolete before they actually broke down. (I used to know a guy who loved buying them cheap just to rip the servo motors out of them for robotics projects.)
Ok, thanks for the info. That's one of the things I really do like about Slashdot. People from a WIDE variety of backgrounds are here, and can share first-hand information the rest of us wouldn't have.
I imagined the cows would pretty much just ignore such things as solar panel installations, since they're stationary objects and they can graze around their perimeter. Still, building fences around them doesn't seem like a bad idea anyway -- as you probably don't want random people climbing around on them, vandalizing them, etc. etc.
It doesn't necessarily mean someone is making a dumb decision. This can be a perfectly legitimate, sensible option, IMO.
I knew people who moved to Mexico in the past, with similar motivations. If you can earn enough money there, you can easily afford to build yourself a fortress of a house and hire people to go out and run errands for you, etc. It might not make sense for someone with a whole family to take care of. But a younger, single person who might tend to be more of an introvert in the first place might be happy to "go where the money is" and spend a portion of it to buy the security that's lacking in the environment otherwise.
I keep seeing news clips from sources like MSNBC who are apparently on a mission to frame Bundy in that light (thief, welfare mooch, etc. etc.).
If you look at it a little further though, I don't think it's quite that clear....
First off, the entire argument centers around his letting his cattle roam and graze on the grass on all of the otherwise unused land that the Feds are NOW putting up a fuss about. Do animals not roam and graze on land in nature anyway? This isn't a case of Bundy building physical structures on govt. land, or even so much as parking vehicles on it. The government's main defense here is a claim that he owes them a large amount of money for unpaid "grazing rights". Ok ... except if you look at the history of grazing rights? All they were was a way for ranchers to avoid having to deal with the hassles of maintaining grazing lands themselves -- repairing broken fences and so forth. A govt. agency offered to make things easier on them by performing those services centrally and collecting grazing fees to fund it, and they agreed. Bundy was actually doing the fence repairs and maintenance himself ... so his failure to pay these fees is little more than a technicality.
Additionally, I think many folks supported him primarily as a way to "poke a proverbial stick in the eye of big government", as opposed to a direct interest in seeing justice done for Bundy and his family/relatives/friends. As a taxpayer myself, I have a big problem with government buying up large tracts of land and then just sitting on them, as they clearly did here. That's a huge waste of our money! Government's purpose is to serve the public -- so any land it purchases should be clearly towards that end. In this case, Bundy's ancestors had cattle grazing on the same land for over 100 years ... and it didn't bother anybody. Only *now* is it such a big deal, govt. felt the need to use helicopters, vans with SWAT teams and more, to basically invade the area and put on a show of force -- even attempting to seize the man's cattle.
Lastly, there's the issue of govt. clearly lying about its intentions. A claim was initially made about the land being purchased for the purpose of preserving an endangered species of tortoise. Interestingly enough, there are records showing the boundaries of the protected land were re-drawn in the past, to accommodate other government projects - when they were found inconvenient. So the idea Bundy has to go for endangering these animals now is ludicrous.
Bottom line? If the guy owes the IRS back taxes and keeps refusing to pay, fine... Collect it from him the usual way. Seize his bank account or garnish some of his income. If the govt. *really* wants to FINALLY do something constructive with the land they sat on for over a century? Again, fine ... but do it in a sensible way. Inform people of exactly what's going on (not LYING about it), and if it's something like a solar project? Why not just build it there and leave the cattle alone? I don't see why they couldn't co-exist and keep everyone happy.
Like other people said, it's too bad these artists disrespect the property rights of others.
It takes some practice to fly these drones well, even though they have such high-tech features as on-board GPS systems and smartphone or tablet software as control devices in many cases. They're usually smart enough to do things like stop moving and hover in place, when they lose a control signal, until you catch back up with them. But flying one precisely enough to draw actual paintings with spray paint is surely not something everyone can just run out and do well.
I'd like to see this become a new "thing" ... but in a more acceptable setting. I think people would enjoy watching or even pay to see good artists creating art with flying drones -- but spraying it on places where they were ALLOWED to do it!
When I first got interested in running a computer bulletin board system, around 1986-87, I had a Tandy Color Computer 2 (with a whopping 64K of RAM) and a 300 baud auto-dial/auto-answer modem. What I didn't have was any good software to use for the purpose. Back then, the only BBS package I really knew of for the platform was a commercial one called Colorama (typically sold in "Rainbow" magazine, a Tandy Color Computer publication). As a kid who had a LOT more time than money, I was pretty uninterested in trying to buy that one.
A buddy of mine who was learning to do assembly language coding for the Motorola 6809e processor in the Color Computer started working on a device driver which could translate screen output to modem output, and intercept the results of BASIC INPUT statements, taking them as input received from the modem. That was the missing piece of the puzzle for me, allowing me to code the rest of my own BBS package using BASIC.
(As a side note... one of the limitations of the Color Computer 2 was the fact it couldn't display any lowercase letters. It knew about the ASCII codes for them, but would only show them on screen as inverse video; essentially looked like the usual uppercase text, except with black blocks behind each letter. Eventually, my friend enhanced his device driver to put the machine into a graphics mode and draw all of the text in a graphical font giving true lowercase and more characters per line than the 32 you got with the original Color Computer text font. It was a little sluggish, but worked and looked great!)
Due to lack of suitable mass storage devices back then, I wrote the message forum portion of the BBS to store each line of text in DIM variables. Rather limiting, but looking back, it was kind of amazing it worked as well as it did. (I gave people a 15 or 20 line limit per message, I believe.)
That's one theory -- but I'd say previous experience shows it wasn't the case.
For example, there were quite a few people who hung onto Windows '98SE *long* after it was discontinued, yet they never really ran into any new security threats of significance. (The biggest problem for some of them was finding anti-virus software that would still install and run on the platform, after a while. But a few packages still supported it, and downloaded AV signature updates just as well as they did on other OS's.)
In that situation, the hackers quit focusing on anything Win '98 and concerned themselves only with exploiting the more recent code out there, which had an ever increasing market-share, not a decreasing one.
We saw this again with Windows 2000 Server, where security updates stopped -- yet many businesses kept on using it in production, in situations where older and complex applications were already running well on it, and redoing the whole thing on a newer server version was a big and costly undertaking. (I know my previous employer still uses Win2K server for a custom written app developed in the PROGRESS language. It's a virtual machine now, instead of a physical server -- but there's simply no need to go through the hassle that would be involved to move it to Windows Server 2008 or 2012.)
I'm not sure where your 98% statistic comes from, but I suspect you pulled it out of thin air. Many of the old exploits and bugs affecting XP systems had to do with aspects of its design which were changed considerably in Vista and later. (We're talking everything from restricted areas of the system registry that random apps aren't allowed to change anymore, to issues related to Active-X and the older versions of IE which XP users are forced to use since the new ones won't install on it.) I doubt hackers, moving forward, will put a huge effort into finding new exploits for IE version 6,7, and 8 that weren't already patched, or trying to write malware that wouldn't be effective in the first place on any Windows version with UAC?
Monster Cables CEO found to have the Stradivarius family in his family tree! :P
The primary reason you don't see the real upward mobility in America is primarily a function of the proverbial "crab bucket". If you're surrounded by people who lack the motivation to try to do more or to "rise above" the situation they're in, they tend to see you climbing past them and attempt to pull you back down to their level again -- just like a crab escaping a bucket full of crabs.
When you're the son or daughter of successful/wealthy parents, you already have higher expectations placed on you, as a rule. You probably live in a place where most of those you go to school with or have as friends are in a similar economic status. You don't want to be the "odd one out" in your peer group who doesn't maintain that same level of success, AND you're repeatedly told there's no reason you CAN'T maintain it.
Who you know will always be as important as what you know .... but many of the successful entrepreneurs I've read about don't appear to have been handed a "free success" ticket by their family members, even if those family members had the financial means to do it?
I'm constantly thinking of places where more software development is needed. The problem is, most of those places aren't the "sexy" ones. The kids in school are all about being the next video game coding superstar, which only makes sense when you consider they're raised on titles like Minecraft.
To be a successful developer right now, you almost need to run away from anything that's being hyped. If it smacks of "social networking" -- pretend you never saw that! Video gaming? Saturated ... avoid it.
Niches that aren't really being adequately addressed yet?
1. Home automation. Yes, there are complete "systems" on the high-end, but that's stuff that nobody but the very wealthy even bother with. The real money is going to be with inexpensive, mass-produced systems that "John Q. Public" can go out and buy, piecemeal, and build his own "smart home / apartment" with on a budget. This was basically done before with the X10 controllers, a couple decades ago. But that was all "pre Internet" and "pre wi-fi" -- yet they STILL sell some of it today, because there's nothing more modern that's roughly equivalent in price and functionality. The Nest thermostat and smoke alarm are, by most counts, big "hits" - yet they're just stand-alone smart devices that don't integrate into a whole! There's big money to be made if someone does all of this right ... maybe using Arduino gear as a base?
2. Automotive systems. The auto-makers are starting to show they have a clue about this stuff, at LAST ... but they're still in the early stages of really "getting it right", IMO. Cadillac has the CUE system now, while Ford outsourced to Microsoft (with rather mixed results). It's probably difficult to get a foot in the door with these places -- but maybe there's room for a 3rd. party to engineer replacement stereo systems that make serious improvements on the factory designs? I don't see why I can't, for example, buy a replacement stereo that has a custom plate on it so it's a direct fit replacement for a specific make/model of vehicle, instead of buying some "single DIN' or "double DIN" stereo and then paying $25 for a company like Metra to sell me a crappy plastic "dash kit" to make it fit -- and netting a result that looks like I yanked the factory radio out? The replacement should integrate with the vehicle's steering wheel controls, out of the box, and do everything the factory unit did. It should also be able to talk to the OBDII system in the car, showing me any vehicle fault codes on screen, letting me get a readout of things like the fuel-air mixture while I drive and more! Integrate a GPS and navigation system that actually works well, like Waze, and let people with cellular data connections submit updates in real-time! There's so much to do here!
Well, obviously, I'm not Mr. Tesla and I'm just throwing the general idea out there, for people more knowledgeable than myself to argue the details / merits of it.
But his original oscillator was steam powered and quite small in size. The whole point was that it would continually amplify the initial frequency with each repetitive slamming of the piston into the ground, making an initially small wave very large. It doesn't sound like it would require all that much energy, even if you built it much larger in size? How many would you need? I don't have any idea .... I would guess that even large magnitude earthquakes start out in a similar fashion -- with waves that increase in energy as they build in energy over the first few seconds? If so, maybe timing is the most critical thing.... cancelling some of it out before it has that chance to amplify?
For some reason, this article made me think of that story about Tesla and his "oscillator" experiment:
http://www.angelfire.com/scifi...
I wonder if, rather than relying on these "metametals" in special soil, one could station units similar to these at strategic locations along fault lines, designed to pick up an earthquake's resonant frequency and generate a corresponding one tuned to cancel it out?
....needing socialism!
The problem the U.S. has is *corporatism"; meaning a situation where the biggest businesses managed to buy influence into government and co-mingle with it.
We've become a government by the corporation, for the corporation (which still tosses around the "By the people, for the people!" paperwork as propaganda to keep the citizenry content).
As I've pointed out to people before, the Star Trek: TNG universe really only works because of the imaginary technologies in the series which make real-world constraints vanish. You've got the replicator which eliminates the entire "supply and demand" concept for goods. Anything someone might wish for is just "ordered up" and assembled instantly out of atoms floating around in space. You've also got the teleporter and the warp drive technologies, which bypass the constraints people have in the real world of limitations on travel. (EG. I would see advantages X, Y and Z if I was able to be over there right now instead of here, but that's realistically impossible due to the time required to travel, not to mention the cost of said travel!) And interestingly, even in the Star Trek universe, there still seems to be central government of sorts (Starfleet Command) which isn't appreciated by all inhabitants of said universe. That would seem to be tied to the one constraint left; limited availability of energy. The Dilithium crystals are supposedly rare and only found on certain planets, meaning whoever controls those planets controls the energy source practically all the starships rely on. (I guess in the Star Trek IV movie, Spock supposedly found a way to synthesize these, but only by using extinct fission reactor technology from the 20th. century. Still doesn't sound like a reliable and unlimited energy source for them.)
Many forms of government are "good" and "workable" in theory..... It's usually the constraints of the real world we live in which make most of them fall flat.
I've thought about the same thing.....
If you look to what other countries are doing, you see an awful lot of people involved in assembly of new products by hand. (For example, every time Apple comes out with a new iPhone, they pay workers in Chinese factories to hand-assemble them. Would robots produce more consistent results and be far more efficient? Sure ... except I suspect the initial set-up cost to get the robot assembling them correctly is still a fairly involved and costly undertaking. If you're going to release a new model of phone every 6 months to a year, how much of an ongoing cost will there be to keep redesigning the assembly robots for the new product?)
I guess I'm thinking that's also a possible glimpse of where all these "low skilled laborers" might end up in an automated future America? No matter how much the cost of robots come down, it seems likely that for businesses not producing huge quantities of a product, or for businesses constantly changing products, humans would still be the cheaper option. And as long as we place a certain value on human rights and everyone entitled to a "fair wage", we'll probably continue to apply legal pressure to businesses to pay them at least some sort of minimum "living wage". (After all, the alternative is letting them stay unemployed and existing completely on government hand-outs, or cutting off the hand-outs and letting them fend for themselves -- which encourages crime.)
American society (generally) maintains the idea that Socialism is bad/evil not simply because of your "Communism == Socialism == Hitler == bad" equation.
The core problem we have with the concept is the idea it provides no incentives for "going above and beyond". By design, it pretends that there's a way to centrally determine what a "fair wage" is for all manner of job positions, and to dictate that wage is paid. There's no recognition of the reality that some people are more motivated than others .... that some people care more about a job well done than others do. Mediocrity is rewarded instead. In fact, it tries to ensure that people who utterly lack motivation to work will never wind up in a bad situation due to their own laziness or unwillingness to learn something new.
Forced wealth redistribution runs counter to every reason the United States was founded in the first place.
IMO, our nation has already done a considerable amount of compromising of these beliefs. Labor unions, for example, add a socialist angle to American Capitalism; basically offering an avenue by which someone can voluntarily choose to become part of a collective where certain standards are guaranteed for the whole. Raises are only given out based on length of service or graduation to a new job function where the standard pay rate is deemed higher.
Partially correct, but IMO, not the whole picture.....
A job really is only created when an employer decides to offer it.
Even if someone has more people wanting to use his/her service than he can handle, he has other options besides creating a new job to hire extra help. I see this every day.... Many people decide that thanks to all the government "red tape", it's not desirable to grow the business larger than the sole proprietorship level it's at. (As soon as you hire that first employee, you're mired in a mess of payroll taxes, questions about health insurance and benefits, worker's comp, etc. etc. You're practically committing to hiring at least TWO people, right off the bat, because you need an accountant to make sure all of that is done properly!)
You also see this all the time in the restaurant industry. Someone will be perfectly happy running a restaurant that gets so crowded, people have to wait 60 minutes or more just to get seated, and people who didn't call ahead with reservations are turned away. Whenever you witness that, you see potential additional jobs right there not being realized. This place is losing business right before your eyes, yet they're not trying to change it by hiring more waitstaff, leasing a larger place, hiring extra chefs, etc.
You're correct that nobody creates a new job out of purely altruistic motivations. But neither are they ever "forced" to do it, just because their business is a success. If you're earning enough money so you're content, and business is steady enough so you're not overly worried about income randomly dropping off -- you don't really have a reason to hire more people at all. You *might* do it, if greed is a motivator for you and you're always looking for ways to make MORE money. But then we bad-mouth and crucify those types when they go after that motivation and build a huge corporation, hiring MANY people, and finally get themselves those huge salaries.
I think you're absolutely right about the trend in news shifting towards immediacy vs. verification of content. Maybe professional journalism has a marketing problem, in that regard? I think the general public, especially in the "Internet age" where everything seems to be available at the click of a mouse, might need reminders of the value of fact-checked, accurate news reporting?
Really, there's no true need to be first, if doing so means only having part of the story, or an inaccurate one. The *perceived* need to do so only comes from the content consuming public who is trained to make the assumption that whatever news they get is already properly verified as accurate. There's a perception out there that, "If it comes from a name-brand news source, it's good content. So whichever of those professional source gives it to me first, consistently, must be the best at doing it."
I don't think most of us are anxious to see another negative ad campaign attacking the competition for doing things wrong .... but emphasis on a news team going the extra mile every time to ensure you get complete and verified news reporting, "even if it takes us a little longer" might help change peoples' priorities?
Exactly! Everything Symantec puts its name on turns to garbage.... Company could rename itself "Reverse Midas Corp."
"Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."
Well, Karen Lewis .... I'd rather see companies concentrate on what they do best, and then share some of that for free with schools when they see fit to do so!
The typical union mentality of "Pay more taxes! Give us more money!" doesn't necessarily solve a thing, except insuring raises for overpaid school administrators.
Maybe so, but I think the argument made in the original article is still valid. If you're going to copyright your color scheme, you better list a *specific* color shade. Simply declaring "yellow" or any other primary color to be "your copyrighted color" is far too broad a statement.
People who pay a premium price for a Fluke meter are usually well aware of what they're paying for. Just because a Chinese knock-off comes out with similar colors doesn't mean people would be fooled into thinking it was equivalent to a Fluke.
I know with OneNote 2013 for Windows, it stores the "master" copy of your data wherever you configure it to go. It could be on a local drive, a network share, or the cloud (if you default it to SkyDrive or DropBox or Google Drive or whatever).
Then, it always keeps a cached copy on your C: drive in a big cache file for improved performance. (For Windows users, it's found under C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0)
AppData is a hidden directory, BTW.
It seems to me that almost all of this concern over running short of water centers around having enough available clean drinking water; a very different issue than actually not having water at all.
California is a *coastal* state, up against an ocean full of water, yet they're seriously entertaining such elaborate ideas as pumping water from an aquifer far below the desert, to areas around L.A. (Never mind the strong possibility that once they drain it, it won't refill for quite a long time again.)
People keep discussing desalination as too costly and inefficient a process... as something that's "not Green enough". IMO, that's ridiculous. The clear answer is to do more R&D to make that process more feasible! When you're short on drinkable water but you sit up against an ocean full of it, and removing the salt is the only real obstacle? Figure out a good way to remove the salt!