As for the cards.. the same product mix at HEB without a card is less expensive than Krogers and Randalls (which both have cards). So yes, they are higher.
You are comparing apples and oranges. I asked if the prices at the store WITH the card are lower than they would be WITHOUT the card, not if one store's prices are higher than another's. If the prices are lower with the card, then the card is saving you money. Not as much money as you'd save by shopping elsewhere, but still.
--- I'm going to assume you are not being purposely dense and try this one more time.
Randalls Brand Name Product without card $5.50, with card - Special Deal! of $5.00. HEB Brand Name Product without card $4.79 every day. Food Town Same Brand Name product $3.50.
--- On the other point, we are arguing over semantics.
I didn't pay for local stations. They were always "free". I.e. the advertiser paid 100% of costs (distribution and production). There was no syndication or DVD's so it was *ALL* Advertisers footing the entire bill. Now, they pay even more, I get even less TV per hour on the same stations, and I have to pay $5 extra to get the local stations.
The reason advertising can't pay for the programs any more is because actors, directors, etc. make a lot more money than they used to. They used to make fabulous $50,000 to $100,000 incomes back in the 50's and lived quite well. Adjusting for inflation it was about $250k to $500k a year income. Today, they can make as much as $1 million an episode for each actor on a hit series. Directors, producers, writers, everyone takes more money relative to the population's average wages than they used to.
And of course the cable companies have something to do with the length of programs. Many cable networks set the number of commercials they will sell per hour and then the syndicators make programs to fit that length.
The entertainment industry (like the college industry, the medical industry, etc.) is pricing themselves out of the market for the average consumer-- who are increasingly worried about being employed and reducing debt load. My daughter and her young friends don't even use cable period. They netflix everything. And they have post college jobs.
A full cable bill is now $11,000 or more per 10 years. That's basically a car, or 3 awesome vacations you are giving up for cable TV.
I went back and have to agree that the first movie is a loop which they don't break out of.
I had merged the 2nd and 1st movie into one story by the time the 3rd movie came out. The second movie had closed so solidly without a twist ending that really the story was done for me with a final message of "you can change your fate". Rather than the second movie changing the point of the series, it made the point.
But then the 3rd movie flipped it all back and then it became, "what is the point of this series?" If it is not about fate, changing or unchanging, then what other message is there?
I would have liked the last terminator movie a lot more if they had not blown the secret in the advertising campaign. The concept was actually intriguing and they could have made it without violating canon.
As for the cards.. the same product mix at HEB without a card is less expensive than Krogers and Randalls (which both have cards). So yes, they are higher.
I never heard of a "Q" channel. And yes, I'm in a major metro area. For a while right after I got out of high school, you had cable with cable stations and then flipped over to normal TV for the local stations- but it wasn't long. I remember the night MTV started tho (Video killed the radio star). We'd had cable a couple years then (I think).
As for the rest.. it's all like hollywood accounting. at the base, they are charging us and the advertisers both. the advertisers could pay for the distribution too (and it could be a lot cheaper than it is) like they used to. Cable has gotten so expensive that many people I know are cutting services. It was about $20 in this area in the 80's and $40 in the 90s- but now it's $110-- much faster than inflation. and with shopping channels and other stations and many more commercials. Anyway you play it, cable is not the good deal it used to be. It doesn't make sense the way it used to. 42 minute shows instead of 52 minute shows- and you pay for them and you have commercials. It's rampant greed.
In my town, Cable was first sold (for about 8 to 10 years) as being commercial free. Sounds like it was different in your town. WGN and other superstations didn't come til later. Back in those days, it was Movie, 1 or 2 minutes about later movies, then Movie. TMC was particularly good- even had a month where they showed over 400 movies in one month.
I remember going to a work party and someone was showing how they were getting Showtime with a coffee can antennae.
And yes, I still find it funny that the advertisers pay millions of dollars and then the cable company turns around and charges us to see the ads and programs.
It's like the affinity cards at randalls. At first, they wanted your personal information in exchange for lower prices. Now, the prices are higher- even with the cards than HEB (which has no affinity card program).
When a corporation passes a certain size, having a packaged ERP is a good idea (for legal compliance).
The problem is, generic accounting packages, ERP packages, etc. work best when you don't have a bunch of exceptional processes (our PO process had 17 variations- from as little as 2 lines on the form- to a full form plus multiple attachments-- people used the same form area for many different meanings-- the 1 page form was really about a 4 page form).
The solution was to cut down most of the exceptions and standardize. We do things that we added for an "edge case" 15 years ago which has never recurred. We have steps to address customers who are no longer customers. Yet the steps live on.
Having an ERP and using it as specified (no unique coding unless it makes us boatloads of money) is the right choice for a big corporation.
I have to agree with the other person. Cable TV has gotten so expensive that it cuts into my discretionary spending. It's odd that you pay them and I pay them too, isn't it?
I remember when I paid for cable because it had no commercials.
Also... when there were 2 or 3 commercials in a commercial break, I'd usually watch them. Now that there are 6-7 minutes of commercials I skip them unless they look entertaining as I skip by.
I've developed the ability on the web and television to not see or process commercials when I don't want to.
I'm probably not in your target audience anyway. I save 30% of my gross income. I buy products based on research, not advertisements. I always bargain shop and rarely pay full retail. If you advertise restaurants, I might be in your target audience but to be honest, you'd do a LOT better with a $1 off coupon in the newspaper (which I read and mine for coupons) than dropping $50 million on a television ad campaign. For example, I love geico commercials but I'd never get the insurance because when I price compared it, it was a lot more expensive than 21st century insurance. (Don't get me started on Allstate who shafted me badly-- refusing to give me a free letter saying they couldn't cover my lodging so Fema couldn't put me up in a hotel).
I've never bought a television based on a television ad (I find the concept ironic).
I typically catch 15 to 20 seconds of the first commercial, 1 to 2 seconds of intermediate commercials, and the last 10 seconds of the last commercial (2 or 3 times sometimes).
Sometimes, if I see an interesting looking commercial (like Jack in prison with a relative or one of the Geico commercials or a new movie commercial) then I'll back up and watch it.
However, even if I sat there and didn't skip- my mine literally tunes out on commercials (and has for a decade). You could ask me 15 minutes later what commercials I saw and I couldn't tell you.
To succeed with an ERP you have to cut business functionality that the ERP doesn't support.
The problem with ERP is executives. They understand *very clearly* that we should not have custom code or the project will fail.
So they created a new name (can't share it here since it would ID my company) for customization so let's call it "Business Exception Functionality Coding". We long ago passed 700 BEFC's. People on the ERP team who have done ERP in the past now say we are in line for a 10 year implementation. And it will require a large support staff whenever the ERP gets a new version. And (if the past is prologue) will prevent us from upgrading.
But executives frequently succeed by redefining terms. We will "succeed" at our first major goalpost in about 7 months.
Aye, When the human mixer for coca-cola retired, they distilled his entire life's experience into under 50 rules and created a system that controlled mixing cocacola. Then it was the humans that screwed things up and decided to make New Coke and use corn syrup instead of sugar.
Here's a good article... http://www.plimoth.org/discover/myth/4-ft-2.php where it says, in part: --- The average height for an early 17th-century English man was approximately 5' 6". For 17th-century English women, it was about 5' ½". While average heights in England remained virtually unchanged in the 17th and 18th centuries, American colonists grew taller. Averages for modern Americans are just over 5' 9" for men, and about 5' 3 ¾" for women. The main reasons for this difference are improved nutrition, notably increased consumption of meat and milk, and antibiotics.
For modern white Americans, the average stature for males is 69.1", or just over 5' 9", and for women, 63.7", or about 5' 3 ¾".
---
Some chinese are tall now. As their food quality improves, I think their average height will improve.
It looks like the japanese have increased from 5'5" to 5'7" since WWII.
There was an article a few months ago that some group of humans have stopped getting taller (one of the nordic countries I think) so they may have found the limit of nutrition effects.
I was going to post a similar comment, but it occured to me that much of the observed height difference between different groups of humans (except pygmies?) arise from differences in nutrition. The average Caucasian height was about the same 300 years ago.
Your facts are less correct than they were 50 years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html "The movement of families up and down the economic ladder is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. But it does not seem to be happening quite as often as it used to."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662456 Eighty percent of Americans still believe it's possible to pull yourself up by the proverbial bootstraps. That's according to a New York Times poll reported last week, but a recent mobility study suggests the American Dream may be more style than substance.
The wealthy own the media and push the "you could be wealthy!" idea hard. It helps keep the lower class folks voting against their own self interests. It's why the wizard of wall street pays a lower tax rate on his monumental earnings than his secretary pays on her salary.
There is a tiny chance you will break into the wealthy classes. But, for the most part, they pass the good jobs down to their own. Just look at the way hollywood has been taken over by 2nd and 3rd generation actors. CEO jobs are less obvious but essentially the same.
Any idiot can bankrupt themselves-- but it takes a lot more than simple hard work to get into the executive class.
From what I've observed in my life. Dumb women that really like sex have a lot more kids than average women.
I've known three ex strippers in my life. Each eventually shared that they had each had 4 or more children. All had given at least one up for adoption. All had very high sex drives (which sounds good... but when you really think about it, most of us couldn't emotionally handle being married to women like that).
They were thin, two were tall, one was about 5'.
Perhaps dumb is the wrong word tho. They were intelligent but unwise.
Along those lines, and in line with the study, women who put themselves first and are wise, tend not to not be prolific in my experience. Several smart, wise females I knew from college did quite well in life but never had children. Two never married (and weren't gay-- their standards were just too high until it was too late).
It's bad for us long term to keep growing the population and I think we would be much happier and sustainable as a race at about 3 billion population.
I can't see robots "designing" anything for a hundred years (maybe 60?). I think we can get "smart" robots but "genius" may elude us unless intelligence is linear.
But manual labor (stocking shelves, building things, digging holes, folding and ironing) has required the work station be set up for a robot until recently. Over the last two years, I've seen walking robots, stair climbing robots, running robots and then robots which can pick unsorted objects out of a bin, and then that recent article about the robot that could flip things in the air and catch them, pick up items with chopsticks, etc. You get a general purpose robot under $40,000, it's going to be extremely compelling. Imagine coming home and your laundry is done, the floors cleaned, beds made, dishes cleaned, garbage bagged and ready to put outside. And then imagine tons of manual labor jobs going away shortly after that since even a cheap $22,000 a year human being is going to run you close to $35,000 after benefits and taxes-- and they take days off, quit on you, etc.
I've been saving hard in multiple currencies and commodities for a while now. Just in case.
There's a robot book/story like that on the internet- but it's a work of fiction.
The U.S. is at the leading edge of this--- huge numbers of service jobs.
Okay.. so now robots replace most of those service jobs.
What kind of jobs replace service jobs?
If you have a robot that can do data entry, clean house, dig ditches, fully duplicate human manual labor, then that only leaves brain jobs. We have too many college graduates as it is. Purchasing power has been dropping for brainy people for over a decade. When china and india are fully online, their work forces are larger than the entire US population. They are smart and willing to work for about $10k-$20k a year in purchasing power. Poverty wages here-- for jobs that require $40k degrees and five years of your life.
Okay... I agree on the "design" but... who has to manufacture the robots?
You are correct on the 99%. Say that it's 60%-- so you have 40% employed and the other 60% are competing with them for jobs, desperate for a job at any wage.
First, while your decisions can affect your promotion to some degree, the fast majority of executive class positions are held by people who have upper class parents.
The last hard data I could find quickly is from 1988, which is admittedly pretty dated, but my personal experience in multiple companies Boone et al, found in 1988 that CEO's in 1986 (p37) that only 18% of CEO's were from lower class backgrounds while 54% of the population met that criteria. They concluded that "the majority of the nations business leaders come from the relatively privileged class" (1988b, p.37)
A search for more recent information on the first CEO that came to mind quickly turned up this... "As his father did before him, Hurd attended the Browning School - a prestigious all-boys school where classmate Jamie Dimon, now CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, remembers seventh-grader Hurd as a good basketball player..."
How about IBM's leader Sam Palmisano... father owned an auto repair shop.. sounds like I might have a shot... oh wait.... "Palmisano was born into an old family that had its roots in eighteenth-century America. Its members had spread their influence across the United States as physicians, politicians, and business leaders."
Starting to get it? The ILLUSION that you have a chance is much greater than the REALITY that you have a chance. I can't find the source but I read the odds were about 50:1. So 1 in 50 people move up these days. We are much less class mobile than we used to be. It's hard. I climbed from lower class to lower upper class. That's about all I'm going to manage and I had to make some brutal choices and I'm reasonably intelligent (now with improved Dale Carnegie charisma too!)
The ILLUSION you have a chance of being rich is heavily promoted by the wealthy who now own basically all media. That's how they get the lower class to vote against their own self-interest and vote to charge lower tax rates to wealthy people that the lower class pay themselves (source on that tax rate bit: warren buffet who stated he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary).
---
Now -- on your reading comprehension of my post.
My bosses took advantage of me *because I was in IT*. I got out of IT and went into management. My recommendation above was, "don't enter IT; get out of IT if you are in it".
In the dark ages of IT in the early 1980's, you worked normal to long hours and you had complete freedom and fairly damn good pay. How good? In the early 1980's you could make the equivalent of about $120k to $140k today. I knew people who would work six months and then take six months off. Languages and hardware lines were stable for long periods of time. You had cobol, fortran, accounting, banking, etc. Any reasonably intelligent person could master a language or operating system in six months.
Now, it's the complete opposite. well almost. You still work long hours but now you have no freedom, and the pay has dropped to fair or poor, and you *frequently* have to work holidays now too. The software becomes obsolete in 24 to 36 months so continuous training on your personal time is required unlike most other jobs on the planet. Training for these marvelous jobs often takes 5 years and is brutal (in my degree program there were *three* "weedout" classes with over 75% failure rates-- the homework for database and assembly language classes were each 20 hours a week-- vs the 2 hours a week the folks who washed out and went to business degrees had).
IT is not a job I would recommend to anyone unless you are certified genius and/or can get a suitable government job. If you like computers, play with them on your spare time. If you are "smart" and a "hard worker" you will do much better, have more family time, have better dating potential, have more free time, and avoid working in the A.M. and on holidays, by choosing a field besides IT.
Don't get me wrong... I do recommend IT over some jobs... say like Alaskan fishing or coal mining.
I don't know... just finished brushing up on Steganography and it really seems centered around sending a single message in another message (carrier) which doesn't have a lot of other copies to compare to.
This is about sending many unique messages inside of a common carrier. It seems like anything that could uniquely identify a given recipient would be easy to filter out by comparison of multiple sources. Perhaps I'm just being fuzzy and missing it. But for example: Picture of apple, Picture of apple with message added would fall easily. What seems to make steganography work normally is the fact there is no base image to compare to.
Perhaps this is more targeted at casual or idiot sharers?
XYXXXXXDXXXX22XXXXXXYXXXXXX XYXZXXXXXXXXXXXX11XXYXXXXEX becomes XYX?XXX?XXXX2XX1XXYXXXXXX : where Y is a code but I can't tell because its the same in both books. 1 & 2 are trivial duplicate word sets ( "the the" on a page boundary for example). E is a spelling error easily fixed.
After manual patching becomes
XYXAXXXWXXXX2XX1XXYXXXXXX where A and W are manually chosen synonyms.
Even worse, with three sets XEXXX XXXYX XXXYX -----
I can now create a version that has XEXYX which may pin some unknown person as the source. Perhaps in regular stegonagraphy (sp), you don't have multiple copies of the same picture with different encoded data to compare.
Imagine the book as a picture of a rose. Then make a thousand copies and watermark each copy uniquely.
Also, would the bit caught matter?
For example, 1001 - the first bit determines if it is in the first set of 8 or the last set of 8. The last bit determines if it is in the even or odd set of books. Guess no difference in the magnitude on position unless it isn't a true binary set (say there were 1225 books printed, then there would be one "binary" set divided into 1024 books and another into 201 books).
However, if you change the key to ?00?, the best you can do is know the book was in a given 25% of the total books distributed.
You could probably also force more unique key values by ordering over different days, in different parts of the country or in different countries. Of course Amazon could randomize the sequence the changes would be distributed in to combat that.
What I can get out of both books, is the words where everything is the same, and the words which differ.
Now I can modify the words that differ to a new value and I can correct any spelling or grammar errors.
So XYXXXXXDXXXX22XXXXXXYXXXXXX XYXZXXXXXXXXXXXX11XXYXXXXEX becomes XXX?XXX?XXXX2XX1XXYXXXXXX where Y is a code but I can't tell because its the same in both books. 1 & 2 are trivial duplicate word sets ( "the the" on a page boundary for example). E is a spelling error easily fixed.
It seems that, at best, your 24 bits would identify a set of books, but not an individual book. Because- ANY differences are wiped out. So the only information that survives are bit values that were the same in both books.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the cards.. the same product mix at HEB without a card is less expensive than Krogers and Randalls (which both have cards). So yes, they are higher.
You are comparing apples and oranges. I asked if the prices at the store WITH the card are lower than they would be WITHOUT the card, not if one store's prices are higher than another's. If the prices are lower with the card, then the card is saving you money. Not as much money as you'd save by shopping elsewhere, but still.
---
I'm going to assume you are not being purposely dense and try this one more time.
Randalls Brand Name Product without card $5.50, with card - Special Deal! of $5.00.
HEB Brand Name Product without card $4.79 every day.
Food Town Same Brand Name product $3.50.
---
On the other point, we are arguing over semantics.
I didn't pay for local stations. They were always "free". I.e. the advertiser paid 100% of costs (distribution and production). There was no syndication or DVD's so it was *ALL* Advertisers footing the entire bill. Now, they pay even more, I get even less TV per hour on the same stations, and I have to pay $5 extra to get the local stations.
The reason advertising can't pay for the programs any more is because actors, directors, etc. make a lot more money than they used to. They used to make fabulous $50,000 to $100,000 incomes back in the 50's and lived quite well. Adjusting for inflation it was about $250k to $500k a year income. Today, they can make as much as $1 million an episode for each actor on a hit series. Directors, producers, writers, everyone takes more money relative to the population's average wages than they used to.
And of course the cable companies have something to do with the length of programs. Many cable networks set the number of commercials they will sell per hour and then the syndicators make programs to fit that length.
The entertainment industry (like the college industry, the medical industry, etc.) is pricing themselves out of the market for the average consumer-- who are increasingly worried about being employed and reducing debt load. My daughter and her young friends don't even use cable period. They netflix everything. And they have post college jobs.
A full cable bill is now $11,000 or more per 10 years. That's basically a car, or 3 awesome vacations you are giving up for cable TV.
I went back and have to agree that the first movie is a loop which they don't break out of.
I had merged the 2nd and 1st movie into one story by the time the 3rd movie came out. The second movie had closed so solidly without a twist ending that really the story was done for me with a final message of "you can change your fate". Rather than the second movie changing the point of the series, it made the point.
But then the 3rd movie flipped it all back and then it became, "what is the point of this series?" If it is not about fate, changing or unchanging, then what other message is there?
I would have liked the last terminator movie a lot more if they had not blown the secret in the advertising campaign. The concept was actually intriguing and they could have made it without violating canon.
As for the cards.. the same product mix at HEB without a card is less expensive than Krogers and Randalls (which both have cards).
So yes, they are higher.
I never heard of a "Q" channel. And yes, I'm in a major metro area. For a while right after I got out of high school, you had cable with cable stations and then flipped over to normal TV for the local stations- but it wasn't long. I remember the night MTV started tho (Video killed the radio star). We'd had cable a couple years then (I think).
As for the rest.. it's all like hollywood accounting. at the base, they are charging us and the advertisers both. the advertisers could pay for the distribution too (and it could be a lot cheaper than it is) like they used to. Cable has gotten so expensive that many people I know are cutting services. It was about $20 in this area in the 80's and $40 in the 90s- but now it's $110-- much faster than inflation. and with shopping channels and other stations and many more commercials. Anyway you play it, cable is not the good deal it used to be. It doesn't make sense the way it used to. 42 minute shows instead of 52 minute shows- and you pay for them and you have commercials. It's rampant greed.
I liked the concept of a terminator that was unaware it was a terminator and the movie didn't violate the canon of the first two movies.
In my town, Cable was first sold (for about 8 to 10 years) as being commercial free. Sounds like it was different in your town. WGN and other superstations didn't come til later. Back in those days, it was Movie, 1 or 2 minutes about later movies, then Movie. TMC was particularly good- even had a month where they showed over 400 movies in one month.
I remember going to a work party and someone was showing how they were getting Showtime with a coffee can antennae.
And yes, I still find it funny that the advertisers pay millions of dollars and then the cable company turns around and charges us to see the ads and programs.
It's like the affinity cards at randalls. At first, they wanted your personal information in exchange for lower prices.
Now, the prices are higher- even with the cards than HEB (which has no affinity card program).
The third changed the basic message of the series from "you can change your fate" to "you can't change your fate".
It's kinda like bringing "Lord of the Rings 4: Turns out Sauron and the Ring are still doing fine" so they can make more money.
The fourth wasn't bad.
I have to agree with this...
When a corporation passes a certain size, having a packaged ERP is a good idea (for legal compliance).
The problem is, generic accounting packages, ERP packages, etc. work best when you don't have a bunch of exceptional processes (our PO process had 17 variations- from as little as 2 lines on the form- to a full form plus multiple attachments-- people used the same form area for many different meanings-- the 1 page form was really about a 4 page form).
The solution was to cut down most of the exceptions and standardize. We do things that we added for an "edge case" 15 years ago which has never recurred.
We have steps to address customers who are no longer customers. Yet the steps live on.
Having an ERP and using it as specified (no unique coding unless it makes us boatloads of money) is the right choice for a big corporation.
I have to agree with the other person. Cable TV has gotten so expensive that it cuts into my discretionary spending.
It's odd that you pay them and I pay them too, isn't it?
I remember when I paid for cable because it had no commercials.
Also... when there were 2 or 3 commercials in a commercial break, I'd usually watch them. Now that there are 6-7 minutes of commercials I skip them unless they look entertaining as I skip by.
I've developed the ability on the web and television to not see or process commercials when I don't want to.
I'm probably not in your target audience anyway. I save 30% of my gross income. I buy products based on research, not advertisements. I always bargain shop and rarely pay full retail. If you advertise restaurants, I might be in your target audience but to be honest, you'd do a LOT better with a $1 off coupon in the newspaper (which I read and mine for coupons) than dropping $50 million on a television ad campaign. For example, I love geico commercials but I'd never get the insurance because when I price compared it, it was a lot more expensive than 21st century insurance. (Don't get me started on Allstate who shafted me badly-- refusing to give me a free letter saying they couldn't cover my lodging so Fema couldn't put me up in a hotel).
I've never bought a television based on a television ad (I find the concept ironic).
I typically catch 15 to 20 seconds of the first commercial, 1 to 2 seconds of intermediate commercials, and the last 10 seconds of the last commercial (2 or 3 times sometimes).
Sometimes, if I see an interesting looking commercial (like Jack in prison with a relative or one of the Geico commercials or a new movie commercial) then I'll back up and watch it.
However, even if I sat there and didn't skip- my mine literally tunes out on commercials (and has for a decade). You could ask me 15 minutes later what commercials I saw and I couldn't tell you.
To succeed with an ERP you have to cut business functionality that the ERP doesn't support.
The problem with ERP is executives.
They understand *very clearly* that we should not have custom code or the project will fail.
So they created a new name (can't share it here since it would ID my company) for customization so let's call it "Business Exception Functionality Coding". We long ago passed 700 BEFC's. People on the ERP team who have done ERP in the past now say we are in line for a 10 year implementation. And it will require a large support staff whenever the ERP gets a new version. And (if the past is prologue) will prevent us from upgrading.
But executives frequently succeed by redefining terms. We will "succeed" at our first major goalpost in about 7 months.
Aye,
When the human mixer for coca-cola retired, they distilled his entire life's experience into under 50 rules and created a system that controlled mixing cocacola.
Then it was the humans that screwed things up and decided to make New Coke and use corn syrup instead of sugar.
Thanks,
I guess I left out some words.
Here's a good article...
http://www.plimoth.org/discover/myth/4-ft-2.php
where it says, in part:
---
The average height for an early 17th-century English man was approximately 5' 6". For 17th-century English women, it was about 5' ½". While average heights in England remained virtually unchanged in the 17th and 18th centuries, American colonists grew taller. Averages for modern Americans are just over 5' 9" for men, and about 5' 3 ¾" for women. The main reasons for this difference are improved nutrition, notably increased consumption of meat and milk, and antibiotics.
For modern white Americans, the average stature for males is 69.1", or just over 5' 9", and for women, 63.7", or about 5' 3 ¾".
---
Some chinese are tall now. As their food quality improves, I think their average height will improve.
It looks like the japanese have increased from 5'5" to 5'7" since WWII.
There was an article a few months ago that some group of humans have stopped getting taller (one of the nordic countries I think) so they may have found the limit of nutrition effects.
I was going to post a similar comment, but it occured to me that much of the observed height difference between different groups of humans (except pygmies?) arise from differences in nutrition.
The average Caucasian height was about the same 300 years ago.
Your facts are less correct than they were 50 years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html
"The movement of families up and down the economic ladder is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. But it does not seem to be happening quite as often as it used to."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662456
Eighty percent of Americans still believe it's possible to pull yourself up by the proverbial bootstraps. That's according to a New York Times poll reported last week, but a recent mobility study suggests the American Dream may be more style than substance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
Upper nonmanual occupations have the highest level of occupational inheritance. [3]
http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/27/news/companies/lashinsky_hurd.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009030310
As his father did before him, Hurd attended the Browning School - a prestigious all-boys school where classmate Jamie Dimon, now CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, remembers seventh-grader Hurd as a good basketball player
The wealthy own the media and push the "you could be wealthy!" idea hard. It helps keep the lower class folks voting against their own self interests. It's why the wizard of wall street pays a lower tax rate on his monumental earnings than his secretary pays on her salary.
There is a tiny chance you will break into the wealthy classes. But, for the most part, they pass the good jobs down to their own. Just look at the way hollywood has been taken over by 2nd and 3rd generation actors. CEO jobs are less obvious but essentially the same.
Any idiot can bankrupt themselves-- but it takes a lot more than simple hard work to get into the executive class.
From what I've observed in my life. Dumb women that really like sex have a lot more kids than average women.
I've known three ex strippers in my life. Each eventually shared that they had each had 4 or more children. All had given at least one up for adoption.
All had very high sex drives (which sounds good... but when you really think about it, most of us couldn't emotionally handle being married to women like that).
They were thin, two were tall, one was about 5'.
Perhaps dumb is the wrong word tho. They were intelligent but unwise.
Along those lines, and in line with the study, women who put themselves first and are wise, tend not to not be prolific in my experience. Several smart, wise females I knew from college did quite well in life but never had children. Two never married (and weren't gay-- their standards were just too high until it was too late).
It's bad for us long term to keep growing the population and I think we would be much happier and sustainable as a race at about 3 billion population.
Not at all... I could be arguing in my spare time.
Kudos on the use of "paroxysms" in a sentence tho.
the people setting the rules think from the point of view of someone with the other gene setting.
I.e. if the 20% set the rules, then would the 80% be able to comply or would most of them make errors?
I can't see robots "designing" anything for a hundred years (maybe 60?). I think we can get "smart" robots but "genius" may elude us unless intelligence is linear.
But manual labor (stocking shelves, building things, digging holes, folding and ironing) has required the work station be set up for a robot until recently. Over the last two years, I've seen walking robots, stair climbing robots, running robots and then robots which can pick unsorted objects out of a bin, and then that recent article about the robot that could flip things in the air and catch them, pick up items with chopsticks, etc. You get a general purpose robot under $40,000, it's going to be extremely compelling. Imagine coming home and your laundry is done, the floors cleaned, beds made, dishes cleaned, garbage bagged and ready to put outside. And then imagine tons of manual labor jobs going away shortly after that since even a cheap $22,000 a year human being is going to run you close to $35,000 after benefits and taxes-- and they take days off, quit on you, etc.
I've been saving hard in multiple currencies and commodities for a while now. Just in case.
There's a robot book/story like that on the internet- but it's a work of fiction.
The U.S. is at the leading edge of this--- huge numbers of service jobs.
Okay.. so now robots replace most of those service jobs.
What kind of jobs replace service jobs?
If you have a robot that can do data entry, clean house, dig ditches, fully duplicate human manual labor, then that only leaves brain jobs. We have too many college graduates as it is. Purchasing power has been dropping for brainy people for over a decade. When china and india are fully online, their work forces are larger than the entire US population. They are smart and willing to work for about $10k-$20k a year in purchasing power. Poverty wages here-- for jobs that require $40k degrees and five years of your life.
Okay... I agree on the "design" but ... who has to manufacture the robots?
You are correct on the 99%. Say that it's 60%-- so you have 40% employed and the other 60% are competing with them for jobs, desperate for a job at any wage.
Your missing the point.
First, while your decisions can affect your promotion to some degree, the fast majority of executive class positions are held by people who have upper class parents.
The last hard data I could find quickly is from 1988, which is admittedly pretty dated, but my personal experience in multiple companies
Boone et al, found in 1988 that CEO's in 1986 (p37) that only 18% of CEO's were from lower class backgrounds while 54% of the population met that criteria.
They concluded that "the majority of the nations business leaders come from the relatively privileged class" (1988b, p.37)
A search for more recent information on the first CEO that came to mind quickly turned up this...
"As his father did before him, Hurd attended the Browning School - a prestigious all-boys school where classmate Jamie Dimon, now CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, remembers seventh-grader Hurd as a good basketball player..."
How about IBM's leader Sam Palmisano... father owned an auto repair shop.. sounds like I might have a shot... oh wait.... "Palmisano was born into an old family that had its roots in eighteenth-century America. Its members had spread their influence across the United States as physicians, politicians, and business leaders."
Starting to get it? The ILLUSION that you have a chance is much greater than the REALITY that you have a chance. I can't find the source but I read the odds were about 50:1. So 1 in 50 people move up these days. We are much less class mobile than we used to be. It's hard. I climbed from lower class to lower upper class. That's about all I'm going to manage and I had to make some brutal choices and I'm reasonably intelligent (now with improved Dale Carnegie charisma too!)
The ILLUSION you have a chance of being rich is heavily promoted by the wealthy who now own basically all media. That's how they get the lower class to vote against their own self-interest and vote to charge lower tax rates to wealthy people that the lower class pay themselves (source on that tax rate bit: warren buffet who stated he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary).
---
Now -- on your reading comprehension of my post.
My bosses took advantage of me *because I was in IT*. I got out of IT and went into management. My recommendation above was, "don't enter IT; get out of IT if you are in it".
In the dark ages of IT in the early 1980's, you worked normal to long hours and you had complete freedom and fairly damn good pay. How good? In the early 1980's you could make the equivalent of about $120k to $140k today. I knew people who would work six months and then take six months off. Languages and hardware lines were stable for long periods of time. You had cobol, fortran, accounting, banking, etc. Any reasonably intelligent person could master a language or operating system in six months.
Now, it's the complete opposite. well almost. You still work long hours but now you have no freedom, and the pay has dropped to fair or poor, and you *frequently* have to work holidays now too. The software becomes obsolete in 24 to 36 months so continuous training on your personal time is required unlike most other jobs on the planet. Training for these marvelous jobs often takes 5 years and is brutal (in my degree program there were *three* "weedout" classes with over 75% failure rates-- the homework for database and assembly language classes were each 20 hours a week-- vs the 2 hours a week the folks who washed out and went to business degrees had).
IT is not a job I would recommend to anyone unless you are certified genius and/or can get a suitable government job. If you like computers, play with them on your spare time. If you are "smart" and a "hard worker" you will do much better, have more family time, have better dating potential, have more free time, and avoid working in the A.M. and on holidays, by choosing a field besides IT.
Don't get me wrong... I do recommend IT over some jobs... say like Alaskan fishing or coal mining.
I don't know... just finished brushing up on Steganography and it really seems centered around sending a single message in another message (carrier) which doesn't have a lot of other copies to compare to.
This is about sending many unique messages inside of a common carrier. It seems like anything that could uniquely identify a given recipient would be easy to filter out by comparison of multiple sources. Perhaps I'm just being fuzzy and missing it. But for example: Picture of apple, Picture of apple with message added would fall easily. What seems to make steganography work normally is the fact there is no base image to compare to.
Perhaps this is more targeted at casual or idiot sharers?
Dang it..
XYXXXXXDXXXX22XXXXXXYXXXXXX
XYXZXXXXXXXXXXXX11XXYXXXXEX
becomes
XYX?XXX?XXXX2XX1XXYXXXXXX : where Y is a code but I can't tell because its the same in both books. 1 & 2 are trivial duplicate word sets ( "the the" on a page boundary for example). E is a spelling error easily fixed.
After manual patching becomes
XYXAXXXWXXXX2XX1XXYXXXXXX where A and W are manually chosen synonyms.
Even worse, with three sets
XEXXX
XXXYX
XXXYX
-----
I can now create a version that has XEXYX which may pin some unknown person as the source.
Perhaps in regular stegonagraphy (sp), you don't have multiple copies of the same picture with different encoded data to compare.
Imagine the book as a picture of a rose.
Then make a thousand copies and watermark each copy uniquely.
Also, would the bit caught matter?
For example,
1001 - the first bit determines if it is in the first set of 8 or the last set of 8. The last bit determines if it is in the even or odd set of books. Guess no difference in the magnitude on position unless it isn't a true binary set (say there were 1225 books printed, then there would be one "binary" set divided into 1024 books and another into 201 books).
However, if you change the key to ?00?, the best you can do is know the book was in a given 25% of the total books distributed.
You could probably also force more unique key values by ordering over different days, in different parts of the country or in different countries. Of course Amazon could randomize the sequence the changes would be distributed in to combat that.
ah well. . past bed time.
However,
I think I see a problem here.
What I can get out of both books, is the words where everything is the same, and the words which differ.
Now I can modify the words that differ to a new value and I can correct any spelling or grammar errors.
So
XYXXXXXDXXXX22XXXXXXYXXXXXX
XYXZXXXXXXXXXXXX11XXYXXXXEX
becomes
XXX?XXX?XXXX2XX1XXYXXXXXX where Y is a code but I can't tell because its the same in both books. 1 & 2 are trivial duplicate word sets ( "the the" on a page boundary for example). E is a spelling error easily fixed.
It seems that, at best, your 24 bits would identify a set of books, but not an individual book. Because- ANY differences are wiped out. So the only information that survives are bit values that were the same in both books.
What am I not seeing?
Well, robots don't have to sleep so that's one axiom of the leviathan down right there.