Refineries are confined to a highly specific area (mostly the ship channel area).
If you drive an hour north or east, you are in hot muggy forested areas. If you drive an hour west, you are in dry but wooded farm and ranch land If you drive an hour northwest, you are in hill country with lots of 30' trees and tons of wildflowers in the spring. If you drive an hour southwest, you are at the beach. (it's not nearly as pretty as other beaches due to silt from the mississippi and the waves are tepid but it's a beach and even uncrowded (almost desolate) only 15 miles further out.
Let me try to state your point better.
The area around houston is flat for 100 miles in all directions. Other than day tripping for antiques there's not a lot of tourist activity. While there are several state parts that are very nice in the spring and fall, they are pretty hot and miserable during the summer. The gulf is silty and not pretty blue and transparent to the bottom (about 1' transparent on average and 2' on a good day) and has small waves. But it has good fishing.
The areas along almost all the major freeways are unpleasant and fairly ugly with business sprawl and too many billboards.
The city center and is vibrant, well serviced by public transportation, has a vibrant night life, and expensive. Areas just east of the city center are undeveloped and old 1930's shacks.
The lack of zoning allows the city to constantly renew itself. There are no empty, unusable buildings "trapped" by zoning. There are no fat cat developers getting zoning exceptions to put up ugly buildings in residential areas (that has to piss people in zoned cities off to coronary levels).
Houston is unbounded geographically and it has a problem with urban sprawl but that is reflected in lower housing prices. Houston has a problem with flooding. But it has no tornadoes of note and no earthquakes. Roughly every 2 decades it gets wallopped by a hurricane which messes it up for a week( or two for a bad one (longer for a direct hit by a bad one which is about every 50 years)). Smart people get out of the way of hurricanes.
If there is ONE point I would like to make is that people who bring outdoor concerts to houston in the summer are idiots. They could come here in april/may/early october and it would be very pleasant. Even June wouldn't be ridiculous. But July and August- it's an oven. It's still hot at 11pm at night and the high humidity means swamp coolers/misting water won't work well.
Look, I get it and I agree that Houston has its own unique problems.
But...
Population is growing much faster than the national population (15% for houston greater metro vs 3% for the country and vs 10% for california during the same period).
Houston area population averages a 29 minute commute each way while New York, D.C., and San Francisco average 50 minutes each way. That gives the average houstonion 40 minutes more time 5 days a week to enjoy life.
Real Estate is less expensive. A *good* house can still be had for under $200,000 (and 5 miles further out for $140,000). Median household price in San Francisco is over a million. It's $300,000 in Houston.
Houston has a lot more trees than areas like San Diego. The city is verdant but I agree that warming temperatures are killing it slowly over time.
I have no problem with faux brutalist high rises. My neighborhood (like so many others) has strong deed restrictions. I've visited zoned cities and they feel uncomfortable to me. Nothing seems convenient. I have multiple libraries, banks, grocery stores, even walmarts within 5 miles of my house. We tend to have heavy business development along the freeways and select major roads like Westheimer but miles and miles of subdivisions starting less than a mile off the freeways.
Houston is hot for 100 days a year. But.. it's not below freezing for over 100 days a year. No black ice. No shoveling snow. And houston is really nice from Oct 1 to May 20th each year (78-82 days and 60's nights common). September is a bit random. And June isn't so bad. And oddly, tho it is hotter on average than it used to be, we've had less days over 100 than we used to for several years (could be random).
The biggest problem I do see is a weak sense of community. Maybe because it's so spread out. Traveling to the city zoo can be a 50 mile trip. Board gaming groups have a hard time keeping critical mass.
* If critics like a non-art film, go see it. * If they hate it, probably go see it.
Now that we have Rotten Tomatoes..
* If the audience loves it, go see it unless you are an arty-farty type. * If critics like a non-art film, go see it. * If they hate it, probably go see it.
----
One thing I see now tho is that critics have added a layer of social justice warrior to their critical thinking. And I say that as a 20 year liberal voter.
If the movie/show has some aspect they dislike on a social justice warrior level, then everything about the movie/show becomes bad (directing, acting, cinematography, etc. etc.). They are NOT being neutral film critics so I can't trust them even to be typical film critics.
And typical film critics don't like a well made film that's targeted at the mass market. They suffer from having seen 5x as many films as everyone else too so they are pretty jaded/burned out in my opinion. Especially for films targeted at young people. Because the critics have already seen the film 50 times before they ever saw this particular instance of a young persons film for this year. They forget that for young people, it may only be the 5th or 6th time having seen it so it's still fresh to young people.
AC said > depends, what if you said there was a problem with the trunk latch and you wanted him to look at it?
Uh.. okay...
you take your car in for a tuneup and they x-ray the car for hidden compartments- which they search if they find any.
All of which is more akin to what geek squad members were doing.
(and for grins they also search the contents of the console, glove box, your trunk, the closed box in your trunk, pull out the seats and search the space behind the seats).
we did monthly failovers between different physical sites. A blown DC at one site wouldn't have made a difference.
Our failovers involved a couple hours of oncall for about 150 staff. Most the time only a half dozen were working but a couple times a year it would involve most the staff (and a lot of it people) for part of that. A database would be out of sync or messed up and that would fall to the IT staff to fix. It became less common over time.
Did you miss that they fixed the power problems and then the IT systems were messed up for a long time afterwards indicating poor disaster planning and low staff skill.
A company as big as BA, should have had a separate failover site and been doing regular failovers.
Uh yea.. it did for about 10 years that ended in a world war.
Put the world thru another 10 year depression and it will likely end in another world war along with over a billion dead.
25 million jobs will disappear almost instantly (under 10 years- probably under 5 years). It's going to take some time to heal that wound. And meanwhile even more jobs (up to 38% of all jobs now) will be disappearing at the same time.
Also, lots of people play russian roulette every day without ill effects. So we can simply ignore the cases where it doesn't work out.
Fact is retail jobs are about 15 million jobs and jobs that involve driving are about 8.7 for trucks of all kind. Another million bus, taxi, chauffeur jobs s about 10 mllion jobs involving driving.
So 25 million jobs disappearing very quickly (in a 10 year window).
Many of the luddites died homeless and of exposure and starvation. They were right. They only seem dumb because from our perspective today we ignore the 20 year period where they died and say "well it was okay for the next generation" as if it happened 2 days later..
An ill-considered plan to save a few dimes has cost them several dollars.
The CEO should have foreseen this and should be let go. As should other executives who approved the offshoring plan.
Offshoring can work- but excessive staffing cuts to save a few extra dollars are begging for something like this to happen.
Infrastructure people should be located on site with the hardware and there should be multiple hardware systems *with* fail over testing on a monthly basis. (not quarterly. that fails. only monthly is often enough that the failover is seamless and there is a good argument for doing a daily failover.)
Or it will descend into a bloody revolution where billions die and we lose progress for several generations and possibly fall into a dictorship where progress stops entirely and the bloodletting continues.
We've seen that example over and over during the last 150 - 200 years.
We could do it in a much easier way without so much loss of life, and importantly to you- "progress".
If 2% really care, 8% care a little and 90% don't care then A.I is the way to go.
if 90% care, 8% care a little, and 2% really care then A.I. isn't the way to go.
Given the heavy reliance on automated tools and certain chord combinations, human composers are no where near the league that John Williams was in. The music is manipulative but not memorable. If the A.I. can turn out equally manipulative but unmemorable soundtracks then that's fine for most movies.
And also , I think the first case is close to the truth. Most of us don't who composed the music. Because the music isn't worth caring about as much as it was 30 years ago. Because there's 100x more movies per week than there were 30 years ago.
I never got any emotional value out of working. I realized that at 30 and I saw 45 - 50 year olds being discriminated against way back then (when they had stronger protections too) so I knew what to expect.
Age discrimination starts around 40 in the top of the field and is in full strength by 50 even in small shops.
The supreme court gutted protection against age discrimination in 2009.
Everyone gets old. Only the geniuses and the lucky won't be discriminated against.
And it's dumb. Because young people make the same mistakes, are much more likely to leave sooner (no roots, building their resume), have less loyalty than the current older people all did themselves only 15 to 25 years before.
Which results in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for companies. Over and over.
It's often the default browser on android phones. And many people no longer own PC's or they own 3 tablets and a chromebook plus a PC.
It's quite possible that Firefox still has more browser installs than it did back in 2010- but a lower percentage of all browsers since everyone's phone now is a browser.
I don't "use" chrome- but it's REQUIRED for hangouts. So it's installed and sitting there.
I use firefox. Everyone I know uses firefox. Except on their phones.
And Chrome slows down my fairly beefy machine when it loads and spawns off a half dozen processes that I have to kill manually at least once a week when performance gets really bad.
Firefox also runs out of control every 2-3 days and starts to thrash disk, cpu and memory but at least it's easy to kill. Lately, it screws up on youtube videos and they get stuttery but keep playing after it dies.
I'd like a browser that didn't impact performance so badly.
I prefer the noscript plugins on firefox. Does chrome have something similar to no-script? I hate intrusive and popup ads.
Cases of people dying while trying to quit booze are common.
Name a case of a person dying trying to quit pot. (At the least, it's several orders of magnitude lower than the rate for alcohol drinkers.)
There don't appear to be any.
The two biggest risks of pot use are emphysema (only if you smoke it tho and increasingly edibles are the way to go) and increased risk of psychosis if you have a family history of psychosis (and it's possible the heavy pot use was an indicator that you were at a higher risk of psychosis and were self medicating).
Fewer people die from consuming pot than die from swimming, skiing, mountain climbing, smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, eating peanuts, eating shellfish, hiking, and so on. And those activities are legal.
And we are destroying our police, judicial systems, and our civil liberties in our effort to keep pot illegal.
Humans set up the methods for teaching alphago but the actual learning is so complex that humans can't understand it.
In your analogy, it's a bit more like the brilliant grandson beats others. The grandfather knows how he instructed his son and a bit of how his son instructed his grandson, but the grandson is so far advanced from the grandfather that his methods can't be understood well.
Slashdot Mirror
Study...
http://interactives.ap.org/201...
(numbers for specific metros pulled out here)
http://www.chron.com/news/nati...
And this was also interesting...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/5...
You overstate your point about refineries.
Refineries are confined to a highly specific area (mostly the ship channel area).
If you drive an hour north or east, you are in hot muggy forested areas.
If you drive an hour west, you are in dry but wooded farm and ranch land
If you drive an hour northwest, you are in hill country with lots of 30' trees and tons of wildflowers in the spring.
If you drive an hour southwest, you are at the beach. (it's not nearly as pretty as other beaches due to silt from the mississippi and the waves are tepid but it's a beach and even uncrowded (almost desolate) only 15 miles further out.
Let me try to state your point better.
The area around houston is flat for 100 miles in all directions. Other than day tripping for antiques there's not a lot of tourist activity. While there are several state parts that are very nice in the spring and fall, they are pretty hot and miserable during the summer. The gulf is silty and not pretty blue and transparent to the bottom (about 1' transparent on average and 2' on a good day) and has small waves. But it has good fishing.
The areas along almost all the major freeways are unpleasant and fairly ugly with business sprawl and too many billboards.
The city center and is vibrant, well serviced by public transportation, has a vibrant night life, and expensive. Areas just east of the city center are undeveloped and old 1930's shacks.
The lack of zoning allows the city to constantly renew itself. There are no empty, unusable buildings "trapped" by zoning. There are no fat cat developers getting zoning exceptions to put up ugly buildings in residential areas (that has to piss people in zoned cities off to coronary levels).
Houston is unbounded geographically and it has a problem with urban sprawl but that is reflected in lower housing prices. Houston has a problem with flooding. But it has no tornadoes of note and no earthquakes. Roughly every 2 decades it gets wallopped by a hurricane which messes it up for a week( or two for a bad one (longer for a direct hit by a bad one which is about every 50 years)). Smart people get out of the way of hurricanes.
If there is ONE point I would like to make is that people who bring outdoor concerts to houston in the summer are idiots. They could come here in april/may/early october and it would be very pleasant. Even June wouldn't be ridiculous. But July and August- it's an oven. It's still hot at 11pm at night and the high humidity means swamp coolers/misting water won't work well.
Look, I get it and I agree that Houston has its own unique problems.
But...
Population is growing much faster than the national population (15% for houston greater metro vs 3% for the country and vs 10% for california during the same period).
Houston area population averages a 29 minute commute each way while New York, D.C., and San Francisco average 50 minutes each way. That gives the average houstonion 40 minutes more time 5 days a week to enjoy life.
Real Estate is less expensive. A *good* house can still be had for under $200,000 (and 5 miles further out for $140,000). Median household price in San Francisco is over a million. It's $300,000 in Houston.
Houston has a lot more trees than areas like San Diego. The city is verdant but I agree that warming temperatures are killing it slowly over time.
I have no problem with faux brutalist high rises. My neighborhood (like so many others) has strong deed restrictions. I've visited zoned cities and they feel uncomfortable to me. Nothing seems convenient. I have multiple libraries, banks, grocery stores, even walmarts within 5 miles of my house. We tend to have heavy business development along the freeways and select major roads like Westheimer but miles and miles of subdivisions starting less than a mile off the freeways.
Houston is hot for 100 days a year. But.. it's not below freezing for over 100 days a year. No black ice. No shoveling snow. And houston is really nice from Oct 1 to May 20th each year (78-82 days and 60's nights common). September is a bit random. And June isn't so bad. And oddly, tho it is hotter on average than it used to be, we've had less days over 100 than we used to for several years (could be random).
The biggest problem I do see is a weak sense of community. Maybe because it's so spread out. Traveling to the city zoo can be a 50 mile trip. Board gaming groups have a hard time keeping critical mass.
And it was safest to say that
* If critics like a non-art film, go see it.
* If they hate it, probably go see it.
Now that we have Rotten Tomatoes..
* If the audience loves it, go see it unless you are an arty-farty type.
* If critics like a non-art film, go see it.
* If they hate it, probably go see it.
----
One thing I see now tho is that critics have added a layer of social justice warrior to their critical thinking. And I say that as a 20 year liberal voter.
If the movie/show has some aspect they dislike on a social justice warrior level, then everything about the movie/show becomes bad (directing, acting, cinematography, etc. etc.). They are NOT being neutral film critics so I can't trust them even to be typical film critics.
And typical film critics don't like a well made film that's targeted at the mass market. They suffer from having seen 5x as many films as everyone else too so they are pretty jaded/burned out in my opinion. Especially for films targeted at young people. Because the critics have already seen the film 50 times before they ever saw this particular instance of a young persons film for this year. They forget that for young people, it may only be the 5th or 6th time having seen it so it's still fresh to young people.
AC said > depends, what if you said there was a problem with the trunk latch and you wanted him to look at it?
Uh.. okay...
you take your car in for a tuneup and they x-ray the car for hidden compartments- which they search if they find any.
All of which is more akin to what geek squad members were doing.
(and for grins they also search the contents of the console, glove box, your trunk, the closed box in your trunk, pull out the seats and search the space behind the seats).
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to pick up $1,000 by planting child porn on someone's computer by members of the geek squad.
If more than a half dozen geek squad members were working for the FBI, I'd be shocked that at least one didn't turn out to be planting evidence.
Which should turn up with forensic accounting. (Hmmm. 39 geek squad find 0 to 2 child porn instances but this girl found 7 instances).
.
It is if it is set up and administered right.
we did monthly failovers between different physical sites. A blown DC at one site wouldn't have made a difference.
Our failovers involved a couple hours of oncall for about 150 staff. Most the time only a half dozen were working but a couple times a year it would involve most the staff (and a lot of it people) for part of that. A database would be out of sync or messed up and that would fall to the IT staff to fix. It became less common over time.
Did you miss that they fixed the power problems and then the IT systems were messed up for a long time afterwards indicating poor disaster planning and low staff skill.
A company as big as BA, should have had a separate failover site and been doing regular failovers.
Uh yea.. it did for about 10 years that ended in a world war.
Put the world thru another 10 year depression and it will likely end in another world war along with over a billion dead.
25 million jobs will disappear almost instantly (under 10 years- probably under 5 years). It's going to take some time to heal that wound. And meanwhile even more jobs (up to 38% of all jobs now) will be disappearing at the same time.
Also, lots of people play russian roulette every day without ill effects. So we can simply ignore the cases where it doesn't work out.
Fact is retail jobs are about 15 million jobs and jobs that involve driving are about
8.7 for trucks of all kind.
Another million bus, taxi, chauffeur jobs s about 10 mllion jobs involving driving.
So 25 million jobs disappearing very quickly (in a 10 year window).
Many of the luddites died homeless and of exposure and starvation. They were right. They only seem dumb because from our perspective today we ignore the 20 year period where they died and say "well it was okay for the next generation" as if it happened 2 days later..
An ill-considered plan to save a few dimes has cost them several dollars.
The CEO should have foreseen this and should be let go. As should other executives who approved the offshoring plan.
Offshoring can work- but excessive staffing cuts to save a few extra dollars are begging for something like this to happen.
Infrastructure people should be located on site with the hardware and there should be multiple hardware systems *with* fail over testing on a monthly basis. (not quarterly. that fails. only monthly is often enough that the failover is seamless and there is a good argument for doing a daily failover.)
Or it will descend into a bloody revolution where billions die and we lose progress for several generations and possibly fall into a dictorship where progress stops entirely and the bloodletting continues.
We've seen that example over and over during the last 150 - 200 years.
We could do it in a much easier way without so much loss of life, and importantly to you- "progress".
Yes but it depends.
If 2% really care, 8% care a little and 90% don't care then A.I is the way to go.
if 90% care, 8% care a little, and 2% really care then A.I. isn't the way to go.
Given the heavy reliance on automated tools and certain chord combinations, human composers are no where near the league that John Williams was in. The music is manipulative but not memorable. If the A.I. can turn out equally manipulative but unmemorable soundtracks then that's fine for most movies.
And also , I think the first case is close to the truth. Most of us don't who composed the music. Because the music isn't worth caring about as much as it was 30 years ago. Because there's 100x more movies per week than there were 30 years ago.
My solution was to save hard and retire at 51.
I never got any emotional value out of working. I realized that at 30 and I saw 45 - 50 year olds being discriminated against way back then (when they had stronger protections too) so I knew what to expect.
Yea! And it's not really A.I. any more either now that a computer has done it.
And the sun got in his eyes.
Let me join your "humans bitter against computers" club too!
Your definition of young is so funny.
Age discrimination starts around 40 in the top of the field and is in full strength by 50 even in small shops.
The supreme court gutted protection against age discrimination in 2009.
Everyone gets old. Only the geniuses and the lucky won't be discriminated against.
And it's dumb. Because young people make the same mistakes, are much more likely to leave sooner (no roots, building their resume), have less loyalty than the current older people all did themselves only 15 to 25 years before.
Which results in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for companies. Over and over.
It's a multi-platform IM created by google and they've slowly tied it to chrome as a sub-app.
It's often the default browser on android phones. And many people no longer own PC's or they own 3 tablets and a chromebook plus a PC.
It's quite possible that Firefox still has more browser installs than it did back in 2010- but a lower percentage of all browsers since everyone's phone now is a browser.
I don't "use" chrome- but it's REQUIRED for hangouts. So it's installed and sitting there.
I use firefox. Everyone I know uses firefox. Except on their phones.
I don't use firefox on my phone.
And Chrome slows down my fairly beefy machine when it loads and spawns off a half dozen processes that I have to kill manually at least once a week when performance gets really bad.
Firefox also runs out of control every 2-3 days and starts to thrash disk, cpu and memory but at least it's easy to kill. Lately, it screws up on youtube videos and they get stuttery but keep playing after it dies.
I'd like a browser that didn't impact performance so badly.
I prefer the noscript plugins on firefox. Does chrome have something similar to no-script? I hate intrusive and popup ads.
My solution is to not watch sports at all except "greatest plays" on youtube. And mostly incredible down hill skiing stuff.
NFL and MLB have been ruined for me. It's just a bunch of millionaires in a cartel running around trying to pump money out of the rest of society.
I'm a cord cutter and they offered me a great deal to keep cable.
My cable bill with HBO is $10 a month-about $11 with tax. And I can change from HBO to Showtime on a month to month basis.
Yea.. at $10 for the NBA, $10 for MLB, $12 for NFL, $10 for NHL, etc.
Gr.. Since 2010. Typo. Over the last 7 years.
AC said: That's funny I pay Comcast $60 and I get 80Mbs
I checked my current speed and it's
30/6.
I'm assuming that is your *total* bill and not the rate pre tax right?
Looking at the current deals it looks like I can get 50 for $39 (pretax)
https://cabletvinternet.s9.com...
So probably $39 + $10 for basic cable ($49) and taxes ($58).
Probably should go renegotiate.
But it sounds like you are getting a deal if you are paying $60 final cost and getting 80mbps. It's better than anything they offer on their web site.
If you think about it, cable TV now costs the same as a new car every 20 years.
Not really.
Cases of people dying while trying to quit booze are common.
Name a case of a person dying trying to quit pot. (At the least, it's several orders of magnitude lower than the rate for alcohol drinkers.)
There don't appear to be any.
The two biggest risks of pot use are emphysema (only if you smoke it tho and increasingly edibles are the way to go) and increased risk of psychosis if you have a family history of psychosis (and it's possible the heavy pot use was an indicator that you were at a higher risk of psychosis and were self medicating).
Fewer people die from consuming pot than die from swimming, skiing, mountain climbing, smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, eating peanuts, eating shellfish, hiking, and so on. And those activities are legal.
And we are destroying our police, judicial systems, and our civil liberties in our effort to keep pot illegal.
Humans set up the methods for teaching alphago but the actual learning is so complex that humans can't understand it.
In your analogy, it's a bit more like the brilliant grandson beats others. The grandfather knows how he instructed his son and a bit of how his son instructed his grandson, but the grandson is so far advanced from the grandfather that his methods can't be understood well.