Trump is an odd duck and I think a product of celebrity culture as much as anything. If you would have looked at him ten years ago, his public positions and political beliefs would paint him fairly squarely as a Democrat, or at least a New York Democrat. He may also be narcissistic enough that he only really cares about himself and the rest of the big business fat cats don't rate any special treatment from him, or even though he's part of those circles he doesn't feel any tribal loyalty towards them.
News media (or at least the liberal-leaning part of it) will demonize everything he does, but that's hardly new. Some probably just want to peddle controversy so anything will be spun so as to be more dramatic than it really warrants. It just seems like an abrupt change because we've had 8 years of Obama presidency, but there were plenty of people or publications that were doing the same throughout Obama's term and talking about how everything he did was somehow ruining the country. You probably just never saw any of that because you didn't go looking for it or tune in to those programs. If you mostly view content that slants to the left, you would expect it to be as harsh towards the previous administration.
Perhaps Trump has realized that it doesn't really matter what you say or do, as the country is so divided (and actively seeks out reinforcement for that division) that there's always going to be a group that will spin things in his favor as much as there will be a group that spins things against him. Such a system doesn't reward integrity, decorum, or anything really. Maybe a Trump presidency and all the cavalier, politically incorrect shit-slinging is what it takes for us to collectively evaluate what brought us to this point and make a change so that those attributes are valued and rewarded. Otherwise I suspect that in enough time we'll remember back to a time when the Trump-Clinton election was a civil affair compared to the current clown posse and their shenanigans.
The easiest solution is not to set any particular price, but have companies bid for available visas which will naturally drive up the price. Eventually it gets to a point where it's only worth it to hire an H1-B visa candidate if you really can't find any local talent and are more than willing to pay top dollar.
I'm reminded of an old IRC quote: The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Modern society has made the world such an overwhelmingly safe place compared to earlier periods in human history that the universe has to find new ways to work in natural selection. It says homeopathic right on the box, and I would imagine that this was something the parents sought out and wanted to buy. So just let them remove themselves from the gene pool or just regulate who gets to be a parent because I have a feeling that single regulation would remove the need for a lot of other stuff.
Actually corn does have a fair bit of protein (about 1g protein for every 10g of corn according to the USDA) relative to many other vegetables, but it doesn't include all of the essential amino acids so you'll need to get those from somewhere else. Of course that's true for anything a person is going to eat, and corn is probably only something you'd want for supplemental protein anyhow as lentils or other beans offer much more protein per serving. It's good to have on the cob and cornbread is alright once in a while, and you can mix it in with a lot of other things to make salsas and the like. Corn chips and corn flower tortillas are also popular and common.
However, most of what's raised in the U.S. isn't the sweet corn that you can buy at grocery stores, but instead a different variety for livestock feed, which is mainly used because its pretty energy dense compared to grass so you can get your livestock to put on weight faster. Knowing that fact and how much we've incorporated corn into our diets probably gives a bit of a hint as to why the U.S. and Mexico have the worst obesity rates on the planet.
If you have access to it and can know who has it and where it is you can probably get an officer to come with you and knock on a door. If the person denies having it just have it starting making noise or play a loud audio clip about it being stolen. At that point the police officer has probable cause and could enter the dwelling.
No need to post stuff to social media or anything like that. Hell once a cop is at the door it's pretty easy to talk the person into admitting that they must have "found" it and that you're so greatful that they've kept it safe until you could pick it up. Give people an easy out and they'll usually take it.
There's a stark difference between social democracies that have market economies but high taxes on the wealthy (funnily enough those Nordic countries, as well as New Zealand, actually have lower corporate tax rates compared to the United States) and states that attempt to nationalize industries or use centralized planning to run their economies. Communism has been disastrous where implemented and countries which were formerly communist such as China and Vietnam have found greater prosperity in moving away from those ideals and allowing private enterprise to exist.
It's much easier to have a good social safety net when you have citizens that are producing far more wealth in a free market system than they would otherwise do under a centrally planned system. And if you're an adamant socialist, you can usually find some kind of employee owned company even in those capitalist countries or bank at a credit union or engage with other co-ops.
While it's true that Apple hasn't done much in the way of releasing new products to actually compete, and the one product line they did refresh was with a controversial touch bar in place of function keys, Microsoft has gotten better at making products, particularly their Surface line. The newest one that looks much like an iMac but has a huge touch screen seems like it would be great for people who do a lot of drawing. I'll admit that I have no use for such things, but they've started making some interesting hardware, or at least releasing it. Back in the Ballmer days that talked about a lot of interesting stuff, but most of it never saw the light of day. Even outside of Surface, they're making stuff like Hololens.
Their software on the other hand doesn't seem better, at least from the consumer side. I guess Azure is fairly popular and they've probably got other stuff I'm not overly familiar with that gets used by businesses. However, if Microsoft hadn't started making better products, people would have jumped ship from Apple for something else like HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. instead of buying Microsoft hardware.
I think part of the problem is that the basic screen shape has changed. Traditionally, monitors used a 4:3 format that worked reasonably well for most sites and the resolution was low enough that letters had to be sizable so as not to be unreadable. However, we moved to the 16:9 format for most monitors which adds horizontal space, often at the expense of vertical space which is utterly useless for most things beyond watching movies filmed in a 16:9 format.
Studies that were done over 100 years ago found that the best line-length for human reading was around 4 inches at most. The extra width that modern screens provide don't give much benefit, but at least with a tablet it's much easier to adjust to a portrait mode where the added vertical space means less scrolling. Otherwise there isn't a lot of useful things to do with a UI other than add more tool pallets, but for a non-professional tool, its typically better to avoid throwing too much at users so we've got all this extra space that provides no benefit. So websites fill the void by throwing in a side column of ads, but that's worse than just empty space as far as I'm concerned.
The touch model of phones and tablets as makes it more complicated to have a universal UI. Web pages with context menus or anything that interacts with a mouse hover are horribly clunky on touch screens, and optimizing for different platforms is often time consuming or doesn't even make business sense depending on how much traffic you get from different platforms. The same goes for applications that could be run on either a tablet or a PC as the interaction models are different enough that trying a one-size fits all approach often degrades the experience for both users. Using an application with bigger buttons that are necessary for touch targets with a mouse and keyboard just feels like the UI has wasted a lot space and trying to touch small targets designed for mouse use can be exceptionally frustrating.
Well, both Apple and Samsung make their own SoCs that are as good or better than what Qualcomm puts out, but they don't sell them to third parties and keep them for their own devices. Outside of Samsung, no one else is making any money with Android (outside of perhaps some of the Chinese manufacturers who are selling low-end products and can live on those margins) and there isn't enough consumer demand for high-end SoCs to get any company to invest the billions of dollars it would require to design and manufacture such a chip. TI quit the SoC business and even NVidia decided the cost wasn't worth the hassle, especially because your SoC needs an integrated baseband chip to be competitive and Qualcomm had a serious leg up on everyone in that department. The simple truth is that their isn't enough demand for high-end ARM SoCs for any company to devote the resources to challenge Qualcomm in that space and the two largest phone manufacturers are already using their own products so you can't sell to the biggest part of the high-end SoC market.
The more I've looked at social media the more I've come to believe it's dominated by narcissists (or at least that's the bulk of the traffic), so I don't know if they really care how easy it is to follow other people as they mostly only care about themselves and what they have to say. The non-tech savvy older generation of users have always had to put up with ads so suffering through a few more will be nothing new as long as they eventually get to see the pictures of their grand kids. The younger generation might move on to something new, but they always do that anyway.
I don't suspect that there is a part of the brain responsible for modifying the rest of it. Cognitive behavioral therapy just seems like a conscious effort to classically condition ones brain or to undo some other form of conditioning identified as undesirable. The brain reorganizes itself to make memory and associations all the time and we know a little about that process. It's not really that much different than studying material and memorizing things in a way.
What we don't know is the extent to which something like that can be successful for some arbitrary personality characteristics. If you have a sociopath's brain (lacking empathy) it may be possible to teach the brain to recognize the lack of empathy and compensate for it, but not to rewire the part of the brain that naturally is responsible for doing so. There's some evidence to suggest it might be possible because studies looking at blind people have found that the parts of the brain used for vision get repurposed to an extent.
However, I think that some behaviors are likely pretty wired in or almost impossible to change. If this weren't true, things like gay conversion therapy would work or you would be able to condition yourself to change your sexual preferences. Since these don't succeed often or at all, there may be some parts of the brain that you can't modify or are so hard-wired that its not reasonably possible.
It gets worse considering most developers never thought about supporting anything bigger than a ~5" screen. It reminds me of when the first iPad came out and a lot of the apps were just stretched out phone apps, which made them ever worse to use since different buttons would be at far-flung corners of the screen that's no longer within convenient range.
I think the bigger concern is where the data is being stored and who has access. For some documents there's no way in hell that a company would want them to be stored on someone else's servers or having Google's analytics bots looking at the documents even if human eyes will never see it. I don't know if Google sells the ability to install their office software on the company's own hardware, but I suspect that if they keep developing the product they'll get around to it eventually once they decide to go the same service contract / subscription model route that a lot of other companies are using.
You could improve the security by using different images (say pictures of different types of fruit) instead of just dots, and then changing the location of the images for every login. I know that my unlock pattern is grape > apple > cherry > grape > pear, but the pattern I happen to draw (or just tap on the shapes since there's no requirement to draw) changes every time.
It's still not fool proof as anyone with a clear view will be able to see the exact images that were used and reproduce it, but it makes it more difficult for an attacker to rely on capturing hand movement and extrapolating the information from there. One could probably even improve on it a little more, perhaps by including useless information to throw off hackers. For example I could enter red square > blue circle > yellow triangle > green rhombus > red triangle, but I know that it's only the colors that matter and the shapes are meaningless data, but even that has limits to how much added security it brings.
Even then, if someone really wants to get into your device that badly, there isn't any form of security that can't be broken with enough time or resources. I suppose you could implement a one time pad password system if you knew the hardware was completely safe, but woe be unto you should you forget the sequence or where you're at in it, and it still doesn't stop someone from getting the password with their $5 wrench.
Probably because they don't want to take the effort to download and covert the songs and have to manage syncing them to a device. Sure Spotify or any other streaming service costs money, but at a certain point your time becomes more valuable to you fork over the subscription fee instead of downloading the YouTube video and stripping out the audio. It's the same reason that there are plenty of auto shops that mainly specialize in oil changes. Sure, we could all do it ourselves for a lot less money, but most people prefer paying someone else to do all of that work for them.
I think the technology is a good idea, but they've picked a terrible name for it. To someone who is uninformed, it makes it sound as though the feature enables automated driving for the vehicle, and while that may be the end goal, it's currently not at that level and may give a false sense of capability. They should refer to it as "Driver Assist" or something that doesn't leave anyone with a false impression of the capabilities of what it does.
Yes, and we already have that. There are people who die every day waiting for a transplant organ. There's a limited amount available so they must be rationed and someone (or a panel of people most likely) has to determine where the limited supply will do the most good. That means skipping the older man in his 70s in favor of a young person with kids or rejecting the person that drank a liver into oblivion in favor of another person. If there's enough livers to go around, those other patients can certainly get treatment.
Get a big disaster and an influx of too many patients at one time and medical staff is going to have to start prioritizing and some people that might otherwise live or going to die because there's a finite amount of doctors and time they can devote. It might be possible to transport some patients to other hospitals, but there's only a limited number of vehicles capable of doing that. Give me a computer system that can make accurate predictions and judgements over a doctor who can only try their best. If the computer system can keep more people alive because it can make those kinds of tough decisions better than a human, you'd be foolish not to use it.
So are you a health care professional then? Because if you're not, you'd probably better get comfortable with rationing or your so-called "death panels" because otherwise you're not doing anything to help the situation from what I can see.
No, healthcare is wasted on patients that are going to die even with treatment. If you have no way to accurately predict that, you have no fair basis for discriminating between two patients. If you can do that with a high degree of accuracy, you don't spend a lot of money on an expensive treatment that will do any good. At some point everyone is going to die, no matter the amount of medical intervention, or do you believe we should just keep people alive no matter the cost until they grow sick of it and ask to die?
What's the problem with that exactly? Since health care like anything else is a finite resource it doesn't make a lot of sense to allocate resources to someone who's on the way out when it could be put towards patients who have decades of life ahead of them.
The house doesn't cheat. It plays by a set of rules that mathematically work out in its favor. It tells you this up front. The closest thing the house does to cheating is having a house limit.
Also, give holders more flexibility in changing jobs without losing the visa, make the system a path to citizenship, and prevent new visas from being created if previous holders are unemployed. Essentially prevent jobs from using the visa to control workers while suppressing wages or constantly churning through new candidates.
I don't think every generation is getting weaker, or the world wouldn't be getting better. Crime is down, we're reducing pollution, advancing technology and medicine, etc. Maybe that just makes the worst parts of humanity stick out a bit more, but as a whole, we're moving forward. Perfect is never going to happen and things in western democracies are already really good historically speaking, and improving on that is a very slow process rife with missteps to learn from.
Some colleges and/or degrees are shit, but that was always the case. I don't expect some fields to get watered down because of the tenure system. The administration might want to be a degree mill or churn out more students, but cantankerous old tenured professors won't let it happen, and the administration probably doesn't care too much as they get paid whether a student passes or fails so there isn't too much push-back. Ultimately it doesn't matter as long as the rest of the system can correct for it. Eventually the universities that are degree mills get passed over and people start going somewhere else due to the bad reputation. That's why even though some things seem worse, as a whole things are getting better.
Slashdot Mirror
Trump is an odd duck and I think a product of celebrity culture as much as anything. If you would have looked at him ten years ago, his public positions and political beliefs would paint him fairly squarely as a Democrat, or at least a New York Democrat. He may also be narcissistic enough that he only really cares about himself and the rest of the big business fat cats don't rate any special treatment from him, or even though he's part of those circles he doesn't feel any tribal loyalty towards them.
News media (or at least the liberal-leaning part of it) will demonize everything he does, but that's hardly new. Some probably just want to peddle controversy so anything will be spun so as to be more dramatic than it really warrants. It just seems like an abrupt change because we've had 8 years of Obama presidency, but there were plenty of people or publications that were doing the same throughout Obama's term and talking about how everything he did was somehow ruining the country. You probably just never saw any of that because you didn't go looking for it or tune in to those programs. If you mostly view content that slants to the left, you would expect it to be as harsh towards the previous administration.
Perhaps Trump has realized that it doesn't really matter what you say or do, as the country is so divided (and actively seeks out reinforcement for that division) that there's always going to be a group that will spin things in his favor as much as there will be a group that spins things against him. Such a system doesn't reward integrity, decorum, or anything really. Maybe a Trump presidency and all the cavalier, politically incorrect shit-slinging is what it takes for us to collectively evaluate what brought us to this point and make a change so that those attributes are valued and rewarded. Otherwise I suspect that in enough time we'll remember back to a time when the Trump-Clinton election was a civil affair compared to the current clown posse and their shenanigans.
The easiest solution is not to set any particular price, but have companies bid for available visas which will naturally drive up the price. Eventually it gets to a point where it's only worth it to hire an H1-B visa candidate if you really can't find any local talent and are more than willing to pay top dollar.
I'm reminded of an old IRC quote: The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Modern society has made the world such an overwhelmingly safe place compared to earlier periods in human history that the universe has to find new ways to work in natural selection. It says homeopathic right on the box, and I would imagine that this was something the parents sought out and wanted to buy. So just let them remove themselves from the gene pool or just regulate who gets to be a parent because I have a feeling that single regulation would remove the need for a lot of other stuff.
I didn't know Tourettes extended to written communication.
Learn something new everyday.
Reminds me of the old joke:
Q: What does ORACLE stand for?
A: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
Actually corn does have a fair bit of protein (about 1g protein for every 10g of corn according to the USDA) relative to many other vegetables, but it doesn't include all of the essential amino acids so you'll need to get those from somewhere else. Of course that's true for anything a person is going to eat, and corn is probably only something you'd want for supplemental protein anyhow as lentils or other beans offer much more protein per serving. It's good to have on the cob and cornbread is alright once in a while, and you can mix it in with a lot of other things to make salsas and the like. Corn chips and corn flower tortillas are also popular and common.
However, most of what's raised in the U.S. isn't the sweet corn that you can buy at grocery stores, but instead a different variety for livestock feed, which is mainly used because its pretty energy dense compared to grass so you can get your livestock to put on weight faster. Knowing that fact and how much we've incorporated corn into our diets probably gives a bit of a hint as to why the U.S. and Mexico have the worst obesity rates on the planet.
If you have access to it and can know who has it and where it is you can probably get an officer to come with you and knock on a door. If the person denies having it just have it starting making noise or play a loud audio clip about it being stolen. At that point the police officer has probable cause and could enter the dwelling.
No need to post stuff to social media or anything like that. Hell once a cop is at the door it's pretty easy to talk the person into admitting that they must have "found" it and that you're so greatful that they've kept it safe until you could pick it up. Give people an easy out and they'll usually take it.
There's a stark difference between social democracies that have market economies but high taxes on the wealthy (funnily enough those Nordic countries, as well as New Zealand, actually have lower corporate tax rates compared to the United States) and states that attempt to nationalize industries or use centralized planning to run their economies. Communism has been disastrous where implemented and countries which were formerly communist such as China and Vietnam have found greater prosperity in moving away from those ideals and allowing private enterprise to exist.
It's much easier to have a good social safety net when you have citizens that are producing far more wealth in a free market system than they would otherwise do under a centrally planned system. And if you're an adamant socialist, you can usually find some kind of employee owned company even in those capitalist countries or bank at a credit union or engage with other co-ops.
While it's true that Apple hasn't done much in the way of releasing new products to actually compete, and the one product line they did refresh was with a controversial touch bar in place of function keys, Microsoft has gotten better at making products, particularly their Surface line. The newest one that looks much like an iMac but has a huge touch screen seems like it would be great for people who do a lot of drawing. I'll admit that I have no use for such things, but they've started making some interesting hardware, or at least releasing it. Back in the Ballmer days that talked about a lot of interesting stuff, but most of it never saw the light of day. Even outside of Surface, they're making stuff like Hololens.
Their software on the other hand doesn't seem better, at least from the consumer side. I guess Azure is fairly popular and they've probably got other stuff I'm not overly familiar with that gets used by businesses. However, if Microsoft hadn't started making better products, people would have jumped ship from Apple for something else like HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. instead of buying Microsoft hardware.
I think part of the problem is that the basic screen shape has changed. Traditionally, monitors used a 4:3 format that worked reasonably well for most sites and the resolution was low enough that letters had to be sizable so as not to be unreadable. However, we moved to the 16:9 format for most monitors which adds horizontal space, often at the expense of vertical space which is utterly useless for most things beyond watching movies filmed in a 16:9 format.
Studies that were done over 100 years ago found that the best line-length for human reading was around 4 inches at most. The extra width that modern screens provide don't give much benefit, but at least with a tablet it's much easier to adjust to a portrait mode where the added vertical space means less scrolling. Otherwise there isn't a lot of useful things to do with a UI other than add more tool pallets, but for a non-professional tool, its typically better to avoid throwing too much at users so we've got all this extra space that provides no benefit. So websites fill the void by throwing in a side column of ads, but that's worse than just empty space as far as I'm concerned.
The touch model of phones and tablets as makes it more complicated to have a universal UI. Web pages with context menus or anything that interacts with a mouse hover are horribly clunky on touch screens, and optimizing for different platforms is often time consuming or doesn't even make business sense depending on how much traffic you get from different platforms. The same goes for applications that could be run on either a tablet or a PC as the interaction models are different enough that trying a one-size fits all approach often degrades the experience for both users. Using an application with bigger buttons that are necessary for touch targets with a mouse and keyboard just feels like the UI has wasted a lot space and trying to touch small targets designed for mouse use can be exceptionally frustrating.
Well, both Apple and Samsung make their own SoCs that are as good or better than what Qualcomm puts out, but they don't sell them to third parties and keep them for their own devices. Outside of Samsung, no one else is making any money with Android (outside of perhaps some of the Chinese manufacturers who are selling low-end products and can live on those margins) and there isn't enough consumer demand for high-end SoCs to get any company to invest the billions of dollars it would require to design and manufacture such a chip. TI quit the SoC business and even NVidia decided the cost wasn't worth the hassle, especially because your SoC needs an integrated baseband chip to be competitive and Qualcomm had a serious leg up on everyone in that department. The simple truth is that their isn't enough demand for high-end ARM SoCs for any company to devote the resources to challenge Qualcomm in that space and the two largest phone manufacturers are already using their own products so you can't sell to the biggest part of the high-end SoC market.
The more I've looked at social media the more I've come to believe it's dominated by narcissists (or at least that's the bulk of the traffic), so I don't know if they really care how easy it is to follow other people as they mostly only care about themselves and what they have to say. The non-tech savvy older generation of users have always had to put up with ads so suffering through a few more will be nothing new as long as they eventually get to see the pictures of their grand kids. The younger generation might move on to something new, but they always do that anyway.
I don't suspect that there is a part of the brain responsible for modifying the rest of it. Cognitive behavioral therapy just seems like a conscious effort to classically condition ones brain or to undo some other form of conditioning identified as undesirable. The brain reorganizes itself to make memory and associations all the time and we know a little about that process. It's not really that much different than studying material and memorizing things in a way.
What we don't know is the extent to which something like that can be successful for some arbitrary personality characteristics. If you have a sociopath's brain (lacking empathy) it may be possible to teach the brain to recognize the lack of empathy and compensate for it, but not to rewire the part of the brain that naturally is responsible for doing so. There's some evidence to suggest it might be possible because studies looking at blind people have found that the parts of the brain used for vision get repurposed to an extent.
However, I think that some behaviors are likely pretty wired in or almost impossible to change. If this weren't true, things like gay conversion therapy would work or you would be able to condition yourself to change your sexual preferences. Since these don't succeed often or at all, there may be some parts of the brain that you can't modify or are so hard-wired that its not reasonably possible.
It gets worse considering most developers never thought about supporting anything bigger than a ~5" screen. It reminds me of when the first iPad came out and a lot of the apps were just stretched out phone apps, which made them ever worse to use since different buttons would be at far-flung corners of the screen that's no longer within convenient range.
I think the bigger concern is where the data is being stored and who has access. For some documents there's no way in hell that a company would want them to be stored on someone else's servers or having Google's analytics bots looking at the documents even if human eyes will never see it. I don't know if Google sells the ability to install their office software on the company's own hardware, but I suspect that if they keep developing the product they'll get around to it eventually once they decide to go the same service contract / subscription model route that a lot of other companies are using.
You could improve the security by using different images (say pictures of different types of fruit) instead of just dots, and then changing the location of the images for every login. I know that my unlock pattern is grape > apple > cherry > grape > pear, but the pattern I happen to draw (or just tap on the shapes since there's no requirement to draw) changes every time.
It's still not fool proof as anyone with a clear view will be able to see the exact images that were used and reproduce it, but it makes it more difficult for an attacker to rely on capturing hand movement and extrapolating the information from there. One could probably even improve on it a little more, perhaps by including useless information to throw off hackers. For example I could enter red square > blue circle > yellow triangle > green rhombus > red triangle, but I know that it's only the colors that matter and the shapes are meaningless data, but even that has limits to how much added security it brings.
Even then, if someone really wants to get into your device that badly, there isn't any form of security that can't be broken with enough time or resources. I suppose you could implement a one time pad password system if you knew the hardware was completely safe, but woe be unto you should you forget the sequence or where you're at in it, and it still doesn't stop someone from getting the password with their $5 wrench.
Probably because they don't want to take the effort to download and covert the songs and have to manage syncing them to a device. Sure Spotify or any other streaming service costs money, but at a certain point your time becomes more valuable to you fork over the subscription fee instead of downloading the YouTube video and stripping out the audio. It's the same reason that there are plenty of auto shops that mainly specialize in oil changes. Sure, we could all do it ourselves for a lot less money, but most people prefer paying someone else to do all of that work for them.
I think the technology is a good idea, but they've picked a terrible name for it. To someone who is uninformed, it makes it sound as though the feature enables automated driving for the vehicle, and while that may be the end goal, it's currently not at that level and may give a false sense of capability. They should refer to it as "Driver Assist" or something that doesn't leave anyone with a false impression of the capabilities of what it does.
Or meth heads trying to steal the copper out of electric cables or other equipment.
Yes, and we already have that. There are people who die every day waiting for a transplant organ. There's a limited amount available so they must be rationed and someone (or a panel of people most likely) has to determine where the limited supply will do the most good. That means skipping the older man in his 70s in favor of a young person with kids or rejecting the person that drank a liver into oblivion in favor of another person. If there's enough livers to go around, those other patients can certainly get treatment.
Get a big disaster and an influx of too many patients at one time and medical staff is going to have to start prioritizing and some people that might otherwise live or going to die because there's a finite amount of doctors and time they can devote. It might be possible to transport some patients to other hospitals, but there's only a limited number of vehicles capable of doing that. Give me a computer system that can make accurate predictions and judgements over a doctor who can only try their best. If the computer system can keep more people alive because it can make those kinds of tough decisions better than a human, you'd be foolish not to use it.
So are you a health care professional then? Because if you're not, you'd probably better get comfortable with rationing or your so-called "death panels" because otherwise you're not doing anything to help the situation from what I can see.
No, healthcare is wasted on patients that are going to die even with treatment. If you have no way to accurately predict that, you have no fair basis for discriminating between two patients. If you can do that with a high degree of accuracy, you don't spend a lot of money on an expensive treatment that will do any good. At some point everyone is going to die, no matter the amount of medical intervention, or do you believe we should just keep people alive no matter the cost until they grow sick of it and ask to die?
What's the problem with that exactly? Since health care like anything else is a finite resource it doesn't make a lot of sense to allocate resources to someone who's on the way out when it could be put towards patients who have decades of life ahead of them.
The house doesn't cheat. It plays by a set of rules that mathematically work out in its favor. It tells you this up front. The closest thing the house does to cheating is having a house limit.
Also, give holders more flexibility in changing jobs without losing the visa, make the system a path to citizenship, and prevent new visas from being created if previous holders are unemployed. Essentially prevent jobs from using the visa to control workers while suppressing wages or constantly churning through new candidates.
I don't think every generation is getting weaker, or the world wouldn't be getting better. Crime is down, we're reducing pollution, advancing technology and medicine, etc. Maybe that just makes the worst parts of humanity stick out a bit more, but as a whole, we're moving forward. Perfect is never going to happen and things in western democracies are already really good historically speaking, and improving on that is a very slow process rife with missteps to learn from.
Some colleges and/or degrees are shit, but that was always the case. I don't expect some fields to get watered down because of the tenure system. The administration might want to be a degree mill or churn out more students, but cantankerous old tenured professors won't let it happen, and the administration probably doesn't care too much as they get paid whether a student passes or fails so there isn't too much push-back. Ultimately it doesn't matter as long as the rest of the system can correct for it. Eventually the universities that are degree mills get passed over and people start going somewhere else due to the bad reputation. That's why even though some things seem worse, as a whole things are getting better.
There's an old quote about the current generation being disrespectful little shits. I say old because it goes back to Socrates over 2000 years ago.