All debts are obligations (to pay), but not all obligations are debts. You may be obliged by contract, law, or court order to do things other than pay money.
They're in violation of 31 U.S. Code  5103 , which reads in full: "Legal tender: United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts."
The key term there is "public charges", which includes the charge for getting a government-issued ID.
You can set "destination mode" where (in theory) the rides are only going your way. This can only be done for two destinations in a day, each of which only count if you actually get a ride. They tried allowing 6 per day, but drivers used it to get some control over where they would be heading.
Also, for several months now trips over 45 minutes are marked before the driver accepts the trip. Nevertheless, drivers still have no idea at all what the destination will be before actually starting the ride after reaching the pickup location.
States can't make any thing other than gold or silver coin a tender in payment of debts. The legal dodge is that the states aren't the Fed or the Treasury, so it isn't they that are making the requirement of transacting in fiat Federal Reserve Note dollars, so the constitutional restriction does not apply. This dodge fails if a state decides to accept something else as a tax debt payment.
Arguably a necessary characteristic of money is being able to pay your taxes in it, for instance the success of Worgl stampscript (negative interest currency) experiment of the '30s came largely from the local government accepting it as tax payment. The local government also issued it, which gave them the reason to accept it. The negative-interest aspect (had to buy stamps to affix to keep a currency note current) led to a huge increase in the velocity of money as people wished to avoid paying the stamps, and also a huge move toward long-term investment as negative interest rates turned the present-value calculation upside down, making money worth more the further in the future it would be taken out, rather than future returns being discounted.
The crucial research, by Robert Kinley of CSIRO and Rocky De Nys, professor of aquaculture at Australiaâ(TM)s James Cook University, and colleagues, involved testing some 20 different species of seaweed in artificial cow stomachsâ"that is, a mix of rumen and microbes that mimics the behavior of a cow stomach in a bottle. When grass or feed is added to this in vitro tummy, fermentation takes place and the scientists are able to measure the resulting methane output. In the presence of Asparagopsis taxiformisâ"described by De Nys as âoea real stand-outâ among the tested seaweedsâ" methane production was cut by 99 percent. Experiments in sheep showed that if dried Asparagopsis taxiformis seaweed made up just 2 percent of total feed, methane emissions drop by 70 percent. It can be added as a sprinkle, De Nys says, just as you might add a smattering of herbs to roast chicken.
Asparagopsis is so effective because it contains a chemical called bromoform (CHBr3) that interferes with the microbial digestive enzymes responsible for methane manufacture.... Seaweed experiments in Canada were inspired by observations that seaside cattle, who periodically chowed down on storm-tossed seaweed, were both heftier and healthier than their inland relatives. Less belched-out methane, in other words, makes for more on-the-hoof meat.
Cattle's methant emissions are estimated to be about 10% of GHG emissions, and it would take 30,000 sq . km of seaweed growing to eliminate that, or 2,000 sq. km for the US.
Also, how do short-sellers even have standing to sue? They aren't shareholders. Musk has no duty to them. On the contrary, Musk actually has a legal duty to make them lose money.
He didn't say the deal was going to happen, either, he said he was "considering" it. "Funding secured" in that context means nothing more than he has reason to be confident he can get the money to do the deal _if_ he decides to. Perhaps he should have phrased the latter a bit more cautiously, but the message was clear on its face that the deal wasn't even definitely _intended_, let alone done.
The shorts don't have a leg to stand on in court and should not make it past summary judgement.
Besides which, all the "skills" and "requirements" HR has are bullshit. There's a century of research on it, thousands of studies. The only things that matter in predicting job performance are: 1. IQ 2. integrity (adds about 25% to IQ predictive validity)
-both easily, quickly and cheaply testable. Adding other requirements adds very little, and then only for work sample and "structured interviews" (which are nothing like regular interviews, it amounts to administering certain IQ tests in person) and these cost much more than simple tests.
Resume, education, references, job knowledge tests, peer ratings, even job tryouts combined all are less predictive of performance than IQ alone.
In particular: experience, education and interviews add practically nothing to IQ score alone in predicting job performance. Age adds slightly less than nothing.
Everything about how hiring is done now is totally wrong, and it costs literally tens of trillions in lost wealth - worse, it costs several percent a year in GDP growth rate. Most of the people with high-paid, powerful or creative jobs today need to be replaced, and most of the smart people today are in jobs far below what they should have.
"Perhaps there's an equal rights argument to be made for HR departments not being such irrepressible dicks."
That's inaccurate - HR doesn't act like dicks, they act like cunts. HR is over 90% women and tech job applicants are ~90% men. The reason HR treats applicants like that - entitled, flaky, narcissistic and entirely lacking self-insight - is because women treat men like that. They have evolved to do so because eggs are billions of times scarcer than sperm. Western culture was designed to balance that advantage by giving the more productive sex (men) compensating advantages in the workplace, but that went out of fashion in the 1960s when consuming rather than producing became the basis of the economy. Women control 80% of all spending while getting 40% of all wages for 20% of all workplace productivity, so they are the rulers of the consumer economy. Treating female applicants better than male applicants is the opposite of the answer.
The documentation of the COSMOS wiring database was the bigger issue in that case, IIRC. Same basic deal, though, got it through dumpster diving, could have been bought officially for a few bucks. That database lets you do the really fun stuff like assign lines to accounts. OTOH using it is pretty much its own punishment (e.g. working out the 3 letter wire-center code from the exchange key = 1st 3 of 7 digit phone #) and in later years the official documentation was basically nonexistent (oral tradition and a few 5th generation photocopies on cubicle walls, basically). -ex-BS MMT
PassMark - CPU Mark Single Thread Performance AMD Athlon XP 2800+ @ 2.25 GHz / rel. October 1, 2002 / Score: 627 Intel Core i7-8700K @ 3.70GHz (4.7GHz turbo) / rel. October 5, 2017 / Score: 2708 (highest-scoring processor for single thread performance as of June 5, 2018)
The really fundamental advances take a long time to be fully explored. There is little significant that doesn't build upon earlier work.
Check out Conformal Geometric Algebra, which is the basis for the company Geomerics' Enighten software for real-time global radiosity lighting for games. (Now part of ARM / Silicon Studio).
See the lectures linked from the first link, in particular lecture 7 on CGA. These are by Chris Doran, one of the founders of Geomerics, a member of the Cambridge GA group. Also see Leo Dorst's GAviewer CGA tutorial for interactive visualization and a better idea how this can be used in computer graphics. GA is also a lingua franca for physics and simulation that subsumes vector algebra, imaginary numbers, homogeneous coordinates, quaternions and a zillion ad-hoc hacks that have made graphics far more complicated than it needs to be. The papers in the field are nearly all written to be understood and require little background knowledge.
That's just your fantasy. Blacks commit violent crimes against Whites at over *25 times* the per-capita rate that Whites do against Blacks. That's from yearly random surveys of victimization carried out by the DOJ.
The fundamental principal of all possible systems of ethics is to favor the better over the worse, to favor the better to the extent it is better and to disdain the worse to the extent it is worse. People are not equal, not in any way and to treat them as if they were is unjust. One cannot infer that just because one person or group is favored that that is unjust to those who are not favored; in fact it may be that by their merits the favored group should be favored more than they are.
Only inferior people advocate equality, and they do so to take what is not their due from their betters.
Quite true. One major class of uncomfortable truths: any fact that that falsifies their religious belief in equality, or their resulting dogma that differences in groups' success are due to privilege and discrimination.
Yep. The NSA has tap rooms that are super-secret (or were). But the FBI has rooms that are only kinda secret, over which they have complete control, with no logs, no oversight, and complete access to the whole network which can do targeted monitoring rather than the NSA's trying to get everything, which is exponentially less efficient.
Alcohol, at least with heavy, chronic consumption lowers testosterone, so maybe that is the mechanism here. It wasn't that they were civilized that made them less masculine in looks, rather that they were sots.
The standard deviation for IQ tests is 15, not 10. While the tests become less reliable at a rate proportional to the rarity of the score, nearly all the inaccuracy is in underestimating IQ, and this is a problem with the specific tests, not the concept of general intelligence. If someone has a score of 150IQ, they are nearly certainly that smart. If they have tested twice at that level, they are almost certainly substantially above 150IQ. Due to the 0.65-0.7 correlation of the tests, getting a second 1 in 1000 score on a different IQ test with just a 150 "real" IQ and 1 prior 150 IQ score will only happen about 15% of the time.
The IQ scale compresses vast differences in ability into the highest scores. There is literally more variation in the top 1% than in the 1st-99th percentiles. Nearly all the ideas that really change things come from that top 1%. No number of merely bright 120IQ people can take the place of one person with 160IQ for really hard new thoughts.
I think the different forms of the Otis-Lennon have an age break at about that age. It would be a perfectly good place for an age break, just after the "corner" in the graph of raw scores with age. The additional mental development is negligible between 13 and 16, equivalent in Rasch CSS measure to 6 months increase at age 6.
Using just the difference between two very simple perceptual tests to get similar results to other IQ tests would imply that the classic tests are not significantly biased in any factor more complex than used in the simple perceptual tests, which effectively means not biased at all. The correlation of the perceptual test with a long-form IQ test was 0.71, which is at or above the typical correlations of different major IQ tests with each other. It seems like the measuring methodology could be improved to eliminate the meaningless peripheral nervous propagation speed (would likely need EEG/EMG), or the almost meaningless non-choice reaction time (which can be done by just subtracting out the minimum repeated non-choice reaction time from pre-tests.)
If they can be improved even slightly, then perceptual tests would be the gold standard for IQ measurements, and even as it is now will be much cheaper and more convenient than traditional tests while being just as accurate for anybody with reasonably good vision and no confounding neurological diseases such as MS.
Those who haven't read The Dying Earth series, or Jack Vance's later Lyonesse series really are missing a treat. It isn't for no reason that in 2006 his fans published a meticulously copy-edited 44-volume edition of his works, usually selling for over $3500. (There are cheaper editions, of course.)
Gene Wolfe is a big fan of Jack Vance's writing. Wolfe himself is one of the best writers ever - the Science Fiction Writer's Association named him Grand Master for lifetime achievement this year. (29 named in the last 38 years, 10 still living, Jack Vance was named in 1997) Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which made his name, recasts Vance's Dying Earth series, while adding mind-bending depths. Highly recommended.
Looking at all taxes, people getting minimum wage pay quite a lot. The effective federal income tax actually paid by someone in the $13-15K/yr income bracket on their adjusted gross income (that's before exemptions and deductions other than student loan interest - the other adjustments basically don't apply at this income level) is slightly lower than you estimated, about 3- 4% ($600 on $15K is 4%), but they also have to pay 12.4% SS, 2.9% Medicare, about 10% in state taxes and duties including sales tax, fees and so forth. Their total tax burden is around 27%.
After paying the average $2.2K/yr for individual insurance, their taxes are 42% of what's left. Allowing just $700/month for rent and food and all the the other necessities to keep their shitty job, taxes eat all the rest. (That's assuming full time with paid vacations and holidays - i.e. about $2.3K more than realistic. $600 is a better estimate)
On the other hand, if they pay the 2.5% penalty rather than buy insurance, their effective tax rate drops from 42% to 29% and they can spend $750 to $900 per month. For many minimum-wage workers, that's the difference between impossible and merely difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
All debts are obligations (to pay), but not all obligations are debts. You may be obliged by contract, law, or court order to do things other than pay money.
They're in violation of 31 U.S. Code  5103 , which reads in full: "Legal tender: United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts."
The key term there is "public charges", which includes the charge for getting a government-issued ID.
You can set "destination mode" where (in theory) the rides are only going your way. This can only be done for two destinations in a day, each of which only count if you actually get a ride. They tried allowing 6 per day, but drivers used it to get some control over where they would be heading.
Also, for several months now trips over 45 minutes are marked before the driver accepts the trip. Nevertheless, drivers still have no idea at all what the destination will be before actually starting the ride after reaching the pickup location.
States can't make any thing other than gold or silver coin a tender in payment of debts. The legal dodge is that the states aren't the Fed or the Treasury, so it isn't they that are making the requirement of transacting in fiat Federal Reserve Note dollars, so the constitutional restriction does not apply. This dodge fails if a state decides to accept something else as a tax debt payment.
Arguably a necessary characteristic of money is being able to pay your taxes in it, for instance the success of Worgl stampscript (negative interest currency) experiment of the '30s came largely from the local government accepting it as tax payment. The local government also issued it, which gave them the reason to accept it. The negative-interest aspect (had to buy stamps to affix to keep a currency note current) led to a huge increase in the velocity of money as people wished to avoid paying the stamps, and also a huge move toward long-term investment as negative interest rates turned the present-value calculation upside down, making money worth more the further in the future it would be taken out, rather than future returns being discounted.
A small addition of seaweed to cow diets virtually eliminates methane:
Cattle's methant emissions are estimated to be about 10% of GHG emissions, and it would take 30,000 sq . km of seaweed growing to eliminate that, or 2,000 sq. km for the US.
The next time you need a tiny magnetometer that only works in a unique and temperamental two-story agglomeration of exotic technology, anyway.
Also, how do short-sellers even have standing to sue? They aren't shareholders. Musk has no duty to them. On the contrary, Musk actually has a legal duty to make them lose money.
He didn't say the deal was going to happen, either, he said he was "considering" it. "Funding secured" in that context means nothing more than he has reason to be confident he can get the money to do the deal _if_ he decides to. Perhaps he should have phrased the latter a bit more cautiously, but the message was clear on its face that the deal wasn't even definitely _intended_, let alone done.
The shorts don't have a leg to stand on in court and should not make it past summary judgement.
Besides which, all the "skills" and "requirements" HR has are bullshit. There's a century of research on it, thousands of studies. The only things that matter in predicting job performance are:
1. IQ
2. integrity (adds about 25% to IQ predictive validity)
-both easily, quickly and cheaply testable. Adding other requirements adds very little, and then only for work sample and "structured interviews" (which are nothing like regular interviews, it amounts to administering certain IQ tests in person) and these cost much more than simple tests.
Resume, education, references, job knowledge tests, peer ratings, even job tryouts combined all are less predictive of performance than IQ alone.
In particular: experience, education and interviews add practically nothing to IQ score alone in predicting job performance. Age adds slightly less than nothing.
Hunter and Schmidt, 1998: The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings (Cited by 4548)
Everything about how hiring is done now is totally wrong, and it costs literally tens of trillions in lost wealth - worse, it costs several percent a year in GDP growth rate. Most of the people with high-paid, powerful or creative jobs today need to be replaced, and most of the smart people today are in jobs far below what they should have.
Being an HR "pro" is a very, very bad thing.
"Perhaps there's an equal rights argument to be made for HR departments not being such irrepressible dicks."
That's inaccurate - HR doesn't act like dicks, they act like cunts. HR is over 90% women and tech job applicants are ~90% men. The reason HR treats applicants like that - entitled, flaky, narcissistic and entirely lacking self-insight - is because women treat men like that. They have evolved to do so because eggs are billions of times scarcer than sperm. Western culture was designed to balance that advantage by giving the more productive sex (men) compensating advantages in the workplace, but that went out of fashion in the 1960s when consuming rather than producing became the basis of the economy. Women control 80% of all spending while getting 40% of all wages for 20% of all workplace productivity, so they are the rulers of the consumer economy. Treating female applicants better than male applicants is the opposite of the answer.
The documentation of the COSMOS wiring database was the bigger issue in that case, IIRC. Same basic deal, though, got it through dumpster diving, could have been bought officially for a few bucks. That database lets you do the really fun stuff like assign lines to accounts. OTOH using it is pretty much its own punishment (e.g. working out the 3 letter wire-center code from the exchange key = 1st 3 of 7 digit phone #) and in later years the official documentation was basically nonexistent (oral tradition and a few 5th generation photocopies on cubicle walls, basically).
-ex-BS MMT
PassMark - CPU Mark Single Thread Performance
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ @ 2.25 GHz / rel. October 1, 2002 / Score: 627
Intel Core i7-8700K @ 3.70GHz (4.7GHz turbo) / rel. October 5, 2017 / Score: 2708 (highest-scoring processor for single thread performance as of June 5, 2018)
Single thread performance ratio: 4.01
**Single thread performance doubling time: 7.5 years**
Note: it's not clear what the best-performing processor was in the early 2000s, the performance doubling time may be even greater.
Moore's law ceased to hold for computing performance quite a while back. Lots of cores doesn't speed up sequential computing tasks (Amdahl's Law).
The really fundamental advances take a long time to be fully explored. There is little significant that doesn't build upon earlier work.
Check out Conformal Geometric Algebra, which is the basis for the company Geomerics' Enighten software for real-time global radiosity lighting for games. (Now part of ARM / Silicon Studio).
See the lectures linked from the first link, in particular lecture 7 on CGA. These are by Chris Doran, one of the founders of Geomerics, a member of the Cambridge GA group. Also see Leo Dorst's GAviewer CGA tutorial for interactive visualization and a better idea how this can be used in computer graphics. GA is also a lingua franca for physics and simulation that subsumes vector algebra, imaginary numbers, homogeneous coordinates, quaternions and a zillion ad-hoc hacks that have made graphics far more complicated than it needs to be. The papers in the field are nearly all written to be understood and require little background knowledge.
Thanks, that is not so much a treat as a whole candy shop.
That's just your fantasy. Blacks commit violent crimes against Whites at over *25 times* the per-capita rate that Whites do against Blacks. That's from yearly random surveys of victimization carried out by the DOJ.
The fundamental principal of all possible systems of ethics is to favor the better over the worse, to favor the better to the extent it is better and to disdain the worse to the extent it is worse. People are not equal, not in any way and to treat them as if they were is unjust. One cannot infer that just because one person or group is favored that that is unjust to those who are not favored; in fact it may be that by their merits the favored group should be favored more than they are.
Only inferior people advocate equality, and they do so to take what is not their due from their betters.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
-James Klass
Quite true. One major class of uncomfortable truths:
any fact that that falsifies their religious belief in equality, or their resulting dogma that differences in groups' success are due to privilege and discrimination.
Yep. The NSA has tap rooms that are super-secret (or were). But the FBI has rooms that are only kinda secret, over which they have complete control, with no logs, no oversight, and complete access to the whole network which can do targeted monitoring rather than the NSA's trying to get everything, which is exponentially less efficient.
Alcohol, at least with heavy, chronic consumption lowers testosterone, so maybe that is the mechanism here. It wasn't that they were civilized that made them less masculine in looks, rather that they were sots.
The standard deviation for IQ tests is 15, not 10. While the tests become less reliable at a rate proportional to the rarity of the score, nearly all the inaccuracy is in underestimating IQ, and this is a problem with the specific tests, not the concept of general intelligence. If someone has a score of 150IQ, they are nearly certainly that smart. If they have tested twice at that level, they are almost certainly substantially above 150IQ. Due to the 0.65-0.7 correlation of the tests, getting a second 1 in 1000 score on a different IQ test with just a 150 "real" IQ and 1 prior 150 IQ score will only happen about 15% of the time.
The IQ scale compresses vast differences in ability into the highest scores. There is literally more variation in the top 1% than in the 1st-99th percentiles. Nearly all the ideas that really change things come from that top 1%. No number of merely bright 120IQ people can take the place of one person with 160IQ for really hard new thoughts.
I think the different forms of the Otis-Lennon have an age break at about that age. It would be a perfectly good place for an age break, just after the "corner" in the graph of raw scores with age. The additional mental development is negligible between 13 and 16, equivalent in Rasch CSS measure to 6 months increase at age 6.
Using just the difference between two very simple perceptual tests to get similar results to other IQ tests would imply that the classic tests are not significantly biased in any factor more complex than used in the simple perceptual tests, which effectively means not biased at all. The correlation of the perceptual test with a long-form IQ test was 0.71, which is at or above the typical correlations of different major IQ tests with each other. It seems like the measuring methodology could be improved to eliminate the meaningless peripheral nervous propagation speed (would likely need EEG/EMG), or the almost meaningless non-choice reaction time (which can be done by just subtracting out the minimum repeated non-choice reaction time from pre-tests.)
If they can be improved even slightly, then perceptual tests would be the gold standard for IQ measurements, and even as it is now will be much cheaper and more convenient than traditional tests while being just as accurate for anybody with reasonably good vision and no confounding neurological diseases such as MS.
Those who haven't read The Dying Earth series, or Jack Vance's later Lyonesse series really are missing a treat. It isn't for no reason that in 2006 his fans published a meticulously copy-edited 44-volume edition of his works, usually selling for over $3500. (There are cheaper editions, of course.)
Gene Wolfe is a big fan of Jack Vance's writing. Wolfe himself is one of the best writers ever - the Science Fiction Writer's Association named him Grand Master for lifetime achievement this year. (29 named in the last 38 years, 10 still living, Jack Vance was named in 1997)
Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which made his name, recasts Vance's Dying Earth series, while adding mind-bending depths. Highly recommended.
Looking at all taxes, people getting minimum wage pay quite a lot. The effective federal income tax actually paid by someone in the $13-15K/yr income bracket on their adjusted gross income (that's before exemptions and deductions other than student loan interest - the other adjustments basically don't apply at this income level) is slightly lower than you estimated, about 3- 4% ($600 on $15K is 4%), but they also have to pay 12.4% SS, 2.9% Medicare, about 10% in state taxes and duties including sales tax, fees and so forth. Their total tax burden is around 27%.
After paying the average $2.2K/yr for individual insurance, their taxes are 42% of what's left.
Allowing just $700/month for rent and food and all the the other necessities to keep their shitty job, taxes eat all the rest.
(That's assuming full time with paid vacations and holidays - i.e. about $2.3K more than realistic. $600 is a better estimate)
On the other hand, if they pay the 2.5% penalty rather than buy insurance, their effective tax rate drops from 42% to 29% and they can spend $750 to $900 per month. For many minimum-wage workers, that's the difference between impossible and merely difficult.