Actually I meant to say what you did, although the wording was awkward. We *used* to have strong unions, but they've fallen apart.
However, I'm not entirely sure a resurgence of unions could really halt this. You'd have to go full-on trade barriers to make it work because in the past, the unions worked while the other countries were undeveloped or recovering from wars. Now, at least in the US, if the union becomes too strong, it will just result in layoffs or competitive disadvantage.
Unless there are location advantages, or artificial barriers, pure labor costs will tend to even out as the global labor pool finds a level.
The major questions are:
Where is that level going to be, and are there enough of those jobs for everyone in the world?
Chances are, the level of payment for labor in an automated world is likely to never again approach what it was due to barriers to work movement and strong unions. The reason for that is fairly clear, the race to the bottom, with the combination of not enough manufacturing jobs for everyone means that there is nothing that props up manufacturing wages except those tasks that have not yet been automated.
So the manufacturing sector is pretty much a dead end for employment, but if we can produce goods without the need for labor, then perhaps we can consider making it unnecessary to maintain a menial job to have a living. I don't know if we're actually there yet, but at some point, we may need to start seriously discussing what it means to not have to have full employment while having the ability to produce more than ever. If someone can come up with a basic income idea that doesn't have us ending up as entitled proles who expect the government to pay for everything, which then turns into shitty politicized central planning, it may be worth serious discussion.
That would make sense, except that subsidies aren't there to benefit the oil companies, they're there to keep production up so that prices stay nice and low.
Providing money for renewables is good and all, but bear in mind, no one is paying oil companies as a solution, they're paying oil companies to keep the population happy.
It is nice to state that all of that money could help make renewables work better, but that's not the point. The point is crowd control, not energy advances. That's why no one is seriously considering changing the subsidies for oil to another energy source. The population won't tolerate the high gas prices while you figure out how to get them all electric cars running on solar power.
The solution is to get the electric cars rolled out and the panels and alternatives up so that solar and renewables can handle the load that oil is carrying right now. When that happens, then you can shut off the subsidies.
Yes. If you have only *one* nuke, and you want to do maximum damage, do you blow up one city, or do you shut down utilities and electronics across the entire continent? I know what I'd do if I was a sinister terrorist with a nuke.
And the nice thing with that is... no one would turn my cities to ash over it. After all... I didn't kill anyone... not directly anyway. I just cost you about a trillion dollars. The indirect deaths would just be gravy. Oh and all the planes would fall out of the sky.
I wonder today whether we are more or less safe from nuclear weapons than we were during the Cold War. At least during the Cold War, massive retaliation was holding everyone back. Who are we going to massively retaliate against if some rogue state or terrorist nukes us, especially in a high altitude EMP sort of way?
Luckily, something like an ICBM is a little far out of the grasp of an ISIS, but it would be interesting if they were able to use EMP on a more local scale to cause havoc.
EMP from solar flares is not a common event, but does happen and could easily knock out large swaths of the grid.
The Carrington Event of 1859 was obviously before any sort of mass electrification, but it did affect the telegraphs pretty profoundly, which bodes pretty ill for what it would have done to a grid.
Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving telegraph operators electric shocks.[10] Telegraph pylons threw sparks.[11] Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies.
There was a coronal mass ejection in 1989 which took out a significant portion of the Quebec grid for nine hours.
Additionally, there was a storm in 2012 which just missed the Earth, but might have been at the level of the 1859 event.
Solar storms are a much greater danger in space, and satellites are always at some risk of actually being permanently disabled by such events.
Of course, it is clear that there are multiple factors in how much damage such an event could have, but this isn't a once in a thousand years event. Before 1859 and thereabouts, we really didn't have anything that would be massively affected by a solar storm. We might see some extremely bright auroras which would extend down to the lower latitudes, but nothing relied on electromagnetism to any major extent. That leads me to believe that it would be incredibly easy for us to underestimate the amount of damage that such an event could cause.
It is entirely believable to me that a solar event could cause a huge problem for us. Losing power is a big deal and if enough of the grid was affected, it would take a lot of time to restore. Even now, when storms take out electrical power, local power companies borrow crews from elsewhere to get the power back on within a reasonable amount of time, so what happens when enough of the grid is out that all of the crews are fully tasked with their own portion of the grid?
EMP from ISIS? I am not all that concerned about. They won't be able to set off a high altitude nuke or any EMP device of more than local effect. I am a lot more concerned with the sun because it is already more than able to replicate the necessary conditions.
Yes, Congress is supposed to know what is going on, although it is a little less direct than having an MP who has a portfolio. The Executive has a fair amount of independence, as long as it obeys the wording of the laws that Congress passes. Not necessarily the intent.
In theory, the FBI could respond with: This is allowed under such and such program which was budgeted under this line item or which the Justice Department has interpreted its mandate as meaning it has the authority to do such and such. If there was such a law, but Congress disagreed with the interpretation, they'd have to pass a new law to clarify or convince the President or the Attorney General to overrule the FBI.
However, many of them certainly can be malicious-seeming, racist assholes. Especially if there are contributing conditions which complicate their schizophrenia.
The point is, they're not actually in full control of themselves. That can express itself in many forms. The difference is that it wasn't a conscious choice for them to become that way, or to act that inappropriately. They simply cannot control themselves because their mental faculties for control either never developed, or were damaged in some way.
"Progress" and "progressive" are subjective terms. They could very easily mean racism and religion, if you determined that such things were the way of the "future". If you simply went by left-right orientations, you'd have your Communists in places like North Korea and Cambodia be "progressives". When applied to such regimes, the term "progressive" loses any positive connotation, but could still be considered to be "progress", if you mean progress towards an autarkic, authoritarian state.
Oddly enough, by moving out of the US, the US is probably a lot more effective at spying on them. When you're in another country, you stop being even marginally protected by US privacy laws. Now, your operations are in the legitimate intelligence gathering territory of the CIA, and amusingly, the NSA.
I think the point is that, just about everyone is doing what the NSA was doing, or are trying to.
Revealing that the US did it, and how it was done, merely exposed the US and created a relative disadvantage for the US. It didn't actually expose the only country that spies on you.
It would be amusing if companies fled the US, only to go for solutions like China or even EU countries. They're all spying on you. Just pick who you'd rather have your information and deal with it.
Speaking as someone who has studied history for my entire life, to the point where I was thinking about a post-grad degree in it, I can tell you that advanced study of history is not something you can do well on your own. To really study history, as opposed to regurgitating what someone else has told you already, you need to be able to have studied the language, customs, and other social aspects of the time and place you are studying. Frequently, that means that you read different languages, and many times you read one or more dead languages.
Aside from having to learn those skills, there is some science that goes into unearthing artifacts, dating them, and even understanding what they do. You frequently have experts in metallurgy or ceramics or other trades who can help you make identifications and give some insight into the dynamics of what you are studying.
There is a lot of analysis work of existing material in History, but you'll always be looking for new Primary sources, which can frequently change your views of documents that you thought were authoritative (Dead Sea Scrolls, Codex Sinaiticus, etc.). You'll also be scanning things like aerial photography and even satellite images for evidence of sites that are invisible looking at them from the ground. You'll be checking ice cores for evidence of volcanic eruptions, and then looking for evidence in literature to see if the instance was recorded and how it affected humanity. You'll look at mitochondrial DNA to trace migration patterns by looking at the matriarchal line.
Don't get me wrong, there's very little money in History as a subject. You need grants to support your research, you'll very infrequently make any money from it. The problem is, you still need advanced skills to do the job. Graduate and post-graduate skills. It's not a self-study course unless you're content to win trivia contests, as opposed to making discoveries.
We did try and rebuild their country. Try rebuilding their country when their own government is bound and determined to maintain the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiites. Try and rebuild things while the insurgents are shooting at you and setting off IEDs right and left.
Yeah, we fucked up because we had no plan when we kicked out Saddam, but let's not pretend that it's because we didn't try and rebuild things. Even getting a few oil people rich doesn't preclude us from rebuilding things. There is plenty of money to go around, it's just being sucked up by the incompetent Iraqi government and insurgents preventing anything like peace from happening.
I get how that works, but I still have trouble believing college age students are that stupid. I can see them going because they believe in ISIL. What I have trouble believing is that they go over there expecting to not end up on the end of a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator drone. Or simply shot in the face by some Peshmerga fighter. Or asked to drive a tanker truck rigged to blow into an Iraqi army position on a "martyrdom" mission.
The only tiny modicum of respect I have for any ISIL fighter is the fighter who goes there fighting for their fucked up version of Islam, but who understands what they are getting into and doesn't expect to be on a vacation in a war zone. The rest of them, especially the teenage females, are Darwin Award material. If they weren't hurting innocent people, I'd almost cheer for them to go over and get their stupid asses killed.
Back in the day, my own anecdotal experience was that disruption is a big deal. I sat in both honors classes and "regular" classes back in the day. There was a huge difference in how much you learned based on how disruptive the class was. When I was in a class filled with kids who were dedicated to getting good grades and learning things, you got shit done. I learned less, had less taught to me, and was less able to concentrate in the regular class. I still personally got good grades, but that was because the class was dumbed down so much, it was hard to understand how anyone could have done poorly, let alone failed those classes, even without being a nerd.
In the end, I realized that I worked to get in honors classes as much to simply not be in the regular classes as I did to excel. You literally could not learn even easier things very well in a disruptive class.
Personally, I think we need to pick out the disruptive cases, get them in smaller classes with more structure, and get them out of the way of people who want to learn. Then everyone, including the disruptive kids, will probably be more successful.
Many of the poor are some of the most honest people out there. Obviously, some have troubles that cause them to steal, but I'm just as afraid of some asshole in Washington stealing my money as I would be of a burglar. At least being burglarized has been a rare event in my life, I'm getting ripped off in taxes on every paycheck.
Well, as someone said above, it doesn't have to be parents. It can be grandparents, cousins, or even non-family members who are friends, rather than professional educators. Anyone who takes an interest in the child and who can earn the trust of the child.
The one thing we don't have as much of, now that we don't have close extended families, is support for children from people other than parents.
Do you think that parents who were gone for 12 hours a day is some sort of new normal? It's as least as old as the industrial age and probably longer. It's only now that we have no one else other than a parent to fill the role when the parents are off working that this has become a crisis. That's not because the parents are working, it's because there are a) children with one parent (frequently a father) who is missing, and not just working and b) there's no one else to raise the children while the parent is working.
Having parents out working is nothing new, and it used to be critical in the olden days when physical labor was much more important than our much automated present. We just happened to have structures that could handle that in the past. Now we don't.
While DC isn't LA-bad, it's one of the top-most congested cities in the country. Much of that is simply that there isn't enough road for all the development that's going on here and the mass transit does not serve the outlying areas very well, so it's a lot of cars. We still don't even have the Metro go all the way to Dulles yet.
There's a feeling that, I suppose, "where there's smoke, there's fire", except in this case, we don't actually know what the "fire" is.
Certain advocates seem to think it is because of discriminatory hiring practices, which I would agree is wrongheaded, if that was the case. I just don't believe it.
I believe that such practices could certainly happen in smaller shops with cozy "brogrammer" atmospheres, perhaps, but I have trouble believing that Google, which is both a big corporation and filled with many "progressive" sorts would allow racial or gender discrimination to become enshrined in their policy.
In fact, I know a person in the recruiting department at Google. She's a latina and pretty liberal. Not to mention a former editor for a newspaper. I can't imagine a person less likely to let a practice like that stand in her area. She'd probably have a piece written and on the desk of her remaining journalist friends in short order if there was any sort of dealings like that.
I just don't think people are turning women away at the door who really, really want to be in tech. I think that, for whatever reason, a greater number of women don't want to be in tech or don't have enough interest that field of study to want to consider it as a career.
The women I have worked with and interviewed never seemed to have any trouble getting their skills or experience and measuring up to the men, but there's always been very few of them. That leads me to believe that this all starts long before anyone ever gets to an interview or application.
I don't think he has to pay taxes on the money he gives someone else, unless it was a sales tax, because he still had to presumably pay tax on it coming in as income. Of course, the recipient should be paying income or some tax on that money too.
Hastert may have had to have gotten a W-9 from the recipient so that he could then report the money that the recipient is getting. So he's still potentially in trouble, I think, but for not reporting the money to the IRS that he gave someone else as a gift or consideration, not for failing to pay taxes on it ( which he already did upon receiving his income that he used to pay the blackmail with).
New Vegas definitely had a different feel from Fallout 3, although if you only played NV briefly, then yes, it would have been harder to differentiate. They did look similar.
One might ask why we believe that our internet communications should be private, but our monetary transactions should be carefully tracked. Especially in the sense that today, more than ever, money transfer is now mostly just the transfer of bits.
People frequently go on about how the government could harass or attack politicians or activists with the information they obtain, but here we have the government doing the same thing with financial reporting. Sure, Hastert's probably a scumbag sex offender, but no one has charged him with that. They're using other laws to push their agenda.
It was a clever little bit of legal trickery which got Al Capone in jail for tax evasion, and certainly you could argue that he needed to be stopped. The problem is, we really never reformed the system to make someone like Capone less likely to be able to corrupt the state and local governments, we're still relying on these sort of loopholes to get convictions that the government wouldn't otherwise try to get in a court of law on the merits of their actual case because they'd fail. It is skating very close to laws being passed to make you a felon in cases where you wouldn't be convicted, but the prosecutor (and not the judge or jury) really wants you convicted of something.
While a company like Google likely has all sorts go through their doors, I can tell you what my experience with hiring is.
Working in a small company, I frequently have quite a bit of exposure to the raw talent pool. Sometimes HR gets involved, but just as often, I am talking to the recruiters myself.
There is the occasional woman. There is the occasional black man. What there is not are both black and female. Google having only 35 black females mirrors my experience. The percentage of resumes of black females, even for junior positions, is likely so low to begin with that I never see one and Google probably only sees a few hundred.
And that is even before any question of their skills or experience come up.
I'm wary of a scenario where the first black female resume in my 5 years as a manager will someday come across my desk and she just happens to not have the skills I require for the job and don't hire her. Am I suddenly discriminating in my hiring practices because I have rejected 100% of my black female candidates? Do I hire her because "diversity"?
More to the point, if I had two identically skilled candidates, and one happened to be a black female, do I derive an advantage from hiring her over the other person?
Reading between the lines is the following at Google HQ.
They hire a lot of men as engineers. Not an incredible surprise. People have picked up on that and want to call them out on that, so they pressure them to release their diversity stats. The stats say what everyone knows: there's a lot of men at Google. Many are white or possibly Asian. Just like in the rest of the IT industry.
Google sees where this is going, and it does its best to spin the stats as a good thing. Especially the significant portion of ethnic/racial minorities, albeit minority men.
As expected, the other side homes in on the intersection of black and female and calls Google out on only having 35 black, female engineers.
Here's the question. What does Google look like when everyone gets what they want?
Does Google have to throw money at some programs for black female coders? Does Google have to have a hiring quota for black females? Does Google have to launch a campaign to get black females into coding and STEM?
Just what is the point of all of this? It feels one side wants to expose something that everyone already knows: there aren't a lot of females in computing in general, fewer of them are black females.
If there is a demonstrable benefit to having a completely diverse workforce as a force multiplier, a corporation, especially one like Google, isn't likely to avoid diversity for the sole purpose of perpetuating the white Patriarchy. Honestly, speaking as someone who hires people for IT work, I'll tell you what the problem is. There are no candidates who are black and female. I'm not rejecting these candidates, I literally never see them. Ever.
We all know this, and yet.... somehow everyone wants us to self-flagellate over an issue that we have almost no control over.
Google is likely sensitive in the same way that anyone in that situation would be. What happens when you don't aim to discriminate, but you end up with a non-diverse workforce based on the demographics of the pool of available workers?
Yes... if you send your emails to people through a Facebook client, instead of downloading the key and sending encrypted mails via your own email client.
Aside from actually doing something stupid like sending emails from FB (where you'd have to trust them anyway to not store your unencrypted text before they encrypted it for you), there is actually no issue with Facebook or the United States doing this.
FB hosting your public key has zero effect on anything. You are supposed to distribute your public key widely. The actual problem with public keys is ensuring that your public key is actually your public key for the purposes of not sending an email that someone else can read.
For that, you need to actually send an email with that key and then (usually over phone or in person) confirm that the recipient:
a) Got the email (proving that the email address isn't sending it to some other mailbox) b) The recipient can decrypt the mail with their secret key.
If the recipient gets the email, but they can't decrypt it, then the public key is incorrect and would be discarded.
This verification process is the hard part for random people downloading keys and sending emails to addresses of people they've never met, although in practice, if you have any real world contact with your recipient, the verification feedback is usually pretty easy to come by.
MITM attacks would presumably require you to be able to intercept mails to the email address of the supposed recipient, you would then decrypt the email, store it, and then re-encrypt it with the actual recipient's public key and forward it on. That requires, however, a significant investment by the attacker, not to mention a not inconsiderable amount of authority to create some sort of email interception proxy.
It can also easily be thwarted by the uploader of the public key logging in as another person or anonymously and comparing the key that FB provides with their known good key. If the key doesn't match, then you have MITM possibilities and you simply remove your public key and call the Washington Post for an expose on FB's MITM of your public key encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I meant to say what you did, although the wording was awkward. We *used* to have strong unions, but they've fallen apart.
However, I'm not entirely sure a resurgence of unions could really halt this. You'd have to go full-on trade barriers to make it work because in the past, the unions worked while the other countries were undeveloped or recovering from wars. Now, at least in the US, if the union becomes too strong, it will just result in layoffs or competitive disadvantage.
Unless there are location advantages, or artificial barriers, pure labor costs will tend to even out as the global labor pool finds a level.
The major questions are:
Where is that level going to be, and are there enough of those jobs for everyone in the world?
Chances are, the level of payment for labor in an automated world is likely to never again approach what it was due to barriers to work movement and strong unions. The reason for that is fairly clear, the race to the bottom, with the combination of not enough manufacturing jobs for everyone means that there is nothing that props up manufacturing wages except those tasks that have not yet been automated.
So the manufacturing sector is pretty much a dead end for employment, but if we can produce goods without the need for labor, then perhaps we can consider making it unnecessary to maintain a menial job to have a living. I don't know if we're actually there yet, but at some point, we may need to start seriously discussing what it means to not have to have full employment while having the ability to produce more than ever. If someone can come up with a basic income idea that doesn't have us ending up as entitled proles who expect the government to pay for everything, which then turns into shitty politicized central planning, it may be worth serious discussion.
That would make sense, except that subsidies aren't there to benefit the oil companies, they're there to keep production up so that prices stay nice and low.
Providing money for renewables is good and all, but bear in mind, no one is paying oil companies as a solution, they're paying oil companies to keep the population happy.
It is nice to state that all of that money could help make renewables work better, but that's not the point. The point is crowd control, not energy advances. That's why no one is seriously considering changing the subsidies for oil to another energy source. The population won't tolerate the high gas prices while you figure out how to get them all electric cars running on solar power.
The solution is to get the electric cars rolled out and the panels and alternatives up so that solar and renewables can handle the load that oil is carrying right now. When that happens, then you can shut off the subsidies.
Yes. If you have only *one* nuke, and you want to do maximum damage, do you blow up one city, or do you shut down utilities and electronics across the entire continent? I know what I'd do if I was a sinister terrorist with a nuke.
And the nice thing with that is... no one would turn my cities to ash over it. After all... I didn't kill anyone... not directly anyway. I just cost you about a trillion dollars. The indirect deaths would just be gravy. Oh and all the planes would fall out of the sky.
I wonder today whether we are more or less safe from nuclear weapons than we were during the Cold War. At least during the Cold War, massive retaliation was holding everyone back. Who are we going to massively retaliate against if some rogue state or terrorist nukes us, especially in a high altitude EMP sort of way?
Luckily, something like an ICBM is a little far out of the grasp of an ISIS, but it would be interesting if they were able to use EMP on a more local scale to cause havoc.
EMP from solar flares is not a common event, but does happen and could easily knock out large swaths of the grid.
The Carrington Event of 1859 was obviously before any sort of mass electrification, but it did affect the telegraphs pretty profoundly, which bodes pretty ill for what it would have done to a grid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving telegraph operators electric shocks.[10] Telegraph pylons threw sparks.[11] Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies.
There was a coronal mass ejection in 1989 which took out a significant portion of the Quebec grid for nine hours.
Additionally, there was a storm in 2012 which just missed the Earth, but might have been at the level of the 1859 event.
Solar storms are a much greater danger in space, and satellites are always at some risk of actually being permanently disabled by such events.
Of course, it is clear that there are multiple factors in how much damage such an event could have, but this isn't a once in a thousand years event. Before 1859 and thereabouts, we really didn't have anything that would be massively affected by a solar storm. We might see some extremely bright auroras which would extend down to the lower latitudes, but nothing relied on electromagnetism to any major extent. That leads me to believe that it would be incredibly easy for us to underestimate the amount of damage that such an event could cause.
It is entirely believable to me that a solar event could cause a huge problem for us. Losing power is a big deal and if enough of the grid was affected, it would take a lot of time to restore. Even now, when storms take out electrical power, local power companies borrow crews from elsewhere to get the power back on within a reasonable amount of time, so what happens when enough of the grid is out that all of the crews are fully tasked with their own portion of the grid?
EMP from ISIS? I am not all that concerned about. They won't be able to set off a high altitude nuke or any EMP device of more than local effect. I am a lot more concerned with the sun because it is already more than able to replicate the necessary conditions.
Yes, Congress is supposed to know what is going on, although it is a little less direct than having an MP who has a portfolio. The Executive has a fair amount of independence, as long as it obeys the wording of the laws that Congress passes. Not necessarily the intent.
In theory, the FBI could respond with: This is allowed under such and such program which was budgeted under this line item or which the Justice Department has interpreted its mandate as meaning it has the authority to do such and such. If there was such a law, but Congress disagreed with the interpretation, they'd have to pass a new law to clarify or convince the President or the Attorney General to overrule the FBI.
However, many of them certainly can be malicious-seeming, racist assholes. Especially if there are contributing conditions which complicate their schizophrenia.
The point is, they're not actually in full control of themselves. That can express itself in many forms. The difference is that it wasn't a conscious choice for them to become that way, or to act that inappropriately. They simply cannot control themselves because their mental faculties for control either never developed, or were damaged in some way.
"Progress" and "progressive" are subjective terms. They could very easily mean racism and religion, if you determined that such things were the way of the "future". If you simply went by left-right orientations, you'd have your Communists in places like North Korea and Cambodia be "progressives". When applied to such regimes, the term "progressive" loses any positive connotation, but could still be considered to be "progress", if you mean progress towards an autarkic, authoritarian state.
Oddly enough, by moving out of the US, the US is probably a lot more effective at spying on them. When you're in another country, you stop being even marginally protected by US privacy laws. Now, your operations are in the legitimate intelligence gathering territory of the CIA, and amusingly, the NSA.
I think the point is that, just about everyone is doing what the NSA was doing, or are trying to.
Revealing that the US did it, and how it was done, merely exposed the US and created a relative disadvantage for the US. It didn't actually expose the only country that spies on you.
It would be amusing if companies fled the US, only to go for solutions like China or even EU countries. They're all spying on you. Just pick who you'd rather have your information and deal with it.
You really think some US government drone wastes time moderating things on Slashdot?
Yes, they probably index the comments for future reference via automation, but moderate? Not fucking likely.
Speaking as someone who has studied history for my entire life, to the point where I was thinking about a post-grad degree in it, I can tell you that advanced study of history is not something you can do well on your own. To really study history, as opposed to regurgitating what someone else has told you already, you need to be able to have studied the language, customs, and other social aspects of the time and place you are studying. Frequently, that means that you read different languages, and many times you read one or more dead languages.
Aside from having to learn those skills, there is some science that goes into unearthing artifacts, dating them, and even understanding what they do. You frequently have experts in metallurgy or ceramics or other trades who can help you make identifications and give some insight into the dynamics of what you are studying.
There is a lot of analysis work of existing material in History, but you'll always be looking for new Primary sources, which can frequently change your views of documents that you thought were authoritative (Dead Sea Scrolls, Codex Sinaiticus, etc.). You'll also be scanning things like aerial photography and even satellite images for evidence of sites that are invisible looking at them from the ground. You'll be checking ice cores for evidence of volcanic eruptions, and then looking for evidence in literature to see if the instance was recorded and how it affected humanity. You'll look at mitochondrial DNA to trace migration patterns by looking at the matriarchal line.
Don't get me wrong, there's very little money in History as a subject. You need grants to support your research, you'll very infrequently make any money from it. The problem is, you still need advanced skills to do the job. Graduate and post-graduate skills. It's not a self-study course unless you're content to win trivia contests, as opposed to making discoveries.
We did try and rebuild their country. Try rebuilding their country when their own government is bound and determined to maintain the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiites. Try and rebuild things while the insurgents are shooting at you and setting off IEDs right and left.
Yeah, we fucked up because we had no plan when we kicked out Saddam, but let's not pretend that it's because we didn't try and rebuild things. Even getting a few oil people rich doesn't preclude us from rebuilding things. There is plenty of money to go around, it's just being sucked up by the incompetent Iraqi government and insurgents preventing anything like peace from happening.
I get how that works, but I still have trouble believing college age students are that stupid. I can see them going because they believe in ISIL. What I have trouble believing is that they go over there expecting to not end up on the end of a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator drone. Or simply shot in the face by some Peshmerga fighter. Or asked to drive a tanker truck rigged to blow into an Iraqi army position on a "martyrdom" mission.
The only tiny modicum of respect I have for any ISIL fighter is the fighter who goes there fighting for their fucked up version of Islam, but who understands what they are getting into and doesn't expect to be on a vacation in a war zone. The rest of them, especially the teenage females, are Darwin Award material. If they weren't hurting innocent people, I'd almost cheer for them to go over and get their stupid asses killed.
Back in the day, my own anecdotal experience was that disruption is a big deal. I sat in both honors classes and "regular" classes back in the day. There was a huge difference in how much you learned based on how disruptive the class was. When I was in a class filled with kids who were dedicated to getting good grades and learning things, you got shit done. I learned less, had less taught to me, and was less able to concentrate in the regular class. I still personally got good grades, but that was because the class was dumbed down so much, it was hard to understand how anyone could have done poorly, let alone failed those classes, even without being a nerd.
In the end, I realized that I worked to get in honors classes as much to simply not be in the regular classes as I did to excel. You literally could not learn even easier things very well in a disruptive class.
Personally, I think we need to pick out the disruptive cases, get them in smaller classes with more structure, and get them out of the way of people who want to learn. Then everyone, including the disruptive kids, will probably be more successful.
Many of the poor are some of the most honest people out there. Obviously, some have troubles that cause them to steal, but I'm just as afraid of some asshole in Washington stealing my money as I would be of a burglar. At least being burglarized has been a rare event in my life, I'm getting ripped off in taxes on every paycheck.
Well, as someone said above, it doesn't have to be parents. It can be grandparents, cousins, or even non-family members who are friends, rather than professional educators. Anyone who takes an interest in the child and who can earn the trust of the child.
The one thing we don't have as much of, now that we don't have close extended families, is support for children from people other than parents.
Do you think that parents who were gone for 12 hours a day is some sort of new normal? It's as least as old as the industrial age and probably longer. It's only now that we have no one else other than a parent to fill the role when the parents are off working that this has become a crisis. That's not because the parents are working, it's because there are a) children with one parent (frequently a father) who is missing, and not just working and b) there's no one else to raise the children while the parent is working.
Having parents out working is nothing new, and it used to be critical in the olden days when physical labor was much more important than our much automated present. We just happened to have structures that could handle that in the past. Now we don't.
While DC isn't LA-bad, it's one of the top-most congested cities in the country. Much of that is simply that there isn't enough road for all the development that's going on here and the mass transit does not serve the outlying areas very well, so it's a lot of cars. We still don't even have the Metro go all the way to Dulles yet.
There's a feeling that, I suppose, "where there's smoke, there's fire", except in this case, we don't actually know what the "fire" is.
Certain advocates seem to think it is because of discriminatory hiring practices, which I would agree is wrongheaded, if that was the case. I just don't believe it.
I believe that such practices could certainly happen in smaller shops with cozy "brogrammer" atmospheres, perhaps, but I have trouble believing that Google, which is both a big corporation and filled with many "progressive" sorts would allow racial or gender discrimination to become enshrined in their policy.
In fact, I know a person in the recruiting department at Google. She's a latina and pretty liberal. Not to mention a former editor for a newspaper. I can't imagine a person less likely to let a practice like that stand in her area. She'd probably have a piece written and on the desk of her remaining journalist friends in short order if there was any sort of dealings like that.
I just don't think people are turning women away at the door who really, really want to be in tech. I think that, for whatever reason, a greater number of women don't want to be in tech or don't have enough interest that field of study to want to consider it as a career.
The women I have worked with and interviewed never seemed to have any trouble getting their skills or experience and measuring up to the men, but there's always been very few of them. That leads me to believe that this all starts long before anyone ever gets to an interview or application.
I don't think he has to pay taxes on the money he gives someone else, unless it was a sales tax, because he still had to presumably pay tax on it coming in as income. Of course, the recipient should be paying income or some tax on that money too.
Hastert may have had to have gotten a W-9 from the recipient so that he could then report the money that the recipient is getting. So he's still potentially in trouble, I think, but for not reporting the money to the IRS that he gave someone else as a gift or consideration, not for failing to pay taxes on it ( which he already did upon receiving his income that he used to pay the blackmail with).
New Vegas definitely had a different feel from Fallout 3, although if you only played NV briefly, then yes, it would have been harder to differentiate. They did look similar.
One might ask why we believe that our internet communications should be private, but our monetary transactions should be carefully tracked. Especially in the sense that today, more than ever, money transfer is now mostly just the transfer of bits.
People frequently go on about how the government could harass or attack politicians or activists with the information they obtain, but here we have the government doing the same thing with financial reporting. Sure, Hastert's probably a scumbag sex offender, but no one has charged him with that. They're using other laws to push their agenda.
It was a clever little bit of legal trickery which got Al Capone in jail for tax evasion, and certainly you could argue that he needed to be stopped. The problem is, we really never reformed the system to make someone like Capone less likely to be able to corrupt the state and local governments, we're still relying on these sort of loopholes to get convictions that the government wouldn't otherwise try to get in a court of law on the merits of their actual case because they'd fail. It is skating very close to laws being passed to make you a felon in cases where you wouldn't be convicted, but the prosecutor (and not the judge or jury) really wants you convicted of something.
While a company like Google likely has all sorts go through their doors, I can tell you what my experience with hiring is.
Working in a small company, I frequently have quite a bit of exposure to the raw talent pool. Sometimes HR gets involved, but just as often, I am talking to the recruiters myself.
There is the occasional woman. There is the occasional black man. What there is not are both black and female. Google having only 35 black females mirrors my experience. The percentage of resumes of black females, even for junior positions, is likely so low to begin with that I never see one and Google probably only sees a few hundred.
And that is even before any question of their skills or experience come up.
I'm wary of a scenario where the first black female resume in my 5 years as a manager will someday come across my desk and she just happens to not have the skills I require for the job and don't hire her. Am I suddenly discriminating in my hiring practices because I have rejected 100% of my black female candidates? Do I hire her because "diversity"?
More to the point, if I had two identically skilled candidates, and one happened to be a black female, do I derive an advantage from hiring her over the other person?
Reading between the lines is the following at Google HQ.
They hire a lot of men as engineers. Not an incredible surprise.
People have picked up on that and want to call them out on that, so they pressure them to release their diversity stats.
The stats say what everyone knows: there's a lot of men at Google. Many are white or possibly Asian. Just like in the rest of the IT industry.
Google sees where this is going, and it does its best to spin the stats as a good thing. Especially the significant portion of ethnic/racial minorities, albeit minority men.
As expected, the other side homes in on the intersection of black and female and calls Google out on only having 35 black, female engineers.
Here's the question. What does Google look like when everyone gets what they want?
Does Google have to throw money at some programs for black female coders?
Does Google have to have a hiring quota for black females?
Does Google have to launch a campaign to get black females into coding and STEM?
Just what is the point of all of this? It feels one side wants to expose something that everyone already knows: there aren't a lot of females in computing in general, fewer of them are black females.
If there is a demonstrable benefit to having a completely diverse workforce as a force multiplier, a corporation, especially one like Google, isn't likely to avoid diversity for the sole purpose of perpetuating the white Patriarchy. Honestly, speaking as someone who hires people for IT work, I'll tell you what the problem is. There are no candidates who are black and female. I'm not rejecting these candidates, I literally never see them. Ever.
We all know this, and yet.... somehow everyone wants us to self-flagellate over an issue that we have almost no control over.
Google is likely sensitive in the same way that anyone in that situation would be. What happens when you don't aim to discriminate, but you end up with a non-diverse workforce based on the demographics of the pool of available workers?
Yes... if you send your emails to people through a Facebook client, instead of downloading the key and sending encrypted mails via your own email client.
Aside from actually doing something stupid like sending emails from FB (where you'd have to trust them anyway to not store your unencrypted text before they encrypted it for you), there is actually no issue with Facebook or the United States doing this.
FB hosting your public key has zero effect on anything. You are supposed to distribute your public key widely. The actual problem with public keys is ensuring that your public key is actually your public key for the purposes of not sending an email that someone else can read.
For that, you need to actually send an email with that key and then (usually over phone or in person) confirm that the recipient:
a) Got the email (proving that the email address isn't sending it to some other mailbox)
b) The recipient can decrypt the mail with their secret key.
If the recipient gets the email, but they can't decrypt it, then the public key is incorrect and would be discarded.
This verification process is the hard part for random people downloading keys and sending emails to addresses of people they've never met, although in practice, if you have any real world contact with your recipient, the verification feedback is usually pretty easy to come by.
MITM attacks would presumably require you to be able to intercept mails to the email address of the supposed recipient, you would then decrypt the email, store it, and then re-encrypt it with the actual recipient's public key and forward it on. That requires, however, a significant investment by the attacker, not to mention a not inconsiderable amount of authority to create some sort of email interception proxy.
It can also easily be thwarted by the uploader of the public key logging in as another person or anonymously and comparing the key that FB provides with their known good key. If the key doesn't match, then you have MITM possibilities and you simply remove your public key and call the Washington Post for an expose on FB's MITM of your public key encryption.