Older people don't drive as much as young ones do and have safer cars.
Wrong. "Older" drivers drive as much or more than young drivers do, on average. The young drivers also are driving cars that had to pass safety inspections to be on the road legally, so I'm also fairly skeptical that there's a massive disparity in average car safety betwen older and younger drivers.
He wears special glasses in order to drive safely and legally
And if he actually needs them for a medical reason, he no doubt has a special exemption / restriction on his license specifying the nature of his issue & the gear required to let him operate a vehicle safely.
Likewise, your friend's father probably also has a restriction on his license stating that he can only safely operate vehicles equipped with hand controls. Likewise you probably have a restriction on your license specifying that you need hearing aids or a full-view mirror for your hearing issue.
If you have an unusual condition that requires you to have an assistive device to operate a vehicle safely, then you will have a restriction stating that put on your license, and if you're pulled over, you simply point out that the glasses you're wearing are special medical devices that allow you to operate your vehicle safely, and the cop won't be able to do a damn thing about the fact that you're "wearing glasses."
Light pollution to the level it has reached in many western cities is not an unavoidable side-effect of industrialization. It is, in fact, an indicator of technological inefficiency. Several billions of dollars worth of energy spilled into outer space every year does no one any good.
Explain how more-efficient light generation that's just as bright solves this problem?
Again: LIGHT POLLUTION is not going to be solved by 'sustainability' efforts. People will move to LEDs - and still use bright lights all night long, because in cities, the lights need to be on - for public safety, to support a 24x7 society, and because some people will always be up and about. In fact, they're more likely to use them, because the LEDs will be cheaper and cheaper, and the energy will be too, as new 'sustainable' capacity comes online and gets more economical - suddenly a hand torch with an economical LED and a high-capacity battery with a small generator becomes a great thing for all the people who now rise & sleep with the sun because they live in third world poverty-stricken areas where electricity is a luxury they can't afford.
Whether or not the light pollution is generated by LEDs or Incandescent bulbs or smoky oil lamps and torches doesn't matter to the problem of light pollution. Do you think people are going to say, "You know what, since I'm moving to LEDs, I don't need a bright light at night?"
Typical output of an incandescent bulb is 15-16 lumens per watt, and LEDs are in the range of 40-50 lumens per watt, if I recall correctly. Switching over to LEDs would certainly reduce pollution created by powering the light sources, but does nothing to change the brightness light emitted by all of the lights on in all the cities that are creating the light pollution. The only way you solve light pollution is by turning the goddamned lights off.
That's all well and good, but "Earth Hour" has nothing to do with "light pollution" - it's about 'showing a commitment to sustainability.' Light pollution is a problem of many people living together in close, industrialized proximity to one another. If "sustainability" requires us to do away with the conveniences and luxuries of modern life such that our cities would produce significantly less light on a consistent basis, then you've identified the crux of the problem right there, and also why the program is destined to fail. You will never convince people to revert to pre-industrial civilization in order to "protect the earth."
Earth Hour does not purport to be an energy/carbon reduction exercise, it is a symbolic action. Therefore, we do not engage in the measurement of energy/carbon reduction levels. Earth Hour is an initiative to encourage individuals, businesses and governments around the world to take accountability for their ecological footprint and engage in dialogue and resource exchange that provides real solutions to our environmental challenges. Participation in Earth Hour symbolises a commitment to change beyond the hour.
So, since it's not about "light pollution," and turning off the lights for 1 hour might actually be a net-negative in terms of sustainability, it still strikes me as "dumping toxic waste in the ocean to show our commitment to ending overfishing." It seems to me that if you want to express your support for sustainable living, you shouldn't do it by engaging in an activity that could actually produce more CO2.
Here's the thing - assuming the numbers are correct, and the symbolic gesture is actually MORE harmful in terms of emissions than doing nothing... why keep doing it? Why not find a new symbolic gesture - except choose one that is actually helpful (even if it's a very small, symbolic improvement) rather than harmful?
This would seem to fit the definition of "cutting off your nose to spite your face," to me. It's the same mentality that allows no-burn policies in national parks to create massive, thousdands-of-acres-conflagrations in the long run by allowing highly flammable deadfall and underbrush to accumulate for years without a periodic burn to clean & clear it in smaller areas naturally.
I suppose next the environmentalists will be telling us that dumping raw sewage and toxic waste into the ocean is an awesome, symbolic gesture to protest overfishing?
Technically, iTunes Match (the part that does that) will run you $25 per year, but once a track is upgraded, you can download & store it and continue using it even if you never re-up your iTunes Match subscription.
most people do not run out of fuel within walking distance of a petrol station
Okay, granting that point - can you call a roadside service and have them bring you a can of electricity when your charge reaches zero?
Also, explain how "recharging a Tesla with jumper cables" is helpful? Assuming it's possible, how much charge are you really going to get out of another (small) car battery, and how fast will that charge accumulate? And how many kindly strangers do you believe are likely to stop, and let you recharge for an hour or two while they wait with you, by the side of the road, while their engine burns their own gasoline? My guess is you're only likely to see a few miles under best case scenarios, and its possible that the current required to move a Tesla may make "recharging off another car's battery" effectively useless.
The fact of the matter is that if your tesla runs out of juice, you're going to call a tow truck, and get towed to a charging station. This is not a feature, this is a drawback to owning a tesla - at least until charging stations are far closer to ubiquitous.
Did you read the person I responded to? He suggested that limiting a judge's ability to retire and go directly to work for someone whose case he JUST finished adjudicating is an undue burden on them, and that they wouldn't be able to support themselves or find work.
He also is the one who brought up "federal judge" - I'm well aware that the judge in this case is British. s/Federal/UK/g if you really want to be pedantic - I'm fairly certain that the UK isn't turning their retired judges out to a life of poverty on the streets.
What exactly do you think he would write about
Textbooks, law journal articles, etc? The same thing MANY other retired lawyers and judges write.
Who would he speak to? What about? Why? Who would pay him to do so?
Lawyers' groups? Law firms? Law students? The segment of the public that might be interested in IP law reform, if that is his special area of expertise?
Why should he do this?
I never suggested he "should" - I said he COULD, if he - having retired - was bored, or felt the need to earn some additional money.
Do you really think that there are going to be many companies who care about his expertise...
Yes, actually, I do. Because I specifically said, "some sort of perfectly reasonable 'no working for companies who had a case before you within 5 years of the closure of the case,' clause." He has not seen cases covering the entirety of the tech industry in his tenure as a judge. He has not seen cases covering even a majority of the tech industry - I said nothing about "any company IMPACTED by his decisions" - I said "companies involved in a suit (defendant or plaintiff) which he has sat on."
7) Why would he do this?
Again, I never said he "had" to, I said he "could" do it, if he felt that he needed more money, or was just so bored that he wanted to be involved with the legal profession still. I think it's perfectly reasonable to think that a highly respected judge with a generous government retirement plan wouldn't have to worry about "making money in his field," after retirement - the person I responded to apparently thinks that that assumption is unreasonable, and that retired judges need to keep on working. I highlighted numerous ways a retired judge could make money and keep working without having to be an employe of a company whose case he recently adjudicated.
Right, and if you told politicians that they can't go work for lobbying firms the moment they're out of office, they'd never be able to find a job in the private sector, either! So you can't possible put limits on them going to work for lobbying firms who benefitted from legislation that was passed by the politicians!
Your argument is an argument in favor of tolerating - even encouraging - political corruption. You do realize that, don't you?
I'm sorry, are federal judges not given generous federal retirement benefits?
If you retire in the area you worked as a federal judge, you can... 1) Teach - many judges do this, and end up professors at a law school. 2) Write 3) Speak 4) Run for political office 5) Work in an unrelated field; 6) Practice law, with some sort of perfectly reasonable "no working for companies who had cases before you within 5 years of the closure of the case" clause; 7) Be on retainer for numerous 3-person startups in tech law, to provide them with patent and other legal advice; 8) Be retired, and enjoy your new free time while collecting generous federal retirement benefits;
How is "you can't retire, and 2 months later, go work for the highest-profile client you ever worked for and decided in favor of," some sort of undue burden for a person whose ENTIRE job description can be summed up as "apply the law impartially, and exhibit no personal preference or interest in the case"?
It's even easier to take charge of the conversation. Most managers who pull this "hourly updates" thing aren't actually asking for you to say, hourly, "Still working, no change in status." What they're trying to communicate to you is that the project is urgent, critical, and needs to be solved as soon as possible.
You can head off the "hourly status check" behavior by saying, "I understand this is urgent. It is my highest priority at this point. Here is a broad outline of the work that needs to happen. I'm on step X. I estimate step X will be done by date Y, and if anything changes that would impact delivery by that date, I will notify you as soon as it happens."
And if everyone were free to leave for a better paying job, there would be no low paying jobs because everyone would have left.
Great, now go learn the difference between "equal opportunity" and "equal outcome." Hint: everybody is, in fact, free to leave for a better paying job. However! Not everybody is qualified to get a better paying job. Hard truth of the world - some people, through some combination of luck, talent, skill, and hard work, will end up making more than others. It's not society's job to guarantee an equal outcome for all people. You could certainly make an argument that a "moral" society should guarantee a certain minimum starting point for all its citizens, but what that minimum should be is certainly a debatable point.
While you're learning about equal opportunity and outcome, maybe you should also read up on how averages work, and what bell curves look like. Some jobs will always pay "below average," and some jobs will always pay "above average," because not all jobs are equally valuable to the person doing the hiring. Increase the "average wage," and there will still be people who earn "below average" wages. The REAL question you should be asking is, are the "below average" earners earning at least enough to match the guaranteed minimum you're arguing for?
But business and the rich at the top of it have no money but what they take from their customers.
They do not *TAKE* that money from customers. There is a voluntary exchange of goods & services for that money, it is not being appropriated from you at the point of a gun.
Well business and the rich get roads and infrastructure and police and fire departments and a military and courts to protect their interests for the money the government takes from them.
Awesome, so can we agree that the only legitimate use for tax revenues is infrastructure spending? If so, that should allow us to set the taxes much lower than their current rates, so everybody should be happy with that. Or did you think that infrastructure maintenance & investment spending was a major component of the federal budget? (Hint: It's not.)
Considering unemployment in the US is ~7-8%, and Americans took an average of 12 out of their average of 14 allotted vacation days granted in 2012, it's perfectly reasonable advice.
If it were as common as you seem to think that "people get fired/laid off for using their vacation days," then unemployment would be through the roof and people would be afraid to take even 2 of 14 days, much less 12 of 14.
Agreed; And I hope that statement means you've been supporting, evangelizing, and voting for legitimate alternative parties. I don't care which, but if you view the two "major party" alternatives available to us as fundamentally unreasonable, the only way that changes is if we put third, fourth, and fifth-party candidates in office.
Outlaw inheritance? And what happens to the businesses owned by someone who dies? Are they shut down and demolished?
How about we agree to tax inheritance at a reasonable rate, instead of penalizing people for being successful by destroying their entire life's work the moment they die?
Mind you, a co-worker from Chili was forced to go through a course teaching him about Holland... in the book it told him that in Holland family is not as important as in other countries... right... I know several people who live in the same street as their parents and their grandparents are only a few minutes away. My co-workers LEFT his family on another CONTINENT and in 4 years had visited them ONCE!
To who does family then matter more? THINK before you answer. In CHILI family might matter more BUT not to THIS particular Chilian person who didn't MIND not seeing his family for years!
That's an interesting point, but you could look at it another way: Your ChilEan co-worker (I assume you don't work at an American 'fast casual food' chain with a vaguely Southwestern emphasis) sacrificed in order to better his family's lot in life. Being willing to move a continent away and not see your family for several years in order to earn money and improve your family's prospects would suggest that family is certainly very important to him.
If he had stayed on the same block, and been unemployed, and let his family sink into poverty - would that have showed that his family was "more important" to him?
I bet there's a world of difference between "didn't mind not seeing them" and "survived not seeing them because the goal of making his family more financially stable was more important than his needs to see them and interact with them physically every day."
By the same token, those people who live "on the same street" as their parents and grandparents may not see their family, or interact with them in a meaningful way, much more than one or two times a year anyway. I know plenty of people like this - they live literally minutes from members of their family, and see them maybe twice a year, at Christmas & Thanksgiving.
Being physically close to something doesn't necessarily mean it's very important to you.
But it's so much harder to score cheap points if you have to say "You pay all the taxes that we, as a society, have determined you are legally obligated to pay, thank you," when you really mean "You have more money than I do, and I somehow feel cheated by that and think you should pay more. Therefore, you're a lazy shiftless cheat who is raping society, and you belong in jail, or should be executed."
If you say it the first way, you have to, you know, propose reasonable legislative alternatives and work to get them implemented.
If you say it the second way, you can just open a Twitter account & a Tumblr, and end up on Rachel Maddow's show, while ignoring the problem and leaving it for the next generation to deal with.
Since you don't seem to have read the article, I'll reproduce a chunk of it here.
In 1995, following an appearance on Tomorrow’s World, he set up Baygen Power Industries before the company was renamed Freeplay Energy. It was at this point that the design began incorporating cheap rechargeable battery technology and his involvement ceased. Freeplay has gone on to sell more than three million wind-up radios, with that number growing every day. John Hutchinson, chief technology officer at Freeplay, said Mr Baylis had voluntarily sold his shares in the company and that technology had moved on, leaving his original patent outdated. He said: “Freeplay developed its own technology and by 2000 no more clockwork radios were made. The method was to use human power to recharge a battery. Trevor sold his shares in the company and the now outdated patent was incorporated into Freeplay.”
So, let's recap: 1) Baylis invents hand-crank which stores energy in a spring; energy is used to provide enough energy to run the device for about 14 minutes. 2) Starts Baygen, which becomes Freeplay Energy, and licenses his new design to a company that he owns presumably a rather large stake in for production. 3) Someone at company improves clockwork/spring drive, then comes up with the idea of charging a battery, rather than storing the energy in a spring, making his original idea obsolete, as something new & better has been introduced to the market; 4) Baylis voluntarily (and unwisely) sells off his shares in the company he set up to exploit his (obsolete) patents; 5) Now complains that he doesn't make money from a device produced by this company that is "based" off of his original design from the mid-90's (how long do patents last in the UK?) - the company which he voluntarily sold his stake in.
How much protection, exactly, is the system supposed to provide him with? Is it the government's job to step in and solve this problem for him? It sounds to me like he made some very bad business decisions, and as a result, is having some financial issues. While I certainly *sympathize* with him, and hope he's able to find a way to save his home, I'm not sure I see what role the government has in fixing this problem.
That's a fair complaint, and a legitimate use case where I could see the ribbon being practically worse than the menus. In general, though, the "TEH RIBBUN SUX" complaints rarely offer this level of specificity, and confine themselves to "they changed my shit, and I don't like change."
I'd also note the following counterpoints:
1) keyboard shortcuts are still available, and work just fine even with ribbon collapsed; if you're going to the menu OR the ribbon for stuff, you're already slowing down. 2) Long, detailed hierarchical menu structures don't always fit well on a laptop screen, either; I've often had menu drop-downs that are "longer" than the available screen height on my laptop, and require scrolling up and down in that dropdown to find the option I want. The ribbon tends to keep things pretty "flat" - not a lot of long hierarchical menus to click through - which helps eliminate a different frustration.
Gotta admit that I agree on that. I've been using some Office variant since the mid-90's, and about 6 months ago got upgraded to Office 2010 at work.
The ribbon took a little adjustment, but I've found that the "it puts the most commonly used features in the ribbon" argument generally holds true. A few times I've had to dig a little bit to find the particular formatting option I was looking for, but generally an F1+search, or a google search will bring me right to it within a few seconds. In general, I've found that the stuff I use most commonly is easier to find, and often right there in the main ribbon.
All the people who whine about the ribbon seem to be bitching mostly because "they changed something," not because it is actually worse, in practice. If you're an IT professional, and you've spent more than about 15 minutes of your life "adapting" to the Office ribbon, you're probably getting way too hung up on a cosmetic change.
which lends a different flavour than the glucose/fructose mix that's typical in Canada
That "different flavour" is all in your head. Read this, specifically the paragraph that reads as follows (bold added for emphasis):
Key commodity inputs needed to make carbonated soft drinks include concentrates, sugar (cane or beet), glucose/fructose, aspartame, acesulfame-potassium, caramel colour, sodium benzoate, phosphoric and citric acids, caffeine, seasonings, carbon dioxide and specially treated water. (Glucose/fructose is a generic term for high fructose corn syrup or HFCS, now more commonly referred to as "'corn sugar'".) The industry uses about 20 times as much corn sugar as it does cane/beet sugar as the sweetening agent. Except for water, the bulk of raw inputs for this industry are imported, mostly from the U.S. However a small portion of the corn sugar is supplied domestically.
You say Glucose/Fructose, we say HFCS. Same stuff.
Don't be sure- at the very least, I hope you're getting yourself checked out by your doctor regularly.
"Metabolically Obese but Normal Weight" (MONW, or popularly, 'skinny fat') is a real thing, and puts you at FAR greater risk of some bad results of heart disease, diabetes, and other 'metabolic syndrome' diseases - most likely because the skinny folk don't exhibit symptoms until the disease is more advanced, meaning intervention is less likely to improve things.
In a nut, you don't have to be "fat" to have these diseases - they TEND to travel together, but if you happen to be an ectomorph who is still raising hell with his body by dumping raw sugar into it at the rate you claimed, then that's probably going to exact a pretty steep toll on you over time. Being skinny and "not falling apart" isn't exacly a bill of good health... if you're not getting regular checkups with the doc, you might want to consider starting.
Not to say "oh god don't drink that stuff ever" - maybe you're the lucky "one in a million" whose body is able to handle it better than most... but the weight of medical evidence is pretty clear that that volume of regular soda over that long a time has some pretty bad effects on most people.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. "Older" drivers drive as much or more than young drivers do, on average. The young drivers also are driving cars that had to pass safety inspections to be on the road legally, so I'm also fairly skeptical that there's a massive disparity in average car safety betwen older and younger drivers.
And if he actually needs them for a medical reason, he no doubt has a special exemption / restriction on his license specifying the nature of his issue & the gear required to let him operate a vehicle safely.
As an example: NY state's page about driver's license restrictions - http://www.dmv.ny.gov/olderdriver/restriction.htm
Likewise, your friend's father probably also has a restriction on his license stating that he can only safely operate vehicles equipped with hand controls. Likewise you probably have a restriction on your license specifying that you need hearing aids or a full-view mirror for your hearing issue.
If you have an unusual condition that requires you to have an assistive device to operate a vehicle safely, then you will have a restriction stating that put on your license, and if you're pulled over, you simply point out that the glasses you're wearing are special medical devices that allow you to operate your vehicle safely, and the cop won't be able to do a damn thing about the fact that you're "wearing glasses."
Since that is an impossible standard of proof to achieve, your answer could have been more succinctly stated as, "NO."
Explain how more-efficient light generation that's just as bright solves this problem?
Again: LIGHT POLLUTION is not going to be solved by 'sustainability' efforts. People will move to LEDs - and still use bright lights all night long, because in cities, the lights need to be on - for public safety, to support a 24x7 society, and because some people will always be up and about. In fact, they're more likely to use them, because the LEDs will be cheaper and cheaper, and the energy will be too, as new 'sustainable' capacity comes online and gets more economical - suddenly a hand torch with an economical LED and a high-capacity battery with a small generator becomes a great thing for all the people who now rise & sleep with the sun because they live in third world poverty-stricken areas where electricity is a luxury they can't afford.
Whether or not the light pollution is generated by LEDs or Incandescent bulbs or smoky oil lamps and torches doesn't matter to the problem of light pollution. Do you think people are going to say, "You know what, since I'm moving to LEDs, I don't need a bright light at night?"
Typical output of an incandescent bulb is 15-16 lumens per watt, and LEDs are in the range of 40-50 lumens per watt, if I recall correctly. Switching over to LEDs would certainly reduce pollution created by powering the light sources, but does nothing to change the brightness light emitted by all of the lights on in all the cities that are creating the light pollution. The only way you solve light pollution is by turning the goddamned lights off.
That's all well and good, but "Earth Hour" has nothing to do with "light pollution" - it's about 'showing a commitment to sustainability.' Light pollution is a problem of many people living together in close, industrialized proximity to one another. If "sustainability" requires us to do away with the conveniences and luxuries of modern life such that our cities would produce significantly less light on a consistent basis, then you've identified the crux of the problem right there, and also why the program is destined to fail. You will never convince people to revert to pre-industrial civilization in order to "protect the earth."
From their own FAQ page:
So, since it's not about "light pollution," and turning off the lights for 1 hour might actually be a net-negative in terms of sustainability, it still strikes me as "dumping toxic waste in the ocean to show our commitment to ending overfishing." It seems to me that if you want to express your support for sustainable living, you shouldn't do it by engaging in an activity that could actually produce more CO2.
Here's the thing - assuming the numbers are correct, and the symbolic gesture is actually MORE harmful in terms of emissions than doing nothing... why keep doing it? Why not find a new symbolic gesture - except choose one that is actually helpful (even if it's a very small, symbolic improvement) rather than harmful?
This would seem to fit the definition of "cutting off your nose to spite your face," to me. It's the same mentality that allows no-burn policies in national parks to create massive, thousdands-of-acres-conflagrations in the long run by allowing highly flammable deadfall and underbrush to accumulate for years without a periodic burn to clean & clear it in smaller areas naturally.
I suppose next the environmentalists will be telling us that dumping raw sewage and toxic waste into the ocean is an awesome, symbolic gesture to protest overfishing?
Technically, iTunes Match (the part that does that) will run you $25 per year, but once a track is upgraded, you can download & store it and continue using it even if you never re-up your iTunes Match subscription.
Okay, granting that point - can you call a roadside service and have them bring you a can of electricity when your charge reaches zero?
Also, explain how "recharging a Tesla with jumper cables" is helpful? Assuming it's possible, how much charge are you really going to get out of another (small) car battery, and how fast will that charge accumulate? And how many kindly strangers do you believe are likely to stop, and let you recharge for an hour or two while they wait with you, by the side of the road, while their engine burns their own gasoline? My guess is you're only likely to see a few miles under best case scenarios, and its possible that the current required to move a Tesla may make "recharging off another car's battery" effectively useless.
The fact of the matter is that if your tesla runs out of juice, you're going to call a tow truck, and get towed to a charging station. This is not a feature, this is a drawback to owning a tesla - at least until charging stations are far closer to ubiquitous.
Did you read the person I responded to? He suggested that limiting a judge's ability to retire and go directly to work for someone whose case he JUST finished adjudicating is an undue burden on them, and that they wouldn't be able to support themselves or find work.
He also is the one who brought up "federal judge" - I'm well aware that the judge in this case is British. s/Federal/UK/g if you really want to be pedantic - I'm fairly certain that the UK isn't turning their retired judges out to a life of poverty on the streets.
Textbooks, law journal articles, etc? The same thing MANY other retired lawyers and judges write.
Lawyers' groups? Law firms? Law students? The segment of the public that might be interested in IP law reform, if that is his special area of expertise?
I never suggested he "should" - I said he COULD, if he - having retired - was bored, or felt the need to earn some additional money.
Yes, actually, I do. Because I specifically said, "some sort of perfectly reasonable 'no working for companies who had a case before you within 5 years of the closure of the case,' clause." He has not seen cases covering the entirety of the tech industry in his tenure as a judge. He has not seen cases covering even a majority of the tech industry - I said nothing about "any company IMPACTED by his decisions" - I said "companies involved in a suit (defendant or plaintiff) which he has sat on."
Again, I never said he "had" to, I said he "could" do it, if he felt that he needed more money, or was just so bored that he wanted to be involved with the legal profession still. I think it's perfectly reasonable to think that a highly respected judge with a generous government retirement plan wouldn't have to worry about "making money in his field," after retirement - the person I responded to apparently thinks that that assumption is unreasonable, and that retired judges need to keep on working. I highlighted numerous ways a retired judge could make money and keep working without having to be an employe of a company whose case he recently adjudicated.
Did you read the comment I responded to, at all?
Right, and if you told politicians that they can't go work for lobbying firms the moment they're out of office, they'd never be able to find a job in the private sector, either! So you can't possible put limits on them going to work for lobbying firms who benefitted from legislation that was passed by the politicians!
Your argument is an argument in favor of tolerating - even encouraging - political corruption. You do realize that, don't you?
I'm sorry, are federal judges not given generous federal retirement benefits?
If you retire in the area you worked as a federal judge, you can...
1) Teach - many judges do this, and end up professors at a law school.
2) Write
3) Speak
4) Run for political office
5) Work in an unrelated field;
6) Practice law, with some sort of perfectly reasonable "no working for companies who had cases before you within 5 years of the closure of the case" clause;
7) Be on retainer for numerous 3-person startups in tech law, to provide them with patent and other legal advice;
8) Be retired, and enjoy your new free time while collecting generous federal retirement benefits;
How is "you can't retire, and 2 months later, go work for the highest-profile client you ever worked for and decided in favor of," some sort of undue burden for a person whose ENTIRE job description can be summed up as "apply the law impartially, and exhibit no personal preference or interest in the case"?
It's even easier to take charge of the conversation. Most managers who pull this "hourly updates" thing aren't actually asking for you to say, hourly, "Still working, no change in status." What they're trying to communicate to you is that the project is urgent, critical, and needs to be solved as soon as possible.
You can head off the "hourly status check" behavior by saying, "I understand this is urgent. It is my highest priority at this point. Here is a broad outline of the work that needs to happen. I'm on step X. I estimate step X will be done by date Y, and if anything changes that would impact delivery by that date, I will notify you as soon as it happens."
Great, now go learn the difference between "equal opportunity" and "equal outcome." Hint: everybody is, in fact, free to leave for a better paying job. However! Not everybody is qualified to get a better paying job. Hard truth of the world - some people, through some combination of luck, talent, skill, and hard work, will end up making more than others. It's not society's job to guarantee an equal outcome for all people. You could certainly make an argument that a "moral" society should guarantee a certain minimum starting point for all its citizens, but what that minimum should be is certainly a debatable point.
While you're learning about equal opportunity and outcome, maybe you should also read up on how averages work, and what bell curves look like. Some jobs will always pay "below average," and some jobs will always pay "above average," because not all jobs are equally valuable to the person doing the hiring. Increase the "average wage," and there will still be people who earn "below average" wages. The REAL question you should be asking is, are the "below average" earners earning at least enough to match the guaranteed minimum you're arguing for?
They do not *TAKE* that money from customers. There is a voluntary exchange of goods & services for that money, it is not being appropriated from you at the point of a gun.
Awesome, so can we agree that the only legitimate use for tax revenues is infrastructure spending? If so, that should allow us to set the taxes much lower than their current rates, so everybody should be happy with that. Or did you think that infrastructure maintenance & investment spending was a major component of the federal budget? (Hint: It's not.)
Considering unemployment in the US is ~7-8%, and Americans took an average of 12 out of their average of 14 allotted vacation days granted in 2012, it's perfectly reasonable advice.
If it were as common as you seem to think that "people get fired/laid off for using their vacation days," then unemployment would be through the roof and people would be afraid to take even 2 of 14 days, much less 12 of 14.
Aren't you using the cloud? Everybody's using the cloud.
Agreed; And I hope that statement means you've been supporting, evangelizing, and voting for legitimate alternative parties. I don't care which, but if you view the two "major party" alternatives available to us as fundamentally unreasonable, the only way that changes is if we put third, fourth, and fifth-party candidates in office.
Outlaw inheritance? And what happens to the businesses owned by someone who dies? Are they shut down and demolished?
How about we agree to tax inheritance at a reasonable rate, instead of penalizing people for being successful by destroying their entire life's work the moment they die?
That's an interesting point, but you could look at it another way: Your ChilEan co-worker (I assume you don't work at an American 'fast casual food' chain with a vaguely Southwestern emphasis) sacrificed in order to better his family's lot in life. Being willing to move a continent away and not see your family for several years in order to earn money and improve your family's prospects would suggest that family is certainly very important to him.
If he had stayed on the same block, and been unemployed, and let his family sink into poverty - would that have showed that his family was "more important" to him?
I bet there's a world of difference between "didn't mind not seeing them" and "survived not seeing them because the goal of making his family more financially stable was more important than his needs to see them and interact with them physically every day."
By the same token, those people who live "on the same street" as their parents and grandparents may not see their family, or interact with them in a meaningful way, much more than one or two times a year anyway. I know plenty of people like this - they live literally minutes from members of their family, and see them maybe twice a year, at Christmas & Thanksgiving.
Being physically close to something doesn't necessarily mean it's very important to you.
But it's so much harder to score cheap points if you have to say "You pay all the taxes that we, as a society, have determined you are legally obligated to pay, thank you," when you really mean "You have more money than I do, and I somehow feel cheated by that and think you should pay more. Therefore, you're a lazy shiftless cheat who is raping society, and you belong in jail, or should be executed."
If you say it the first way, you have to, you know, propose reasonable legislative alternatives and work to get them implemented.
If you say it the second way, you can just open a Twitter account & a Tumblr, and end up on Rachel Maddow's show, while ignoring the problem and leaving it for the next generation to deal with.
Since you don't seem to have read the article, I'll reproduce a chunk of it here.
So, let's recap:
1) Baylis invents hand-crank which stores energy in a spring; energy is used to provide enough energy to run the device for about 14 minutes.
2) Starts Baygen, which becomes Freeplay Energy, and licenses his new design to a company that he owns presumably a rather large stake in for production.
3) Someone at company improves clockwork/spring drive, then comes up with the idea of charging a battery, rather than storing the energy in a spring, making his original idea obsolete, as something new & better has been introduced to the market;
4) Baylis voluntarily (and unwisely) sells off his shares in the company he set up to exploit his (obsolete) patents;
5) Now complains that he doesn't make money from a device produced by this company that is "based" off of his original design from the mid-90's (how long do patents last in the UK?) - the company which he voluntarily sold his stake in.
How much protection, exactly, is the system supposed to provide him with? Is it the government's job to step in and solve this problem for him? It sounds to me like he made some very bad business decisions, and as a result, is having some financial issues. While I certainly *sympathize* with him, and hope he's able to find a way to save his home, I'm not sure I see what role the government has in fixing this problem.
I'm sure it never occurred to the Renault technician to tell the man, "Press the stop button to shut down your engine."
And everybody knows that pressing a labeled button ALWAYS causes the malfunctioning computer connected to the button to take appropriate action.
By Jove, you've solved the case!
That's a fair complaint, and a legitimate use case where I could see the ribbon being practically worse than the menus. In general, though, the "TEH RIBBUN SUX" complaints rarely offer this level of specificity, and confine themselves to "they changed my shit, and I don't like change."
I'd also note the following counterpoints:
1) keyboard shortcuts are still available, and work just fine even with ribbon collapsed; if you're going to the menu OR the ribbon for stuff, you're already slowing down.
2) Long, detailed hierarchical menu structures don't always fit well on a laptop screen, either; I've often had menu drop-downs that are "longer" than the available screen height on my laptop, and require scrolling up and down in that dropdown to find the option I want. The ribbon tends to keep things pretty "flat" - not a lot of long hierarchical menus to click through - which helps eliminate a different frustration.
Gotta admit that I agree on that. I've been using some Office variant since the mid-90's, and about 6 months ago got upgraded to Office 2010 at work.
The ribbon took a little adjustment, but I've found that the "it puts the most commonly used features in the ribbon" argument generally holds true. A few times I've had to dig a little bit to find the particular formatting option I was looking for, but generally an F1+search, or a google search will bring me right to it within a few seconds. In general, I've found that the stuff I use most commonly is easier to find, and often right there in the main ribbon.
All the people who whine about the ribbon seem to be bitching mostly because "they changed something," not because it is actually worse, in practice. If you're an IT professional, and you've spent more than about 15 minutes of your life "adapting" to the Office ribbon, you're probably getting way too hung up on a cosmetic change.
That "different flavour" is all in your head. Read this, specifically the paragraph that reads as follows (bold added for emphasis):
You say Glucose/Fructose, we say HFCS. Same stuff.
Don't be sure- at the very least, I hope you're getting yourself checked out by your doctor regularly.
"Metabolically Obese but Normal Weight" (MONW, or popularly, 'skinny fat') is a real thing, and puts you at FAR greater risk of some bad results of heart disease, diabetes, and other 'metabolic syndrome' diseases - most likely because the skinny folk don't exhibit symptoms until the disease is more advanced, meaning intervention is less likely to improve things.
In a nut, you don't have to be "fat" to have these diseases - they TEND to travel together, but if you happen to be an ectomorph who is still raising hell with his body by dumping raw sugar into it at the rate you claimed, then that's probably going to exact a pretty steep toll on you over time. Being skinny and "not falling apart" isn't exacly a bill of good health... if you're not getting regular checkups with the doc, you might want to consider starting.
Not to say "oh god don't drink that stuff ever" - maybe you're the lucky "one in a million" whose body is able to handle it better than most... but the weight of medical evidence is pretty clear that that volume of regular soda over that long a time has some pretty bad effects on most people.