Citations? Re:The economy under Bush is just fine.
on
Get Buff While Geeking Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not trying to troll you here -- I'd love to see some citations for the fact's you're presenting, such as who's paying the taxes, how much wealth the top 1% are absorbing, etc...
"we are at 4.6% unemployment"... "5.7 million new jobs have been created since 2003."
The CIA World Factbook entry on the U.S. (updated October 5th) states 5.1% (2005 est) unemployment index (okay, not a big difference, but still, when dealing with such small percentages, that's still a 10% difference), with 12% below poverty (not exactly great there, for such an economic powerhouse). And, keep in mind, the revised U.I. is not a true reflection of unemployment rates, it's based only on "new unemployment claims". In a nut-shell, it's not a terribly accurate measure of economic health in and of itself. If a person loses their $60,000.00/year job and starts working part-time at McD's to try to bring in some money, they don't even get counted as a new unemployment claim because, well, they're working!
Meanwhile, public debt is 68% of the GDP (the GDP, by the way, is $12,000,000,000,000.00, so apparently the debt-load is > eight trillion dollars).
In the two year period of 2004-2005 three million jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector alone. How you spin the data you selectively present makes a difference... While I'm certain that there are many benefiting in the GWB economy, there are many suffering as well.
(This is where you're supposed to respond and say something about poor people being that way by choice, that if they'd only work a little harder then they too could become rich and successful, and avoid a situation where the military seems like the only viable option).
Inflation is miniscule.
Quote from outside source: "The inflation outlook remains highly uncertain, and until we actually see inflation begin to slow down, I will be focused on the upside risks in the outlook," Yellen said in a speech to the California Independent Bankers convention in Laguna Beach, California.
In the Carter days, minimum wage was far closer to a living wage than it is today. Executive compensation was also much closer to employee compensation -- granted, there may be a higher level of benefits for the peons these days, but in almost all corporations, the lower you are on the totem pole, the more you are paying out of your own pocket for "benefits" such as health care (seriously, the U.S. still lacks national health care?)
Now, I'm not saying the Dem's would make it any better, that's not for me to say, but it seems that the truthiness of you post is aimed at justifying a specific agenda. Frankly, I think the Dem's are the same as the GOP with one small difference -- they tend to lack backbones. Bottom-line, both the primary parties seem to be no more than corporate lapdogs in this day and age. You'll never see any radical changes in economic policy based on who wins or loses, perhaps only in "moral issues" legislation and warmongering.
How do you feel about the elected officials that "represent" you? For each elected rep you know of:
Do you feel they actually have your best interest at heart?
Do you feel they avoid collusion and appearances of favoritism?
Do they seem to spend more time:
"working for the people"?
"working for re-election"?
"working for lobbyist funds"?
etcetera
Do you honestly feel that any given appointee is siginificantly different in these same qualities? If so, which qualities?
My guess is the only striking difference is: they don't spend half their time trying to get re-elected. Now, this could be a good thing, or this could be a bad thing, I suppose.... an incompetent worker spending half his time trying to get re-elected just might be better than an incompetent worker devoted to his "work".. or is he/she?
Well, I didn't RTFA (of course) but this little gem from the summary says, "but batteries must be properly wrapped and stowed away in carry-on for the duration of the flight."
Carry-on *would* be the cabin. But actually, wouldn't they be safer in the sub-zero-low-oxygen-cargo-hold, than in the cabin? (where perhaps a malicious individual could purposely cause just about *any* type of batter to go up in flames?)
em/ holds breath waiting for the new FAA regulation re: batteries, knowing it will probably be measureable in nano-seconds
Well it's true -- and it's been repeated many times, and the *IAA obviously would prefer to ignore the evidence, so just to add my own experiences on the issue:
A while back I worked as a sysadmin for {censored} and the boss allowed us to setup a fileshare from which to stream MP3s to our workstations. Everyone ripped some music from their personal collection, and everyone was able to browse the entire "catalog". If I listened to something a coworker had ripped but I didn't own, I'd buy it if I liked it. If I didn't like it, I didn't listen to it again.
I rarely (although do on occasion) buy music that I've heard on the radio -- I'd say about one CD per year (at the most) I purchase because I heard the artist on the radio. Mostly, I just don't like the garbage played on the airwaves.
When I'm in a music store, however, and they're playing something original I always ask what they're playing. Compared with one CD purchase per year from radio exposure, I purchase one newly discovered CD for about every 5 times I go into a music store.
The bottom line is -- the more you let people sample the music (and I'm not talking about the top-20 that get's pushed onto the airwaves) then the more music people are going to buy. Yes, sure -- there may also be a rise in piracy, but refer to the former point and you'll see that the process feeds itself... more music floating about (no matter how it got there) means more profits for the "artists".
I wonder if the industry will ever take their hands off their ears/eyes and figure this out -- I suppose it's *not* in the interest of the *IAA to admit this, however, because it'd put them out of work.
I don't see how customers "working it at speed" matters -- they store isn't paying them. Also, the associate attending to the self-checkout lines (where I've seen them) is attending to 4, 6, 8, or more systems. On the rare occasion that a manager must intercede -- well, the manager is on duty anyway, and is likely making salary, not wage, so it doesn't really cost the store anything in that case, does it? I've never seen an incident that required manager intervention where I've seen these self-checkout lines. If the systems weren't clunky and unintuitive (and constantly going into "wait for assistance" mode) perhaps some customers could work them "at speed" too.
If the grocer is losing money from impulse purchases (oh boy, $0.10 profit from that pack of gum) they're making it back in reduced labor & overhead... I don't have solid figures, but even a minimum-wager with no benefits has a higher overhead than an autonomous system with a low maintainance requirement.... certainly enough to offset that $0.10 profit per customer....
But regarding self-checkout: the systems I've used are all a major pain in the arse; the only time I'll use them is if I have very few items to purchase, the self-checkout lines are clear, and the regular checkout lines are overflowing. Why?.... self-checkout systems are uusually crap, with terrible user-interfaes, buggy scales that constantly put you into "wait for assistance" mode because they think you're trying to steal something, staffed by a single "associate" who is busy talking to a co-worker or otherwise unattentive to your self-checkout system being in locak-down mode... I could go on, but basically until they rqadivally improve the efficiency of self-checkout I generally avoid it.
(and I don't impulse-buy in the regular checkout lines... the only thing I'll grab there are batteries or phone-cards that I actually need.)
Great points! There's no better way to take your passion away than by taking something that you truely love and adding: inconsisentcies of other people, strict schedules, typical (i.e. crappy) management, and all the other flotsam & jetsam of a job to make you burn-out.
When will employers learn that inquisitve and/or intelligent people are best served by relaxed and evolving work environments (except for the work-a-holic stress-magnet types -- who, let's be honest, are quite possibly that way simply because it allows them to stay away from the wife (or husband) and the kids?)
<flame on!>
What's *really* missing in email clients....
on
What's In Your Inbox?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing really missing from today's email clients is an intuitive means to export/backup/import email by the message, box, or in it's entirity. Well, heck with intuitive, how about existant?
When Picasa for Linux was announced I tried to download it, but was prevented from doing so because I live in Canada. I was only able to obtain it by going through a proxy. That's not a rumor, that's a fact. That wasn't due to any of their servers being down -- they explicitly told me I couldn't download it because of where I lived.
If they've changed that policy, well that's grand, but since I already had downloaded it perhaps you might consider it reasonable that I didn't pursue such knowledge -- or maybe not, who knows. If you'd researched the situation instead of repeating rumors you might have known that, but of course I wouldn't expect that from anyone on/.
I think Z-modem was around before Akami, Quicktime, etc.... no?
And isn't there some little detail about protecting a patent or lose it? Or is that only a copyright thing? I get so confused in all this IP quicksand....
I don't see why the public can't encourage websites to adopt the "rating" meta-tag (that I mentioned in my other post.) There's no need to try to refine the rating down to 2 values (general/adult) it would probably work best done in a similar way as the video-game ratings that the industry has largely self-adopted...
i.e. have a "global" rating level, perhaps General, Teen, Mature, Abnormal:)
but then include supplementary tags that define *why* it's been classified in gloabl category "X", such as
Meta: Rating - Mature Meta: Rating-Content - Nudity, Photography, Art (for the artist or photographer's page)
vs.
Meta: Rating-Content - xxx, sexual intercourse, pornography (for the porono-pages)
or something to that effect... if it were widely adopted, then the browser-makers could easilly add parental-control type filtering based on either global or specific ratings, with extensible keywords so that certain people could filter just about anything, and others could allow art/photography type sites through.... Mozilla could probably do this through a plug-in (I mean extension) I presume.
Well, since the Content-Type meta tag already has a defined function, you might try to get your legislators to push for wider (or even ubiquitous) use of the "rating" tag, i.e.:
I think I still prefer Deuteros... sure SC has a better combat system, but Deuteros (Atari ST) has an elegant way of integrating "new technology" (in-game) in a way that enhances game-play. I don't have the ol' ST anymore, but MAME handles it without too many crashes:)
Yes and no.... In a perfect world, yes -- it would help fight terrorism; even if the terrorists are using encryption there is meta-data there to be mined.... when you cross-reference the data begin and end points you can still get the jist of what may be going on; do so with *ALL* traffic on the 'net and you can certainly learn something useful.
On the other hand, it would have been clear to a child that Osama and friends were going to take over commerical jets for nefarious deeds long before 9-11 if they'd had access to all the same information that was circulating in the 'intelligence community'. As you say, the problem was (in-part) the disability to tie all that information into a cohesive report that the top-brass would listen and react to in time to make a difference.
Gathering more information is useless if it's not properly filtered and disseminated.
Here in Ontario (perhaps in the rest of Canada? I'm new here) there are electronic kiosks where you can do such things as renew your license or registration, change your address, etc... I'm sure there are people afraid to use it, but it's great for those of us who are not technophobic.
I have memories of the DMV in California and spending half-a-day hopping from line-to-line to get simple tasks taken care of. I'll use the kiosk whenever I can!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not trying to troll you here -- I'd love to see some citations for the fact's you're presenting, such as who's paying the taxes, how much wealth the top 1% are absorbing, etc...
"we are at 4.6% unemployment" ... "5.7 million new jobs have been created since 2003."
The CIA World Factbook entry on the U.S. (updated October 5th) states 5.1% (2005 est) unemployment index (okay, not a big difference, but still, when dealing with such small percentages, that's still a 10% difference), with 12% below poverty (not exactly great there, for such an economic powerhouse). And, keep in mind, the revised U.I. is not a true reflection of unemployment rates, it's based only on "new unemployment claims". In a nut-shell, it's not a terribly accurate measure of economic health in and of itself. If a person loses their $60,000.00/year job and starts working part-time at McD's to try to bring in some money, they don't even get counted as a new unemployment claim because, well, they're working!
Meanwhile, public debt is 68% of the GDP (the GDP, by the way, is $12,000,000,000,000.00, so apparently the debt-load is > eight trillion dollars).
In the two year period of 2004-2005 three million jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector alone. How you spin the data you selectively present makes a difference... While I'm certain that there are many benefiting in the GWB economy, there are many suffering as well.
(This is where you're supposed to respond and say something about poor people being that way by choice, that if they'd only work a little harder then they too could become rich and successful, and avoid a situation where the military seems like the only viable option).
Inflation is miniscule.
Quote from outside source: "The inflation outlook remains highly uncertain, and until we actually see inflation begin to slow down, I will be focused on the upside risks in the outlook," Yellen said in a speech to the California Independent Bankers convention in Laguna Beach, California.
In the Carter days, minimum wage was far closer to a living wage than it is today. Executive compensation was also much closer to employee compensation -- granted, there may be a higher level of benefits for the peons these days, but in almost all corporations, the lower you are on the totem pole, the more you are paying out of your own pocket for "benefits" such as health care (seriously, the U.S. still lacks national health care?)
Now, I'm not saying the Dem's would make it any better, that's not for me to say, but it seems that the truthiness of you post is aimed at justifying a specific agenda. Frankly, I think the Dem's are the same as the GOP with one small difference -- they tend to lack backbones. Bottom-line, both the primary parties seem to be no more than corporate lapdogs in this day and age. You'll never see any radical changes in economic policy based on who wins or loses, perhaps only in "moral issues" legislation and warmongering.
Medal of Honor, here we come!
...are you... could you be... are you implying that the researcher..... **Cheated** ?!?!?
Look at it this way:
My guess is the only striking difference is: they don't spend half their time trying to get re-elected. Now, this could be a good thing, or this could be a bad thing, I suppose.... an incompetent worker spending half his time trying to get re-elected just might be better than an incompetent worker devoted to his "work".. or is he/she?
POS meant point-of-sale... guess I was mistaken.
1. higher fuel prices = higher prices on everything else
2. fuel prices have been rising faster (much faster) than inflation
Of course it's on people's minds!
Well, I didn't RTFA (of course) but this little gem from the summary says, "but batteries must be properly wrapped and stowed away in carry-on for the duration of the flight."
Carry-on *would* be the cabin. But actually, wouldn't they be safer in the sub-zero-low-oxygen-cargo-hold, than in the cabin? (where perhaps a malicious individual could purposely cause just about *any* type of batter to go up in flames?)
em/ holds breath waiting for the new FAA regulation re: batteries, knowing it will probably be measureable in nano-seconds
Well it's true -- and it's been repeated many times, and the *IAA obviously would prefer to ignore the evidence, so just to add my own experiences on the issue:
A while back I worked as a sysadmin for {censored} and the boss allowed us to setup a fileshare from which to stream MP3s to our workstations. Everyone ripped some music from their personal collection, and everyone was able to browse the entire "catalog". If I listened to something a coworker had ripped but I didn't own, I'd buy it if I liked it. If I didn't like it, I didn't listen to it again.
I rarely (although do on occasion) buy music that I've heard on the radio -- I'd say about one CD per year (at the most) I purchase because I heard the artist on the radio. Mostly, I just don't like the garbage played on the airwaves.
When I'm in a music store, however, and they're playing something original I always ask what they're playing. Compared with one CD purchase per year from radio exposure, I purchase one newly discovered CD for about every 5 times I go into a music store.
The bottom line is -- the more you let people sample the music (and I'm not talking about the top-20 that get's pushed onto the airwaves) then the more music people are going to buy. Yes, sure -- there may also be a rise in piracy, but refer to the former point and you'll see that the process feeds itself... more music floating about (no matter how it got there) means more profits for the "artists".
I wonder if the industry will ever take their hands off their ears/eyes and figure this out -- I suppose it's *not* in the interest of the *IAA to admit this, however, because it'd put them out of work.
I don't see how customers "working it at speed" matters -- they store isn't paying them. Also, the associate attending to the self-checkout lines (where I've seen them) is attending to 4, 6, 8, or more systems. On the rare occasion that a manager must intercede -- well, the manager is on duty anyway, and is likely making salary, not wage, so it doesn't really cost the store anything in that case, does it? I've never seen an incident that required manager intervention where I've seen these self-checkout lines. If the systems weren't clunky and unintuitive (and constantly going into "wait for assistance" mode) perhaps some customers could work them "at speed" too.
If the grocer is losing money from impulse purchases (oh boy, $0.10 profit from that pack of gum) they're making it back in reduced labor & overhead... I don't have solid figures, but even a minimum-wager with no benefits has a higher overhead than an autonomous system with a low maintainance requirement.... certainly enough to offset that $0.10 profit per customer....
But regarding self-checkout: the systems I've used are all a major pain in the arse; the only time I'll use them is if I have very few items to purchase, the self-checkout lines are clear, and the regular checkout lines are overflowing. Why?.... self-checkout systems are uusually crap, with terrible user-interfaes, buggy scales that constantly put you into "wait for assistance" mode because they think you're trying to steal something, staffed by a single "associate" who is busy talking to a co-worker or otherwise unattentive to your self-checkout system being in locak-down mode... I could go on, but basically until they rqadivally improve the efficiency of self-checkout I generally avoid it.
(and I don't impulse-buy in the regular checkout lines... the only thing I'll grab there are batteries or phone-cards that I actually need.)
Great points! There's no better way to take your passion away than by taking something that you truely love and adding: inconsisentcies of other people, strict schedules, typical (i.e. crappy) management, and all the other flotsam & jetsam of a job to make you burn-out.
When will employers learn that inquisitve and/or intelligent people are best served by relaxed and evolving work environments (except for the work-a-holic stress-magnet types -- who, let's be honest, are quite possibly that way simply because it allows them to stay away from the wife (or husband) and the kids?)
<flame on!>
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing really missing from today's email clients is an intuitive means to export/backup/import email by the message, box, or in it's entirity. Well, heck with intuitive, how about existant?
Reality-Check:
/.
When Picasa for Linux was announced I tried to download it, but was prevented from doing so because I live in Canada. I was only able to obtain it by going through a proxy. That's not a rumor, that's a fact. That wasn't due to any of their servers being down -- they explicitly told me I couldn't download it because of where I lived.
If they've changed that policy, well that's grand, but since I already had downloaded it perhaps you might consider it reasonable that I didn't pursue such knowledge -- or maybe not, who knows. If you'd researched the situation instead of repeating rumors you might have known that, but of course I wouldn't expect that from anyone on
Just to note, that unlike Picasa/Linux, this version of GoogleEarth IS downloadable from outside the USA without needing a proxy in the States...
Yay! Go Google!
You're kidding right? You're not new to /., so where do you get off expecting someone to RTFP? :)
"Personally, I think cars are some kind of advanced intelligence sapping device." - ObsessiveMathsFreak
(Repo Man) "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are" - Miller
It must be true!
resume a download...
I think Z-modem was around before Akami, Quicktime, etc.... no?
And isn't there some little detail about protecting a patent or lose it? Or is that only a copyright thing? I get so confused in all this IP quicksand....
I don't see why the public can't encourage websites to adopt the "rating" meta-tag (that I mentioned in my other post.) There's no need to try to refine the rating down to 2 values (general/adult) it would probably work best done in a similar way as the video-game ratings that the industry has largely self-adopted...
:)
i.e. have a "global" rating level, perhaps General, Teen, Mature, Abnormal
but then include supplementary tags that define *why* it's been classified in gloabl category "X", such as
Meta: Rating - Mature
Meta: Rating-Content - Nudity, Photography, Art (for the artist or photographer's page)
vs.
Meta: Rating-Content - xxx, sexual intercourse, pornography (for the porono-pages)
or something to that effect... if it were widely adopted, then the browser-makers could easilly add parental-control type filtering based on either global or specific ratings, with extensible keywords so that certain people could filter just about anything, and others could allow art/photography type sites through.... Mozilla could probably do this through a plug-in (I mean extension) I presume.
Well, since the Content-Type meta tag already has a defined function, you might try to get your legislators to push for wider (or even ubiquitous) use of the "rating" tag, i.e.:
/>
<meta name="rating" content="general"
etc...
I think I still prefer Deuteros... sure SC has a better combat system, but Deuteros (Atari ST) has an elegant way of integrating "new technology" (in-game) in a way that enhances game-play. I don't have the ol' ST anymore, but MAME handles it without too many crashes :)
Yes and no.... In a perfect world, yes -- it would help fight terrorism; even if the terrorists are using encryption there is meta-data there to be mined.... when you cross-reference the data begin and end points you can still get the jist of what may be going on; do so with *ALL* traffic on the 'net and you can certainly learn something useful.
On the other hand, it would have been clear to a child that Osama and friends were going to take over commerical jets for nefarious deeds long before 9-11 if they'd had access to all the same information that was circulating in the 'intelligence community'. As you say, the problem was (in-part) the disability to tie all that information into a cohesive report that the top-brass would listen and react to in time to make a difference.
Gathering more information is useless if it's not properly filtered and disseminated.
Here in Ontario (perhaps in the rest of Canada? I'm new here) there are electronic kiosks where you can do such things as renew your license or registration, change your address, etc... I'm sure there are people afraid to use it, but it's great for those of us who are not technophobic.
I have memories of the DMV in California and spending half-a-day hopping from line-to-line to get simple tasks taken care of. I'll use the kiosk whenever I can!
You say IC, but I say !IC
Well, if your brain-dead web-filter is screening out any request to a .xxx domain, what if a user (or your child) enters in an IP address?
Reverse lookup? okay then, what if they use an anonymizing service?
This is just politics as usual in the USA though, I guess.