we won't have electric cars anytime soon. It's all related to that most despised of schemes: planned obsolescence.
ICE-driven cars break down, as everyone knows. With so many moving parts, vast temperature fluxations, etc, they very rarely last longer than 150,000 miles, which is around 10 years for most drivers. Most people who can afford to, however, end up purchasing a new car every two to three years, and trading off the old one, under the assumption that cars will start developing problems after 50,000 miles or so.
However, electric motors and drivetrains have a much, much longer lifespan. I've never seen exact numbers, but I would imagine 200k-300k wouldn't be unreasonable.
So, as a business, do you choose to spend your R&D dollars on a car that needs to be replaced every 10 years, or a car that needs to be replaced every 20, 30, etc? It really doesn't make sense to cut your own throat like that. Granted, there will still be people who buy new cars every other year just to keep up in style, but the depreciation rate will decrease considerably.
BTW, I'm sure somebody else has mentioned this, but there's a movie called Who Killed the Electric Car? coming out soon that goes into this. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
I went to high school in the conservative, Bible Belt south. I don't know if this is normal for the rest of the country, but throughout high school we said the pledge as well. The funny thing is 9/11 was my freshman year, and Iraq started my junior year. After Iraq, about a quarter of the student body engaged in a long-term civil disobedience campaign in which we would remain sitting during the pledge, or on particularly bad days we would stand with our backs to it.
The administration didn't like that much, but it's not as if they are going to call up the Texas National Guard to force us to pledge. So, I suppose the point of this is that, yes, we are on a horribly slippery slope to tyranny right now, but at least they couldn't force me to pledge allegiance to a flag, and vicariously, a cause I didn't believe in.
The NSA is listening. You're advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government, which is complete treason. You don't want to piss these guys off; they might throw you in a secret prison and not let you out for months on end.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
Let's also not forget that in the Texas government, political parties are relatively irrelevant. Most of the decisions in the legislature are made by the leaders of the Houses, who in turn have a "team" of both Republicans and Democrats. Things don't split easily down party lines, but on whether you are on the Speaker's or the Lieutenant Governor's team or not. In this way, it's actually pretty close to a parliamentry system, but alot more idiotic.
BTW, Texas' government is fundamentally broke, and won't be fixed until a new Constitution is written that is more statist than the current one, which strictly limits central power to the point of inefficacy. The proof is that this is, IIRC, the fourth special session Gov Perry has called on education, and there is shit to show for any of them.
Any idea how bad desalination plants are for the nearshore ecosystem? A couple of years ago the national high school policy debate topic was centered on ocean policy. My case was to ban seaside desalination plants. There's about four major issues here.
1. The building process is incredibly disruptive. It often involves shifting parts of the natural shoreline and disrupting migration patterns, not to mention the chemical leaks involved in physical construction. 2. Once they're built, they begin to remove salt from the water, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, most plants just dump the removed salt back into the water that they drew from. Common sense then tells you that in this small region of the ocean that eventually there's going to be a higher salt concentration than normal. And as we all know, higher salt concentrations are not good. 3. As this highly concentrated saltwater is piped back out of the plant, it is often several degrees warmer than when it came in, due to the heating process. Regions of heavy desalination development, like on the Persian Gulf, have noticed gradual warming of the ocean, often to the detriment of species. 4. Finally, fish love to swim up and get stuck in the input pipes. Yes, it happens, and no, grating doesn't really help.
Then, of course, you have the ecological footprint in terms of the emissions from fossil fuel use, which is decent in size. Instead, the better route is something that actually makes sense most in desert environments anyway. You pump in the seawater several miles inland to an arid, desert-like area. Then you set up giant passive solar cells, angled, and pass the water underneath them. The water evaporates, runs down the slope of the cell, and is collected at the bottom. The salt is gathered and buried deep underground or sold as a commodity. It's pretty damn efficient too. I don't really remember, but I believe the numbers were one million gallons a day on a square km area of land. And, it's indefinently useable, especially after an oil crash, with the only real energy needed is for pumping the water inland, which could be cogenerated on some of the cells. Anyway, this is the better way of doing desal. Also, don't think that America is free from this either. If you want to see an example of overuse of water, you should check out the Rio Grande sometime. It's not particularly Grande anymore.
to those of us who actually deserve to be in college and are spending rediculous amounts for it. Back in the day, college was considered for the incredibly capable. Now, when I sit in my lecture classes of 500+ people, and listen to the conversations around me, all I can think is how utterly useless my degree will be.
Yes, that's called be a temp, and it's basically the first step in becoming a full-time employee. It's not exactly easy to become a full employee at the post office, and competition is fierce. If she was not hired on after several of the temp terms, than she was more than likely not competitive enough.
As for gone postal, first of all, it has more to do with the high-stress nature of the job and the previous lack of effective management in this regards. Workplace violence has gone done drastically over the past 10 years or so in the post office. Furthermore, if you speak to anyone that works at the post office, that term is now considered extremely offensive. I would recommend against it.
The United States Postal Service exists on the fringe between public and non-public. They are fully autonomous and do not recieve directions from the executive branch, as well as the fact they completely finaince themselves without public dollars. At the same time, they exist within the bureaucracy, and the Postmaster General holds a public office, so whichever way you take this.
BTW, stop bitching about postal stamps. Do you understand that for 39 cents you can send a piece of mail nearly 3,000 miles in around 3 or 4 days? Do you get how good of a deal that is? No other country in the world has a postal system that good, and on top of that, they make a profit and recieve no governmental subsidies, something that can't be said of many PRIVATE sector businesses. Furthermore, they have a completely unionized workforce that makes among the best wages on the market. It's not unusual for a standard postal clerk to earn $60,000 a year, or more depending on local market, etc. So, I don't want to hear anymore bullshit about how unionization hurts business. The post office is doing damn good by paying their workers good and providing speedy service at a good price.
Yea, yea... "tough love", "save the rod, spoil the child.."
You guys that are saying that, you don't have the side of research on you. It may be one thing to say, "I'd beat my kid until they'd learn to be quiet," but that practice just DOESNT work. It causes a whole host of problems within the child including insecure attachment, mental scarring, and the justification of the use of aggression to solve problems. Here's a little riddle for you: Two kids are on the playground, and one of them is running around, pushing people over, hitting, kicking, etc. The other is playing in the sand with a smaller group of kids, interacting, using social skills such as sharing. Which one of these kids is the one which gets hit with a belt whenever he misbehaves? From that angle it is completely different, right?
Not to say that the mother was acting appropriately. Parenting lesson #1, use the minimal level of force needed to immediately stop misbehavior, whether this threatening time out or physically restraining the child. That does not include physical abuse. The reason this works is because of a wonderful little thing called cognitive dissonance. When you stop behavior, the child then has time to analyze what he has done and will come to the point where his opinion of himself as good contrasts with his bad actions, causing discomfort. He therefor has to relieve this. If you use violence on the child, he relieves this by a process called overjustification, and ends up devaluing the consequences of his behavior, and will continue doing it once you walk away. If you stop the behavior mildly, then the child will be forced to reevaluate his own internal mindset, and behaviorally change will result. Some of you are already saying "That will not work on a 5 year old," but it does. Children learn these things incredibly early on.
Anyway, guys, please stop this whole beating the child thing. It's not cute, it's not macho, and it's not good parental advice. There are so many ills within our society already that we don't need people going around and blatently advocating the advancement of another one.
I worked at Fry's, and was actually lucky enough to catch somebody doing this trick. I say lucky because, besides for other draconian security measures in place at Fry's is a $50 bonus for catching someone shoplifting ($300 if it was an employee). Anyway, these scams are particularly clever because it requires very little in the form of "suspicious behavior" from the customer. All they have to do is put the package in the cart with the barcode up and casually place the sticker on it. Furthermore, since you can pretty much generate whatever you want on that, it can be difficult for the cashier to notice it, because the product could ring up as an item very similiar. For instance, the trick goes to purchase an iPod case for $10 and then take home the barcode and fiddle with it until you make a sticker with the same info on it. It rings up to the cashier as "iPod" something, and it takes a rather observant cashier to notice this. Very clever, indeed.
The only reason I caught him was because I noticed he kept peeling something off of the box, which was suspicious. Apparently, he had f'ed up the first sticker's application, and it was crooked, a dead giveaway.
Hah! You think a particle physicist does not know his computer very well? I've met a quite a few of them, and all of them are incredibly computer savvy, much more so than me. Most of them I know can program in very base languages like FORTRAN, and they all have enough knowledge of assembly to do by hand adjustments. Since they tend to run extremely complicated calculations and need the highest efficiency available, they know their crap.
I've long thought that the only reason MS decided to go with the smaller laptop drives is their drastically reduced capacity. Does the lure of piracy decrease with the size of the Hard Drive? I'll admit that on my modded XBox, I prefer to rip all of my *legit* games to the HD, just for easy access. Anybody else think the same way?
Actually, I'm not a clinical, in the sense that I've never practiced psychology. I'm more of a interdisciplinary theoretical psychologist, in that my interests lie in the crossroads of political science and psychology. BTW, I think my nick gives away enough about myself.;-D
I'm a psychologist. Have the degree and everything to prove it. For full disclosure to any other psychologists out there, I'm a mixture of the neo-Freudian and sociocultural schools, with a dash of biogenetic. Personally, I view this as a good thing. There's been alot of bashing of hypnosis by both the scientific and the nonscientific communities for either it's 1) percieved goofiness (you're getting sleeppyyyyy...) or 2) the suggestability it causes. However, I find it to be a good tool if it's handled by somebody who is actually qualified to do it in a scientific manner. Most of the suggestability accounts are done by non professionals pretending to be professionals. They're mostly shame artists. But for a real hypnotist, the real value of hynopsis is not in recovering deep dark secrets, but for use as a tool of self-honesty, in bringing issues to light that people really know, but keep back by a thin layer of repression. If you dig any deeper than that, then you risk falling into the suggestability catagory.
Yea, I surely chose to send him. That was exactly my choice. I made the conscious act to concentrate all of my mental efforts to subvertly have Bush represent me. It's called a democracy, jackass.
Actually, living about a mile away from the Dell headquarters, and working briefly in their factories, don't give them that service bullshit. The technical service agents they hire out through the temp agencies are simply people that did decent on the factory side of the operation, and they promoted up. There's nothing inherently guaranteeing that these guys have good technical abilities. Furthermore, since they hire out everybody through a temp agency, they do not have to pay a good wage, comperable to the Austin area's market values. Most of the people that work the tech support lines for Dell are making around $10/hr, and Austin, while certaintly not a NY or San Francisco, is not exactly a cheap place to live. Furthermore, talk to anyone of the people working those lines, or in the factory, and nobody talks positively about the place. Dell is a big enigma in this town, in my opinion. It is crucial to the city's economy, but very few people actually LIKE workign for them, but prefer to work for the smaller or more technically advanced firms around the city, like Sun or Freescale.
For the record, I actually work, through a temp agency, for Samsung technical support. It is probably the most life draining job I've ever had in my life. It's lower than average for tech support in the area ($9.50/hr, whereas most tech support line guys around here make $14/hr or so). Furthermore, instead of just having experience with computer technical support, I have to know camcorders, DVD players, TVs, MP3 players, and satellite recievers. It would certaintly seem like that would qualify me for more than average pay. Oh well. What it really comes to though, is that, quite frankly, the vast majority of customers deserve to be outsourced to India. The technical competence of the majority of them is too low to be deserving of experienced technical support. I should not have to answer 20 times a day how to hook up a TV player. Let other people do that, and let me concentrate on software conflicts with our monitors, or something that's not a waste of my abilities.
When I read the submission, I knew that the first 50 posts or so would probably involve a hick accent and killing people. What I didn't expect was the fact that NOBODY would say anything about that characterization.
Look, Texas has hick parts. There's strong concentrations of them in East Texas around the Louisiana border and also in West Texas starting from Abilene west and north. But, it is unfair to characterize this entire state as being uncultured cowboy gun slingers, nor is it fair to generalize people who live in the more rural parts as hicks. This state is as cultured as any others, and when it comes to the South, we stand far and above. We have the largest and one of the most prestigious university systems in the world, we represent one of the most diverse cultural melting pots in the country, we have probably the best music and independent film communities outside of New York and LA, and the list goes on.
What disturbs me most is that not one person from Texas wants to dispute any of that bullshit the rest of these comments are flinging about. And it's not that there aren't Texan/. readers. Austin is part of the San Francisco - Seattle - Austin Axis of Technology. Screw the rest of you guys.
As far as the AG sueing Sony, hats off to him. It's not exactly a secret that this state is pretty damn laissez-faire. That was a damn impressive move.
Also, by the way, you know that Texan accent that you have been using mentally to read this post? Stop that... now.
Just as people didn't have the slighest moral right to delegate anything to you, like, you know.. GOVERNMENT.
Get your head out of your ass and realize you're living in a society.
I'm tired of hearing about all these advances that we will NEVER see. Our public inferstructure budgets are lame, and I'm tired of hearing about a "market-solution". No company is going to spend the massive amount of cash needed to wire even one city with this, especially when there's not much of a percieved market for faster broadband. Why doesn't the FCC get off their ass and mandate this kind of thing instead of doing nothing? Also, why in the world does is this at least 5 years away? I mean, I understand they need to research this and then set up manufacturing and distributing routes, but I just don't understand why that would take more than a year and a half, at most.
Stop telling me about things I want, but will never have.
One of my favorite stories from my High School AP Government teacher had to do with local Eminent Domain.
One of his friends had a relatively small house on a large piece of land, with about 20-25 pecan trees on it. The local government wanted to do some neighborhood development in his area, and claimed Eminent Domain to build something like a playground on his land. They offered him somewhere around 70% of the market value of his home (around $50,000. It was actually a decently nice home and land, et al. Just very low housing market prices in this city). Well, he didn't want to leave his house, etc, especially for that low of a price. So, he hired a lawyer and fought it. They arbitrated to agree to hire a third party to assess the value of the home, and that would be the agreed upon price he would sell at. Well, the independent assessor came back with a figure of around $200,000. The city was furious and the dude cashed that check smiling all the way to the bank.
The difference? The assessor factored in the value of the pecan trees on the property, which generated the guy about $5000 dollars a year, for 30 years.
Take that, local government!
Slashdot Mirror
ICE-driven cars break down, as everyone knows. With so many moving parts, vast temperature fluxations, etc, they very rarely last longer than 150,000 miles, which is around 10 years for most drivers. Most people who can afford to, however, end up purchasing a new car every two to three years, and trading off the old one, under the assumption that cars will start developing problems after 50,000 miles or so.
However, electric motors and drivetrains have a much, much longer lifespan. I've never seen exact numbers, but I would imagine 200k-300k wouldn't be unreasonable.
So, as a business, do you choose to spend your R&D dollars on a car that needs to be replaced every 10 years, or a car that needs to be replaced every 20, 30, etc? It really doesn't make sense to cut your own throat like that. Granted, there will still be people who buy new cars every other year just to keep up in style, but the depreciation rate will decrease considerably.
BTW, I'm sure somebody else has mentioned this, but there's a movie called Who Killed the Electric Car? coming out soon that goes into this. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
I went to high school in the conservative, Bible Belt south. I don't know if this is normal for the rest of the country, but throughout high school we said the pledge as well. The funny thing is 9/11 was my freshman year, and Iraq started my junior year. After Iraq, about a quarter of the student body engaged in a long-term civil disobedience campaign in which we would remain sitting during the pledge, or on particularly bad days we would stand with our backs to it.
The administration didn't like that much, but it's not as if they are going to call up the Texas National Guard to force us to pledge. So, I suppose the point of this is that, yes, we are on a horribly slippery slope to tyranny right now, but at least they couldn't force me to pledge allegiance to a flag, and vicariously, a cause I didn't believe in.
Shhhh....
The NSA is listening. You're advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government, which is complete treason. You don't want to piss these guys off; they might throw you in a secret prison and not let you out for months on end.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
Let's also not forget that in the Texas government, political parties are relatively irrelevant. Most of the decisions in the legislature are made by the leaders of the Houses, who in turn have a "team" of both Republicans and Democrats. Things don't split easily down party lines, but on whether you are on the Speaker's or the Lieutenant Governor's team or not. In this way, it's actually pretty close to a parliamentry system, but alot more idiotic.
BTW, Texas' government is fundamentally broke, and won't be fixed until a new Constitution is written that is more statist than the current one, which strictly limits central power to the point of inefficacy. The proof is that this is, IIRC, the fourth special session Gov Perry has called on education, and there is shit to show for any of them.
Come to mention it... There aren't very many 24 year olds in fraternities either.
Well.. perhaps in some of the heavier partying ones. =D
Any idea how bad desalination plants are for the nearshore ecosystem? A couple of years ago the national high school policy debate topic was centered on ocean policy. My case was to ban seaside desalination plants. There's about four major issues here.
1. The building process is incredibly disruptive. It often involves shifting parts of the natural shoreline and disrupting migration patterns, not to mention the chemical leaks involved in physical construction.
2. Once they're built, they begin to remove salt from the water, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, most plants just dump the removed salt back into the water that they drew from. Common sense then tells you that in this small region of the ocean that eventually there's going to be a higher salt concentration than normal. And as we all know, higher salt concentrations are not good.
3. As this highly concentrated saltwater is piped back out of the plant, it is often several degrees warmer than when it came in, due to the heating process. Regions of heavy desalination development, like on the Persian Gulf, have noticed gradual warming of the ocean, often to the detriment of species.
4. Finally, fish love to swim up and get stuck in the input pipes. Yes, it happens, and no, grating doesn't really help.
Then, of course, you have the ecological footprint in terms of the emissions from fossil fuel use, which is decent in size. Instead, the better route is something that actually makes sense most in desert environments anyway. You pump in the seawater several miles inland to an arid, desert-like area. Then you set up giant passive solar cells, angled, and pass the water underneath them. The water evaporates, runs down the slope of the cell, and is collected at the bottom. The salt is gathered and buried deep underground or sold as a commodity. It's pretty damn efficient too. I don't really remember, but I believe the numbers were one million gallons a day on a square km area of land. And, it's indefinently useable, especially after an oil crash, with the only real energy needed is for pumping the water inland, which could be cogenerated on some of the cells. Anyway, this is the better way of doing desal. Also, don't think that America is free from this either. If you want to see an example of overuse of water, you should check out the Rio Grande sometime. It's not particularly Grande anymore.
to those of us who actually deserve to be in college and are spending rediculous amounts for it. Back in the day, college was considered for the incredibly capable. Now, when I sit in my lecture classes of 500+ people, and listen to the conversations around me, all I can think is how utterly useless my degree will be.
Yes, that's called be a temp, and it's basically the first step in becoming a full-time employee. It's not exactly easy to become a full employee at the post office, and competition is fierce. If she was not hired on after several of the temp terms, than she was more than likely not competitive enough.
As for gone postal, first of all, it has more to do with the high-stress nature of the job and the previous lack of effective management in this regards. Workplace violence has gone done drastically over the past 10 years or so in the post office. Furthermore, if you speak to anyone that works at the post office, that term is now considered extremely offensive. I would recommend against it.
Just a clarification issue here...
The United States Postal Service exists on the fringe between public and non-public. They are fully autonomous and do not recieve directions from the executive branch, as well as the fact they completely finaince themselves without public dollars. At the same time, they exist within the bureaucracy, and the Postmaster General holds a public office, so whichever way you take this.
BTW, stop bitching about postal stamps. Do you understand that for 39 cents you can send a piece of mail nearly 3,000 miles in around 3 or 4 days? Do you get how good of a deal that is? No other country in the world has a postal system that good, and on top of that, they make a profit and recieve no governmental subsidies, something that can't be said of many PRIVATE sector businesses. Furthermore, they have a completely unionized workforce that makes among the best wages on the market. It's not unusual for a standard postal clerk to earn $60,000 a year, or more depending on local market, etc. So, I don't want to hear anymore bullshit about how unionization hurts business. The post office is doing damn good by paying their workers good and providing speedy service at a good price.
Yea, yea... "tough love", "save the rod, spoil the child.."
You guys that are saying that, you don't have the side of research on you. It may be one thing to say, "I'd beat my kid until they'd learn to be quiet," but that practice just DOESNT work. It causes a whole host of problems within the child including insecure attachment, mental scarring, and the justification of the use of aggression to solve problems. Here's a little riddle for you: Two kids are on the playground, and one of them is running around, pushing people over, hitting, kicking, etc. The other is playing in the sand with a smaller group of kids, interacting, using social skills such as sharing. Which one of these kids is the one which gets hit with a belt whenever he misbehaves? From that angle it is completely different, right?
Not to say that the mother was acting appropriately. Parenting lesson #1, use the minimal level of force needed to immediately stop misbehavior, whether this threatening time out or physically restraining the child. That does not include physical abuse. The reason this works is because of a wonderful little thing called cognitive dissonance. When you stop behavior, the child then has time to analyze what he has done and will come to the point where his opinion of himself as good contrasts with his bad actions, causing discomfort. He therefor has to relieve this. If you use violence on the child, he relieves this by a process called overjustification, and ends up devaluing the consequences of his behavior, and will continue doing it once you walk away. If you stop the behavior mildly, then the child will be forced to reevaluate his own internal mindset, and behaviorally change will result. Some of you are already saying "That will not work on a 5 year old," but it does. Children learn these things incredibly early on.
Anyway, guys, please stop this whole beating the child thing. It's not cute, it's not macho, and it's not good parental advice. There are so many ills within our society already that we don't need people going around and blatently advocating the advancement of another one.
I worked at Fry's, and was actually lucky enough to catch somebody doing this trick. I say lucky because, besides for other draconian security measures in place at Fry's is a $50 bonus for catching someone shoplifting ($300 if it was an employee). Anyway, these scams are particularly clever because it requires very little in the form of "suspicious behavior" from the customer. All they have to do is put the package in the cart with the barcode up and casually place the sticker on it. Furthermore, since you can pretty much generate whatever you want on that, it can be difficult for the cashier to notice it, because the product could ring up as an item very similiar. For instance, the trick goes to purchase an iPod case for $10 and then take home the barcode and fiddle with it until you make a sticker with the same info on it. It rings up to the cashier as "iPod" something, and it takes a rather observant cashier to notice this. Very clever, indeed.
The only reason I caught him was because I noticed he kept peeling something off of the box, which was suspicious. Apparently, he had f'ed up the first sticker's application, and it was crooked, a dead giveaway.
Hah! You think a particle physicist does not know his computer very well? I've met a quite a few of them, and all of them are incredibly computer savvy, much more so than me. Most of them I know can program in very base languages like FORTRAN, and they all have enough knowledge of assembly to do by hand adjustments. Since they tend to run extremely complicated calculations and need the highest efficiency available, they know their crap.
I've long thought that the only reason MS decided to go with the smaller laptop drives is their drastically reduced capacity. Does the lure of piracy decrease with the size of the Hard Drive? I'll admit that on my modded XBox, I prefer to rip all of my *legit* games to the HD, just for easy access. Anybody else think the same way?
Very Pale lot. Spoonerism.
No, you were just looking at a crowd of people. They are a vale pale lot up there.
Actually, I'm not a clinical, in the sense that I've never practiced psychology. I'm more of a interdisciplinary theoretical psychologist, in that my interests lie in the crossroads of political science and psychology. BTW, I think my nick gives away enough about myself. ;-D
I'm a psychologist. Have the degree and everything to prove it. For full disclosure to any other psychologists out there, I'm a mixture of the neo-Freudian and sociocultural schools, with a dash of biogenetic. Personally, I view this as a good thing. There's been alot of bashing of hypnosis by both the scientific and the nonscientific communities for either it's 1) percieved goofiness (you're getting sleeppyyyyy...) or 2) the suggestability it causes. However, I find it to be a good tool if it's handled by somebody who is actually qualified to do it in a scientific manner. Most of the suggestability accounts are done by non professionals pretending to be professionals. They're mostly shame artists. But for a real hypnotist, the real value of hynopsis is not in recovering deep dark secrets, but for use as a tool of self-honesty, in bringing issues to light that people really know, but keep back by a thin layer of repression. If you dig any deeper than that, then you risk falling into the suggestability catagory.
Yea, I surely chose to send him. That was exactly my choice. I made the conscious act to concentrate all of my mental efforts to subvertly have Bush represent me. It's called a democracy, jackass.
Actually, living about a mile away from the Dell headquarters, and working briefly in their factories, don't give them that service bullshit. The technical service agents they hire out through the temp agencies are simply people that did decent on the factory side of the operation, and they promoted up. There's nothing inherently guaranteeing that these guys have good technical abilities. Furthermore, since they hire out everybody through a temp agency, they do not have to pay a good wage, comperable to the Austin area's market values. Most of the people that work the tech support lines for Dell are making around $10/hr, and Austin, while certaintly not a NY or San Francisco, is not exactly a cheap place to live. Furthermore, talk to anyone of the people working those lines, or in the factory, and nobody talks positively about the place. Dell is a big enigma in this town, in my opinion. It is crucial to the city's economy, but very few people actually LIKE workign for them, but prefer to work for the smaller or more technically advanced firms around the city, like Sun or Freescale.
For the record, I actually work, through a temp agency, for Samsung technical support. It is probably the most life draining job I've ever had in my life. It's lower than average for tech support in the area ($9.50/hr, whereas most tech support line guys around here make $14/hr or so). Furthermore, instead of just having experience with computer technical support, I have to know camcorders, DVD players, TVs, MP3 players, and satellite recievers. It would certaintly seem like that would qualify me for more than average pay. Oh well. What it really comes to though, is that, quite frankly, the vast majority of customers deserve to be outsourced to India. The technical competence of the majority of them is too low to be deserving of experienced technical support. I should not have to answer 20 times a day how to hook up a TV player. Let other people do that, and let me concentrate on software conflicts with our monitors, or something that's not a waste of my abilities.
When I read the submission, I knew that the first 50 posts or so would probably involve a hick accent and killing people. What I didn't expect was the fact that NOBODY would say anything about that characterization.
/. readers. Austin is part of the San Francisco - Seattle - Austin Axis of Technology. Screw the rest of you guys.
Look, Texas has hick parts. There's strong concentrations of them in East Texas around the Louisiana border and also in West Texas starting from Abilene west and north. But, it is unfair to characterize this entire state as being uncultured cowboy gun slingers, nor is it fair to generalize people who live in the more rural parts as hicks. This state is as cultured as any others, and when it comes to the South, we stand far and above. We have the largest and one of the most prestigious university systems in the world, we represent one of the most diverse cultural melting pots in the country, we have probably the best music and independent film communities outside of New York and LA, and the list goes on.
What disturbs me most is that not one person from Texas wants to dispute any of that bullshit the rest of these comments are flinging about. And it's not that there aren't Texan
As far as the AG sueing Sony, hats off to him. It's not exactly a secret that this state is pretty damn laissez-faire. That was a damn impressive move.
Also, by the way, you know that Texan accent that you have been using mentally to read this post? Stop that... now.
Just as people didn't have the slighest moral right to delegate anything to you, like, you know.. GOVERNMENT. Get your head out of your ass and realize you're living in a society.
I'm tired of hearing about all these advances that we will NEVER see. Our public inferstructure budgets are lame, and I'm tired of hearing about a "market-solution". No company is going to spend the massive amount of cash needed to wire even one city with this, especially when there's not much of a percieved market for faster broadband. Why doesn't the FCC get off their ass and mandate this kind of thing instead of doing nothing? Also, why in the world does is this at least 5 years away? I mean, I understand they need to research this and then set up manufacturing and distributing routes, but I just don't understand why that would take more than a year and a half, at most. Stop telling me about things I want, but will never have.
I read this as "Cyborg Cells Sense Humanity".
I nearly broke down into a "Must free these forms of life from their shackles of our egos!" tirade, but then I realized I think cyborgs kick ass.
One of my favorite stories from my High School AP Government teacher had to do with local Eminent Domain. One of his friends had a relatively small house on a large piece of land, with about 20-25 pecan trees on it. The local government wanted to do some neighborhood development in his area, and claimed Eminent Domain to build something like a playground on his land. They offered him somewhere around 70% of the market value of his home (around $50,000. It was actually a decently nice home and land, et al. Just very low housing market prices in this city). Well, he didn't want to leave his house, etc, especially for that low of a price. So, he hired a lawyer and fought it. They arbitrated to agree to hire a third party to assess the value of the home, and that would be the agreed upon price he would sell at. Well, the independent assessor came back with a figure of around $200,000. The city was furious and the dude cashed that check smiling all the way to the bank. The difference? The assessor factored in the value of the pecan trees on the property, which generated the guy about $5000 dollars a year, for 30 years. Take that, local government!