Basically, inflation and deflation happen at a macroeconomic level in ways that aren't fully understood. If there wasn't any "intentional" inflation, the value of money would be sometimes inflating, and sometimes deflating.
Say you live in this world. You take out a 20-year mortgage on your house, or a 3-year loan on a car or something. Stuff we'd like to encourage; people loaning money put it to better use than leaving it under the mattress and people being loaned money can control the timings of their purchases better.
So you have this loan or mortgage, and are making payments. But the currency deflates, over a few years, and although everybody knows it's eventually going back up, it'll take a while.
Oops. Your payments are a fixed number of dollars, and suddenly those dollars cost you a lot more, since your wages have been cut in response to deflation. Theoretically, at least, you're earning the same value, but the numbers are off. This has the effect of making your payments that much more expensive.
It's not just theory. Farmers in the late 1800s were inclined to take out loans to buy new fancy equipment like tractors that they knew would make them more money, well more than needed to pay off the loan, but they were petrified that deflation would make them end up owing a lot more than they'd planned on. If inflation (its existence, not necessarily the rate) is a constant, it's no big deal, it just gets worked into the interest and everybody understands it. But it keeps a borrower from owing more than they know about up-front, which makes people more confident in borrowing, which makes the economy move.
Hey, don't lump JPM in with the rest of the bailouts. They were doing just dandy when the government asked them to take the money so that it wouldn't become a scarlet letter on the other banks.
I'm all for hating the banks, let's just hate the right banks.
You're missing the point, I think. If you have a "normal" insurance plan, they cover your checkups and medications because they know it saves them money if you deal with your cholesterol before it gives you a $50k heart attack. If you have one of those high-deductible plans (the kind of healthcare you describe), they sign up young folks unlikely to develop chronic medical conditions and just screw them over on the doctor visits, but it doesn't cost them much money if the person skips the doctor visit because a 25 year old guy isn't likely to get a heart attack or a stroke or something in the next 20 years, but they can take his money in the meantime.
I do EMS, so the healthcare debate seems incredibly stupid to me. Let me paint you a scenario - somebody calls from the bad part of town with severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, etc - the paramedics come and see a nasty AMI (heart attack) in progress, he codes in the rig, they work on him, we get him to the hospital where they get a pulse back and he end up OK - at great cost. But he can't pay for it, at all - everybody knows it, but the hospital can't turn him away by law. So he walks out of there, they hound him for a few months and give it up as a lost cause. They figure they'll make it back by tacking a bit onto every visit, procedure, test, etc - which raises costs on the people who have insurance or otherwise can pay. Higher costs to the insurance company become higher costs to the subscriber, so the people on the edge of being able to afford their plan no longer can. Some of them have heart attacks they can't afford... and it goes on.
This isn't a hypothetical. I've had literally dozens of people who follow this exact story. We've already decided on universal healthcare - anyone can walk into an ER and get treated - but we've done it in literally the worst possible way. I'd rather pay for that guy's Lipitor and checkups for 10 years than for his one heart attack.
You can construct the same story for almost anything, from pregnancy (prenatal care substantially reduces complications and hence costs) to asthma (inhalers vs. needing an emergency intubation). Emergent care is the most expensive way to do anything, both because of the complexity of emergency medicine, and the fact that it needs to be much worse to qualify as an emergency. But it's the only way we let the disadvantaged get "treatment"
In any case, "donating to charity" is a fantastic way to find out if a card is valid without making anyone at the bank particularly suspicious. It's also extremely harmful to the charities, since then they get hit with the chargeback when the fraud is detected.
Yes, of course. Especially when kids go to an allergist, they stab some protein under your skin and look for swelling, then call you peanut-allergic. Most of those kids aren't (over 50% by a lot of studies), of course. I had asthma as a kid as well, but I grew out of it. I was just simplifying things for the example.
Statins and albuterol are quite safe for most people, but letting the average guy decide to use them is pretty dangerous. To quote George Carlin: think of how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
I think what makes a lot more sense is for long-term prescriptions - a kid with asthma is going to need an inhaler for years, and a kid allergic to bee stings or peanuts or something is going to need an Epi-Pen for the rest of his life. It makes a lot of sense to give a prescription for a year or two.
But on the other hand, the prescription is a good "timer" - my father has high cholesterol (even on a near-no cholesterol diet) so he's on Lipitor and will be for the foreseeable future. His prescription lasts almost exactly 3 months, at which time he goes to his cardiologist for bloodwork anyway. That makes sense to me - most of these conditions require some attention, and having the prescription run out is a good way to get it.
When I read "the hard way", I expected something at least as sophisticated as Tor, but this is just stupid. Their suggestion is to use Google cache and copy the magnet link.
Horse shit. Not even Greenpeace claims there were more than 200k deaths, and their numbers are a joke. The real numbers seem to be somewhere between 5k and 10k, with some folks saying up to 60k (using outdated and suspect models of radiation exposure).
Your number is two orders of magnitude higher than the highest partly-credible report, and another order of magnitude higher than the generally accepted factors. Though I suppose it depends on what "estimated by some" means... if it includes people pulling numbers out of their ass, what about my estimation that fossil fuels have killed 150 billion people since March?
What are you talking about? I'm agreeing with you. Your original post was about the plane itself, which is a different beast since there's liabilities for mechanics. I don't know why you brought them into it.
As stupid as the GGP's comment was, I don't think it was about the device itself. The article he linked was talking about using them to replace paper charts.
Yeah, but if an airplane mechanic botches a repair job on a plane, he loses his license or gets a huge fine, and can be sued for a lot of money if there are injuries or damages. An iPhone mechanic has no license, can't be fined, and if you wanted to take it to court, you wouldn't get much more than the value of the phone (much more and this shady company would just go bankrupt and not pay)
Actually, I think this particular policy makes sense. Lying on an application/resume is prima facie evidence that you aren't always honest in your dealings with the company. Lying on a resume (or other piece of qualifications) is additionally egregious because it's the document that got you hired, and you presumably lied to show yourself more favorably than you deserve, so you likely wouldn't have been hired in the first place.
“A closer look atdonors reveals a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans”
After each name, the campaign lists deeds that they find objectionable or “less-than-reputable” that mostly boil down to business transactions that included alleged outsourcing or layoffs and involvement in the oil energy industry.
In other words, it's campaigning and an attempt at shaming people. Frankly, it's not a particularly difficult job to meet the criteria. The president personally and publicly mourned the death of just such an individual (Steve Jobs), calling him "among the greatest of American innovators". And before I get haters, he fits the criteria - wealthy, and in his youth he sold blue boxes (illegal). It's a stupid list, but it's even stupider to call this a threat that a renegade executive will make good on.
I'm no fan of Obama's detention and "due process" nonsense, but it's disingenuous and, as the GP said, "histrionics", to claim that the President is going to disappear you or hit you with an airstrike because you won't donate to his reELECTION campaign. Emphasis intentional, since even in this dystopian post-apocalyptic hellscape, he can still lose the election and there's not a damn thing he can do. Big difference to any of the countries like Belize, where you actually can get arrested for not "donating".
By trying to refute the GP, you have proven his point.
Not only that, it's a fire-on-the-spot offense for anyone else anywhere. They'd really set the tone for the company (in a good way) if they said "we're going to hold everyone to the same rules" and had security escort him out of the building after he emptied out his desk, like they'd do to anyone else.
Actually, yes. Between the buttons you can press to do it automatically, the instructions in the box that make it dead easy, the fact that you usually have to do it to even get it to work at all, and the fact that millions of people around the country would be happy to do it for a few bucks, I think it's reasonable.
It's a bog-simple procedure with potential consequences for not completing. We expect people to do their taxes, and this is substantially easier, quicker, and cheaper than that. In any case it's not a requirement, just highly recommended to prevent your ass from being burned by someone else. Even if this guy didn't download the porn, he spent a lot of his time in a federal court.
Don't know why it wasn't in the writeup. This ruling was in the federal court for New York's East District, which I think (IANAL) means it is precedent there (but not necessarily elsewhere in the country)
Excellent suggestion, and a perennial one for Ask Slashdot about the home I'm building/renovating. But run a piece of string or twine or something through the cable instead of screwing around with fish tape. Any time you pull something through, pull through another string. Easy as anything, and a 10 minute job to add whatever cable you need.
[not in citation given] Quotation (emphasis mine):
PGP version 3.0 may also contain support for "key escrow". If it does, it won't be the sort of back door, government mandated key escrow that the Clinton administration is supporting. Instead, it will be a voluntary, individually controlled key escrow system
TO A COMPANY WITH A VASTLY POWERFUL DISTRIBUTED AND HIGHLY PARALLEL COMPUTING ARRAY?
So either Google has an existence proof that P=NP and is using that fact to show you ads, or they're magic. Which one do you think it is? Oh, and "has a million machines at their bidding that can drop everything and work on your Quicken document for a few hundred billion years" isn't a third choice.
To be fair, Valve hasn't ever turned off the matchmaking servers. I think Sierra's WON servers may have been turned off, but Steam-based versions of CS and TF(1) work just fine. Valve doesn't host servers, and they've never given any indication of giving up on their older games. GoldSrc games even (occasionally, to be fair) still get patches
When I went to school, we didn't skip anything. We went over the smallpox brought over (and sometimes transmitted delibrately) by Europeans, we read about the Trail of Tears and the rest of Jackson's Indian removal policy, Custer, the way we stole Texas from Mexico, imperialism, the Spanish-American War, slavery, Japanese internment camps, Hiroshima, the firebombing of Dresden, and our support of various dictators around the world, including the coups we've instigated. There wasn't any hiding.
Of course, I grew up in one of those east-coast godless liberal states... so we were dealing in facts, not "isn't America the most perfect nation ever?" jingoism. If you grew up somewhere else, I'm very sorry.
For the record, although people will be debating the atomic bombing of Japan forever, I think it was justified. There's a lot of evidence that it was a "better watch out" to Russia, who had become aggressive in the area, but I think it stands on its own anyway. The fact is, by that point Japan was going to lose the war. Hirohito had already tried to get his generals to surrender, but it wasn't working. And the US's experience with island-hopping was miserable - effective, but heavy casualties (especially for the Japanese). They literally built planes designed for kamikaze so there were no questions about a willingness to fight to the death. The argument has always been that something overwhelmingly powerful would be the only way to "shock" them into surrender, as opposed to simply destroying their ability to wage war, which would have been a huge number of casualties. Arguably, an atomic bomb (being so powerful on its own) was more effective than a massive conventional bombing campaign would be for that task
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, inflation and deflation happen at a macroeconomic level in ways that aren't fully understood. If there wasn't any "intentional" inflation, the value of money would be sometimes inflating, and sometimes deflating.
Say you live in this world. You take out a 20-year mortgage on your house, or a 3-year loan on a car or something. Stuff we'd like to encourage; people loaning money put it to better use than leaving it under the mattress and people being loaned money can control the timings of their purchases better.
So you have this loan or mortgage, and are making payments. But the currency deflates, over a few years, and although everybody knows it's eventually going back up, it'll take a while.
Oops. Your payments are a fixed number of dollars, and suddenly those dollars cost you a lot more, since your wages have been cut in response to deflation. Theoretically, at least, you're earning the same value, but the numbers are off. This has the effect of making your payments that much more expensive.
It's not just theory. Farmers in the late 1800s were inclined to take out loans to buy new fancy equipment like tractors that they knew would make them more money, well more than needed to pay off the loan, but they were petrified that deflation would make them end up owing a lot more than they'd planned on. If inflation (its existence, not necessarily the rate) is a constant, it's no big deal, it just gets worked into the interest and everybody understands it. But it keeps a borrower from owing more than they know about up-front, which makes people more confident in borrowing, which makes the economy move.
Hey, don't lump JPM in with the rest of the bailouts. They were doing just dandy when the government asked them to take the money so that it wouldn't become a scarlet letter on the other banks.
I'm all for hating the banks, let's just hate the right banks.
MS sells info on how to make your crapware difficult to remove to the crapware authors
[citation needed]
You're missing the point, I think. If you have a "normal" insurance plan, they cover your checkups and medications because they know it saves them money if you deal with your cholesterol before it gives you a $50k heart attack. If you have one of those high-deductible plans (the kind of healthcare you describe), they sign up young folks unlikely to develop chronic medical conditions and just screw them over on the doctor visits, but it doesn't cost them much money if the person skips the doctor visit because a 25 year old guy isn't likely to get a heart attack or a stroke or something in the next 20 years, but they can take his money in the meantime.
I do EMS, so the healthcare debate seems incredibly stupid to me. Let me paint you a scenario - somebody calls from the bad part of town with severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, etc - the paramedics come and see a nasty AMI (heart attack) in progress, he codes in the rig, they work on him, we get him to the hospital where they get a pulse back and he end up OK - at great cost. But he can't pay for it, at all - everybody knows it, but the hospital can't turn him away by law. So he walks out of there, they hound him for a few months and give it up as a lost cause. They figure they'll make it back by tacking a bit onto every visit, procedure, test, etc - which raises costs on the people who have insurance or otherwise can pay. Higher costs to the insurance company become higher costs to the subscriber, so the people on the edge of being able to afford their plan no longer can. Some of them have heart attacks they can't afford... and it goes on.
This isn't a hypothetical. I've had literally dozens of people who follow this exact story. We've already decided on universal healthcare - anyone can walk into an ER and get treated - but we've done it in literally the worst possible way. I'd rather pay for that guy's Lipitor and checkups for 10 years than for his one heart attack.
You can construct the same story for almost anything, from pregnancy (prenatal care substantially reduces complications and hence costs) to asthma (inhalers vs. needing an emergency intubation). Emergent care is the most expensive way to do anything, both because of the complexity of emergency medicine, and the fact that it needs to be much worse to qualify as an emergency. But it's the only way we let the disadvantaged get "treatment"
In any case, "donating to charity" is a fantastic way to find out if a card is valid without making anyone at the bank particularly suspicious. It's also extremely harmful to the charities, since then they get hit with the chargeback when the fraud is detected.
I doubt these guys were being altruistic.
There might be no integrated-circuit memory, but components still need to be connected somehow.
Yeah, the GP mentioned it - wire wrapping. It's pretty cool stuff - done properly, it actually creates an even better connection than solder.
Yes, of course. Especially when kids go to an allergist, they stab some protein under your skin and look for swelling, then call you peanut-allergic. Most of those kids aren't (over 50% by a lot of studies), of course. I had asthma as a kid as well, but I grew out of it. I was just simplifying things for the example.
Statins and albuterol are quite safe for most people, but letting the average guy decide to use them is pretty dangerous. To quote George Carlin: think of how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
I think what makes a lot more sense is for long-term prescriptions - a kid with asthma is going to need an inhaler for years, and a kid allergic to bee stings or peanuts or something is going to need an Epi-Pen for the rest of his life. It makes a lot of sense to give a prescription for a year or two.
But on the other hand, the prescription is a good "timer" - my father has high cholesterol (even on a near-no cholesterol diet) so he's on Lipitor and will be for the foreseeable future. His prescription lasts almost exactly 3 months, at which time he goes to his cardiologist for bloodwork anyway. That makes sense to me - most of these conditions require some attention, and having the prescription run out is a good way to get it.
When I read "the hard way", I expected something at least as sophisticated as Tor, but this is just stupid. Their suggestion is to use Google cache and copy the magnet link.
Please.
Chernobyl death toll is estimated at 1M by some.
Horse shit. Not even Greenpeace claims there were more than 200k deaths, and their numbers are a joke. The real numbers seem to be somewhere between 5k and 10k, with some folks saying up to 60k (using outdated and suspect models of radiation exposure).
Your number is two orders of magnitude higher than the highest partly-credible report, and another order of magnitude higher than the generally accepted factors. Though I suppose it depends on what "estimated by some" means... if it includes people pulling numbers out of their ass, what about my estimation that fossil fuels have killed 150 billion people since March?
What are you talking about? I'm agreeing with you. Your original post was about the plane itself, which is a different beast since there's liabilities for mechanics. I don't know why you brought them into it.
As stupid as the GGP's comment was, I don't think it was about the device itself. The article he linked was talking about using them to replace paper charts.
Yeah, but if an airplane mechanic botches a repair job on a plane, he loses his license or gets a huge fine, and can be sued for a lot of money if there are injuries or damages. An iPhone mechanic has no license, can't be fined, and if you wanted to take it to court, you wouldn't get much more than the value of the phone (much more and this shady company would just go bankrupt and not pay)
Actually, I think this particular policy makes sense. Lying on an application/resume is prima facie evidence that you aren't always honest in your dealings with the company. Lying on a resume (or other piece of qualifications) is additionally egregious because it's the document that got you hired, and you presumably lied to show yourself more favorably than you deserve, so you likely wouldn't have been hired in the first place.
I lol'd. Of course, I'm not sure if you're trolling, or actually mean this Glenn Beck nonsense. Poe's Law and all that.
You've misleadingly quoted the sentence.
“A closer look atdonors reveals a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans”
After each name, the campaign lists deeds that they find objectionable or “less-than-reputable” that mostly boil down to business transactions that included alleged outsourcing or layoffs and involvement in the oil energy industry.
In other words, it's campaigning and an attempt at shaming people. Frankly, it's not a particularly difficult job to meet the criteria. The president personally and publicly mourned the death of just such an individual (Steve Jobs), calling him "among the greatest of American innovators". And before I get haters, he fits the criteria - wealthy, and in his youth he sold blue boxes (illegal). It's a stupid list, but it's even stupider to call this a threat that a renegade executive will make good on.
I'm no fan of Obama's detention and "due process" nonsense, but it's disingenuous and, as the GP said, "histrionics", to claim that the President is going to disappear you or hit you with an airstrike because you won't donate to his reELECTION campaign. Emphasis intentional, since even in this dystopian post-apocalyptic hellscape, he can still lose the election and there's not a damn thing he can do. Big difference to any of the countries like Belize, where you actually can get arrested for not "donating".
By trying to refute the GP, you have proven his point.
Not only that, it's a fire-on-the-spot offense for anyone else anywhere. They'd really set the tone for the company (in a good way) if they said "we're going to hold everyone to the same rules" and had security escort him out of the building after he emptied out his desk, like they'd do to anyone else.
Actually, yes. Between the buttons you can press to do it automatically, the instructions in the box that make it dead easy, the fact that you usually have to do it to even get it to work at all, and the fact that millions of people around the country would be happy to do it for a few bucks, I think it's reasonable.
It's a bog-simple procedure with potential consequences for not completing. We expect people to do their taxes, and this is substantially easier, quicker, and cheaper than that. In any case it's not a requirement, just highly recommended to prevent your ass from being burned by someone else. Even if this guy didn't download the porn, he spent a lot of his time in a federal court.
Don't know why it wasn't in the writeup. This ruling was in the federal court for New York's East District, which I think (IANAL) means it is precedent there (but not necessarily elsewhere in the country)
Not just you. 216.34.181.45
Wow.
Excellent suggestion, and a perennial one for Ask Slashdot about the home I'm building/renovating. But run a piece of string or twine or something through the cable instead of screwing around with fish tape. Any time you pull something through, pull through another string. Easy as anything, and a 10 minute job to add whatever cable you need.
Cryptography (Government mandated PGP backdoor, anyone?)
Sources:
PGP:
http://books.google.com/books?id=cSe_0OnZqjAC&pg=PA352&lpg=PA352&dq=pgp+government+mandated+backdoor&source=bl&ots=cVtmm3vwYK&sig=fwjn6mfbXVWngTS0pgHIFWFV9bE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5OyZT8_pLsXUgAf3gNX1DQ&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=pgp%20government%20mandated%20backdoor&f=false)
[not in citation given]
Quotation (emphasis mine):
PGP version 3.0 may also contain support for "key escrow". If it does, it won't be the sort of back door, government mandated key escrow that the Clinton administration is supporting. Instead, it will be a voluntary, individually controlled key escrow system
TO A COMPANY WITH A VASTLY POWERFUL DISTRIBUTED AND HIGHLY PARALLEL COMPUTING ARRAY?
So either Google has an existence proof that P=NP and is using that fact to show you ads, or they're magic. Which one do you think it is? Oh, and "has a million machines at their bidding that can drop everything and work on your Quicken document for a few hundred billion years" isn't a third choice.
To be fair, Valve hasn't ever turned off the matchmaking servers. I think Sierra's WON servers may have been turned off, but Steam-based versions of CS and TF(1) work just fine. Valve doesn't host servers, and they've never given any indication of giving up on their older games. GoldSrc games even (occasionally, to be fair) still get patches
What?
When I went to school, we didn't skip anything. We went over the smallpox brought over (and sometimes transmitted delibrately) by Europeans, we read about the Trail of Tears and the rest of Jackson's Indian removal policy, Custer, the way we stole Texas from Mexico, imperialism, the Spanish-American War, slavery, Japanese internment camps, Hiroshima, the firebombing of Dresden, and our support of various dictators around the world, including the coups we've instigated. There wasn't any hiding.
Of course, I grew up in one of those east-coast godless liberal states... so we were dealing in facts, not "isn't America the most perfect nation ever?" jingoism. If you grew up somewhere else, I'm very sorry.
For the record, although people will be debating the atomic bombing of Japan forever, I think it was justified. There's a lot of evidence that it was a "better watch out" to Russia, who had become aggressive in the area, but I think it stands on its own anyway. The fact is, by that point Japan was going to lose the war. Hirohito had already tried to get his generals to surrender, but it wasn't working. And the US's experience with island-hopping was miserable - effective, but heavy casualties (especially for the Japanese). They literally built planes designed for kamikaze so there were no questions about a willingness to fight to the death. The argument has always been that something overwhelmingly powerful would be the only way to "shock" them into surrender, as opposed to simply destroying their ability to wage war, which would have been a huge number of casualties. Arguably, an atomic bomb (being so powerful on its own) was more effective than a massive conventional bombing campaign would be for that task
Damn, was expecting something quite different from the title.