The first thing Georgia Tech does with brand-new freshmen is sit them down before classes start and tell the crowd "look at the person to your left, and to your right. One of the three of you will not graduate from this school." The odds are a little better than that, actually, but not by much. And in my case, the guy to my left was the one that dropped out.
Last time I checked, it took five years to get the graduation rate of a given freshman class above 50%.
Worst interfaces I've seen are in CAD software. Yeah, they can be even worse than the GIMP. Unbelievable how bad some of it is. They still seem to expect users to be able to draw precisely with the mouse. Why even allow such freehand? Should always use a snap grid, or some sort of intelligent positioning so you don't end up 0.00001 off, or get cramps trying to nudge the mouse pointer one pixel over.
That's why any decent CAD package (eg, Catia V5) allows you to constrain your sketch, so you just approximate the shape, add a constraint, and then set that constraint to exactly what you want it to be. No need to be super exactly precise freehand, just type the numbers in. Need to make a change? Just change the dimension.
"General Welfare" was not, and should not, be a cop-out for "whatever you think is good". I mean, why bother enumerating specific powers and then render that stuff meaningless by including everything else? It's like saying "the only things you are allowed to do are X, Y, Z, or anything you want". It just doesn't make sense.
Now I know this is immediately going to paint me as some kind of paleoconservative who wants federal powers restricted so states can enact religious laws. That's not the case at all. Yes, I think the government should be sticking much more closely to the Constitution, which would make quite a lot of its current activities unconstitutional. But, a lot of those things the feds should be involved in, though the way to implement those things should be to make an amendment authorizing them instead of saying "well, we're going to pretend that section says something else and just do it anyway".
you do realize that NOAA is the government, right?
I do realize that. But notice how I made a distinction between a relatively well-run, transparent, benign agency with a legitimate purpose, and the scheming, sniveling, whoring, corrupt, power-loving political governing branches. The former would be providing a service, paid for by my tax dollars and and at my request. The latter would be saying "we are your lords and masters, and you will listen to us when we talk, subject!"
I'm much more inclined to trust an agency of regular people honestly trying to do a good job than a bunch of *spit* politicians and their henchmen.
The trick is that, like prohibitions on the police busting into your house to search it, prohibitions on the government tracking everyone's location without a warrant are just that: prohibitions that we trust the government to follow, not physical or electronic barriers that actually prevent them from doing those things.
Now, I'd love to get tower-specific immediate broadcast for things like tornado warnings, on an opt-in basis, and administered by NOAA, not Congress or the White House. I really do not want the government demanding access at its will to my phone.
Simply saying "but the bundle is smaller!" doesn't lay fiber. Whether the utility you're laying requires a one-foot pipe or a one-centimeter line, it still needs digging and laying in and connecting. Doing that gets much, much harder when you're trying to retrofit the installation into existing construction, because you either disrupt roads, yards, buildings, etc. for the duration of the install, or you resort to more complicated and time-consuming methods like boring machines.
Basically, the logistical challenges of laying in permanent utilities don't go away just because your bundle got smaller. That does make it a bit easier, but the primary logistical hurdle is labor and installation around/under/over all of the existing roads and other infrastructure. The diameter of the line in question doesn't matter too much.
Not really... I just use a small bank for daily expenses and I guess they aren't used to seeing very much at all in most accounts. Mid four figures (the amount in question) was enough to spur the comment. And I do try to keep a one-month reserve in checking.
The thing is, all of my bills etc. are due right at the beginning of the month, including mortgage, credit card, insurance, utilities, etc. Plus, I pay for everything with credit and pay in full each month. So my balance builds all month as paychecks come in, then drops like a rock when the bills are paid. The visit in question was at the end of the month, just before all the money disappeared.
I have (more than once) had a teller look at my account balances and announce to everyone in earshot that it was a lot of money to have in an account like that, and would I be interested in one of their investment options?
Why are banks open only from 10-3, the sort of hours they know everyone is at work?
Because they can. Banks (and the financial industry as a whole) have all of us by the balls, and more importantly, they know it. Therefore, they can set whatever hours they want, and we all just have to deal with it because we have no alternative.
Most engineers in the US are probably already familiar with kilopounds... we call them "kips", and we also have a "kilopounds-per-square-inch" unit called ksi. However, you don't see these units much outside structural applications.
supposed experts who quibble about the most inane parts of the design and ignore the most important
Ain't that the truth...
The first review in our senior design project (interplanetary probe) had one NASA "expert" continually pestering us about what file format our images would be sent back as, and the colors we chose for our delta-V plots. None of them picked up that we had forgotten to put in any kind of attitude control system.
More recently, I've seen people up to the VP level start asking questions about what kind of fasteners we're using on the new test rigs when the purpose of the review was to figure out how to arrange all of our equipment in the new R&D building. The "design" he was asking about was simply a picture of existing equipment scaled up to a larger size as a placeholder.
Even in the most comfortable welfare states, the vast majority of people get up and go to work every day without complaint.
They get up and go to work because the benefits of doing so (being able to afford nice stuff) outweighs the downsides (having to go to work), not because they get some warm fuzzy altruistic feeling from paying for social welfare programs.
Do you think your utter lack of motivation to achieve anything beyond "continued metabolic activity" is the default?
It may not be the default behavior, but you'd be surprised by how many people it does apply to.
Like I said in another post, people are lazy and self-interested. They don't go to work so they can pay taxes and provide social welfare programs--heck, most people don't go to work to help anyone except themselves and (usually) their immediate family. Even once their own needs are met, they don't work out of altruistic goals; they work so they can buy toys. Personally, I go to work so I can buy toys, go on vacation, and go flying.
The thing is, the more your social programs provide, the more they cost. Someone has to pay that cost, and it comes out of the effort of people who are working. As that cost goes up, the fraction of their work/income/pay that benefits them gets less and less, until they have no money to spend on anything but taxes and their own necessities. At that point, with a choice of "work 40 hours and only get basic needs" or "work 0 hours and only get basic needs", why keep working?
Admittedly, this is a bit of a simplified example, but the point is that people are only going to work if they see a benefit to themselves. Most people do aspire to things higher than "continued metabolic activity". but, everyone has a price, a point below which a given unit of benefit/disposable income is no longer worth the effort needed to acquire it. In a society like the one you describe, I would most likely keep working my current job (if it still existed) even if taxes went high enough that my disposable income was cut in half. I would probably even keep going if I lost 70% of that "fun money". But go much above that, and I would probably decide that (40+ hrs extra free time + $0 disposable income) > (0hrs extra free time + $x disposable income). That is, I might decide I'm better off quitting work and having lots of extra time but no spending money is better than spending a significant portion of my time at work and only having a little spending money, particularly if I know that my housing, medical care, and food will still be provided.
Effectively, you wind up with a cycle that feeds on itself. 1. Award new benefits/more "free" stuff to people 2. Raise taxes to pay for "free" stuff. 3. Some taxpayers decide working is no longer worth it, and quit working. 4. Newly-unemployed no longer contribute to tax revenue. 5. Goto 2
I don't know where this cycle stops. It may stabilize at a level only slightly higher than current expenditures, leaving a vibrant society where people still have money to spend on things and allow growth. It may stabilize at a much higher but still sustainable level, where the overwhelming majority of work performed is done solely to perpetuate the system and keep it running, and most of your society lives egalitarian but very dull lives. Or, the whole thing runs out of control and collapses. But the more stuff you want to give away, the more incentive there is to not work, and the more unstable your system will get.
But what happens when someone says "Why should I have to work? I just want to sit at home and play guitar/whack off/go fishing/watch youtube all day"? What happens when someone says "I want all of that stuff without having to work for it?"
That's the problem with having all of this stuff just provided to everyone as entitlements/"rights". You wind up counting on people to contribute back, to carry their own weight... in short, to do the "right thing". Problem is, people don't do that. They're lazy and self-interested. If they see they can get all of the benefits without having to work, they won't work.
At that point, either the people who are still working have to work harder to provide the same goods and services with less manpower, or they say "screw it, why should I have to work harder just because that guy doesn't want to?" and quit working themselves. The cycle repeats itself until there's nobody doing any work, and nobody gets free stuff anymore.
Alternatively, you can force the lazy people to go back to work, but this presents its own problem. Forcing someone to work against his/her will sounds a lot like this thing we call "slavery", which just about anyone will agree is a Bad Thing.
So which is it? Do you let the slackers get perpetual free rides and watch as your society crumbles under the burden of millions of freeloaders? Do you stand behind everyone and crack a whip to keep them working? Or do you leave it up to able-bodied individuals to provide for themselves?
For certain values of "without human intervention". Assuming a reasonably-advanced airliner or business jet, said non-intervening person would still need to:
Program the appropriate flight plan into the FMC (if this wasn't already done by the pilots)
Select the appropriate approach speed.
Arm the approach autopilot.
Set any required system configuration (pressurization, anti-ice, bleed air, etc).
Set autobraking (if equipped) and arm ground spoilers.
Monitor the approach and abort if something went wrong.
Extend flaps and landing gear (these aren't automatic).
In short, there isn't just some magic "land me" button in the cockpit, and aircraft do not have any kind of automatic AI ability to figure out flight paths on their own. All of it is programmed in by the pilot before and/or during flight. And plenty of things (systems, landing gear, flaps, etc) cannot be operated by autopilots--the only things they control are basic flight control inputs (stick-and-rudder) and sometimes the throttle (depending on the aircraft).
How is saying "8000 pounds" "dumbed down"? Or "37000 feet"? I'll grant you the silly thousand-million-billion-gazillion stuff, but using standardized units is by no means dumb.
Dumbing-down measurements happens when they start making comparisons using units like "jumbo jets", elephants, Libraries of Congress, average-sized cars, etc.
It's one thing to use technology extensively. It's another thing entirely when use of that technology becomes such a fixture or priority in someone's life that they wind up neglecting other important things in their lives--work, school, family, health, sleep, etc. When checking Facebook or Twitter or whatever becomes more important to you than anything else, when you manifest the same behaviors seen in alcoholics and drug addicts (anxiety from not being able to get your "fix", irrational or dangerous behavior to try and get access again, etc), that's when it becomes a problem.
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The first thing Georgia Tech does with brand-new freshmen is sit them down before classes start and tell the crowd "look at the person to your left, and to your right. One of the three of you will not graduate from this school." The odds are a little better than that, actually, but not by much. And in my case, the guy to my left was the one that dropped out.
Last time I checked, it took five years to get the graduation rate of a given freshman class above 50%.
You don't see Boeing announcing the manufacture of the new 787 in Maine or Georgia
.
No, you don't, because they already announced that they will be running a second production line in South Carolina.
Worst interfaces I've seen are in CAD software. Yeah, they can be even worse than the GIMP. Unbelievable how bad some of it is. They still seem to expect users to be able to draw precisely with the mouse. Why even allow such freehand? Should always use a snap grid, or some sort of intelligent positioning so you don't end up 0.00001 off, or get cramps trying to nudge the mouse pointer one pixel over.
That's why any decent CAD package (eg, Catia V5) allows you to constrain your sketch, so you just approximate the shape, add a constraint, and then set that constraint to exactly what you want it to be. No need to be super exactly precise freehand, just type the numbers in. Need to make a change? Just change the dimension.
AutoCAD is a 1980s interface.
"General Welfare" was not, and should not, be a cop-out for "whatever you think is good". I mean, why bother enumerating specific powers and then render that stuff meaningless by including everything else? It's like saying "the only things you are allowed to do are X, Y, Z, or anything you want". It just doesn't make sense.
Now I know this is immediately going to paint me as some kind of paleoconservative who wants federal powers restricted so states can enact religious laws. That's not the case at all. Yes, I think the government should be sticking much more closely to the Constitution, which would make quite a lot of its current activities unconstitutional. But, a lot of those things the feds should be involved in, though the way to implement those things should be to make an amendment authorizing them instead of saying "well, we're going to pretend that section says something else and just do it anyway".
you do realize that NOAA is the government, right?
I do realize that. But notice how I made a distinction between a relatively well-run, transparent, benign agency with a legitimate purpose, and the scheming, sniveling, whoring, corrupt, power-loving political governing branches. The former would be providing a service, paid for by my tax dollars and and at my request. The latter would be saying "we are your lords and masters, and you will listen to us when we talk, subject!"
I'm much more inclined to trust an agency of regular people honestly trying to do a good job than a bunch of *spit* politicians and their henchmen.
The trick is that, like prohibitions on the police busting into your house to search it, prohibitions on the government tracking everyone's location without a warrant are just that: prohibitions that we trust the government to follow, not physical or electronic barriers that actually prevent them from doing those things.
Now, I'd love to get tower-specific immediate broadcast for things like tornado warnings, on an opt-in basis, and administered by NOAA, not Congress or the White House. I really do not want the government demanding access at its will to my phone.
Simply saying "but the bundle is smaller!" doesn't lay fiber. Whether the utility you're laying requires a one-foot pipe or a one-centimeter line, it still needs digging and laying in and connecting. Doing that gets much, much harder when you're trying to retrofit the installation into existing construction, because you either disrupt roads, yards, buildings, etc. for the duration of the install, or you resort to more complicated and time-consuming methods like boring machines.
Basically, the logistical challenges of laying in permanent utilities don't go away just because your bundle got smaller. That does make it a bit easier, but the primary logistical hurdle is labor and installation around/under/over all of the existing roads and other infrastructure. The diameter of the line in question doesn't matter too much.
But it's not really work unless you'd rather be doing something else...
No, he got it right. 1,210 MW = 1.21 GW, at least in US notation where commas are used as separators of thousand groups.
Not really... I just use a small bank for daily expenses and I guess they aren't used to seeing very much at all in most accounts. Mid four figures (the amount in question) was enough to spur the comment. And I do try to keep a one-month reserve in checking.
I've been using it about as long as I've been on the internet... late 90s at least.
I saw it last night, and it was the most depressing thing I've read in a while.
Unfortunately, the human race appears to have little (if any) desire to leave mommy's basement and explore the neighborhood, much less anything else.
The thing is, all of my bills etc. are due right at the beginning of the month, including mortgage, credit card, insurance, utilities, etc. Plus, I pay for everything with credit and pay in full each month. So my balance builds all month as paychecks come in, then drops like a rock when the bills are paid. The visit in question was at the end of the month, just before all the money disappeared.
I have (more than once) had a teller look at my account balances and announce to everyone in earshot that it was a lot of money to have in an account like that, and would I be interested in one of their investment options?
Why are banks open only from 10-3, the sort of hours they know everyone is at work?
Because they can. Banks (and the financial industry as a whole) have all of us by the balls, and more importantly, they know it. Therefore, they can set whatever hours they want, and we all just have to deal with it because we have no alternative.
Ok, as long as I get to pick the person who programs the computers :)
Most engineers in the US are probably already familiar with kilopounds... we call them "kips", and we also have a "kilopounds-per-square-inch" unit called ksi. However, you don't see these units much outside structural applications.
supposed experts who quibble about the most inane parts of the design and ignore the most important
Ain't that the truth...
The first review in our senior design project (interplanetary probe) had one NASA "expert" continually pestering us about what file format our images would be sent back as, and the colors we chose for our delta-V plots. None of them picked up that we had forgotten to put in any kind of attitude control system.
More recently, I've seen people up to the VP level start asking questions about what kind of fasteners we're using on the new test rigs when the purpose of the review was to figure out how to arrange all of our equipment in the new R&D building. The "design" he was asking about was simply a picture of existing equipment scaled up to a larger size as a placeholder.
Even in the most comfortable welfare states, the vast majority of people get up and go to work every day without complaint.
They get up and go to work because the benefits of doing so (being able to afford nice stuff) outweighs the downsides (having to go to work), not because they get some warm fuzzy altruistic feeling from paying for social welfare programs.
Do you think your utter lack of motivation to achieve anything beyond "continued metabolic activity" is the default?
It may not be the default behavior, but you'd be surprised by how many people it does apply to.
Like I said in another post, people are lazy and self-interested. They don't go to work so they can pay taxes and provide social welfare programs--heck, most people don't go to work to help anyone except themselves and (usually) their immediate family. Even once their own needs are met, they don't work out of altruistic goals; they work so they can buy toys. Personally, I go to work so I can buy toys, go on vacation, and go flying.
The thing is, the more your social programs provide, the more they cost. Someone has to pay that cost, and it comes out of the effort of people who are working. As that cost goes up, the fraction of their work/income/pay that benefits them gets less and less, until they have no money to spend on anything but taxes and their own necessities. At that point, with a choice of "work 40 hours and only get basic needs" or "work 0 hours and only get basic needs", why keep working?
Admittedly, this is a bit of a simplified example, but the point is that people are only going to work if they see a benefit to themselves. Most people do aspire to things higher than "continued metabolic activity". but, everyone has a price, a point below which a given unit of benefit/disposable income is no longer worth the effort needed to acquire it. In a society like the one you describe, I would most likely keep working my current job (if it still existed) even if taxes went high enough that my disposable income was cut in half. I would probably even keep going if I lost 70% of that "fun money". But go much above that, and I would probably decide that (40+ hrs extra free time + $0 disposable income) > (0hrs extra free time + $x disposable income). That is, I might decide I'm better off quitting work and having lots of extra time but no spending money is better than spending a significant portion of my time at work and only having a little spending money, particularly if I know that my housing, medical care, and food will still be provided.
Effectively, you wind up with a cycle that feeds on itself.
1. Award new benefits/more "free" stuff to people
2. Raise taxes to pay for "free" stuff.
3. Some taxpayers decide working is no longer worth it, and quit working.
4. Newly-unemployed no longer contribute to tax revenue.
5. Goto 2
I don't know where this cycle stops. It may stabilize at a level only slightly higher than current expenditures, leaving a vibrant society where people still have money to spend on things and allow growth. It may stabilize at a much higher but still sustainable level, where the overwhelming majority of work performed is done solely to perpetuate the system and keep it running, and most of your society lives egalitarian but very dull lives. Or, the whole thing runs out of control and collapses. But the more stuff you want to give away, the more incentive there is to not work, and the more unstable your system will get.
But what happens when someone says "Why should I have to work? I just want to sit at home and play guitar/whack off/go fishing/watch youtube all day"? What happens when someone says "I want all of that stuff without having to work for it?"
That's the problem with having all of this stuff just provided to everyone as entitlements/"rights". You wind up counting on people to contribute back, to carry their own weight... in short, to do the "right thing". Problem is, people don't do that. They're lazy and self-interested. If they see they can get all of the benefits without having to work, they won't work.
At that point, either the people who are still working have to work harder to provide the same goods and services with less manpower, or they say "screw it, why should I have to work harder just because that guy doesn't want to?" and quit working themselves. The cycle repeats itself until there's nobody doing any work, and nobody gets free stuff anymore.
Alternatively, you can force the lazy people to go back to work, but this presents its own problem. Forcing someone to work against his/her will sounds a lot like this thing we call "slavery", which just about anyone will agree is a Bad Thing.
So which is it? Do you let the slackers get perpetual free rides and watch as your society crumbles under the burden of millions of freeloaders? Do you stand behind everyone and crack a whip to keep them working? Or do you leave it up to able-bodied individuals to provide for themselves?
But they still would have lost in the end. It would have taken longer, but they would have lost.
For certain values of "without human intervention". Assuming a reasonably-advanced airliner or business jet, said non-intervening person would still need to:
Program the appropriate flight plan into the FMC (if this wasn't already done by the pilots)
Select the appropriate approach speed.
Arm the approach autopilot.
Set any required system configuration (pressurization, anti-ice, bleed air, etc).
Set autobraking (if equipped) and arm ground spoilers.
Monitor the approach and abort if something went wrong.
Extend flaps and landing gear (these aren't automatic).
In short, there isn't just some magic "land me" button in the cockpit, and aircraft do not have any kind of automatic AI ability to figure out flight paths on their own. All of it is programmed in by the pilot before and/or during flight. And plenty of things (systems, landing gear, flaps, etc) cannot be operated by autopilots--the only things they control are basic flight control inputs (stick-and-rudder) and sometimes the throttle (depending on the aircraft).
How is saying "8000 pounds" "dumbed down"? Or "37000 feet"? I'll grant you the silly thousand-million-billion-gazillion stuff, but using standardized units is by no means dumb.
Dumbing-down measurements happens when they start making comparisons using units like "jumbo jets", elephants, Libraries of Congress, average-sized cars, etc.
It's one thing to use technology extensively. It's another thing entirely when use of that technology becomes such a fixture or priority in someone's life that they wind up neglecting other important things in their lives--work, school, family, health, sleep, etc. When checking Facebook or Twitter or whatever becomes more important to you than anything else, when you manifest the same behaviors seen in alcoholics and drug addicts (anxiety from not being able to get your "fix", irrational or dangerous behavior to try and get access again, etc), that's when it becomes a problem.