Perhaps not the convention. In California, the night before the primary election, there was an announcement on the news that Clinton had won. Guess what, turnout of Democratic electors was lower than expected. And the claim that Clinton had already won: false. Was that false claim an accident? I don't think so.
This statement, while correct, is so condensed that it's extremely misleading. The Associated Press announced the night before the California primary that by their reckoning Clinton had enough Super Delegate votes to clinch the nomination for her. As you write it,,it could be interpreted to mean that somebody announced the night before the primary vote that Clinton had already won the California primary, which is not what happened. I'm not arguing that the AP shouldn't have done this nor am I arguing that there for sure wasn't any kind of insider deal going on with the announcement, but you're going to have to provide more than speculation that this made any difference in the outcome. Sanders failure to clean house on Super Tuesday put him in the position of having to capture an unrealistic number of votes to get the nomination and he didn't even come close to hitting his target.
I'm not convinced that there isn't any price Zuckerberg wouldn't pay to get back into China. But I also admit that I don't have a great opinion of him.
During this decade I had two girlfriends (not at the same time) who were both born and raised in China ladies. They weren't very fond of the Chinese government, which is why they didn't want to live in China any more. I used to think that a lot of Chinese people were like that. Then I read recently that a Western news agency did a survey in China and they found overwhelmingly that while Chinese people didn't think their government was perfect and they thought that there were some important things that they still needed to do, basically everything was negotiable and they were willing to give it up in terms of personal freedom if they kept making good money. So now I think that the ladies I once dated were the exceptions to the rule and maybe most Chinese people really don't care at all if they have any freedom as long as they're making some sweet cash. This does not bode well long term for western Democracies. Some forces in China in the military are barely under control of the CCP and it's not going to take much to make them go off on their own and start a war that will have disastrous consequences for everybody, including the winners.
In addition to pla's excellent reasons, I'd like to point out that most Americans live pay to paycheck. There simply isn't any savings to fall back on if they suddenly get unemployed and it takes a while to find a new job. Additionally, if you don't cooperate in training your replacements, you may be fired for cause and my understanding is that you won't get unemployment money if you are fired for cause. I don't want to digress, but my previous job was working for a US office of a European company and my company gave my team 6 months notice that they were outsourcing our jobs to another country. I ended up leaving for another job before those 6 months expired and I got no severance package. They made us sign forms earlier in the year that basically said we agreed that they could do some tricks, like lay us off and rehire us, to get out of paying severance. I'm sure it was highly illegal, but who has the time and money to sue them? And we had a post here some years ago where an employment lawyer told us that lawsuits against employers rarely succeed, even when the employer has clearly been in the wrong and it can be proven. He said his standard reply to clients was to not hire him and not sue and just move on with their lives because the odds were they'd be happier that way.
While I'd love it ever to be true, I can't imagine any post Obama congress will fund it at all.
No Congress has ever been willing to fund it or even a Moon mission since Nixon stopped the Moon missions. In the past the main argument was that there were too many other problems that needed to be solved or paid to fix first. Of course what happens is that you never run out of problems you say need to be fixed first, so you never get back to going. Now Congress won't fund it because each major party is only willing to pay for it by ways that are completely unacceptable to the other party. This allows them to pretend that they are in favor of it but in reality they know it will never happen.
The Democrats only want to pay for it by slashing defense spending, which the Republicans will never agree to. The Republicans only want to pay for it by cutting social programs, which the Democrats will never agree to. Since the Republicans are very likely to retain control of the House for maybe decades to come, they're never going to agree to fund it with a Democratic president to take credit for it. And the presidency is very likely to remain in Democratic hands for a while to come too as demographics favor the Democratic party. Note that the reason the Democratic Party is likely to retain the presidency is that young people skew towards the Democratic Party big time. But as these same new voters move to large urban areas, that leaves rural districts mostly in the hands of the Republican Party, which is why that favors them retaining control of the House even as the nation leans towards the Democratic Party. It sure doesn't help that the last time a major candidate for president, Newt Gingrich, tried to make it a platform plank he was ridiculed for it. I'm convinced that the only thing that will ever get it funded is if China looks like they're going to do it first, which is how the movie The Martian had us going to Mars.
What's sad here is that this is *obviously* Obama searching for a legacy, not a full hearted attempt to actually do this. Had this been important, why didn't he do it 8 years ago when his party had both cambers? Oh, no, wasn't important then. He has 180 days left with Obama Care is as popular as getting a root canal,
Not disputing that yes, this probably should have been done at the start of his presidency, but you're betraying your Republican bias with the next statement. Obamacare seems to be pretty popular with those who are actually using it. The only people I still hear bitching about it are people it doesn't apply to any way. One of my old friends is a small businessman and he hates Obama with a passion but admitted to me that Obamacare has lowered the health care premiums substantially for him and his family.
And oddly, within India's military, they are VERY close to Russia. Much closer to Russia than to the west. As such, Indians are going to be looked at as well.
That's not as true as it used to be. India does still buy military hardware from Russia but they buy less now than they used to and they buy more from the US than they used to. Also, Russia has been cozying up to Pakistan and that doesn't play well in India. Actually the whole "India loves the USSR/Russia" thing was pure idiocy that Ghandi and his cronies started to show how "independent" they were from the West. So India constantly voted as the USSR dictated in the UN and served as an international apologist for them. The only reason the US and Pakistan were ever friends is that India made it so by flatly rejecting the West at the time. The US wanted some influence in the region, so it took what it could get. It's really difficult for me to point to anything worthwhile that India has gotten out of its subservient relationship with the USSR and Russia, which is no doubt why the current Indian government is moving closer to the USA.
I'm probably going to be going against the grain here, but I think the entertainment industry is probably one place where age discrimination is reasonable.
Think about it: Imagine Anthony Hopkins playing the role of a young teenager. Sure, he's a really talented actor, but it would just be really...odd... Unless the movie is supposed to be a comedy or something.
You might want to rethink how "reasonable" that age discrimination is. Let me give you a true story. Ever heard of Lillian Gish? She lived to be 100 and got famous in the silent screen era, although she did make movies after the sound era started. She worked with Lionel Barrymore on a film, who was roughly 15 years older than her, and played his grand-daughter. Then some years later she played his daughter in another film. Then by 1946 she played his wife in a film. She quipped that if they ever had worked together again she'd have probably played his mother.
That's 29% interest. Who out there is actually offering student loans at 29% interest?
Probably a combination of credit card charging and private loans. You might be surprised at the terms allowed under private loans for schooling. Extreme variable rates happen a lot where the student gets suckered into signing it for very low interest rates at first but by 10 years into the loan, the interest rate could be triple or worse if it's still not paid off. Many students grossly underestimate the time needed to pay off these loans and fall hopelessly behind.
Beware of being led by emotions. They seldom lead to good decisions. To reason alone must be one's first master.
Scott Adams, who you might know as the Dilbert creator, has been saying for a while that humans make decisions on emotions and facts don't matter much or any. In fact, he argues that appealing to reason and laying out facts is actually counterproductive when faced with an opponent who appeals to emotions. I am beginning to wonder with some concern that he might be right. Recent studies have shown that if you take someone who holds a wrong belief or opinion and you can prove with evidence that the opinion is wrong, most people will actually double down and cling more stubbornly to the wrong belief. This is part of why Trump appeals to so many people. A lot of what he is says is very simple emotional arguments. Hillary has been trying to get off the facts in her speech and get more emotional as a result of this. Don't be surprised if the first debate has very little in the way of concrete ideas and a whole lot of name calling directed at the other person. People will complain that it lacks substance, but it may just be that humans in general are pretty stupid and we're just getting what we deserve with a bunch of name calling because we ignore the substance when we're given it.
I can only say that among my circle of friends and family that just about all of us have about reached the end of what we're going to pay for TV and internet and I think there's a pretty good chance that $10 extra would be the straw that breaks the camel's back and makes people drop cable TV altogether. Cable TV subscribers are going down every year due to cost. Even Disney had to do something in some negotiations in the past year that most stock market analysts didn't think they would ever do. They were able to keep their channels like ESPN on basic cable packages but they had to agree to lower numbers of subscribers to do it, which does reduce their revenue.
Modify the Uber app so that the rider has to confirm the start of the ride on their mobile device.
Suppose the user refuses to confirm the start of the ride to try to get it for free. What do you do then?
Reporting of "scary" profile pics should be simple as well - simple snapshot and forward - If proven - the driver takes a hit on their next 5 drives - say $1-2 per drive.
What's to stop people from just being jerks and reporting "scary" photos when it's not true? For example, person A has a grudge against person B and A knows that B drives for Uber so A gets a bunch of his/her friends to report B's photo as "scary".
Problem solved.
Maybe not for the reasons I stated but the thought also occurs to me that maybe Uber doesn't want to solve this problem for various reasons. Maybe it's rare or they have also thought of my problems with your solutions and view the fixes as worse than the problem.
As to making a home-brew vacuum tube, it is doable but not practical. To get predictable performance mechanical tolerances must be exacting and the materials used in commercial tubes are rather exotic and difficult (if not impossible to come close to) for a home-brew vacuum tube maker. What you end up doing is making a tube using 'best guesses' and test/measure the tube's operational parameters and design the circuit around those parameters, rather than the other way around.
There is an amazing amount of exacting engineering, sophisticated manufacturing processes/techniques, and exotic materials science in the old commercial vacuum tubes even by today's standards and is pretty much impractical and beyond the means for the vast majority of private experimenters to reproduce in a home shop.
Strat
I've lived long enough to know that when some dude says "I want to build my own vacuum tubes" that he's not interested in hearing how unrealistic it is.
Having traveled in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, I actually knew exactly what a mooncake was. It was interesting to me to see some of the "What's a mooncake?" posts given how I'm all the time seeing articles here on subjects I've never heard of, like the latest programming language de jour which is apparently one million times more awesome and useful than every other language that ever came before it.
By the way, most mooncakes aren't very delicious, at least not according to my white boy American tastes. The ones that probably are delicious rarely if ever make to the USA. Even a good friend in Taiwan told me recently that she doesn't like mooncakes much at all. So if you didn't know what it was, you might not think you were missing much if you actually had a chance to try one.
I know tons of people that would vote for Satan himself if he ran on the Democratic ticket.
This is not unique to the Democrats. The exact same statement is certainly true of most Republican voters. I'd go so far as to suggest that Trump could have anal sex with Satan on TV and pledge his eternal allegiance to ISIS/Daesh/ISIL and he'd still win Texas. I can imagine Texas voters saying "I don't like it that he had sex with Satan and supports ISIS but I'm not voting for a Democrat". I've been to Texas recently. I have family that lives there. Yes, it really is like that. I estimate that as many as 80% of voters only care about whether the D or R is by a candidate's name and everything else is negotiable, but the only sources I could find that tried to track this kind of thing suggest that the percentage is actually around 60%. All I can say is that it seems higher to me.
I disagree quite a bit with most of the people here on whether what he did was a good thing or not. But we can have different viewpoints on that here. However, the reason he won't get a pardon is that doing so would set a bad precedent that some other person in the future will disclose something maybe a lot more harmful to the US government and citizenry and then expect a pardon for that. The government is simply not going to pardon him because it would give the illusion that individuals can make the kind of decisions he made with no punishment.
Despite the scare mongering that his stay in Russia expires next year, Putin will simply extend it for a few more years. What Snowden doesn't get is that eventually Putin will be out of power, perhaps through death. For all we know his replacement will send Snowden back to the US to stand trial, even if that's 20 years from now. I think sometimes the US is OK with people being permanently in exile as their punishment and they can't admit it but I think that in Snowden's case that's what's going on.
Whatever China and Russia are, neither is a dictatorship. That is an ignorant characterization.
The President of China (head of state; mostly a figurehead) is elected by the National People's Congress, which in turn is elected by an interesting hierarchical election system, ultimately by the people. The Premier (leader of the State Council; head of government) is nominated by the President and approved by the Congress.
Nice job as an apologist there. The Chinese presidency is simply an elected dictatorship with backroom deals being cut and alliances forged to reach that position. In no way at all do the common people have any say at all in this process. At best they get to vote in elections where those running have no opposition. The NPC folks are all carefully chosen and it's not like some office worker in Zhuhai, for example, can one day hope to move up through the system to join the NPC. One of the major problems as I see it is that the upper levels of the CCP have children who inherited their position from their fathers and they didn't do anything to earn it except be born into the right family. President Xi himself is an example of such. When you just give out leadership positions to the children of people who held those jobs before, you won't necessarily get the best and brightest.
By the start of the Korean War in 1950, the South had imprisoned 30,000 communists, and had interred 300,000 more in "reeducation camps". They had also killed more than 60,000 of their own citizens in various quellings of uprisings by disowned groups. The North were doing their own similar thing, sure, but I concentrate on the South here because they are always the side which gets white washed when it comes to the Korean War. After all, you hardly ever hear that, in the early days of the war, the southern president, Syngmam Rhee, ordered the executions of between 100,000 and 200,000 of his political opponents in the Bodo League massacre.
You didn't mention it, but the only reason you have that information to talk about is because South Korea is a well functioning democracy and you have no access at all to information about what North Korea did at the time. We don't know if they did the same, more or less. And as far as white-washing goes, that may simply be your view of the situation from outside South Korea. For all I know people in South Korea have a really good understanding of what went on and it's not white-washed there at all. The Korean War wasn't glamorous like WWII kind of was and the last 2 years were basically a stalemate so it doesn't get a lot of attention in the USA and maybe almost none at all in the EU, where most European countries sat it out and only the UK contributed any decent numbers of troops. Well, unless maybe you count Turkey as part of Europe but even they only supplied roughly 1/3 what the UK did. The US contributed over 20 times the number of troops the UK did.
When something is more expensive, less of it gets bought. When it costs more to hire people, jobs start to go away.
So you're arguing all of the following?
1) That University of California IT workers actually are making only $13 an hour.
2) That these workers can actually live in San Freakin' Francisco on $13 an hour .
3) That the Indian workers are somehow magically going to be paid LESS than $15 an hour (since the rates are going up and that's your justification, we have use $15 as the rate now).
The problem as usual is that people are not educated in security. Anybody being a minimum of paranoid would refuse to install a plugin like that froma random web page.
You'd hope, but most of my friends and all of my family are not IT people and they cover the spectrum from "skeptical about random popups" to "likely to click on anything that pops up with a dire warning telling them they need to click on it immediately". In general people that don't work in IT just don't care about security on their PCs and they grossly underestimate the danger. My brother is a pretty smart guy but he works in sales and over a decade ago he ran an old Win 98 PC at home that he made no attempt to protect with a firewall because he said it was so old that nobody would want to hack it. That's a lot more typical of the non-IT person's thinking than "Wow. I need to be careful because bad people are out there."
Let's not forget that it was basically Russia who won WWII - if it weren't for them, we'd be living in a very different world today.
Dude. Seriously. What part of the USSR did you grow up in to actually believe that?
Russia got lucky. Real lucky. But luck counts. Had the Nazis not gotten stopped by weather and some eventual decent Russian resistance, the Russians could have been out of the picture. Stalin killed tons of his military commanders out of his personal paranoia before the war and that played a huge role in why Russia got beat so badly at first. Then with the Nazis knocking on Moscow's door he came within a day or so of surrendering when he suddenly changed his mind and fought on. Look I'm not disputing that eventually the Russians did a fantastic job and they were surely important, but I heard that crap a lot from people who have strong Soviet sympathies, namely that the US and UK and everybody else didn't do jack to win and Russia alone saved everybody's bacon. Apparently they never heard of this little thing called D Day. I can tell you that is also helped a lot that the Nazis pushed so far into the USSR that the eastern front got a lot less attention from the top than protecting France from an eventual invasion. And Russian manufacturing was so awesomely good that Russia actually sent war materials to the US and UK to help them fight. Right.... right.
Sorry David Hansson, but I'm calling bs on that one. Let's see which of the following difficulties Danish has that truly difficult to learn languages have...
Does it have a really weird alphabet or even worse ideographs? Nope. Standard Latin alphabet.
Does it have no relation at all to any more commonly spoken languages? Not only is it close enough to Norwegian and Swedish that the degree of mutual intelligibility is very high among them, it's also a Germanic language which makes it kind of related to English, German and Dutch. Lots of people speak those. So it's not like, say, Basque.
Does it have tones like Mandarin (4) or Vietnamese (6) or Cantonese (6 or 7 or even more depending on the source)? Nope.
Does it have tons of cases like Finnish which apparently has 15 and Hungarian which has so many that even linguists don't agree on how many it has? No.
Foreigners may not learn Danish because it's not particularly useful to them, but let's get over this idea that modern Danish is just far too complicated for foreigners to ever learn, OK?
So long as there's rhyme and reason to the numbering scheme, I have no problem with it.
BMW does this, and it's awesome. The first digit is the body style (3 is small, 5 is mid, 7 is large), and the next 2 digits are the engine displacement. They add letters on the end for extra little features: i for Fuel Injection, s for Sport Package, L for Luxury Package, etc. So a 328is is a small car with a 2.8L engine, fuel injection and sport package.
Fair enough, but can you explain the monstrosity that is the M240i XDrive then? I'm not a BMW fan. I don't hate them. I just don't care about this kind of car. M apparently means Performance. OK.... I don't speak German so maybe in German using M for "Performance" is actually OK because for all I know the German word starts with M. Then we come to the 240 part, which according to you is the engine size. However, the M240i has a 3.0 liter engine. And you say that "i" means fuel injected. Really? Because if you go back in time like 20 years that actually would have meant something but as far as I know no major car manufacturer makes a carburetor any more so all cars are fuel injection now. So it's "fuel injection" as opposed to what exactly? I have no idea what xDrive even means but maybe that actually is helpful if you're familiar with line. To me that looks like a bunch of randomly chosen gibberish but you're welcome to educate me here if you disagree.
I guess that means either I'm not spending enough time on the internet or the rest of you really need to get a life/hobby because you seem to know every meme there is to be known. I'll allow the readers to decide for themselves which one of those choices applies.
As long as the employees are not forcibly coerced to work there, I fail to be outraged.
They may not be forced to work there but it's very possible that for all practical terms they can't leave this work. I don't know. I can't tell you whether this exists in China or not, but in Russia employment contracts are often signed. A worker may be guaranteed X years of a job at Y years of money. But here's the catch - the worker who signs it can't leave the job without paying a huge fine that is the equivalent of several years of salary. If this factory has a similar thing, they may not be able to leave. I know that in the dormitories (some recent reports suggest that the dormitories are no longer in use, but outsiders don't know why) they used to put up netting to prevent "happy" workers from leaping to the deaths out of the windows. That doesn't suggest to me that there's likely a lot of individual freedom while working there.
I have experience with this. I'm not just pulling this out of my rear end.
CDs - Honestly, they're all pretty much the same now. If you really worry a lot about these, Taiyo Yuden makes high quality discs and Verbatim made ones that use AZO dye may have superior longevity. Maybe. By the time we know if they do or not, nobody will probably care. But honestly any name brand is almost identical in quality to Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim for CDs. That does not apply to other types of discs though.
DVDs - You can buy Taiyo Yuden and you can buy Verbatim. Everything TY makes is great. Most of Verbatim's stuff is great except their cheap Life series of discs which is the same landfill grade crap that everybody else in the industry makes, including TDK. Note that Verbatim also makes DataLifePlus which is top notch and not the same at all as Life series. Skip everybody else here. And nobody knows if dual layer consumer burnable DVDs will last as long as single layer ones do. Again, by the time we figure it out, nobody will probably care to know. In the earlier part of the previous decade most name manufacturers made really high quality DVD media, but the US marketplace demanded lower price, so almost everybody switched to cheap crap. TDK was actually really good at one time, using Taiyo Yuden as their manufacturer, but that hasn't been true for more than a decade now. I specifically mention TDK because the top article does. Note that Sony sometimes does and sometimes does not use top notch manufacturers for their DVD media but you'll never know which they've used until you buy it. Not worth the trouble in my opinion since you know what you get with Verbatim (non-Life series) and Taiyo Yuden. Note that Verbatim uses AZO dye on all their DVDs except the Life series, even though they don't always say so on the packaging.
BluRays - I pretty much stick to Verbatim (again, avoid Life series) and Panasonic here. Taiyo Yuden barely makes BD discs and last I checked they only made a single layer LTH type that some burners and some players may have problems with. LTH discs are a way to leverage existing DVD pressing plants so they can also make BD media and because these discs actually are written and read from backwards from normal BD media, some burners and some players have problems with them. Verbatim also makes some LTH BD discs and some regular BD discs. I advise avoiding the LTH media unless you are sure you can burn it and play it.
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Perhaps not the convention. In California, the night before the primary election, there was an announcement on the news that Clinton had won. Guess what, turnout of Democratic electors was lower than expected. And the claim that Clinton had already won: false. Was that false claim an accident? I don't think so.
This statement, while correct, is so condensed that it's extremely misleading. The Associated Press announced the night before the California primary that by their reckoning Clinton had enough Super Delegate votes to clinch the nomination for her. As you write it, ,it could be interpreted to mean that somebody announced the night before the primary vote that Clinton had already won the California primary, which is not what happened. I'm not arguing that the AP shouldn't have done this nor am I arguing that there for sure wasn't any kind of insider deal going on with the announcement, but you're going to have to provide more than speculation that this made any difference in the outcome. Sanders failure to clean house on Super Tuesday put him in the position of having to capture an unrealistic number of votes to get the nomination and he didn't even come close to hitting his target.
I'm not convinced that there isn't any price Zuckerberg wouldn't pay to get back into China. But I also admit that I don't have a great opinion of him.
During this decade I had two girlfriends (not at the same time) who were both born and raised in China ladies. They weren't very fond of the Chinese government, which is why they didn't want to live in China any more. I used to think that a lot of Chinese people were like that. Then I read recently that a Western news agency did a survey in China and they found overwhelmingly that while Chinese people didn't think their government was perfect and they thought that there were some important things that they still needed to do, basically everything was negotiable and they were willing to give it up in terms of personal freedom if they kept making good money. So now I think that the ladies I once dated were the exceptions to the rule and maybe most Chinese people really don't care at all if they have any freedom as long as they're making some sweet cash. This does not bode well long term for western Democracies. Some forces in China in the military are barely under control of the CCP and it's not going to take much to make them go off on their own and start a war that will have disastrous consequences for everybody, including the winners.
In addition to pla's excellent reasons, I'd like to point out that most Americans live pay to paycheck. There simply isn't any savings to fall back on if they suddenly get unemployed and it takes a while to find a new job. Additionally, if you don't cooperate in training your replacements, you may be fired for cause and my understanding is that you won't get unemployment money if you are fired for cause. I don't want to digress, but my previous job was working for a US office of a European company and my company gave my team 6 months notice that they were outsourcing our jobs to another country. I ended up leaving for another job before those 6 months expired and I got no severance package. They made us sign forms earlier in the year that basically said we agreed that they could do some tricks, like lay us off and rehire us, to get out of paying severance. I'm sure it was highly illegal, but who has the time and money to sue them? And we had a post here some years ago where an employment lawyer told us that lawsuits against employers rarely succeed, even when the employer has clearly been in the wrong and it can be proven. He said his standard reply to clients was to not hire him and not sue and just move on with their lives because the odds were they'd be happier that way.
While I'd love it ever to be true, I can't imagine any post Obama congress will fund it at all.
No Congress has ever been willing to fund it or even a Moon mission since Nixon stopped the Moon missions. In the past the main argument was that there were too many other problems that needed to be solved or paid to fix first. Of course what happens is that you never run out of problems you say need to be fixed first, so you never get back to going. Now Congress won't fund it because each major party is only willing to pay for it by ways that are completely unacceptable to the other party. This allows them to pretend that they are in favor of it but in reality they know it will never happen.
The Democrats only want to pay for it by slashing defense spending, which the Republicans will never agree to. The Republicans only want to pay for it by cutting social programs, which the Democrats will never agree to. Since the Republicans are very likely to retain control of the House for maybe decades to come, they're never going to agree to fund it with a Democratic president to take credit for it. And the presidency is very likely to remain in Democratic hands for a while to come too as demographics favor the Democratic party. Note that the reason the Democratic Party is likely to retain the presidency is that young people skew towards the Democratic Party big time. But as these same new voters move to large urban areas, that leaves rural districts mostly in the hands of the Republican Party, which is why that favors them retaining control of the House even as the nation leans towards the Democratic Party. It sure doesn't help that the last time a major candidate for president, Newt Gingrich, tried to make it a platform plank he was ridiculed for it. I'm convinced that the only thing that will ever get it funded is if China looks like they're going to do it first, which is how the movie The Martian had us going to Mars.
What's sad here is that this is *obviously* Obama searching for a legacy, not a full hearted attempt to actually do this. Had this been important, why didn't he do it 8 years ago when his party had both cambers? Oh, no, wasn't important then. He has 180 days left with Obama Care is as popular as getting a root canal,
Not disputing that yes, this probably should have been done at the start of his presidency, but you're betraying your Republican bias with the next statement. Obamacare seems to be pretty popular with those who are actually using it. The only people I still hear bitching about it are people it doesn't apply to any way. One of my old friends is a small businessman and he hates Obama with a passion but admitted to me that Obamacare has lowered the health care premiums substantially for him and his family.
And oddly, within India's military, they are VERY close to Russia. Much closer to Russia than to the west. As such, Indians are going to be looked at as well.
That's not as true as it used to be. India does still buy military hardware from Russia but they buy less now than they used to and they buy more from the US than they used to. Also, Russia has been cozying up to Pakistan and that doesn't play well in India. Actually the whole "India loves the USSR/Russia" thing was pure idiocy that Ghandi and his cronies started to show how "independent" they were from the West. So India constantly voted as the USSR dictated in the UN and served as an international apologist for them. The only reason the US and Pakistan were ever friends is that India made it so by flatly rejecting the West at the time. The US wanted some influence in the region, so it took what it could get. It's really difficult for me to point to anything worthwhile that India has gotten out of its subservient relationship with the USSR and Russia, which is no doubt why the current Indian government is moving closer to the USA.
I'm probably going to be going against the grain here, but I think the entertainment industry is probably one place where age discrimination is reasonable.
Think about it: Imagine Anthony Hopkins playing the role of a young teenager. Sure, he's a really talented actor, but it would just be really...odd... Unless the movie is supposed to be a comedy or something.
You might want to rethink how "reasonable" that age discrimination is. Let me give you a true story. Ever heard of Lillian Gish? She lived to be 100 and got famous in the silent screen era, although she did make movies after the sound era started. She worked with Lionel Barrymore on a film, who was roughly 15 years older than her, and played his grand-daughter. Then some years later she played his daughter in another film. Then by 1946 she played his wife in a film. She quipped that if they ever had worked together again she'd have probably played his mother.
That's 29% interest. Who out there is actually offering student loans at 29% interest?
Probably a combination of credit card charging and private loans. You might be surprised at the terms allowed under private loans for schooling. Extreme variable rates happen a lot where the student gets suckered into signing it for very low interest rates at first but by 10 years into the loan, the interest rate could be triple or worse if it's still not paid off. Many students grossly underestimate the time needed to pay off these loans and fall hopelessly behind.
Beware of being led by emotions. They seldom lead to good decisions. To reason alone must be one's first master.
Scott Adams, who you might know as the Dilbert creator, has been saying for a while that humans make decisions on emotions and facts don't matter much or any. In fact, he argues that appealing to reason and laying out facts is actually counterproductive when faced with an opponent who appeals to emotions. I am beginning to wonder with some concern that he might be right. Recent studies have shown that if you take someone who holds a wrong belief or opinion and you can prove with evidence that the opinion is wrong, most people will actually double down and cling more stubbornly to the wrong belief. This is part of why Trump appeals to so many people. A lot of what he is says is very simple emotional arguments. Hillary has been trying to get off the facts in her speech and get more emotional as a result of this. Don't be surprised if the first debate has very little in the way of concrete ideas and a whole lot of name calling directed at the other person. People will complain that it lacks substance, but it may just be that humans in general are pretty stupid and we're just getting what we deserve with a bunch of name calling because we ignore the substance when we're given it.
I can only say that among my circle of friends and family that just about all of us have about reached the end of what we're going to pay for TV and internet and I think there's a pretty good chance that $10 extra would be the straw that breaks the camel's back and makes people drop cable TV altogether. Cable TV subscribers are going down every year due to cost. Even Disney had to do something in some negotiations in the past year that most stock market analysts didn't think they would ever do. They were able to keep their channels like ESPN on basic cable packages but they had to agree to lower numbers of subscribers to do it, which does reduce their revenue.
Modify the Uber app so that the rider has to confirm the start of the ride on their mobile device.
Suppose the user refuses to confirm the start of the ride to try to get it for free. What do you do then?
Reporting of "scary" profile pics should be simple as well - simple snapshot and forward - If proven - the driver takes a hit on their next 5 drives - say $1-2 per drive.
What's to stop people from just being jerks and reporting "scary" photos when it's not true? For example, person A has a grudge against person B and A knows that B drives for Uber so A gets a bunch of his/her friends to report B's photo as "scary".
Problem solved.
Maybe not for the reasons I stated but the thought also occurs to me that maybe Uber doesn't want to solve this problem for various reasons. Maybe it's rare or they have also thought of my problems with your solutions and view the fixes as worse than the problem.
As to making a home-brew vacuum tube, it is doable but not practical. To get predictable performance mechanical tolerances must be exacting and the materials used in commercial tubes are rather exotic and difficult (if not impossible to come close to) for a home-brew vacuum tube maker. What you end up doing is making a tube using 'best guesses' and test/measure the tube's operational parameters and design the circuit around those parameters, rather than the other way around.
There is an amazing amount of exacting engineering, sophisticated manufacturing processes/techniques, and exotic materials science in the old commercial vacuum tubes even by today's standards and is pretty much impractical and beyond the means for the vast majority of private experimenters to reproduce in a home shop.
Strat
I've lived long enough to know that when some dude says "I want to build my own vacuum tubes" that he's not interested in hearing how unrealistic it is.
Having traveled in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, I actually knew exactly what a mooncake was. It was interesting to me to see some of the "What's a mooncake?" posts given how I'm all the time seeing articles here on subjects I've never heard of, like the latest programming language de jour which is apparently one million times more awesome and useful than every other language that ever came before it.
By the way, most mooncakes aren't very delicious, at least not according to my white boy American tastes. The ones that probably are delicious rarely if ever make to the USA. Even a good friend in Taiwan told me recently that she doesn't like mooncakes much at all. So if you didn't know what it was, you might not think you were missing much if you actually had a chance to try one.
I know tons of people that would vote for Satan himself if he ran on the Democratic ticket.
This is not unique to the Democrats. The exact same statement is certainly true of most Republican voters. I'd go so far as to suggest that Trump could have anal sex with Satan on TV and pledge his eternal allegiance to ISIS/Daesh/ISIL and he'd still win Texas. I can imagine Texas voters saying "I don't like it that he had sex with Satan and supports ISIS but I'm not voting for a Democrat". I've been to Texas recently. I have family that lives there. Yes, it really is like that. I estimate that as many as 80% of voters only care about whether the D or R is by a candidate's name and everything else is negotiable, but the only sources I could find that tried to track this kind of thing suggest that the percentage is actually around 60%. All I can say is that it seems higher to me.
I disagree quite a bit with most of the people here on whether what he did was a good thing or not. But we can have different viewpoints on that here. However, the reason he won't get a pardon is that doing so would set a bad precedent that some other person in the future will disclose something maybe a lot more harmful to the US government and citizenry and then expect a pardon for that. The government is simply not going to pardon him because it would give the illusion that individuals can make the kind of decisions he made with no punishment.
Despite the scare mongering that his stay in Russia expires next year, Putin will simply extend it for a few more years. What Snowden doesn't get is that eventually Putin will be out of power, perhaps through death. For all we know his replacement will send Snowden back to the US to stand trial, even if that's 20 years from now. I think sometimes the US is OK with people being permanently in exile as their punishment and they can't admit it but I think that in Snowden's case that's what's going on.
Whatever China and Russia are, neither is a dictatorship. That is an ignorant characterization.
The President of China (head of state; mostly a figurehead) is elected by the National People's Congress, which in turn is elected by an interesting hierarchical election system, ultimately by the people. The Premier (leader of the State Council; head of government) is nominated by the President and approved by the Congress.
Nice job as an apologist there. The Chinese presidency is simply an elected dictatorship with backroom deals being cut and alliances forged to reach that position. In no way at all do the common people have any say at all in this process. At best they get to vote in elections where those running have no opposition. The NPC folks are all carefully chosen and it's not like some office worker in Zhuhai, for example, can one day hope to move up through the system to join the NPC. One of the major problems as I see it is that the upper levels of the CCP have children who inherited their position from their fathers and they didn't do anything to earn it except be born into the right family. President Xi himself is an example of such. When you just give out leadership positions to the children of people who held those jobs before, you won't necessarily get the best and brightest.
By the start of the Korean War in 1950, the South had imprisoned 30,000 communists, and had interred 300,000 more in "reeducation camps". They had also killed more than 60,000 of their own citizens in various quellings of uprisings by disowned groups. The North were doing their own similar thing, sure, but I concentrate on the South here because they are always the side which gets white washed when it comes to the Korean War. After all, you hardly ever hear that, in the early days of the war, the southern president, Syngmam Rhee, ordered the executions of between 100,000 and 200,000 of his political opponents in the Bodo League massacre.
You didn't mention it, but the only reason you have that information to talk about is because South Korea is a well functioning democracy and you have no access at all to information about what North Korea did at the time. We don't know if they did the same, more or less. And as far as white-washing goes, that may simply be your view of the situation from outside South Korea. For all I know people in South Korea have a really good understanding of what went on and it's not white-washed there at all. The Korean War wasn't glamorous like WWII kind of was and the last 2 years were basically a stalemate so it doesn't get a lot of attention in the USA and maybe almost none at all in the EU, where most European countries sat it out and only the UK contributed any decent numbers of troops. Well, unless maybe you count Turkey as part of Europe but even they only supplied roughly 1/3 what the UK did. The US contributed over 20 times the number of troops the UK did.
This was likely a factor in the decision: the minimum wage is $13/hour and will be $15/hour by 2018.
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Minimum-Wage-Jumps-to-13-Per-Hour-in-San-Francisco-385257511.html
When something is more expensive, less of it gets bought. When it costs more to hire people, jobs start to go away.
So you're arguing all of the following?
1) That University of California IT workers actually are making only $13 an hour.
2) That these workers can actually live in San Freakin' Francisco on $13 an hour .
3) That the Indian workers are somehow magically going to be paid LESS than $15 an hour (since the rates are going up and that's your justification, we have use $15 as the rate now).
Good luck with that one.
The problem as usual is that people are not educated in security. Anybody being a minimum of paranoid would refuse to install a plugin like that froma random web page.
You'd hope, but most of my friends and all of my family are not IT people and they cover the spectrum from "skeptical about random popups" to "likely to click on anything that pops up with a dire warning telling them they need to click on it immediately". In general people that don't work in IT just don't care about security on their PCs and they grossly underestimate the danger. My brother is a pretty smart guy but he works in sales and over a decade ago he ran an old Win 98 PC at home that he made no attempt to protect with a firewall because he said it was so old that nobody would want to hack it. That's a lot more typical of the non-IT person's thinking than "Wow. I need to be careful because bad people are out there."
Let's not forget that it was basically Russia who won WWII - if it weren't for them, we'd be living in a very different world today.
Dude. Seriously. What part of the USSR did you grow up in to actually believe that?
Russia got lucky. Real lucky. But luck counts. Had the Nazis not gotten stopped by weather and some eventual decent Russian resistance, the Russians could have been out of the picture. Stalin killed tons of his military commanders out of his personal paranoia before the war and that played a huge role in why Russia got beat so badly at first. Then with the Nazis knocking on Moscow's door he came within a day or so of surrendering when he suddenly changed his mind and fought on. Look I'm not disputing that eventually the Russians did a fantastic job and they were surely important, but I heard that crap a lot from people who have strong Soviet sympathies, namely that the US and UK and everybody else didn't do jack to win and Russia alone saved everybody's bacon. Apparently they never heard of this little thing called D Day. I can tell you that is also helped a lot that the Nazis pushed so far into the USSR that the eastern front got a lot less attention from the top than protecting France from an eventual invasion. And Russian manufacturing was so awesomely good that Russia actually sent war materials to the US and UK to help them fight. Right.... right.
Sorry David Hansson, but I'm calling bs on that one. Let's see which of the following difficulties Danish has that truly difficult to learn languages have...
Does it have a really weird alphabet or even worse ideographs? Nope. Standard Latin alphabet.
Does it have no relation at all to any more commonly spoken languages? Not only is it close enough to Norwegian and Swedish that the degree of mutual intelligibility is very high among them, it's also a Germanic language which makes it kind of related to English, German and Dutch. Lots of people speak those. So it's not like, say, Basque.
Does it have tones like Mandarin (4) or Vietnamese (6) or Cantonese (6 or 7 or even more depending on the source)? Nope.
Does it have tons of cases like Finnish which apparently has 15 and Hungarian which has so many that even linguists don't agree on how many it has? No.
Foreigners may not learn Danish because it's not particularly useful to them, but let's get over this idea that modern Danish is just far too complicated for foreigners to ever learn, OK?
So long as there's rhyme and reason to the numbering scheme, I have no problem with it.
BMW does this, and it's awesome. The first digit is the body style (3 is small, 5 is mid, 7 is large), and the next 2 digits are the engine displacement. They add letters on the end for extra little features: i for Fuel Injection, s for Sport Package, L for Luxury Package, etc. So a 328is is a small car with a 2.8L engine, fuel injection and sport package.
Fair enough, but can you explain the monstrosity that is the M240i XDrive then? I'm not a BMW fan. I don't hate them. I just don't care about this kind of car. M apparently means Performance. OK.... I don't speak German so maybe in German using M for "Performance" is actually OK because for all I know the German word starts with M. Then we come to the 240 part, which according to you is the engine size. However, the M240i has a 3.0 liter engine. And you say that "i" means fuel injected. Really? Because if you go back in time like 20 years that actually would have meant something but as far as I know no major car manufacturer makes a carburetor any more so all cars are fuel injection now. So it's "fuel injection" as opposed to what exactly? I have no idea what xDrive even means but maybe that actually is helpful if you're familiar with line. To me that looks like a bunch of randomly chosen gibberish but you're welcome to educate me here if you disagree.
I guess that means either I'm not spending enough time on the internet or the rest of you really need to get a life/hobby because you seem to know every meme there is to be known. I'll allow the readers to decide for themselves which one of those choices applies.
As long as the employees are not forcibly coerced to work there, I fail to be outraged.
They may not be forced to work there but it's very possible that for all practical terms they can't leave this work. I don't know. I can't tell you whether this exists in China or not, but in Russia employment contracts are often signed. A worker may be guaranteed X years of a job at Y years of money. But here's the catch - the worker who signs it can't leave the job without paying a huge fine that is the equivalent of several years of salary. If this factory has a similar thing, they may not be able to leave. I know that in the dormitories (some recent reports suggest that the dormitories are no longer in use, but outsiders don't know why) they used to put up netting to prevent "happy" workers from leaping to the deaths out of the windows. That doesn't suggest to me that there's likely a lot of individual freedom while working there.
I have experience with this. I'm not just pulling this out of my rear end.
CDs - Honestly, they're all pretty much the same now. If you really worry a lot about these, Taiyo Yuden makes high quality discs and Verbatim made ones that use AZO dye may have superior longevity. Maybe. By the time we know if they do or not, nobody will probably care. But honestly any name brand is almost identical in quality to Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim for CDs. That does not apply to other types of discs though.
DVDs - You can buy Taiyo Yuden and you can buy Verbatim. Everything TY makes is great. Most of Verbatim's stuff is great except their cheap Life series of discs which is the same landfill grade crap that everybody else in the industry makes, including TDK. Note that Verbatim also makes DataLifePlus which is top notch and not the same at all as Life series. Skip everybody else here. And nobody knows if dual layer consumer burnable DVDs will last as long as single layer ones do. Again, by the time we figure it out, nobody will probably care to know. In the earlier part of the previous decade most name manufacturers made really high quality DVD media, but the US marketplace demanded lower price, so almost everybody switched to cheap crap. TDK was actually really good at one time, using Taiyo Yuden as their manufacturer, but that hasn't been true for more than a decade now. I specifically mention TDK because the top article does. Note that Sony sometimes does and sometimes does not use top notch manufacturers for their DVD media but you'll never know which they've used until you buy it. Not worth the trouble in my opinion since you know what you get with Verbatim (non-Life series) and Taiyo Yuden. Note that Verbatim uses AZO dye on all their DVDs except the Life series, even though they don't always say so on the packaging.
BluRays - I pretty much stick to Verbatim (again, avoid Life series) and Panasonic here. Taiyo Yuden barely makes BD discs and last I checked they only made a single layer LTH type that some burners and some players may have problems with. LTH discs are a way to leverage existing DVD pressing plants so they can also make BD media and because these discs actually are written and read from backwards from normal BD media, some burners and some players have problems with them. Verbatim also makes some LTH BD discs and some regular BD discs. I advise avoiding the LTH media unless you are sure you can burn it and play it.