You probably don't need insurance if you have a high "net worth". You should only buy insurance for things you cannot cover yourself.
If you can cover it yourself, it's usually cheaper on average to simply cover it yourself. Consumer groups will often give you this advice. Insurance co's ask a markup on what you pay into them on the average.
For example, if you can cover a $20k car crash on your own without going into bankruptcy or getting into dire financial problems, it's best to only buy insurance for amounts over $20k, having a deductible of $20k. This is sometimes called "catastrophic" insurance.
It sounds like AIG doesn't want to sell catastrophic insurance, but rather "ordinary" insurance to rich people/co's. Catastrophic coverage for the really rich would probably bankrupt AIG after an event or two. Thus, they instead are looking for rich suckers who are dumb enough to buy low-deductible insurance with payout limits. (I suppose there are specific situations where it makes sense to a given person or co, at least for the shorter term.)
...the discrepancy that dark energy was "invented" to fill might have arisen from the parts of the theory that were glossed over for the sake of simplicity. The researchers set up a computer simulation of how the universe formed, based on its large-scale structure. [Matter grew lumpy in simulations]...The team simulated how gravity would affect matter in this [lumpy] structure and found that, rather than the universe expanding in a smooth, uniform manner, different parts of it would expand at different rates...consistent with observations...could change the direction of the study of physics away from...dark energy...[emph. added]
As I interpret this, they really did "assume a spherical cow" at first.
The old models assumed uniform expansion of the universe (a 4D sphere) because apparently that either makes the math easier, or we didn't have the computing power back then to "do it right". But that required "dark energy" to explain some oddities we observe in the current universe.
Then these guys looked at expansion rates and patterns with lumpy matter (uneven aggregation), found it made a big difference, and now we allegedly don't need "dark energy" to explain current observations anymore.
Thus, they simulated with a more realistic cow shape instead of with a spherical cow, and got results that fit observations without inventing extra factors (dark energy).
Both require going into the dark dangerous void and grovelling around to figure out where the pay dirt is, and at the end of the day you come out covered with grime and sweat and get no appreciation for a hard day's work.
We need more forced-bundling like a whole in the web. The great promise of web-based content delivery was more a-la-carte choice. Now Apple is doing the same bleep as the other bleepsters. Bleep you, Apple!
on the internet, they're called "Grammar Nazis". Maybe people who correct bad grammar aren't so bad after all...
There used to be a site called Portland Pattern Repository at c2.com that was a wiki and discussion board for software-engineering-related topics. There was nothing really like it for general software engineering topics and debates. It wasn't a help-desk like StackOverflow, but up at the philosophical level. (It's messy, but arguably this accurately mirrors the different viewpoints and lack of formal research in SE.)
It was the very first wiki, invented by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term "wiki" for a kind of web collaboration software resembling Apple Hypercard. ("Wiki" is based on a Hawaiian word for "quick".)
Anyhow, a grammar-and-spelling-correcting "grammar vandal" (GV) ended up killing the wiki, which is set to read-only mode for now.
To save it, volunteers had built scripts to try to back out GV's changes, but GV was highly persistent and kept a step ahead of the clean-up scripts, flooding it with garbage at times. GV was one determined SOB.
Part of the problem was that some of the corrections were questionable/debatable in nature and potentially changed the interpretation different from what an author had intended (some content was signed). GV argued this was a small price to pay for improving overall grammar and spelling, which most disagreed with. Negotiations for a compromise broke down; GV wanted full editing control.
The wiki is still alive in read-only mode, but Ward Cunningham decided to experiment with a "federated wiki" concept whereby different participants can keep a version of how they wanted the content to look and more control over who can change one's own copy. Interesting idea in theory, but so far it's failed to catch on the way the original did. It makes things too fractured for users and readers. And, you pretty much have to manage your own federated-wiki-server to participate.
GV believed "my way or no way" and sank the entire ship. Jerk!
How would a slashdot dupe-story vigilante work? DOS the dupe? Hack into slashdot and delete the dupe? Turn it into a cow story via word substitution? Flood the dupe story with ***WARNING: DUPE STORY***" flags? Pop the tires of the editor's car as punishment? Volunteer to read-check for free?
That's not a confusing sign; it was simply lacking a useful piece of additional information.
To delve into a little language debate here, I don't find that a wrong statement as given. As I understand/interpret the word "confusion", it can be caused by ANY of these:
1. Ambiguity 2. Wrong info 3. Missing info 4. Sloppy reading 5. Ill-informed reading (poor language skills)
There are two key problems with the "fat client" web-stack way of doing things.
First (1), is that each client is a potential "mutation" of the web standards in that each is client is slightly different. To make thorough application tests, you'd have to test on roughly 200 client devices to cover browser brands and versions and OS setting variations (such as Window's DPI settings). I constantly encounter device-specific render problems from many at work and at home, including some really annoying slashdot menu glitches. I often end up with help-desk calls where I tell the user to try Chrome instead of IE or vise versa. (Roughly half know this trick, but the rest still need education. They too are baffled why the industry "standards" are so screwed up. It's illogical.)
If the main render engine were on the server, you'd pretty much only have to test ONE render engine. There is far less to go wrong on the client side because the server is sending only "dumb" cordinate-based vectors. The client-side display engine is far simpler: it's not calculating layout flow, box constraint coordination, etc. It's much closer to "screen echo" protocols like VNC and Windows Remote Desktop, but vector-based instead of pixel based for efficiency. (There may also be a text-box mode where text boxes are semi-buffered or fully buffered on the client for smooth text entry.)
Second (2), the existing fat-client stack cannot practically do WYSIWYG if you want to. (Flow-based server-side engine(s) would still exist, possibly using existing browser libraries.)
There are at least two reason we want the possibility of doing WYSIWYG. First (2a), is that the app developer simply wants or needs fine control over the UI for various reasons. Interactive charting/graphing is an example: you want to be tightly bound with coordinates because it's charts.
The second benefit (2b) of WYSIWYG as on option is to make or use a different render engine. If I am setting out to build a render engine for multiple devices, I'd need something equivalent to a "graphic assembler" language to build it against. The dumb-vector approach mentioned above is just such a language. One cannot do the same with the current fat-client-web-stack approach because one is stuck with DOM/JS/CSS. If it sucks for the purpose and/or is inconsistent across browser brands/versions/OS's, tough luck: slug it out.
The fat client got too fat. Time to pop it, or at least explore alternatives.
Footnotes: One advantage vectors has over pixels is that they can be resized without the blur and/or stair-stepping pixel-based scaling gives you. Also, how custom fonts are managed needs to be defined carefully. If you use the default (included) fonts of the render engine, you'll have almost perfect matches on the client. Custom fonts could be sent as either vectors, which could eat up bandwidth, be downloaded as needed, also a bandwidth issue, or a "bounding box" be given in which the client side guarantees a fit within using possibly some degree of horizontal aspect scaling for minor shoe-horning if needed. (An app designer who doesn't want the headache of custom fonts will typically stick with the built-in fonts, accepting perhaps some loss of esthetics. At least one has a choice they don't have now.)
can expect my salary to go up $20k a year overnight now right?
Sorry, you still suck:-) But reduced visa worker competition may make your pay go up at least some, regardless.
That being said, it makes sense not to give most work visas to a narrow set of professions, but rather spread it out to more disciplines. For one, it spreads both the pain and benefits of internationalization. IT, farm laborers, and factory workers have taken most of the brunt of internationalization. (An angry rust-belt, which happened to center on swing-states, is main reason T was elected.)
You have to give T kudos for (potentially) doing some things right, even if the rest leaves a hand-print on your forehead.
Courts are mostly after-the-fact "solutions". Pollution regulations often require a company to log and monitor their own expulsions. To break the law you have to actively forge documents and test results. If we rely on lawsuits, there is little incentive to "fly right" being a lawsuit could be distant and delay-able with enough legal finagling. Corporations only tend to think about 5 years out. The internal executive mantra is "get big, get laid, then leave for another company".
I typically have browsers and other programs running, and will resize the browser window when I need to
It still sounds like a relatively rare operation compared to total usage time. I will agree longer resize redraw's are a downside, but that's only one grading factor among many.
That's five layouts for Apple mobile devices in my nuclear family plus brother.
What's the point of telling me this? A server-side formatting engine can handle all such sizes if one wants it to.
Server-centric layout rendering does NOT force one to design with absolute coordinates. It merely makes it possible. (One can half do it in current browsers also, but only in the approximate.)
Content authors and owners often don't want to go to a web developer to re-make their content into a super-flex document. It's time and money. It's almost like having to take your car to a mechanic to fill up the gas tank.
They want a CHOICE of when do that and when not to. The current standards don't give them such a choice (other than PDF, which has the limits I mentioned earlier.)
Sure, the human reader wants perfectly prepared documents/content with magic flexitude, but the reader also wants a free pony.
There are actual reasons why the Web works as it does, and it's not because web designers user orbital mind control lasers to create a demand for what they do.
Yes, because they wanted to separate semantics from presentation. It's a lovely ideal but fails in practice like communism does, or at least doesn't offer decent alternatives for those who don't want pure separation or want a rendering/formatting engine of their choosing rather than live with Microsoft's 10 versions and Google's 9 versions and FireFox's 8 versions and Apple's 7 versions, etc. etc. etc. Vesionitus sucks bigly.
As a business, if there is nobody to bribe to do X instead of Y, then you can do X yourself. Gov't would just be the middle man.
For example, suppose Biz A wants to dump pollution into a river. With a gov't, they'd have to bribe/manipulate the gov't to allow them dump pollution. If there is no gov't or a small gov't who doesn't regulate rivers, then Biz A simply dumps.
The big players are shooting themselves in the foot via forced bundling and forced big-package deals. There are new and interesting niche sports that the younger generation is learning about, and these sports often offer consumer-friendly viewing options to gain and keep new customers.
The Internet offers too many alternatives to keep doing it the big-bundle way if you want to grow.
Small-govt-ists and corporatists are pretty much the same thing. Small gov't in practice means corporations fill the void/swamp. Libertarians romantically decorate their "small gov't" claims by saying it enables freedom for ordinary folks, but that mostly stopped working after mass industrialization, and the winner-take-all pattern is ever growing (network effect).
The FCC tracking dereg vote was almost purely along party lines.
Companies already have to navigate state-specific regulations.
That's like reasoning that since your backyard pool already has alligators inhabiting it, it's okay to also put piranhas in it.
Why not let the local government, who theoretically has a better handle on the needs of its citizens than the federal government, decide what privacy is needed and enforce it on companies?
It hurts international competitiveness because companies have spend resources dealing with local laws that cover the same issue differently. You could use "broken window theory" of economics to say it creates jobs for lawyers and system implementators, but it will make doing business more expensive in the USA, and thus potentially hurt the exportability of our products and services.
I can perhaps see it from a "political freedom" perspective, but NOT a job creation mechanism for the middle class, like T claimed.
Why does the federal government need to concern itself when California already sets high standards? It's not like car companies are going to make two cars, one dirty and fuel-guzzling for the rest of the US, and another clean, lean one for California.
This directly illustrates the problem. TX won't want to pay extra for cars because CA has higher pollution standards. The "W" Bush admin actually fought with CA on this issue, trying force CA to accept lower standards because most states wanted lower standards to have cheaper cars (or more profits for Detroit).
It seems GOP wants to make it a "states rights" issue when it benefits the 1% but issue nation-wide edicts when states rights gets in the way. They wanted this also on healthcare: force CA to accept TX's low medical standards to allegedly increase cross-state competition.
Thus, "political freedom" is just a rouse for GOP. The 1% is really their focus.
I hope my state adopts something similar. This is actually how the "Federalist" model is supposed to work: each state regulates what and how they want to.
However, it can result in fractured laws where a corporation has to consider up to 50 laws (and more if county-specific ones appear) instead of just one. In other words, "poor factoring".
The same could happen to laws on the environment, finance, labor, etc. per GOP deregulation. California has even threatened to start its own space program to launch environmental research satellites if NASA's science is gutted.
State granularity of somewhat similar laws is good job security for lawyers; but efficiency, and thus international competitiveness may take a hit. "Deregulation" may instead result in messy regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
You probably don't need insurance if you have a high "net worth". You should only buy insurance for things you cannot cover yourself.
If you can cover it yourself, it's usually cheaper on average to simply cover it yourself. Consumer groups will often give you this advice. Insurance co's ask a markup on what you pay into them on the average.
For example, if you can cover a $20k car crash on your own without going into bankruptcy or getting into dire financial problems, it's best to only buy insurance for amounts over $20k, having a deductible of $20k. This is sometimes called "catastrophic" insurance.
It sounds like AIG doesn't want to sell catastrophic insurance, but rather "ordinary" insurance to rich people/co's. Catastrophic coverage for the really rich would probably bankrupt AIG after an event or two. Thus, they instead are looking for rich suckers who are dumb enough to buy low-deductible insurance with payout limits. (I suppose there are specific situations where it makes sense to a given person or co, at least for the shorter term.)
If they are purchasing it, just call it "Verizon". "AOL X" (service) would now be "Verizon X".
Being married to a physicist:
Wife: "Does this universe simulation make my ass look fat?"
Husband: "Mind if I tweak a few sim parameters before I answer?"
Wife: "Sounds like a waffly 'yes'. You can tweak your own parameter tonight!"
You're just afraid of owning 32% of a cat.
As I interpret this, they really did "assume a spherical cow" at first.
The old models assumed uniform expansion of the universe (a 4D sphere) because apparently that either makes the math easier, or we didn't have the computing power back then to "do it right". But that required "dark energy" to explain some oddities we observe in the current universe.
Then these guys looked at expansion rates and patterns with lumpy matter (uneven aggregation), found it made a big difference, and now we allegedly don't need "dark energy" to explain current observations anymore.
Thus, they simulated with a more realistic cow shape instead of with a spherical cow, and got results that fit observations without inventing extra factors (dark energy).
Even God has deficit problems.
Webscale asynchronous responsive node.js appity apps?
Both require going into the dark dangerous void and grovelling around to figure out where the pay dirt is, and at the end of the day you come out covered with grime and sweat and get no appreciation for a hard day's work.
We need more forced-bundling like a whole in the web. The great promise of web-based content delivery was more a-la-carte choice. Now Apple is doing the same bleep as the other bleepsters. Bleep you, Apple!
There used to be a site called Portland Pattern Repository at c2.com that was a wiki and discussion board for software-engineering-related topics. There was nothing really like it for general software engineering topics and debates. It wasn't a help-desk like StackOverflow, but up at the philosophical level. (It's messy, but arguably this accurately mirrors the different viewpoints and lack of formal research in SE.)
It was the very first wiki, invented by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term "wiki" for a kind of web collaboration software resembling Apple Hypercard. ("Wiki" is based on a Hawaiian word for "quick".)
Anyhow, a grammar-and-spelling-correcting "grammar vandal" (GV) ended up killing the wiki, which is set to read-only mode for now.
To save it, volunteers had built scripts to try to back out GV's changes, but GV was highly persistent and kept a step ahead of the clean-up scripts, flooding it with garbage at times. GV was one determined SOB.
Part of the problem was that some of the corrections were questionable/debatable in nature and potentially changed the interpretation different from what an author had intended (some content was signed). GV argued this was a small price to pay for improving overall grammar and spelling, which most disagreed with. Negotiations for a compromise broke down; GV wanted full editing control.
The wiki is still alive in read-only mode, but Ward Cunningham decided to experiment with a "federated wiki" concept whereby different participants can keep a version of how they wanted the content to look and more control over who can change one's own copy. Interesting idea in theory, but so far it's failed to catch on the way the original did. It makes things too fractured for users and readers. And, you pretty much have to manage your own federated-wiki-server to participate.
GV believed "my way or no way" and sank the entire ship. Jerk!
How would a slashdot dupe-story vigilante work? DOS the dupe? Hack into slashdot and delete the dupe? Turn it into a cow story via word substitution? Flood the dupe story with ***WARNING: DUPE STORY***" flags? Pop the tires of the editor's car as punishment? Volunteer to read-check for free?
To delve into a little language debate here, I don't find that a wrong statement as given. As I understand/interpret the word "confusion", it can be caused by ANY of these:
1. Ambiguity
2. Wrong info
3. Missing info
4. Sloppy reading
5. Ill-informed reading (poor language skills)
There are two key problems with the "fat client" web-stack way of doing things.
First (1), is that each client is a potential "mutation" of the web standards in that each is client is slightly different. To make thorough application tests, you'd have to test on roughly 200 client devices to cover browser brands and versions and OS setting variations (such as Window's DPI settings). I constantly encounter device-specific render problems from many at work and at home, including some really annoying slashdot menu glitches. I often end up with help-desk calls where I tell the user to try Chrome instead of IE or vise versa. (Roughly half know this trick, but the rest still need education. They too are baffled why the industry "standards" are so screwed up. It's illogical.)
If the main render engine were on the server, you'd pretty much only have to test ONE render engine. There is far less to go wrong on the client side because the server is sending only "dumb" cordinate-based vectors. The client-side display engine is far simpler: it's not calculating layout flow, box constraint coordination, etc. It's much closer to "screen echo" protocols like VNC and Windows Remote Desktop, but vector-based instead of pixel based for efficiency. (There may also be a text-box mode where text boxes are semi-buffered or fully buffered on the client for smooth text entry.)
Second (2), the existing fat-client stack cannot practically do WYSIWYG if you want to. (Flow-based server-side engine(s) would still exist, possibly using existing browser libraries.)
There are at least two reason we want the possibility of doing WYSIWYG. First (2a), is that the app developer simply wants or needs fine control over the UI for various reasons. Interactive charting/graphing is an example: you want to be tightly bound with coordinates because it's charts.
The second benefit (2b) of WYSIWYG as on option is to make or use a different render engine. If I am setting out to build a render engine for multiple devices, I'd need something equivalent to a "graphic assembler" language to build it against. The dumb-vector approach mentioned above is just such a language. One cannot do the same with the current fat-client-web-stack approach because one is stuck with DOM/JS/CSS. If it sucks for the purpose and/or is inconsistent across browser brands/versions/OS's, tough luck: slug it out.
The fat client got too fat. Time to pop it, or at least explore alternatives.
Footnotes: One advantage vectors has over pixels is that they can be resized without the blur and/or stair-stepping pixel-based scaling gives you. Also, how custom fonts are managed needs to be defined carefully. If you use the default (included) fonts of the render engine, you'll have almost perfect matches on the client. Custom fonts could be sent as either vectors, which could eat up bandwidth, be downloaded as needed, also a bandwidth issue, or a "bounding box" be given in which the client side guarantees a fit within using possibly some degree of horizontal aspect scaling for minor shoe-horning if needed. (An app designer who doesn't want the headache of custom fonts will typically stick with the built-in fonts, accepting perhaps some loss of esthetics. At least one has a choice they don't have now.)
Sorry, you still suck :-) But reduced visa worker competition may make your pay go up at least some, regardless.
That being said, it makes sense not to give most work visas to a narrow set of professions, but rather spread it out to more disciplines. For one, it spreads both the pain and benefits of internationalization. IT, farm laborers, and factory workers have taken most of the brunt of internationalization. (An angry rust-belt, which happened to center on swing-states, is main reason T was elected.)
You have to give T kudos for (potentially) doing some things right, even if the rest leaves a hand-print on your forehead.
A few years ago a local artist improved a confusing L.A. freeway sign, making an interstate number shield in the process:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...
https://www.good.is/articles/t...
http://gizmodo.com/how-one-fed...
One down, 9,999 to go...
Courts are mostly after-the-fact "solutions". Pollution regulations often require a company to log and monitor their own expulsions. To break the law you have to actively forge documents and test results. If we rely on lawsuits, there is little incentive to "fly right" being a lawsuit could be distant and delay-able with enough legal finagling. Corporations only tend to think about 5 years out. The internal executive mantra is "get big, get laid, then leave for another company".
Trump doesn't know it, but he's Made Robots Great Again!
(Before you complain about "again", T never defined the first time in MAGA either. He deflected the question in the debates.)
Why would the human CEO say anything different? A robot and a robot salesman have similar motives.
It still sounds like a relatively rare operation compared to total usage time. I will agree longer resize redraw's are a downside, but that's only one grading factor among many.
What's the point of telling me this? A server-side formatting engine can handle all such sizes if one wants it to.
Server-centric layout rendering does NOT force one to design with absolute coordinates. It merely makes it possible. (One can half do it in current browsers also, but only in the approximate.)
Content authors and owners often don't want to go to a web developer to re-make their content into a super-flex document. It's time and money. It's almost like having to take your car to a mechanic to fill up the gas tank.
They want a CHOICE of when do that and when not to. The current standards don't give them such a choice (other than PDF, which has the limits I mentioned earlier.)
Sure, the human reader wants perfectly prepared documents/content with magic flexitude, but the reader also wants a free pony.
Yes, because they wanted to separate semantics from presentation. It's a lovely ideal but fails in practice like communism does, or at least doesn't offer decent alternatives for those who don't want pure separation or want a rendering/formatting engine of their choosing rather than live with Microsoft's 10 versions and Google's 9 versions and FireFox's 8 versions and Apple's 7 versions, etc. etc. etc. Vesionitus sucks bigly.
As a business, if there is nobody to bribe to do X instead of Y, then you can do X yourself. Gov't would just be the middle man.
For example, suppose Biz A wants to dump pollution into a river. With a gov't, they'd have to bribe/manipulate the gov't to allow them dump pollution. If there is no gov't or a small gov't who doesn't regulate rivers, then Biz A simply dumps.
So forcing people to study X does not make them want a career in X. Shocking!
In related news, redundancy is redundantly redundant.
The big players are shooting themselves in the foot via forced bundling and forced big-package deals. There are new and interesting niche sports that the younger generation is learning about, and these sports often offer consumer-friendly viewing options to gain and keep new customers.
The Internet offers too many alternatives to keep doing it the big-bundle way if you want to grow.
Small-govt-ists and corporatists are pretty much the same thing. Small gov't in practice means corporations fill the void/swamp. Libertarians romantically decorate their "small gov't" claims by saying it enables freedom for ordinary folks, but that mostly stopped working after mass industrialization, and the winner-take-all pattern is ever growing (network effect).
The FCC tracking dereg vote was almost purely along party lines.
That's like reasoning that since your backyard pool already has alligators inhabiting it, it's okay to also put piranhas in it.
It hurts international competitiveness because companies have spend resources dealing with local laws that cover the same issue differently. You could use "broken window theory" of economics to say it creates jobs for lawyers and system implementators, but it will make doing business more expensive in the USA, and thus potentially hurt the exportability of our products and services.
I can perhaps see it from a "political freedom" perspective, but NOT a job creation mechanism for the middle class, like T claimed.
This directly illustrates the problem. TX won't want to pay extra for cars because CA has higher pollution standards. The "W" Bush admin actually fought with CA on this issue, trying force CA to accept lower standards because most states wanted lower standards to have cheaper cars (or more profits for Detroit).
It seems GOP wants to make it a "states rights" issue when it benefits the 1% but issue nation-wide edicts when states rights gets in the way. They wanted this also on healthcare: force CA to accept TX's low medical standards to allegedly increase cross-state competition.
Thus, "political freedom" is just a rouse for GOP. The 1% is really their focus.
I hope my state adopts something similar. This is actually how the "Federalist" model is supposed to work: each state regulates what and how they want to.
However, it can result in fractured laws where a corporation has to consider up to 50 laws (and more if county-specific ones appear) instead of just one. In other words, "poor factoring".
The same could happen to laws on the environment, finance, labor, etc. per GOP deregulation. California has even threatened to start its own space program to launch environmental research satellites if NASA's science is gutted.
State granularity of somewhat similar laws is good job security for lawyers; but efficiency, and thus international competitiveness may take a hit. "Deregulation" may instead result in messy regulation.
Damn! you guessed my password.