Well you could knock me over with a plate of biscuits and gravy...
seriously...
somebody...
damn, now I gotta drive down town for biscuits and gravy...
Well if it helps, I have a scone I can scone you with.
Everywhere I've lived in the US, vaccinations are provided gratis by the local health department.
Organisation may be a serious problem there.
With Australia and Canada. Nationwide you can go see a GP for your childs immi and receive it. Basic adult immunisations like a tetanus booster are free for life.
You dont have to search for a clinic that provides the free vaccines, it doesn't change if I move states, your records move with you easily.
Don't most race drivers use paddle shifters now? (Full disclosure: I drive a manual)
Sadly yes.
But professional motorsports haven't been about driver skill for a while now. It should be noted that a lot of them use floor mounted sequential shifters rather than paddles.
I miss the days of the old Group B rally cars.
If the average Joe wants to get into motorsports as a hobby, they're better off getting a manual. Hyundai Excels may seem boring, but they are a hoot when you're in an Excel racing league and it costs less than a bag of golf bats and a golfing hat. MX-5 (Miata) racing leagues are a step up. If you just want to be a casual racer, there's the run what you brung track days where you can take your everyday hot hatch around a track and then drive it home again.
I drive a Nissan Silvia S15 (ADM 200sx) which I've upgraded to be very track capable.
If Google is hacked, Google takes the hit and looks bad.
If your bank gets hacked, you take the hit, the merchant takes the hit, the bank walks away clean.
In what scenario? Maybe if 3rd-party debit card readers get hacked?
If your banks ATM gets hacked, that's on the bank. If your account gets hacked via online access, or plain-old in-person fraud, most banks these days will take the hit, or most of it.
Erm, in Australia if your bank account gets hacked via online access or in person fraud at the branch, the bank is liable for the loss. Same with card skimmers (from your perspective, the bank can go after the people committing the fraud for compensation). So they're forced to take more steps to prevent it. This is enforced by law.
In order to see how much money I have (yes, I'm one of those strange people who's personal account is in the black) I just have to log onto my banks website. To transfer money I have to put in a one time code I receive via SMS (there is also an optional hard token). Sure someone could steal my phone or use social engineering techniques to subvert my number but these are very difficult things to do and very, very rare (and in the case of trying to get a copy of my SIM card from the telco, would require the attacker to actually know me) so the system is not 100% secure but no system is.
Security is often the embodiment of the saying "perfect is the enemy of done". You cant ever have perfect security, all you can do is make it hard enough that 99% of attackers simply give up and move onto softer targets.
Simple solution: name names and vote with your feet.
Good Idea... Tell me a bank that cares more about the security of its customers than profit.
OK, OK, that's too hard so just tell me a bank that cares about security.
The fact is, whenever a bank does something to improve security, people whinge about it until its neutered beyond the point of it being secure. The amount of people in Australia who complain about 2 factor authentication (there'll even be a few on/. who'll complain) is amazing when it prevents 99.9% of drive by account theft. Its not 100% secure, but it's better than it was when all an attacker needed to transfer all your money was your username and password (which was no doubt saved in IE).
Beyond this, there is the fact banks dont want to spend money on security when they dont have to. Banks only have to reasons to care about security:
1. when it costs them money.
2. when the government forces them to.
Because the cost of fraud can be offset, reasons #2 is the main reason that banks upgrade their security. This is why European banks have better security than US banks.
Once people give up hands-on driving experience, expect a rapid descent into complete dependence on the AI.
This has already happened.
A lot of steering wheel attendants (I refuse to call them drivers) now refuse to buy a car unless it can change gear for them, brake for them and stay in the lane for them.
People expect that lane assist and automatic emergency braking will do things for them so they dont have to pay attention to what they are doing. If you were to take one of these steering wheel attendants out of their SUV and put them into a TVR, they'd kill themselves within 5 minutes.
Lets not even start on the fact my manual transmission acts as an anti-theft device these days.
About the ethical rules that should govern decisions like saving one baby who's lying on the railway track to the left vs 5 grannies toddling across the track on the right, when you're at the controls of the track-switch.
Now someone gets to actually program these rules into a car.
Cool!
The problem is, how will the car know which car contains the grandma, which one contains the brain surgeon on the way to save the popes life and which one contains 3 kids?
The simple answer from engineers is that it doesn't.
Engineers and safety experts have already got a bunch of rules to determine what to do in an emergency. Rule 1, avoid if at all possible a collision, rule 2, if a collision is unavoidable, do not swerve. Brake and stay straight as a rear end crash is the safest kind of crash.
It doesn't matter if the guy in front has an OBE and the guy to your left is a meth addict. The car will be programed to choose the course that causes the less damage and that is the rear ender.
The problem that will appear with autonomous cars aren't the cars, its the people. Everyone expects them to be some kind of motoring messiah that means they dont have to worry about driving. In reality, autonomous cars will be programmed to:
- Not speed.
- slow down for adverse and unexpected conditions.
- Maintain safe distances.
- Keep out of the passing lane even if the it means going slower.
- Slow down to anticipate potentially dangerous spots (I.E. pedestrian crossings).
- Slow down in areas heavily trafficked by pedestrians or when significant pedestrian traffic is detected.
- Not to change lane unless necessary.
- Indicate and give way to traffic when changing lanes.
- Obey all traffic signs and slow for give way (yield) signs.
How do I know all this, they're straight from the defensive drivers handbook (OK some are from the learn to drive handbook). This will frustrate a lot of todays drivers because it means the autonomous car will be perceived to be slower than they are (even though it will probably be just as fast due to better decision making) so you'll find a lot of the worst drivers taking manual control because the bleeping car isn't tailgating or lane weaving like they want it to.
SDCs have already logged hundreds of thousands of miles on public roads, and have a safety record better than human drivers.
So, they've logged fewer operating miles than accumulate in the US in a single day? Impressive.
And how many of those miles have been in a typical Pacific Northwest blinding rainstorm? Or after a snow storm such as the Northeast experienced last week? (Etc... etc...) Or to put it another way, the numbers logged as only impressive to the easily impressionable.
This, number of hours does not make a good driver, human or otherwise. You can be a pitiful driver for your whole life and still not have a crash out of blind luck (and better drivers around you.
Exactly. My father was a big jogger in the 1970's and 1980's. He ran 5 to 10 miles almost every day.
Around age 68 he had to get a knee replaced. At 73 he had the other knee replaced. The doctors told him that pretty much anyone who jogged that much has to get new knees. Now he still has trouble walking long distances, which sucks for him since he lives in the mountains and loves to hike.
My father has advised me against jogging more than a couple miles twice a week.
Its the same with any form of high impact sports. Former (Australian Rules) football players getting hip replacements in their 40's. A lot have their hamstrings pack it in whilst still in their 20's (effectively ending their career).
Also with lifting weights, its far more important to lift correctly than to lift heavy. Sure you can squat twice as much if you only drop by 2 inches instead of putting your arse below your knees like you're meant to, but the former will leave you with a serious back problem in a short time.
Here in Australia, home-schooling is almost unheard of. The stereotype here is that only super-religious parents home-school their children, in an effort to shield the children from conflicting viewpoints. The exception is farmers in very remote areas where there are no schools.
What is it in America that makes home-schooling more popular there? Is it mostly religion-driven there too?
Its mostly paranoia driven. Some people dont want the "gubbermint" teaching their children ideas that might contradict creationism, or let them learn about science, the harm caused by easily vaccinated diseases or other things that may break the fragile brainwashing these children have.
We've got our fair share of nutters here in Oz, FOTLs (Freemen On The Land) are basically the Aussie equivalent of paranoid anti-govt rednecks combined with a generous helping of libertarian delusions. The thing is we just dont give them the airtime that their American equivalents get.
That and the public schooling system here in Oz is actually quite good, consistently from kindergarten to university.
When you eat properly, there is no need for any vitamin supplement, period. You can get all vitamins and minerals and whatnot from your food - people have done just that for thousands upon thousands of years. There's no reason why we suddenly can't do that any more.
This.
Suppliments dont work. Unless you've got a serious medical condition that is causing a serious deficiency, you can get all the nutrients you need from regular food. Not only that, they'll be adsorbed far more completely than they will with pills (erm... we pass a vast majority of the stuff we eat, food is digested more completely than pills). You dont even have to eat that healthily to get all the vitamins and minerals you need as long as you eat a somewhat balanced diet with meat, fruits, grains and vegetables. Do this and you'll eat far more vitamins and minerals than you need, even when you only adsorb a fraction of them.
If you are on prescribed supplements, these will be kept behind the counter at the pharmacy with all the other drugs that work.
The supplements you buy at the supermarket are so weak that they have no measurable effect compared to the control group given placebos. They have to be as high doses are actually harmful (most notably beta-Carotene).
Vitamin supplements are an industry, huge amounts of money are made by selling placebo's to the masses. However they dont work if they did work they'd have to be controlled like painkillers and this would be a large impediment to people buying them and taking them every day.
Jesus, how awful is it for a black kid to be told that "black" is a bad word?
-jcr
It depends on the context.
If he was suspended for it, chances are it wasn't used innocuously.
In fact, knowing several teachers chances are this particular student is a right little shit, reading between the lines. The problem is they cant officially say he's maladjusted and ill disciplined without the parents suing.
Don't vaccinate your kids, and they are not allowed in a school, daycare, public park or anywhere else where they may come into contact with other children who cannot be vaccinated due to medical reasons and rely on herd immunity for their safety, or infants who are to young to be vaccinated..
Fixed it a little bit for you, but I agree with you so much. Choose not to vaccinate your kids and face the consequences: I don't want unvaccinated kids in my child's daycare, preschool or school. The government mandates that I take my child to school, and I have every right to expect that her safety is taken care of. That includes the threat of unvaccinated children.
No vaccine is 100% effective. Even vaccinated kids can contract a disease they've been vaccinated against. The risk is much lower (vaccines are over 99.9% effective) but its still a risk. In the recent measles outbreak at Disney that had 95 confirmed cases, at least 6 were confirmed to be vaccinated against measles.
This is one reason I'm glad that in my country, Australia, an MMR vaccination (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) is mandatory unless you have a damn good reason not to get one (and being an idiot isn't good enough).
sorry but Uber seems to have a higher share of body odor drivers than regular taxi companies.
Its worse than that.
The last Uber ride I took was terrible. The guy arrived in a 5 door Pug 206 diesel, so I was immediately greeted with the sound of sharp breaking and a farmyard. The car was dirty but that wasn't as bad as the inside that smelled of dirty socks and expired prawns. The driver tailgated and braked hard then stopped 1 KM from my house and demanded I give him a 5 star rating. I told him to consume a large number of phalluses, got out and walked the rest of the way.
Compare this to the last taxi I took. It was a newish Camry Hybrid like most taxis in my city. It was clean, the driver was polite, kept safe distances and didn't try to eject unsecured objects through the front window with his braking skills. Drove all the way to my home and showed me a new way to get from my house to the airport avoiding a lot of traffic. I paid cash and said he could keep the change (tipping is not customary in Australia).
The thing is, the taxi was around the same price as the Uber car... including the airport surcharge which the Uber taxi wouldn't have had to pay.
Artificially restricting the number of cabs with medallions that then cost $1 million dollars, locking out rookie entrepreneurs, is crony capitalism.
Complete de-regulation is going to have the same problem but worse.
When you have too many taxis the system results in another form of artificial restriction done by taxi drivers themselves. They form blocs and start defending their territories. Before you know it you end up with a taxi Mafia that wont simply lock out the "rookie entrepreneurs" but drag them out of their car, beat them up and damage their car. You see this all the time in developing nations where there's no taxi licensing, hell in some places (phuket) they will go as far to target any form of public transport to protect their racket, last time the province tried to implement municipal transport (a baht bus) the drivers were dragged out and beaten in the street.
So you can have artificial restriction done by the govt or artificial restriction done by criminals. Pick your poison.
Actually, I travel a lot in Europe, and take a lot of taxis. I have only had very positive experiences with taxi drivers . . . because I treat them with respect.
This, I've travelled in developing nations and had great taxi drivers. Of course I've had the odd one who thinks his Toyota minivan is a F1 car but even in Thailand these guys are not the norm. Taxi drivers in developed nations are almost always very good.
The only reason Uber is popular is due to an irrational and unfounded hate of taxis. The problem these people have is that they'll eventually find Uber has all the same problems and a few problems traditional taxis dont have.
Taxi drivers are the eyes and ears of a city
This too. Taxi drivers in my own city (Perth, Western Australia) have shown me some very clever routes around traffic hotspots.
Plainly Uber does a better job overall than cabs, or people would not use them.
I dont think this is the case.
Everytime I've used an Uber car it's been a lot worse than a taxi service. Unlike a taxi service, they can turn down your fare when you book one. This means trying to find one at 2 AM on a Friday night is impossible. Cars were worse than taxi's last time it was a Pug 206 diesel that looked like the interior had never been washed, smelled of mouldy socks and the driver managed to bunny hop it regularly (and it was an automatic so I'm not sure how he did it), further more, he stopped about 1 KM from my house until you gave him a 5 star rating (I got out and walked).
What's happening is that a lot of people are pretending its better because they have an irrational hate of the existing taxi system. What will happen is that people will slowly learn that Uber has all the same problems as traditional taxi services plus a few new ones. Eventually all but the most stubborn will fall off the band wagon.
But aside of that, these crib sheet supporters exist for a reason. Their existence does not only serve the purpose to waste your time, because that could be accomplished even cheaper than the support monkeys are. By keeping you in the holding loop.
No, the reason is that these utterly and absolutely moronic questions they ask that make you wonder whether they think your IQ measures in the single digits actually solve most tech support problems. Yes, people ARE that stupid. And no, I'm not talking about the supporters here.
The "solutions" these sheets offer that make you wonder whether the support thinks you're unable to tie your own laces without a coach and a personal assistant DO solve the problems most idiots calling them have.
Don't blame support. Blame the idiots who want tha intarwebz but don't want to be bothered with knowing anything about those funny boxes with the blinkenlights next to their computer... or what do you call that thing where my Farmville is shown?
This,
Sadly there are very few ways of determining who is smart enough to have tried all the things that are on a level 1 support monkeys script. The only one I've seen work for an ISP is to go through the support procedure, get it escalated and have a level 3 technician put a note in your file that you're to be immediately escalated to level 2. This is how my ISP deals with me, when I call the first thing they do is put me through to someone higher but they know I'm not going to bother them with anything simple.
If you work for Comcast, you either a) expect to get shit from people hating Comcast; or b) are a complete idiot.
You're a cunt.
Yes a huge, blubbering fanny flap.
Oh, I'm sorry, you don't like getting abused. But you chose to come to/. you accepted that you're a complete cunt.
The point I'm making here is that regardless of your job, being abused by customers is never acceptable and blaming the victim for it is pants on head retarded. Now the thing with telco call centre jobs is that they have a very high rate of turnover. Very few Comcast (or Time Warner or Telstra or Vodafone) workers will be lifers (long gone are the days of BT workers staying till pension age). This means that a lot of people work there because they have little choice in the matter (and yes, take a shitty job or starve is not an acceptable choice) and so they move on as soon as they can.
A lot of people take these jobs because they cant find any other work. This does not mean they have chose to take abuse.
At the college level though I see a different kind of problem. Many of the people from 3rd world countries I have encountered do VERY well at rote memorization tasks and can often solve engineering problems that are almost exactly what they have done before but when you step outside of that they quickly run into problems. I find that american and canadian engineers are more likely to rely on a computer to solve the hard math part but they are much better at figuring out how to define the problem and what should be done to solve it.
Plus one other problem, you have a huge sampling bias.
The people who come over here to live and work from developing nations are typically the best and the brightest. When you're comparing the best a nation has to offer against the median, of course they're going to look good. You need to compare the top 1% against the top 1%.
Finally, culturally most Asian countries are set up for learning by rote memorisation. A huge emphasis is placed on conformity. Also huge pressure from parents to get good grades reinforce this memorise and regurgitate attitude. When it comes to innovation and thinking outside the box, western nations tend to foster more creative people.
I am not sure why but most european countries still seem to do rote memorization
Because they dont. Europe has a lot of different education systems, Waldorf/Steiner schools are German and Montessori schools are Italian and whilst I disagree with the Luddite philosophies, they definitely dont teach by rote memorisation and tend to produce highly creative people.
In fact the only reason I wouldn't send my kids to a Steiner school is their complete disdain for technology.
Had the buyer meet me in the lobby of my bank, transaction was in cash. Called my insurance agency before the guy test drove the car and had him leave the money with me. When the deal was done I deposited the cash, sent a CYA email to the insurance agency cancelling as of that time and date, went out, pulled the tags, tossed the dude the keys. Sketchily, he whipped out some Delaware tags (we were not in Delaware and he said he was from a different state but this was not my problem) and drove away. Seemed like a pretty safe way to do business.
Sounds pretty paranoid, I thought all of those guns in the US were supposed to be making you safer than Australia.
I've bought and sold cars using Gumtree (which is kind of like Craigslist but more useful and less hookers) and the procedure is fairly simple.
1. Buyer contacts seller, arranges time to meet at sellers house.
2. Buyer goes to sellers house, test drives car.
3. If they want to buy, they arrange payment (usually cash for small amounts, bank cheque for larger amounts), give it to the seller at their home and the buyer and seller fill out the registration transfer form which the seller posts then drives off with the car.
Honestly I've never felt the need to take extra security precautions. Apart from annoying tyre kickers, never had any issues.
How does this not drive more Burger Kings into Canada? If they go after McDonalds and not (now Canadian) Burger King, they drive corps out. If they go after BK, then can any country do that, tax USA based corporate assets? It's probably better than a VAT, I guess (which is why USA corporate taxes are relatively high, it makes up for lack of Value Added Tax).
If all of the large corporations are driven out of the US, that will leave room in the marketplace for small companies to get founded, and the US will end up with lots of small companies, with lots of CEO's, instead of a handful of CEO's with all of the money. Why is driving corporations out a bad thing?
A noble sentiment, but unlikely to ever happen.
In the end, companies wont go anywhere. Why? well they're still making money even though they're now being asked to pay tax on it. Burger King wont abandon it's operations because they would lose money. Their assets are worth something now, but if they up sticks and went the values of their properties would drop through the floor as the market would be flooded with cheap burger joints for sale.
Very few businesses will go through with their threat to leave a country that taxes them. Beyond that where would they go... Australia, England, the EU... they tax too, India, China, corruption will cost more than tax. Africa, well fine if you dont need infrastructure. Nope, they whinge and cry and pout but in the end they'll pay because the alternative would lose far too much money.
All it will do is cause US companies to become foreign companies incorporated in other jurisdictions. And then there will be less taxes collected. There are reasons why these things have not been addressed already and contrary to what some may think, they have little to do with politicians being paid off.
So all these companies that have offices, properties, production facilities, staff and what not in the US are just going to up sticks and go.
Utter tripe.
Sure, they'll whine, they scream and cry about how unfair it is that they cant hide their profit, but in the end they'll pay because they cant simply abandon their operations. A big part of their whining is trying to convince you that they will leave but it's an empty threat. If there were more money to be made by abandoning their US operations they would have done it already. The thing is, a lot of these companies cant move, they require something that they cant get outside the developed world. Be it highly educated workers, quality controls or just a lack of corruption. The louder they cry, the less able they are to leave so in the end, they'll pay.
They're acting like a toddler looking for attention, they'll keep getting louder and louder unless you start to ignore them.
Australia also holds that view on personal income for Australian citizens on money earned abroad.
It needs to be noted that this is only if you're living in Australia whilst earning money overseas.
If you live and work in London as an Australian citizen you dont have to pay tax to Australia on what you earned in London. You're considered a non-resident in this case and only the income you earn in Australia is taxed by Australia.
This is quite different to the US system where US citizens who permanently live abroad are still taxed on their income regardless of source.
And, for you whankers that are going to claim "I don't use Facebook", a business can make it so the profile is completely public so no account is needed.
Wankers isn't spelled with a H.
Also, stop trying to be logical with hipsters, if they used facebook's public profiles it would be too mainstream for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you could knock me over with a plate of biscuits and gravy...
seriously...
somebody...
damn, now I gotta drive down town for biscuits and gravy...
Well if it helps, I have a scone I can scone you with.
Everywhere I've lived in the US, vaccinations are provided gratis by the local health department.
Organisation may be a serious problem there.
With Australia and Canada. Nationwide you can go see a GP for your childs immi and receive it. Basic adult immunisations like a tetanus booster are free for life.
You dont have to search for a clinic that provides the free vaccines, it doesn't change if I move states, your records move with you easily.
Don't most race drivers use paddle shifters now? (Full disclosure: I drive a manual)
Sadly yes.
But professional motorsports haven't been about driver skill for a while now. It should be noted that a lot of them use floor mounted sequential shifters rather than paddles.
I miss the days of the old Group B rally cars.
If the average Joe wants to get into motorsports as a hobby, they're better off getting a manual. Hyundai Excels may seem boring, but they are a hoot when you're in an Excel racing league and it costs less than a bag of golf bats and a golfing hat. MX-5 (Miata) racing leagues are a step up. If you just want to be a casual racer, there's the run what you brung track days where you can take your everyday hot hatch around a track and then drive it home again.
I drive a Nissan Silvia S15 (ADM 200sx) which I've upgraded to be very track capable.
If Google is hacked, Google takes the hit and looks bad.
If your bank gets hacked, you take the hit, the merchant takes the hit, the bank walks away clean.
In what scenario? Maybe if 3rd-party debit card readers get hacked?
If your banks ATM gets hacked, that's on the bank. If your account gets hacked via online access, or plain-old in-person fraud, most banks these days will take the hit, or most of it.
Erm, in Australia if your bank account gets hacked via online access or in person fraud at the branch, the bank is liable for the loss. Same with card skimmers (from your perspective, the bank can go after the people committing the fraud for compensation). So they're forced to take more steps to prevent it. This is enforced by law.
In order to see how much money I have (yes, I'm one of those strange people who's personal account is in the black) I just have to log onto my banks website. To transfer money I have to put in a one time code I receive via SMS (there is also an optional hard token). Sure someone could steal my phone or use social engineering techniques to subvert my number but these are very difficult things to do and very, very rare (and in the case of trying to get a copy of my SIM card from the telco, would require the attacker to actually know me) so the system is not 100% secure but no system is.
Security is often the embodiment of the saying "perfect is the enemy of done". You cant ever have perfect security, all you can do is make it hard enough that 99% of attackers simply give up and move onto softer targets.
Simple solution: name names and vote with your feet.
Good Idea... Tell me a bank that cares more about the security of its customers than profit.
/. who'll complain) is amazing when it prevents 99.9% of drive by account theft. Its not 100% secure, but it's better than it was when all an attacker needed to transfer all your money was your username and password (which was no doubt saved in IE).
OK, OK, that's too hard so just tell me a bank that cares about security.
The fact is, whenever a bank does something to improve security, people whinge about it until its neutered beyond the point of it being secure. The amount of people in Australia who complain about 2 factor authentication (there'll even be a few on
Beyond this, there is the fact banks dont want to spend money on security when they dont have to. Banks only have to reasons to care about security:
1. when it costs them money.
2. when the government forces them to.
Because the cost of fraud can be offset, reasons #2 is the main reason that banks upgrade their security. This is why European banks have better security than US banks.
Once people give up hands-on driving experience, expect a rapid descent into complete dependence on the AI.
This has already happened.
A lot of steering wheel attendants (I refuse to call them drivers) now refuse to buy a car unless it can change gear for them, brake for them and stay in the lane for them.
People expect that lane assist and automatic emergency braking will do things for them so they dont have to pay attention to what they are doing. If you were to take one of these steering wheel attendants out of their SUV and put them into a TVR, they'd kill themselves within 5 minutes.
Lets not even start on the fact my manual transmission acts as an anti-theft device these days.
About the ethical rules that should govern decisions like saving one baby who's lying on the railway track to the left vs 5 grannies toddling across the track on the right, when you're at the controls of the track-switch.
Now someone gets to actually program these rules into a car.
Cool!
The problem is, how will the car know which car contains the grandma, which one contains the brain surgeon on the way to save the popes life and which one contains 3 kids?
The simple answer from engineers is that it doesn't.
Engineers and safety experts have already got a bunch of rules to determine what to do in an emergency. Rule 1, avoid if at all possible a collision, rule 2, if a collision is unavoidable, do not swerve. Brake and stay straight as a rear end crash is the safest kind of crash.
It doesn't matter if the guy in front has an OBE and the guy to your left is a meth addict. The car will be programed to choose the course that causes the less damage and that is the rear ender.
The problem that will appear with autonomous cars aren't the cars, its the people. Everyone expects them to be some kind of motoring messiah that means they dont have to worry about driving. In reality, autonomous cars will be programmed to:
- Not speed.
- slow down for adverse and unexpected conditions.
- Maintain safe distances.
- Keep out of the passing lane even if the it means going slower.
- Slow down to anticipate potentially dangerous spots (I.E. pedestrian crossings).
- Slow down in areas heavily trafficked by pedestrians or when significant pedestrian traffic is detected.
- Not to change lane unless necessary.
- Indicate and give way to traffic when changing lanes.
- Obey all traffic signs and slow for give way (yield) signs.
How do I know all this, they're straight from the defensive drivers handbook (OK some are from the learn to drive handbook). This will frustrate a lot of todays drivers because it means the autonomous car will be perceived to be slower than they are (even though it will probably be just as fast due to better decision making) so you'll find a lot of the worst drivers taking manual control because the bleeping car isn't tailgating or lane weaving like they want it to.
So, they've logged fewer operating miles than accumulate in the US in a single day? Impressive.
And how many of those miles have been in a typical Pacific Northwest blinding rainstorm? Or after a snow storm such as the Northeast experienced last week? (Etc... etc...) Or to put it another way, the numbers logged as only impressive to the easily impressionable.
This, number of hours does not make a good driver, human or otherwise. You can be a pitiful driver for your whole life and still not have a crash out of blind luck (and better drivers around you.
Exactly. My father was a big jogger in the 1970's and 1980's. He ran 5 to 10 miles almost every day.
Around age 68 he had to get a knee replaced. At 73 he had the other knee replaced. The doctors told him that pretty much anyone who jogged that much has to get new knees. Now he still has trouble walking long distances, which sucks for him since he lives in the mountains and loves to hike.
My father has advised me against jogging more than a couple miles twice a week.
Its the same with any form of high impact sports. Former (Australian Rules) football players getting hip replacements in their 40's. A lot have their hamstrings pack it in whilst still in their 20's (effectively ending their career).
Also with lifting weights, its far more important to lift correctly than to lift heavy. Sure you can squat twice as much if you only drop by 2 inches instead of putting your arse below your knees like you're meant to, but the former will leave you with a serious back problem in a short time.
Here in Australia, home-schooling is almost unheard of. The stereotype here is that only super-religious parents home-school their children, in an effort to shield the children from conflicting viewpoints. The exception is farmers in very remote areas where there are no schools.
What is it in America that makes home-schooling more popular there? Is it mostly religion-driven there too?
Its mostly paranoia driven. Some people dont want the "gubbermint" teaching their children ideas that might contradict creationism, or let them learn about science, the harm caused by easily vaccinated diseases or other things that may break the fragile brainwashing these children have.
We've got our fair share of nutters here in Oz, FOTLs (Freemen On The Land) are basically the Aussie equivalent of paranoid anti-govt rednecks combined with a generous helping of libertarian delusions. The thing is we just dont give them the airtime that their American equivalents get.
That and the public schooling system here in Oz is actually quite good, consistently from kindergarten to university.
When you eat properly, there is no need for any vitamin supplement, period. You can get all vitamins and minerals and whatnot from your food - people have done just that for thousands upon thousands of years. There's no reason why we suddenly can't do that any more.
This. Suppliments dont work. Unless you've got a serious medical condition that is causing a serious deficiency, you can get all the nutrients you need from regular food. Not only that, they'll be adsorbed far more completely than they will with pills (erm... we pass a vast majority of the stuff we eat, food is digested more completely than pills). You dont even have to eat that healthily to get all the vitamins and minerals you need as long as you eat a somewhat balanced diet with meat, fruits, grains and vegetables. Do this and you'll eat far more vitamins and minerals than you need, even when you only adsorb a fraction of them.
If you are on prescribed supplements, these will be kept behind the counter at the pharmacy with all the other drugs that work.
The supplements you buy at the supermarket are so weak that they have no measurable effect compared to the control group given placebos. They have to be as high doses are actually harmful (most notably beta-Carotene).
Vitamin supplements are an industry, huge amounts of money are made by selling placebo's to the masses. However they dont work if they did work they'd have to be controlled like painkillers and this would be a large impediment to people buying them and taking them every day.
Jesus, how awful is it for a black kid to be told that "black" is a bad word?
-jcr
It depends on the context.
If he was suspended for it, chances are it wasn't used innocuously.
In fact, knowing several teachers chances are this particular student is a right little shit, reading between the lines. The problem is they cant officially say he's maladjusted and ill disciplined without the parents suing.
Don't vaccinate your kids, and they are not allowed in a school, daycare, public park or anywhere else where they may come into contact with other children who cannot be vaccinated due to medical reasons and rely on herd immunity for their safety, or infants who are to young to be vaccinated..
Fixed it a little bit for you, but I agree with you so much. Choose not to vaccinate your kids and face the consequences: I don't want unvaccinated kids in my child's daycare, preschool or school. The government mandates that I take my child to school, and I have every right to expect that her safety is taken care of. That includes the threat of unvaccinated children.
No vaccine is 100% effective. Even vaccinated kids can contract a disease they've been vaccinated against. The risk is much lower (vaccines are over 99.9% effective) but its still a risk. In the recent measles outbreak at Disney that had 95 confirmed cases, at least 6 were confirmed to be vaccinated against measles.
This is one reason I'm glad that in my country, Australia, an MMR vaccination (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) is mandatory unless you have a damn good reason not to get one (and being an idiot isn't good enough).
sorry but Uber seems to have a higher share of body odor drivers than regular taxi companies.
Its worse than that.
The last Uber ride I took was terrible. The guy arrived in a 5 door Pug 206 diesel, so I was immediately greeted with the sound of sharp breaking and a farmyard. The car was dirty but that wasn't as bad as the inside that smelled of dirty socks and expired prawns. The driver tailgated and braked hard then stopped 1 KM from my house and demanded I give him a 5 star rating. I told him to consume a large number of phalluses, got out and walked the rest of the way.
Compare this to the last taxi I took. It was a newish Camry Hybrid like most taxis in my city. It was clean, the driver was polite, kept safe distances and didn't try to eject unsecured objects through the front window with his braking skills. Drove all the way to my home and showed me a new way to get from my house to the airport avoiding a lot of traffic. I paid cash and said he could keep the change (tipping is not customary in Australia).
The thing is, the taxi was around the same price as the Uber car... including the airport surcharge which the Uber taxi wouldn't have had to pay.
Regulation is one thing.
Artificially restricting the number of cabs with medallions that then cost $1 million dollars, locking out rookie entrepreneurs, is crony capitalism.
Complete de-regulation is going to have the same problem but worse.
When you have too many taxis the system results in another form of artificial restriction done by taxi drivers themselves. They form blocs and start defending their territories. Before you know it you end up with a taxi Mafia that wont simply lock out the "rookie entrepreneurs" but drag them out of their car, beat them up and damage their car. You see this all the time in developing nations where there's no taxi licensing, hell in some places (phuket) they will go as far to target any form of public transport to protect their racket, last time the province tried to implement municipal transport (a baht bus) the drivers were dragged out and beaten in the street.
So you can have artificial restriction done by the govt or artificial restriction done by criminals. Pick your poison.
Actually, I travel a lot in Europe, and take a lot of taxis. I have only had very positive experiences with taxi drivers . . . because I treat them with respect.
This, I've travelled in developing nations and had great taxi drivers. Of course I've had the odd one who thinks his Toyota minivan is a F1 car but even in Thailand these guys are not the norm. Taxi drivers in developed nations are almost always very good. The only reason Uber is popular is due to an irrational and unfounded hate of taxis. The problem these people have is that they'll eventually find Uber has all the same problems and a few problems traditional taxis dont have.
Taxi drivers are the eyes and ears of a city
This too. Taxi drivers in my own city (Perth, Western Australia) have shown me some very clever routes around traffic hotspots.
I dont think this is the case.
Everytime I've used an Uber car it's been a lot worse than a taxi service. Unlike a taxi service, they can turn down your fare when you book one. This means trying to find one at 2 AM on a Friday night is impossible. Cars were worse than taxi's last time it was a Pug 206 diesel that looked like the interior had never been washed, smelled of mouldy socks and the driver managed to bunny hop it regularly (and it was an automatic so I'm not sure how he did it), further more, he stopped about 1 KM from my house until you gave him a 5 star rating (I got out and walked).
What's happening is that a lot of people are pretending its better because they have an irrational hate of the existing taxi system. What will happen is that people will slowly learn that Uber has all the same problems as traditional taxi services plus a few new ones. Eventually all but the most stubborn will fall off the band wagon.
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
But aside of that, these crib sheet supporters exist for a reason. Their existence does not only serve the purpose to waste your time, because that could be accomplished even cheaper than the support monkeys are. By keeping you in the holding loop.
No, the reason is that these utterly and absolutely moronic questions they ask that make you wonder whether they think your IQ measures in the single digits actually solve most tech support problems. Yes, people ARE that stupid. And no, I'm not talking about the supporters here.
The "solutions" these sheets offer that make you wonder whether the support thinks you're unable to tie your own laces without a coach and a personal assistant DO solve the problems most idiots calling them have.
Don't blame support. Blame the idiots who want tha intarwebz but don't want to be bothered with knowing anything about those funny boxes with the blinkenlights next to their computer... or what do you call that thing where my Farmville is shown?
This,
Sadly there are very few ways of determining who is smart enough to have tried all the things that are on a level 1 support monkeys script. The only one I've seen work for an ISP is to go through the support procedure, get it escalated and have a level 3 technician put a note in your file that you're to be immediately escalated to level 2. This is how my ISP deals with me, when I call the first thing they do is put me through to someone higher but they know I'm not going to bother them with anything simple.
You're a cunt.
/. you accepted that you're a complete cunt.
Yes a huge, blubbering fanny flap.
Oh, I'm sorry, you don't like getting abused. But you chose to come to
The point I'm making here is that regardless of your job, being abused by customers is never acceptable and blaming the victim for it is pants on head retarded. Now the thing with telco call centre jobs is that they have a very high rate of turnover. Very few Comcast (or Time Warner or Telstra or Vodafone) workers will be lifers (long gone are the days of BT workers staying till pension age). This means that a lot of people work there because they have little choice in the matter (and yes, take a shitty job or starve is not an acceptable choice) and so they move on as soon as they can.
A lot of people take these jobs because they cant find any other work. This does not mean they have chose to take abuse.
At the college level though I see a different kind of problem. Many of the people from 3rd world countries I have encountered do VERY well at rote memorization tasks and can often solve engineering problems that are almost exactly what they have done before but when you step outside of that they quickly run into problems. I find that american and canadian engineers are more likely to rely on a computer to solve the hard math part but they are much better at figuring out how to define the problem and what should be done to solve it.
Plus one other problem, you have a huge sampling bias.
The people who come over here to live and work from developing nations are typically the best and the brightest. When you're comparing the best a nation has to offer against the median, of course they're going to look good. You need to compare the top 1% against the top 1%.
Finally, culturally most Asian countries are set up for learning by rote memorisation. A huge emphasis is placed on conformity. Also huge pressure from parents to get good grades reinforce this memorise and regurgitate attitude. When it comes to innovation and thinking outside the box, western nations tend to foster more creative people.
Because they dont. Europe has a lot of different education systems, Waldorf/Steiner schools are German and Montessori schools are Italian and whilst I disagree with the Luddite philosophies, they definitely dont teach by rote memorisation and tend to produce highly creative people.
In fact the only reason I wouldn't send my kids to a Steiner school is their complete disdain for technology.
Had the buyer meet me in the lobby of my bank, transaction was in cash. Called my insurance agency before the guy test drove the car and had him leave the money with me. When the deal was done I deposited the cash, sent a CYA email to the insurance agency cancelling as of that time and date, went out, pulled the tags, tossed the dude the keys. Sketchily, he whipped out some Delaware tags (we were not in Delaware and he said he was from a different state but this was not my problem) and drove away. Seemed like a pretty safe way to do business.
Sounds pretty paranoid, I thought all of those guns in the US were supposed to be making you safer than Australia.
I've bought and sold cars using Gumtree (which is kind of like Craigslist but more useful and less hookers) and the procedure is fairly simple.
1. Buyer contacts seller, arranges time to meet at sellers house.
2. Buyer goes to sellers house, test drives car.
3. If they want to buy, they arrange payment (usually cash for small amounts, bank cheque for larger amounts), give it to the seller at their home and the buyer and seller fill out the registration transfer form which the seller posts then drives off with the car.
Honestly I've never felt the need to take extra security precautions. Apart from annoying tyre kickers, never had any issues.
How does this not drive more Burger Kings into Canada? If they go after McDonalds and not (now Canadian) Burger King, they drive corps out. If they go after BK, then can any country do that, tax USA based corporate assets? It's probably better than a VAT, I guess (which is why USA corporate taxes are relatively high, it makes up for lack of Value Added Tax).
If all of the large corporations are driven out of the US, that will leave room in the marketplace for small companies to get founded, and the US will end up with lots of small companies, with lots of CEO's, instead of a handful of CEO's with all of the money. Why is driving corporations out a bad thing?
A noble sentiment, but unlikely to ever happen.
In the end, companies wont go anywhere. Why? well they're still making money even though they're now being asked to pay tax on it. Burger King wont abandon it's operations because they would lose money. Their assets are worth something now, but if they up sticks and went the values of their properties would drop through the floor as the market would be flooded with cheap burger joints for sale.
Very few businesses will go through with their threat to leave a country that taxes them. Beyond that where would they go... Australia, England, the EU... they tax too, India, China, corruption will cost more than tax. Africa, well fine if you dont need infrastructure. Nope, they whinge and cry and pout but in the end they'll pay because the alternative would lose far too much money.
All it will do is cause US companies to become foreign companies incorporated in other jurisdictions. And then there will be less taxes collected. There are reasons why these things have not been addressed already and contrary to what some may think, they have little to do with politicians being paid off.
So all these companies that have offices, properties, production facilities, staff and what not in the US are just going to up sticks and go.
Utter tripe.
Sure, they'll whine, they scream and cry about how unfair it is that they cant hide their profit, but in the end they'll pay because they cant simply abandon their operations. A big part of their whining is trying to convince you that they will leave but it's an empty threat. If there were more money to be made by abandoning their US operations they would have done it already. The thing is, a lot of these companies cant move, they require something that they cant get outside the developed world. Be it highly educated workers, quality controls or just a lack of corruption. The louder they cry, the less able they are to leave so in the end, they'll pay.
They're acting like a toddler looking for attention, they'll keep getting louder and louder unless you start to ignore them.
Australia also holds that view on personal income for Australian citizens on money earned abroad.
It needs to be noted that this is only if you're living in Australia whilst earning money overseas.
If you live and work in London as an Australian citizen you dont have to pay tax to Australia on what you earned in London. You're considered a non-resident in this case and only the income you earn in Australia is taxed by Australia.
This is quite different to the US system where US citizens who permanently live abroad are still taxed on their income regardless of source.
And, for you whankers that are going to claim "I don't use Facebook", a business can make it so the profile is completely public so no account is needed.
Wankers isn't spelled with a H. Also, stop trying to be logical with hipsters, if they used facebook's public profiles it would be too mainstream for them.