My situation is not exactly like yours, but I joined a startup, but quite mature, product was out, money was coming in, just a couple of years short of IPO. I was not in the 40+ crowd, but was among the oldest (by age) coder, coming in with FORTRAN experience into a C++ shop.
I thrived and became one of the more important cogs mainly because of the understanding of the management. They judged me more holistically, taking into account minor things like helping to keep the morale up and non coding contributions about long term strategy etc. I did deliver on code too, the code base I laid out for my module scaled from 1 mill $ sales to more than 100 million dollar in sales, adapted and developed well and supported features of wide range of products.
But they were not clairvoyants, they would not have known my work was sound and it would scale well. Somehow they sensed that though I was seen at work less than the bachelor boys, the quality of my work was good. It could have easily gone the otherway, they might have discouraged me, reduced my freedom, second guessed my decisions, or out sourced my module. If you are lucky enough to have management like I got, you would do well. If you got PHBs you will end up as Dilbert.
Productivity of the good programmers is very seriously under estimated. A bad algorithm to solve a problem will suck in so much or resources in implementation, debugging and maintenance. When such a code is retired/replaced by fundamentally better algorithm the performance improvement would be orders of magnitude better. Productivity is (output/input). If we define output as the problem solved and the input as the resources consumed during creation, maintenance and execution of the code, you would see the good programmers one order of magnitude better than average one. Great programmers could easily achieve two or even three orders of magnitude improvement on a module that has a service life of 20 years. When a great algorithm is implemented the first time, even people intimately involved with the project might not have a full idea of how much of resource wastage has been averted.
On the other hand if you define output as so many lines of code and the input as so many hours spent on the keyboard, you would get a totally useless metric. Call it anything you want, but please, please do not call it productivity.
This strategy "win-stay lose-switch" is an very important and significant finding in game theory and evolution. The tournament of algorithms conducted in U Mich in late 1980s was a breakthrough in explaining the evolution of cooperation and altruism. But its winning strategy tit-for-tat was indistinguishable from "always-cooperate". So any mutant that does not follow "always-cooperate" would gain a very strong foot hold. This strategy was not evolutionarily stable strategy, ESS.
The win-stay lose-switch strategy would do very badly in any population dominated by non cooperative members. But once tit-for-tat has established a beachhead, and driven the bad actors out of the population, win-stay lose-switch strategy would keep the cheaters to a minimum. This strategy is probably wired into us.
There are programmers who are an order of magnitude more productive than the average ones. But there are very few of them. And it is not all that unusual. The best golfers, chess grandmasters, top R&D scientists are like to be an order of magnitude more productive. Heck, you could extend it to actors and celebrities, you just have to redefine productivity by box office receipts instead of acting ability.
If at all there is something to complain about, it is the fact that we did not use the law to extend VHS rentals to web browsing history and stop sites from storing, selling and buying the browsing history of the visitors. Had we extended this law earlier to logically include all the thing that ought to be private and unstorable by thirdparties and service providers, the world might be a better place today.
You are judging them by today's standards. You are assuming the awesome power of nuclear weapon would be believed and not assumed to be some kind of Hollywood fakery.
Think about it. Japanese Imperial army actually believed USA was thickly forested and it could send incendiary devices on hot air balloons along the jet stream and the whole of USA would be consumed in conflagration. Don't laugh at their lack of knowledge. They did not think of summoning the US forces, demonstrate their ability to destroy the entire nation in a conflagration and demand a surrender. They went ahead and released those balloons , some ten thousand of them. The Japanese military did not distinguish between US armed forces and civilians.
They also sent two submarines with foldable airplanes and they bombed the Oregon forest. Not the cities, not the garrisons not the factories. They wanted to set fire to the entire united states. In their hearts and minds this weapon was more powerful than the atomic bombs. The entire country would burn down once these fires have been started. And they went ahead and did their best to start such fires.
The way Japanese army treated non-combatants and civilians was just horrible. The Phillipines and the Chinese paid dearly for it. Google Bataan death march and the rape of Nanking.
There is absolutely no question, had Japan got the nuclear bomb first, it would not have hesitated even for a second to bomb New York or Los Angeles. So it is not correct judge what USA did with today's standards, when you are not in the drafted list, your father/brother/son/husband is not serving in the Pacific Theater, to judge what Truman did. Just be thankful that they forged an alliance with Japan and Germany and made them allies of America and ended the bloodshed for good. That is the achievement not appreciated by the anti-nuclear crowd.
He thinks bitcoin is something like a fiat currency, backed up by something. He does not realize, bitcoin is simply a public, open digest of transactions, sort of like a public bank ledger.
The best way to describe bitcoin in the stocks world is like the thirdparty stock registrars. Most people do not take possession of stock certificates or even bond certificates when they buy those instruments. Typically a thirdparty company maintains a register where it takes "possession" of the stocks on your behalf, and "delivers" them to the buyer when you sell them. Often your buyer and seller also would a member of the same registrar and so all that happens is your account is debited or credited with so many shares of such and such a company for every transaction. Mutual funds are required by law to keep the instruments they own with a registrar. It is even possible for you to exit a mutual fund by taking your share of the stocks and bonds instead of cash. To avoid triggering taxes, people could take the distribution in "kind" and move them to their name, probably under the same registrar.
So imagine having a completely open registrar, all the transactions are completely transparent and multiple parties verify and tally the ledger and confirm the final balances of all the members, that is bitcoin. Bank ledger keeps dollar amounts for each account. Stock registrar maintain multiple stock/bond shares for each account/member.
Anyway Mattel would be interested in it. That company feels the waists of barbie dolls are not yet thin enough to induce self loathing and bad body self image in all the girls.
Thank God, USA had real leaders who realized that we were fighting the Japanese government and the military, not the citizenry, even though the widespread support of the citizenry was why their military was that powerful and that destructive. After the V-J day, we allowed Emperor Akito to continue to be the head of state. But we did dismiss him from the position of Living God, making him the only living ex-God ever. We poured money to rebuild both Japan and Germany.
Winston Churchill said the World War II did not begin in 1939, but in 1919 when the Versailles Treaty was signed with punitive sanctions against Germany. That is a lesson they are learnt well, they did not treat Germany and Japan they way losers of WW-I were treated. That is how we avoided WW-III.
If we maintain the distinction, realizing we are not fighting all the Muslims, but only the small section of leaders who whip up the passion we will be able to pacify them as we pacified Japan. Think about it, if someone told Americans in 1944, "we are going to pacify Japan, not subjugate them, not conquer them, but truly make friends out of them" how it would have been received. Now substitute Muslim instead of Japan and see how incredulous most Americans would be. But we did make friends, or at least a reasonable approximation of friend, out of Japan.
The description talks about using a gas chamber as a spring to push the piston back to starting position. Why? There is no crank shaft on the other side? We could imagine a dual acting piston with a combustion chamber on both sides. In a regular IC engine there is a flywheel to do the intake, compression and exhaust strokes soaking up the energy from the power stroke. Even with a dual acting piston, there is an issue there.
The linear generator is also a motor. We should be able to use the magnetic fields to move the piston back and forth. Mechanical complexity of cams, crankshafts and flywheels and clutches replaced by the electrical complexity. Easier to handle and more reliable too. But still don't see any reason to believe it is going to be more efficient.
I did Intro Computing CS 301 under Prof Mahabala in IBM 350/155 using punch cards, in 1980. Very few of the punching machines had working ribbons and working print modules. So most of our cards did not have the line printed on the top. They can only be read by a machine, some of us learned to decode the holes pencil in the character on top. We get one run a day. Undergrads are limited to six pages of 132 char fan fold computer paper per job.
The punch card machine had a "multipunch" option to prevent the card advancement. So we could punch out all the rows and all the columns of the punch card. We punch many such cards, staple them together to form a large sheet, fold the sheet into a cylinder and staple the seams too. Our hostels had naked incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling providing the only illumination to the hostel room. We would hang this hole punched cylinders of punch cards as a lamp shade. Casting beautiful dots on the wall, and a flood of illumination in the center of the room. We would use transparent plastic sheets, (cellophane paper in Indian parlance) to color the lamp shade and the illuminated dots on the wall.
We would have beaten Martha Stewart in the creativity department of making lamp shades! I still have my ID card to the computer center.
I develop very complex meshing codes using C++ and STL. It works very well. So far I have had just two issues.
The STL performance spec for size() function for std::list is undefined. Gnu and Linux want to keep std::list::splice() constant time and so they have made size() order N. Microsoft has decided to keep size() constant time and has made splice() O(N). I don't use splice, so I was adversely affected on Linux. But worked around it by creating a counted list class.
I think sometime back STL changed the spec seriously in a non backward compatible way. Something to do with std::set/map/multiset/multimap::iterators. They made the iterators returned by find(), upper_bound() and lower_bound() const_iterators by default. (Or something similar). All prior code that was using iterators had to adjust. Most of my fellow coders used const_cast() and got around it. I never use const_cast(), so I had to do some significant refactoring, rearchitecting, reimplementation.
But for these two issues, STL is working very well for heavy duty computation in finite elements, CFD, computational geometry and such fields. Scales very well. I have had maps and multimaps running into tens of millions of members and then I do insane amount of insert() s and erase()s. Works well. If you give weight to the amount of CPU these codes chew up, we form a significant market share. On unweighted plain numbers, we are probably dwarfed by the number of web applications, ruby people and java hackers.
Is it cheaper than NG? Does it leave behind a toxic ash dump? It is not going to compete with NG.
Coal is dirty fuel. Cleanest coal is not clean enough. Some day people in those places with thank Clinton for preserving that land and its water.
If we stop the federal government from subsidizing water and giving it away at throw away prices, rates frozen since 1920s and 1930s, all these places will start attracting people again. All the coal counties have been losing population since 1970s. They have beautiful forests, wonderful water resources, excellent hunting ranges, charming places to live. With satellites and telecommunications they can compete with other places in quality of life metric and attract jobs. If the buy into the propaganda about clean coal, they will neither have mining jobs, nor water, nor forests, nor mountain tops, nor hunting, nor agriculture. Their place will be a toxic ash dump, your people will be having black lung, and you will be living on top of toxic coal ash heaps.
"What [Caesar] was counting on is concrete," said Davies, who mentioned that the people of ancient Rome became used to politicians erecting buildings to show off their power, similar to the building projects of the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt.
"One could even say that it played a significant role in bringing down the Republic."
OK they invented concrete. Concrete was cheap. It was durable, 1000 years of rain would not wash it away. They gave it a Latin name meaning ash-rock or something. So the rulers embarked on grandiose projects. Then? Why did it fall? Why did the Empire survive for 400 years after they started these grandiose projects? It makes no sense.
Coal is going away. It is losing big to natural gas. NG is cheaper, burns more easily, transports more easily. So coal will be dead. Solar has to beat NG to become viable, not just coal.
Clean Coal is a mirage and snake oil meant to rally poor people in coal mining districts to press for huge subsidies to coal companies. The fact is dirty coal is more expensive than natural gas. Natural gas is cheaper, transports more easily, burns better without toxic ash dumps etc. So coal is basically dead. Winner is natural gas and fracking, not solar or wind.
If the people of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia are smart they will try to preserve their water resources. Clean water is going to be the most valuable and sought after resource in the coming decades. But that is not an easy sell. And the coal companies are doing to everything to get one more shot at the buffet table, gutting regulations, gutting safety, gutting pollution control to stay competitive against natural gas.
Solar/wind beating coal is not enough. It needs to beat natural gas to go utility level scaling. But for large customers, the retail price of electricity is already comparable with utility grid electricity. Utilities are worried about this, if big box retail customers with large parking lots and huge roof area go solar, and the utilities are forced to buy their electricity at retail rates, their bottom line would be seriously affected. But both big box retailers, mall owners and the utility companies are titans with lots of political influence. The one who is going to lose net-metering are going to be residential customers.
Design the watches with spare batteries that get swapped in seconds. One in the charger and one in the wrist. Swap them once a day or once a week.
Make the software update automatic. Use the watch as simple status update device with rudimentary controls. As one who has used Timex+Microsoft datalink watches which downloaded contact lists by the flashing bars of a CRT display back in 1996, I tell you, there is a market for a well designed smart watch designed smartly.
In many eastern cultures self-denial is considered a virtue and earns respect. It is not written in any scripture or anything. Just a cultural practice, done by ordinary people as part of their lives without serious thinking. They clump all of it under religion, but won't be able to quote chapter and verse to justify, say, the practice of going on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Banares to renounce a vegetable for the rest of their lives. But my parents, all my uncles, aunts and grandparents had done that. I know my dad had renounced snake-gourd in that pilgrimage and I have to avoid cooking that vegetable in his death-anniversary function/feast.
Some of the vegetarians follow vegetarian diet due to religious reasons. An extreme form of that practice is followed by the Jains, They would not even eat root vegetables because harvesting it kills the plant. But they would accept milk because milking does not kill the cow. There are others who would eat all the vegetables, but not meat. These people not only don't want to eat meat, they don't want anything that looks like meat.
In fact I belong to one such group: south Indian lacto-vegetarian brahmin. My rational mind and my reading of scriptures tell me, it is just a cultural practice, Hinduism does not really ban meat. My reading of books in evolution and my rudimentary understanding of biology tells me Homo sapiens evolved to eat at least some meat. Our closes primate relatives bonobos and chimps both eat meat. Still my cultural training is so ingrained I would not be able to bring myself to bite a piece of chicken, or something that resembles chicken. I am sure bits and pieces of meat must have found their way into my plate by accident. Restaurant workers might not have changed gloves, or the pizza cutter might not have been wiped before cutting my pizza, or the soup might have had a chicken stock instead of vegetable stock. Even after knowing all this, I am not able to bring myself to eat meat or anything that resembles meat.
I know we form such a microscopic minority what we think or do would not have the slightest effect on the general population and trends. But still, I have no plans to change.
White House is looking ahead, far into the future, where all active and advertent discrimination is gone and the only problem left is inactive and inadvertent discrimination becomes the top priority. And it is acting now to forestall that possibility. But unfortunately many people will not see it as a farsighted move on the part of the administration and ridicule it. And the ridicule will come from both left and right. Finally Obama would have united America into one !. Hurrah!
And there was no guarantee they will renew your policy next year. If you have an accident or diagnosed with a major illness they will drop you like hot potato. You know that, still you like to pretend the insurance companies were run by angles.
Slashdot Mirror
I thrived and became one of the more important cogs mainly because of the understanding of the management. They judged me more holistically, taking into account minor things like helping to keep the morale up and non coding contributions about long term strategy etc. I did deliver on code too, the code base I laid out for my module scaled from 1 mill $ sales to more than 100 million dollar in sales, adapted and developed well and supported features of wide range of products.
But they were not clairvoyants, they would not have known my work was sound and it would scale well. Somehow they sensed that though I was seen at work less than the bachelor boys, the quality of my work was good. It could have easily gone the otherway, they might have discouraged me, reduced my freedom, second guessed my decisions, or out sourced my module. If you are lucky enough to have management like I got, you would do well. If you got PHBs you will end up as Dilbert.
On the other hand if you define output as so many lines of code and the input as so many hours spent on the keyboard, you would get a totally useless metric. Call it anything you want, but please, please do not call it productivity.
The win-stay lose-switch strategy would do very badly in any population dominated by non cooperative members. But once tit-for-tat has established a beachhead, and driven the bad actors out of the population, win-stay lose-switch strategy would keep the cheaters to a minimum. This strategy is probably wired into us.
There are programmers who are an order of magnitude more productive than the average ones. But there are very few of them. And it is not all that unusual. The best golfers, chess grandmasters, top R&D scientists are like to be an order of magnitude more productive. Heck, you could extend it to actors and celebrities, you just have to redefine productivity by box office receipts instead of acting ability.
If at all there is something to complain about, it is the fact that we did not use the law to extend VHS rentals to web browsing history and stop sites from storing, selling and buying the browsing history of the visitors. Had we extended this law earlier to logically include all the thing that ought to be private and unstorable by thirdparties and service providers, the world might be a better place today.
Think about it. Japanese Imperial army actually believed USA was thickly forested and it could send incendiary devices on hot air balloons along the jet stream and the whole of USA would be consumed in conflagration. Don't laugh at their lack of knowledge. They did not think of summoning the US forces, demonstrate their ability to destroy the entire nation in a conflagration and demand a surrender. They went ahead and released those balloons , some ten thousand of them. The Japanese military did not distinguish between US armed forces and civilians.
They also sent two submarines with foldable airplanes and they bombed the Oregon forest. Not the cities, not the garrisons not the factories. They wanted to set fire to the entire united states. In their hearts and minds this weapon was more powerful than the atomic bombs. The entire country would burn down once these fires have been started. And they went ahead and did their best to start such fires.
The way Japanese army treated non-combatants and civilians was just horrible. The Phillipines and the Chinese paid dearly for it. Google Bataan death march and the rape of Nanking.
There is absolutely no question, had Japan got the nuclear bomb first, it would not have hesitated even for a second to bomb New York or Los Angeles. So it is not correct judge what USA did with today's standards, when you are not in the drafted list, your father/brother/son/husband is not serving in the Pacific Theater, to judge what Truman did. Just be thankful that they forged an alliance with Japan and Germany and made them allies of America and ended the bloodshed for good. That is the achievement not appreciated by the anti-nuclear crowd.
The best way to describe bitcoin in the stocks world is like the thirdparty stock registrars. Most people do not take possession of stock certificates or even bond certificates when they buy those instruments. Typically a thirdparty company maintains a register where it takes "possession" of the stocks on your behalf, and "delivers" them to the buyer when you sell them. Often your buyer and seller also would a member of the same registrar and so all that happens is your account is debited or credited with so many shares of such and such a company for every transaction. Mutual funds are required by law to keep the instruments they own with a registrar. It is even possible for you to exit a mutual fund by taking your share of the stocks and bonds instead of cash. To avoid triggering taxes, people could take the distribution in "kind" and move them to their name, probably under the same registrar.
So imagine having a completely open registrar, all the transactions are completely transparent and multiple parties verify and tally the ledger and confirm the final balances of all the members, that is bitcoin. Bank ledger keeps dollar amounts for each account. Stock registrar maintain multiple stock/bond shares for each account/member.
Anyway Mattel would be interested in it. That company feels the waists of barbie dolls are not yet thin enough to induce self loathing and bad body self image in all the girls.
Winston Churchill said the World War II did not begin in 1939, but in 1919 when the Versailles Treaty was signed with punitive sanctions against Germany. That is a lesson they are learnt well, they did not treat Germany and Japan they way losers of WW-I were treated. That is how we avoided WW-III.
If we maintain the distinction, realizing we are not fighting all the Muslims, but only the small section of leaders who whip up the passion we will be able to pacify them as we pacified Japan. Think about it, if someone told Americans in 1944, "we are going to pacify Japan, not subjugate them, not conquer them, but truly make friends out of them" how it would have been received. Now substitute Muslim instead of Japan and see how incredulous most Americans would be. But we did make friends, or at least a reasonable approximation of friend, out of Japan.
The linear generator is also a motor. We should be able to use the magnetic fields to move the piston back and forth. Mechanical complexity of cams, crankshafts and flywheels and clutches replaced by the electrical complexity. Easier to handle and more reliable too. But still don't see any reason to believe it is going to be more efficient.
Thanks, But I am not reverting my hack. But in future I will be a little bit more confident in using size()
The punch card machine had a "multipunch" option to prevent the card advancement. So we could punch out all the rows and all the columns of the punch card. We punch many such cards, staple them together to form a large sheet, fold the sheet into a cylinder and staple the seams too. Our hostels had naked incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling providing the only illumination to the hostel room. We would hang this hole punched cylinders of punch cards as a lamp shade. Casting beautiful dots on the wall, and a flood of illumination in the center of the room. We would use transparent plastic sheets, (cellophane paper in Indian parlance) to color the lamp shade and the illuminated dots on the wall.
We would have beaten Martha Stewart in the creativity department of making lamp shades! I still have my ID card to the computer center.
The STL performance spec for size() function for std::list is undefined. Gnu and Linux want to keep std::list::splice() constant time and so they have made size() order N. Microsoft has decided to keep size() constant time and has made splice() O(N). I don't use splice, so I was adversely affected on Linux. But worked around it by creating a counted list class.
I think sometime back STL changed the spec seriously in a non backward compatible way. Something to do with std::set/map/multiset/multimap::iterators. They made the iterators returned by find(), upper_bound() and lower_bound() const_iterators by default. (Or something similar). All prior code that was using iterators had to adjust. Most of my fellow coders used const_cast() and got around it. I never use const_cast(), so I had to do some significant refactoring, rearchitecting, reimplementation.
But for these two issues, STL is working very well for heavy duty computation in finite elements, CFD, computational geometry and such fields. Scales very well. I have had maps and multimaps running into tens of millions of members and then I do insane amount of insert() s and erase()s. Works well. If you give weight to the amount of CPU these codes chew up, we form a significant market share. On unweighted plain numbers, we are probably dwarfed by the number of web applications, ruby people and java hackers.
AOL still exists?
Image search: https://www.google.com/search?... sa=X&ei=b6JeU6HtBcW62gW2gIGgBQ&ved=0CE4QsAQ&biw=1430&bih=962
Coal is dirty fuel. Cleanest coal is not clean enough. Some day people in those places with thank Clinton for preserving that land and its water.
If we stop the federal government from subsidizing water and giving it away at throw away prices, rates frozen since 1920s and 1930s, all these places will start attracting people again. All the coal counties have been losing population since 1970s. They have beautiful forests, wonderful water resources, excellent hunting ranges, charming places to live. With satellites and telecommunications they can compete with other places in quality of life metric and attract jobs. If the buy into the propaganda about clean coal, they will neither have mining jobs, nor water, nor forests, nor mountain tops, nor hunting, nor agriculture. Their place will be a toxic ash dump, your people will be having black lung, and you will be living on top of toxic coal ash heaps.
CNN is hoping against hope it aint true. It would not know how to fight the withdrawal symptoms if "370 vanishes" story vanishes.
"What [Caesar] was counting on is concrete," said Davies, who mentioned that the people of ancient Rome became used to politicians erecting buildings to show off their power, similar to the building projects of the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt. "One could even say that it played a significant role in bringing down the Republic."
OK they invented concrete. Concrete was cheap. It was durable, 1000 years of rain would not wash it away. They gave it a Latin name meaning ash-rock or something. So the rulers embarked on grandiose projects. Then? Why did it fall? Why did the Empire survive for 400 years after they started these grandiose projects? It makes no sense.
Coal is going away. It is losing big to natural gas. NG is cheaper, burns more easily, transports more easily. So coal will be dead. Solar has to beat NG to become viable, not just coal.
If the people of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia are smart they will try to preserve their water resources. Clean water is going to be the most valuable and sought after resource in the coming decades. But that is not an easy sell. And the coal companies are doing to everything to get one more shot at the buffet table, gutting regulations, gutting safety, gutting pollution control to stay competitive against natural gas.
Solar/wind beating coal is not enough. It needs to beat natural gas to go utility level scaling. But for large customers, the retail price of electricity is already comparable with utility grid electricity. Utilities are worried about this, if big box retail customers with large parking lots and huge roof area go solar, and the utilities are forced to buy their electricity at retail rates, their bottom line would be seriously affected. But both big box retailers, mall owners and the utility companies are titans with lots of political influence. The one who is going to lose net-metering are going to be residential customers.
Make the software update automatic. Use the watch as simple status update device with rudimentary controls. As one who has used Timex+Microsoft datalink watches which downloaded contact lists by the flashing bars of a CRT display back in 1996, I tell you, there is a market for a well designed smart watch designed smartly.
In many eastern cultures self-denial is considered a virtue and earns respect. It is not written in any scripture or anything. Just a cultural practice, done by ordinary people as part of their lives without serious thinking. They clump all of it under religion, but won't be able to quote chapter and verse to justify, say, the practice of going on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Banares to renounce a vegetable for the rest of their lives. But my parents, all my uncles, aunts and grandparents had done that. I know my dad had renounced snake-gourd in that pilgrimage and I have to avoid cooking that vegetable in his death-anniversary function/feast.
In fact I belong to one such group: south Indian lacto-vegetarian brahmin. My rational mind and my reading of scriptures tell me, it is just a cultural practice, Hinduism does not really ban meat. My reading of books in evolution and my rudimentary understanding of biology tells me Homo sapiens evolved to eat at least some meat. Our closes primate relatives bonobos and chimps both eat meat. Still my cultural training is so ingrained I would not be able to bring myself to bite a piece of chicken, or something that resembles chicken. I am sure bits and pieces of meat must have found their way into my plate by accident. Restaurant workers might not have changed gloves, or the pizza cutter might not have been wiped before cutting my pizza, or the soup might have had a chicken stock instead of vegetable stock. Even after knowing all this, I am not able to bring myself to eat meat or anything that resembles meat.
I know we form such a microscopic minority what we think or do would not have the slightest effect on the general population and trends. But still, I have no plans to change.
White House is looking ahead, far into the future, where all active and advertent discrimination is gone and the only problem left is inactive and inadvertent discrimination becomes the top priority. And it is acting now to forestall that possibility. But unfortunately many people will not see it as a farsighted move on the part of the administration and ridicule it. And the ridicule will come from both left and right. Finally Obama would have united America into one !. Hurrah!
And there was no guarantee they will renew your policy next year. If you have an accident or diagnosed with a major illness they will drop you like hot potato. You know that, still you like to pretend the insurance companies were run by angles.