"Mitchell is no stranger to computer-related controversy. In high school, he was accused of planting more than 100 viruses on the school's systems, according to a report in the Charleston Gazette newspaper."
Great choice, let's hire him!
Eh. If we all had to answer for the rest of our lives for the stupid shit we did in high school, we'd all be homeless and penniless no one would ever love us.
I'm pretty sure that all people are capable of doing dumb things when we are upset. It's just that smart people can conjure up ways to cause more damage.
I am always disgusted when I see IT "professionals" who leave a trail of destruction in their wakes when they leave. It's completely immature, and perhaps if they had applied all of that effort toward adding value instead of destroying it, they wouldn't have been sacked in the first place.
You'll get modded down for your Obama bashing, but the essence of what you have written is correct. The US has always performed poorly on PISA tests since international testing begain in the mid 1960s. Yet most people would acknowledge that the US has done very well as a nation in the last 50 years.
Seems we have something else going for us here other than our ability (or lack thereof) to conjugate our multiplication tables that isn't measured in PISA tests.
Every time the new PISA scores come out, everyone goes apeshit about how the US is lagging behind East Bumfuckistan and how we're going to fall behind in this increasingly high tech world. And I really do mean "every time" the new PISA scores come out, as in they've been saying this since the 1960s when international testing began.
And as we all know, the US has become a desolate wasteland of a third world country since the 1960s, right? Right?
Or maybe the PISA scores really aren't that important and we can all just relax a bit.
No, the quote from the article did not contain the words "South America," so it's the submitter or editor that is poor at geography. And quoting.
I was wondering about that, too. What I assumed had happened was that someone at BBC noticed the error and it was corrected between the time that the article was quoted and the time that I read it.
Nobody wants to be shot by his own firearm, so there is an incentive to own a gun that attempts to prevent it. Once the technology is reliable, I think people would rather own a weapon that can't be fired by their assailant, their 3-year-old kid, etc. Obviously it's not there yet, and may never get there, but we won't ever get there if gunmakers don't even try.
One of the biggest problems in current systems is that devs need unfettered access to get their jobs done.
Oh, by all means, devs should have admin privileges on their own workstations. They just shouldn't have any access to QA and prod environments. Deployments to QA/prod should only be done via a deployment tool. If you can't make your project buildable/deployable by Jenkins/Bamboo/whatever, then your project is not finished.
We had development, QA an production environments that only touched through Control updating processes.
This is actually pretty common at mature companies, financial or otherwise. I strongly urge my clients to adopt a CI tool and instrumented deployment to QA and production environments.
The biggest benefit that my clients have seen from this is the elimination of "magic builds". You know, the kinds that can only be accomplished on one key developer's laptop which might get stolen at the airport and can only run on a server with specific, undocumented settings. I've had to deal with many of these and it's so wasteful. It would take the original developer an extra, what, hour of his or her time to make the project build in plain Jane Jenkins or Bamboo or something, but for the consultant who has to clean up the mess, it can take me a few days to make the bloody thing build after the original dev resigned from the company and you gave his laptop to Eric, the intern.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to bill the hours, but it's my job to prevent my clients from re-fucking up the same thing over and over and over again. For my current client, I set them up so that their projects build and deploy to their dev environment with every push to git. This is the carrot that gets them to make their builds portable: they can be lazy and never have to do any work to deploy to dev. They push, and the app is deployed. For builds to QA, they simply tell the release manager (could be a senior dev or a project manager if the client is too small to need a dedicated release manager), "Hey, can you please push release 3.2.414 to QA?" The release manager makes a few clicks in Bamboo, and the project is deployed to QA, and the fact that the project was deployed, and what was deployed, and by whom, is all logged in Bamboo, so everyone knows what is deployed where and when it was deployed and by whom. Same with production. Lastly, if something is broken in QA or production, rolling back the code to the previous version (or any other version) is like 2 more clicks.
This makes code deployments much less risky. I've many times had the following conversation: Me: We're deploying to prod on tuesday Stakeholder: No can do. We have a demo on Wednesday, and if you fuck something up, it's hosed. Me: Rolling back to the current version takes literally 2 clicks. Call the departmental pager any time 24/7 if you need the change rolled back. Stakeholder: Oh. Well, that's fine then. Go for it.
Time to end this ramble. Basically, I agree with you 100%. Automated builds/releases/deployments should be required in any software dev shop. It's as important as electricity.
For good programmers, a debugger occasionally safes some time.
For those of us without unlimited time, saving it is valuable in and of itself. I don't walk to work, hand-wash my clothes, or raise my own chickens for eggs, either.
I think many people fall into a third category: while they are not driving, they think it would be best and safest if they didn't use their phone while driving. But while they are driving, they forget about safety when they hear an incoming text tone.
If you need to be private from your spouse/so, you should examine why. Then, alter your current relationship or find a relationship where it's comfortable enough that you don't feel like you have to keep secrets.
I don't, strictly speaking, need to have my email private from my wife. However, if my wife felt the need to surveil my email, I would have serious questions about her mental state and trust issues.
We do not read each other's email. I suppose I technically have access to her email since I run the email server, but I've already told her that while I won't read her email, if she intends to have an affair or something, she really ought to get a gmail account, just in case.
HR does not lie when they say (must be currently employed) and no gaps more than 3 months long in 5 years, and years of experience.
This totally depends on the company. I have never seen any company be that strict, especially if you can show that you didn't spend your gap time fapping 24/7.
Personally, I wouldn't want to work for a company that had a policy like that because if they have a stupid, self-defeating policy in one area, they're likely to have them in other areas, too.
In my first year, I had CS101 which was an intro to programming concepts. It was taught in C++, FORTRAN, or Pascal back then, but I imagine that you could do CS101 in PHP or some other web-focused language, now. It was really just to get students comfortable with a high level programming language, running a compiler or an interpreter, etc.
Look for part time work or internships with smaller companies. They tend to be less rigid in their education and experience requirements if you can demonstrate competency.
The summer after my freshman year (so basically when I was your age), I got a summer job at a midsize company doing really, really junior development work. I made roughly 1/5th of what my experienced coworkers were making, but the experience was awesome (I lived at my parents' house, so it's not like I needed the extra money). I learned a ton while I was there, and continued working for them remotely while I was away at school. My experience there was key to getting my first job out of college because I already had demonstrated experience in developing corporate software.
One more word of caution: don't squander your youth being too career-focused. Definitely pursue some experience so that you aren't a total greenbean when you graduate, but have some balance. Go travel, date, drink, smoke, and just generally do what interests you. You've got the rest of your life to worry about your career, mortgage, kids, and all that other shit that we old people have to deal with.
You know, I tried opposing the government, but then people just like you shouted me down for being a racist.
Ahh, so you must be a new Republican. Welcome! Just so you know, you'll be called sexist and a whole host of other things, as well. Welcome to the modern world of lazy political discourse.
Yup, follow this advice and come across like an unhelpful douchbag.
Or, bend over backwards to help them. Provide them with a break down on every single patch (a few line summary with a link to the KB article for the full details), then give each patch a priority based on its impact and come up with different deployment routes for each one, then explain to your manager who allocates your time why patch management for the CAB board just became a full time job.
So you advocate becoming a passive-aggressive douchebag instead? If you don't have enough time for a new job responsibility, then you need to say something right away, not burn up a bunch of time of menial tasks and wait until your boss notices the productivity drop.
Alternatively, if the system runs for a few months and every single patch sent to the CAB board has been approved then you can clearly demonstrate the do not really add anything and start making rational arguments to abandon the process from a sound basis while demonstrating you are an excellent team player who easily adapts.
You know, it's interesting. My current client has a CAB process, and they do a good job of balancing process and agility.
Anyway, they don't use it to micromanage every stupid little patch. They recognize that the Linux admins are trained professionals and know which patches to apply. Same with the DBAs and same with the Network admins and same with the storage admins. Nobody questions them down to the individual patch level unless there is a known conflict with a specific patch, which basically never happens.
What they use it for is for auditing and coordination. Multiple groups never patch during the same maintenance window without a good reason (e.g. Heartbleed. Network and Linux both patched at the same time to get the patch out ASAP. But this was a rare event.). In other words, let's say the DBAs and the Linux admins both have patches that need to be applied. Well, they never patch during the same window, so if something breaks, we know that the problem is isolated to the database patch vs. the Linux patch. Also, if we get a report that something stopped working right on, say, 3/8/2014, then we know that the issue was with a patch to their main web proxy server.
CAB type groups can be a valuable, but it's important to find the sweet spot between micromanagement and chaos. It's good to have all of the various groups know what each other are doing and can advise each other regarding potential issues. It's not like when the DBAs do patching that everybody discusses the Oracle changelogs in great detail for half a day or anything.
A lot of companies say that. Doesn't necessarily mean that they underpay, they just don't want someone who will jump ship if some competitor offers them $5k more.
AWS is expensive, I can provide the equivalent of an m3.large
Oh, excellent! I need to analyze 5PB of data in a 1000 node Hadoop cluster, which I'll need for about a week. I'll need to start the analysis in 3 days. It's a bit of a last-minute rush job. What would you charge me for that?
What? You can't provide that infrastructure at any time at any price? Oh, rats. I guess I'll just have to use AWS.
I am a scooter rider. In most places in the US, the following rules apply:
For scooters that are less than 50cc and cannot go faster than 35 mph:
* You may park in the bike rack like a bike. In some places, you can even park on the sidewalk (!!) as long as it isn't obstructing pedestrian traffic.
* Do not require a motorcycle or even a driver's license, but if you have a prior DUI, some states won't let you ride a scooter until your license gets reinstated.
* Some states require you to register and title your scooter, some do not
* You may or may not need a helmet and/or eye protection (in my state, you need both, and both are a good idea unless you like getting a rock or sand in your eyes while you're trying to drive).
* May not go on the freeway, and you must drive them in the right lane unless you are turning left.
* May not use bike paths, bike lanes, or any other resources designated for bicycles.
* Do not require insurance
Any scooter that is 50cc or more, or can go over 35mph is a motorcycle. For a motorcycle:
* You need a motorcycle license
* You need to register and title your motorcycle and get any required inspections
* You may not park in the bike racks nor engage in any other scooter "magic". The "magic" is for the under 50cc crowd.
Here's the gotcha of scooters: some people derestrict them, but this can be a bad idea, because let's say you derestrict your 50cc scoot and are going 45 in a 35mph zone. If caught, you are violating the following laws: speeding, driving without a license (assuming you have no motorcycle license), driving an unregistered motor vehicle, driving an uninspected vehicle, operating a motorcycle without a helmet/eyewear (if applicable). Is a cop really going to throw the book at you like that? Not likely, but it's still a big risk if the officer is behind on his or her monthly quota!
As for me, I have a derestricted 50cc scoot for the parking "magic", but I also have a motorcycle endorsement and registered my scoot, and I wear a helmet/eyewear, and I have insurance (it's super cheap, and scooter theft is rampant). So if I'm caught speeding, it's simple speeding and I guess I don't get it inspected, but that's a compliance ticket (if you get it inspected, then the ticket is dismissed). Technically, I shouldn't park in the bike rack because my scoot goes faster than 35mph, but the meter maid doesn't know that.
I think that OWS fizzled out because, while the occupiers correctly identified that there is something wrong with the political/economic power structure in this country, they never were able to articulate what they felt was wrong, and neither did they have any solutions in mind. Take the Washington DC OWS, for instance. The encampment was right on K street, yet nobody there could articulate their objection to the corporate lobbying and influence purchasing that was happening, quite literally, in the building across the street from them.
I guess every generation needs to punch their social action card, but the civil rights era and the Vietnam War era are long-since over. We had a good run in the 80s with Apartheid, but after that came, what, the WTO/IMF/World Bank protests? Good luck having any intellectual discourse with any of those nuts. A friend of mine from college, an economist no less, was part of those protests, so I said to myself, "Finally I can get a coherent explanation for what the fuck these protesters want!" When I asked my friend what the protests were all about, she said: "Beats me! I just think protesting is fun!"
foundations laid down in the 5th and 6th grade of school
I always get a kick out of people who ask me how to get into programming. It usually goes something like this: Them: "Hey, how do I make the jump into programming? I want to learn to code." Me: "No, you don't. You are just sick of telling people to clear their cookies, restart their computer, and try again." Them: "That's true, but I really want to program!" Me: "If you really wanted to program, you'd be practicing programming right now instead of having this conversation. There are nearly zero barriers to entry with programming. You could fire up notepad and start programming. Little kids learn in elementary school. Here, let's go to github and start talking through a random open source project and I can explain why they did what they did to give you a jumping off point." Them: "That sounds boring." Me: ??
Not if you have an expensive preexisting condition.
This problem was vastly overplayed. I've had to deal with it because my wife has an expensive preexisting condition.
Prior to ObamaCare, if you had an expensive preexisting condition, you basically had three decent options: 1. If you could work, get a job with group health insurance. Group health insurance was covered by HIPAA, which meant that insurance companies needed to cover preexisting conditions, as long as you maintained continuous coverage.
2. If you could not work, go on Medicare. (Yes, Medicare. Even if you're not old yet. If you're disabled and can't work, you qualify for Medicare.)
3. If you qualified to join a trade organization that offered health insurance (IEEE used to do this, but doesn't anymore), you could join their group plan and get a HIPAA-eligible plan which would cover your condition.
In our case, had my wife not made a miraculous recovery, she would have gone on Medicare since it was no cost to us (other than all of the money that we pay into Medicare!), and the rest of the family would have gotten coverage via a trade association (I was a Realtor at the time).
Preexisting conditions really weren't the big deal that people make it out to be.
I am hardly surprised that insurance companies do not like the situation of having any additional regulation imposed upon them and will raise fees or do anything else they can do to protest and to discredit it.
The sharp increases in premiums aren't due to some sort of tantrum that the insurance industry is throwing due to regulations. It's not like the Department of Health and Human Services or the state insurance commissions sprang up overnight due to ObamaCare. Insurance has always be highly regulated. ObamaCare is actually a massive handout to the insurance industry, due to forcing people to buy their product.
The main drivers for the insurance premium increases are: 1. Elimination of choice in insurance plans. People who previously paid for their own preventative care and minor health issues and only insured against catastrophic events are no longer able to do so. All of a sudden, these people are paying way more for their healthcare than they used to because they are forced to buy more insurance than they need or want.
2. Elimination of risk pools. People who generally take good care of themselves are now in the same risk pool as the alcoholic, obese, biker down the street. Guess who's subsidizing whose bad choices?
If you've even hung around the emergency department of a hospital, you will have seen where the real cost of uninsured patients was going. Suddenly this cost is transferred from the hospital to subsidized plans.
ObamaCare makes this problem way worse due to the Medicaid expansion. ER visits are free under Medicaid, so ERs are now seeing an increase in nonemergent use as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
"Mitchell is no stranger to computer-related controversy. In high school, he was accused of planting more than 100 viruses on the school's systems, according to a report in the Charleston Gazette newspaper."
Great choice, let's hire him!
Eh. If we all had to answer for the rest of our lives for the stupid shit we did in high school, we'd all be homeless and penniless no one would ever love us.
"H-1Bs do not commit sabotage."
Not intentionally, anyway. But must IT staffing really be a tradeoff between malice and incompetence?
Smart people do dumb things when they're upset.
I'm pretty sure that all people are capable of doing dumb things when we are upset. It's just that smart people can conjure up ways to cause more damage.
I am always disgusted when I see IT "professionals" who leave a trail of destruction in their wakes when they leave. It's completely immature, and perhaps if they had applied all of that effort toward adding value instead of destroying it, they wouldn't have been sacked in the first place.
You'll get modded down for your Obama bashing, but the essence of what you have written is correct. The US has always performed poorly on PISA tests since international testing begain in the mid 1960s. Yet most people would acknowledge that the US has done very well as a nation in the last 50 years.
Seems we have something else going for us here other than our ability (or lack thereof) to conjugate our multiplication tables that isn't measured in PISA tests.
Every time the new PISA scores come out, everyone goes apeshit about how the US is lagging behind East Bumfuckistan and how we're going to fall behind in this increasingly high tech world. And I really do mean "every time" the new PISA scores come out, as in they've been saying this since the 1960s when international testing began.
And as we all know, the US has become a desolate wasteland of a third world country since the 1960s, right? Right?
Or maybe the PISA scores really aren't that important and we can all just relax a bit.
No, the quote from the article did not contain the words "South America," so it's the submitter or editor that is poor at geography. And quoting.
I was wondering about that, too. What I assumed had happened was that someone at BBC noticed the error and it was corrected between the time that the article was quoted and the time that I read it.
Nobody wants to be shot by his own firearm, so there is an incentive to own a gun that attempts to prevent it. Once the technology is reliable, I think people would rather own a weapon that can't be fired by their assailant, their 3-year-old kid, etc. Obviously it's not there yet, and may never get there, but we won't ever get there if gunmakers don't even try.
One of the biggest problems in current systems is that devs need unfettered access to get their jobs done.
Oh, by all means, devs should have admin privileges on their own workstations. They just shouldn't have any access to QA and prod environments. Deployments to QA/prod should only be done via a deployment tool. If you can't make your project buildable/deployable by Jenkins/Bamboo/whatever, then your project is not finished.
We had development, QA an production environments that only touched through Control updating processes.
This is actually pretty common at mature companies, financial or otherwise. I strongly urge my clients to adopt a CI tool and instrumented deployment to QA and production environments.
The biggest benefit that my clients have seen from this is the elimination of "magic builds". You know, the kinds that can only be accomplished on one key developer's laptop which might get stolen at the airport and can only run on a server with specific, undocumented settings. I've had to deal with many of these and it's so wasteful. It would take the original developer an extra, what, hour of his or her time to make the project build in plain Jane Jenkins or Bamboo or something, but for the consultant who has to clean up the mess, it can take me a few days to make the bloody thing build after the original dev resigned from the company and you gave his laptop to Eric, the intern.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to bill the hours, but it's my job to prevent my clients from re-fucking up the same thing over and over and over again. For my current client, I set them up so that their projects build and deploy to their dev environment with every push to git. This is the carrot that gets them to make their builds portable: they can be lazy and never have to do any work to deploy to dev. They push, and the app is deployed. For builds to QA, they simply tell the release manager (could be a senior dev or a project manager if the client is too small to need a dedicated release manager), "Hey, can you please push release 3.2.414 to QA?" The release manager makes a few clicks in Bamboo, and the project is deployed to QA, and the fact that the project was deployed, and what was deployed, and by whom, is all logged in Bamboo, so everyone knows what is deployed where and when it was deployed and by whom. Same with production. Lastly, if something is broken in QA or production, rolling back the code to the previous version (or any other version) is like 2 more clicks.
This makes code deployments much less risky. I've many times had the following conversation:
Me: We're deploying to prod on tuesday
Stakeholder: No can do. We have a demo on Wednesday, and if you fuck something up, it's hosed.
Me: Rolling back to the current version takes literally 2 clicks. Call the departmental pager any time 24/7 if you need the change rolled back.
Stakeholder: Oh. Well, that's fine then. Go for it.
Time to end this ramble. Basically, I agree with you 100%. Automated builds/releases/deployments should be required in any software dev shop. It's as important as electricity.
For good programmers, a debugger occasionally safes some time.
For those of us without unlimited time, saving it is valuable in and of itself. I don't walk to work, hand-wash my clothes, or raise my own chickens for eggs, either.
I think many people fall into a third category: while they are not driving, they think it would be best and safest if they didn't use their phone while driving. But while they are driving, they forget about safety when they hear an incoming text tone.
Anything that flies, even a rock is regulated by the FAA.
So you're telling me that if I throw a rock through a window that the FAA could fine me? I'm skeptical.
If you need to be private from your spouse/so, you should examine why. Then, alter your current relationship or find a relationship where it's comfortable enough that you don't feel like you have to keep secrets.
I don't, strictly speaking, need to have my email private from my wife. However, if my wife felt the need to surveil my email, I would have serious questions about her mental state and trust issues.
We do not read each other's email. I suppose I technically have access to her email since I run the email server, but I've already told her that while I won't read her email, if she intends to have an affair or something, she really ought to get a gmail account, just in case.
HR does not lie when they say (must be currently employed) and no gaps more than 3 months long in 5 years, and years of experience.
This totally depends on the company. I have never seen any company be that strict, especially if you can show that you didn't spend your gap time fapping 24/7.
Personally, I wouldn't want to work for a company that had a policy like that because if they have a stupid, self-defeating policy in one area, they're likely to have them in other areas, too.
In my first year, I had CS101 which was an intro to programming concepts. It was taught in C++, FORTRAN, or Pascal back then, but I imagine that you could do CS101 in PHP or some other web-focused language, now. It was really just to get students comfortable with a high level programming language, running a compiler or an interpreter, etc.
Look for part time work or internships with smaller companies. They tend to be less rigid in their education and experience requirements if you can demonstrate competency.
The summer after my freshman year (so basically when I was your age), I got a summer job at a midsize company doing really, really junior development work. I made roughly 1/5th of what my experienced coworkers were making, but the experience was awesome (I lived at my parents' house, so it's not like I needed the extra money). I learned a ton while I was there, and continued working for them remotely while I was away at school. My experience there was key to getting my first job out of college because I already had demonstrated experience in developing corporate software.
One more word of caution: don't squander your youth being too career-focused. Definitely pursue some experience so that you aren't a total greenbean when you graduate, but have some balance. Go travel, date, drink, smoke, and just generally do what interests you. You've got the rest of your life to worry about your career, mortgage, kids, and all that other shit that we old people have to deal with.
You know, I tried opposing the government, but then people just like you shouted me down for being a racist.
Ahh, so you must be a new Republican. Welcome! Just so you know, you'll be called sexist and a whole host of other things, as well. Welcome to the modern world of lazy political discourse.
Yup, follow this advice and come across like an unhelpful douchbag.
Or, bend over backwards to help them. Provide them with a break down on every single patch (a few line summary with a link to the KB article for the full details), then give each patch a priority based on its impact and come up with different deployment routes for each one, then explain to your manager who allocates your time why patch management for the CAB board just became a full time job.
So you advocate becoming a passive-aggressive douchebag instead? If you don't have enough time for a new job responsibility, then you need to say something right away, not burn up a bunch of time of menial tasks and wait until your boss notices the productivity drop.
Alternatively, if the system runs for a few months and every single patch sent to the CAB board has been approved then you can clearly demonstrate the do not really add anything and start making rational arguments to abandon the process from a sound basis while demonstrating you are an excellent team player who easily adapts.
You know, it's interesting. My current client has a CAB process, and they do a good job of balancing process and agility.
Anyway, they don't use it to micromanage every stupid little patch. They recognize that the Linux admins are trained professionals and know which patches to apply. Same with the DBAs and same with the Network admins and same with the storage admins. Nobody questions them down to the individual patch level unless there is a known conflict with a specific patch, which basically never happens.
What they use it for is for auditing and coordination. Multiple groups never patch during the same maintenance window without a good reason (e.g. Heartbleed. Network and Linux both patched at the same time to get the patch out ASAP. But this was a rare event.). In other words, let's say the DBAs and the Linux admins both have patches that need to be applied. Well, they never patch during the same window, so if something breaks, we know that the problem is isolated to the database patch vs. the Linux patch. Also, if we get a report that something stopped working right on, say, 3/8/2014, then we know that the issue was with a patch to their main web proxy server.
CAB type groups can be a valuable, but it's important to find the sweet spot between micromanagement and chaos. It's good to have all of the various groups know what each other are doing and can advise each other regarding potential issues. It's not like when the DBAs do patching that everybody discusses the Oracle changelogs in great detail for half a day or anything.
'there is more to working at amazon, then money'.
A lot of companies say that. Doesn't necessarily mean that they underpay, they just don't want someone who will jump ship if some competitor offers them $5k more.
AWS is expensive, I can provide the equivalent of an m3.large
Oh, excellent! I need to analyze 5PB of data in a 1000 node Hadoop cluster, which I'll need for about a week. I'll need to start the analysis in 3 days. It's a bit of a last-minute rush job. What would you charge me for that?
What? You can't provide that infrastructure at any time at any price? Oh, rats. I guess I'll just have to use AWS.
I am a scooter rider. In most places in the US, the following rules apply:
For scooters that are less than 50cc and cannot go faster than 35 mph:
* You may park in the bike rack like a bike. In some places, you can even park on the sidewalk (!!) as long as it isn't obstructing pedestrian traffic.
* Do not require a motorcycle or even a driver's license, but if you have a prior DUI, some states won't let you ride a scooter until your license gets reinstated.
* Some states require you to register and title your scooter, some do not
* You may or may not need a helmet and/or eye protection (in my state, you need both, and both are a good idea unless you like getting a rock or sand in your eyes while you're trying to drive).
* May not go on the freeway, and you must drive them in the right lane unless you are turning left.
* May not use bike paths, bike lanes, or any other resources designated for bicycles.
* Do not require insurance
Any scooter that is 50cc or more, or can go over 35mph is a motorcycle. For a motorcycle:
* You need a motorcycle license
* You need to register and title your motorcycle and get any required inspections
* You may not park in the bike racks nor engage in any other scooter "magic". The "magic" is for the under 50cc crowd.
Here's the gotcha of scooters: some people derestrict them, but this can be a bad idea, because let's say you derestrict your 50cc scoot and are going 45 in a 35mph zone. If caught, you are violating the following laws: speeding, driving without a license (assuming you have no motorcycle license), driving an unregistered motor vehicle, driving an uninspected vehicle, operating a motorcycle without a helmet/eyewear (if applicable). Is a cop really going to throw the book at you like that? Not likely, but it's still a big risk if the officer is behind on his or her monthly quota!
As for me, I have a derestricted 50cc scoot for the parking "magic", but I also have a motorcycle endorsement and registered my scoot, and I wear a helmet/eyewear, and I have insurance (it's super cheap, and scooter theft is rampant). So if I'm caught speeding, it's simple speeding and I guess I don't get it inspected, but that's a compliance ticket (if you get it inspected, then the ticket is dismissed). Technically, I shouldn't park in the bike rack because my scoot goes faster than 35mph, but the meter maid doesn't know that.
Look at how Occupy Wall Street fizzled out.
I think that OWS fizzled out because, while the occupiers correctly identified that there is something wrong with the political/economic power structure in this country, they never were able to articulate what they felt was wrong, and neither did they have any solutions in mind. Take the Washington DC OWS, for instance. The encampment was right on K street, yet nobody there could articulate their objection to the corporate lobbying and influence purchasing that was happening, quite literally, in the building across the street from them.
I guess every generation needs to punch their social action card, but the civil rights era and the Vietnam War era are long-since over. We had a good run in the 80s with Apartheid, but after that came, what, the WTO/IMF/World Bank protests? Good luck having any intellectual discourse with any of those nuts. A friend of mine from college, an economist no less, was part of those protests, so I said to myself, "Finally I can get a coherent explanation for what the fuck these protesters want!" When I asked my friend what the protests were all about, she said: "Beats me! I just think protesting is fun!"
Indeed.
foundations laid down in the 5th and 6th grade of school
I always get a kick out of people who ask me how to get into programming. It usually goes something like this:
Them: "Hey, how do I make the jump into programming? I want to learn to code."
Me: "No, you don't. You are just sick of telling people to clear their cookies, restart their computer, and try again."
Them: "That's true, but I really want to program!"
Me: "If you really wanted to program, you'd be practicing programming right now instead of having this conversation. There are nearly zero barriers to entry with programming. You could fire up notepad and start programming. Little kids learn in elementary school. Here, let's go to github and start talking through a random open source project and I can explain why they did what they did to give you a jumping off point."
Them: "That sounds boring."
Me: ??
Not if you have an expensive preexisting condition.
This problem was vastly overplayed. I've had to deal with it because my wife has an expensive preexisting condition.
Prior to ObamaCare, if you had an expensive preexisting condition, you basically had three decent options:
1. If you could work, get a job with group health insurance. Group health insurance was covered by HIPAA, which meant that insurance companies needed to cover preexisting conditions, as long as you maintained continuous coverage.
2. If you could not work, go on Medicare. (Yes, Medicare. Even if you're not old yet. If you're disabled and can't work, you qualify for Medicare.)
3. If you qualified to join a trade organization that offered health insurance (IEEE used to do this, but doesn't anymore), you could join their group plan and get a HIPAA-eligible plan which would cover your condition.
In our case, had my wife not made a miraculous recovery, she would have gone on Medicare since it was no cost to us (other than all of the money that we pay into Medicare!), and the rest of the family would have gotten coverage via a trade association (I was a Realtor at the time).
Preexisting conditions really weren't the big deal that people make it out to be.
I am hardly surprised that insurance companies do not like the situation of having any additional regulation imposed upon them and will raise fees or do anything else they can do to protest and to discredit it.
The sharp increases in premiums aren't due to some sort of tantrum that the insurance industry is throwing due to regulations. It's not like the Department of Health and Human Services or the state insurance commissions sprang up overnight due to ObamaCare. Insurance has always be highly regulated. ObamaCare is actually a massive handout to the insurance industry, due to forcing people to buy their product.
The main drivers for the insurance premium increases are:
1. Elimination of choice in insurance plans. People who previously paid for their own preventative care and minor health issues and only insured against catastrophic events are no longer able to do so. All of a sudden, these people are paying way more for their healthcare than they used to because they are forced to buy more insurance than they need or want.
2. Elimination of risk pools. People who generally take good care of themselves are now in the same risk pool as the alcoholic, obese, biker down the street. Guess who's subsidizing whose bad choices?
If you've even hung around the emergency department of a hospital, you will have seen where the real cost of uninsured patients was going. Suddenly this cost is transferred from the hospital to subsidized plans.
ObamaCare makes this problem way worse due to the Medicaid expansion. ER visits are free under Medicaid, so ERs are now seeing an increase in nonemergent use as a result.