sethg

Two other things to keep in mind:

(1) The Republican leadership has been really really invested in the “fake it ’till you make it” school of persuasion: if you act like a winner, this will persuade the people who want to get behind a winner, and then you will win.

(2) Democratic operatives have known for decades that the demographic groups more likely to vote for them are also the groups that are less likely to vote at all. The Clinton-era solution to this problem was to pitch a message that was more likely to resonate with the population that was already voting; the Obama-era solution is to get more of those unlikely voters into the voting booths. Republicans don’t have as much headroom to improve their turnout.

Voter ID does nothing to prevent this sort of thing: the election officials in “friendly” precincts can just wink at forged or missing ID.

And voter ID makes a certain kind of election-skewing even easier, since officials in “unfriendly” precinct can discourage people from voting by rejecting valid ID, or simply by spending so long examining the IDs and arguing with the voters that everyone has to wait for hours in order to vote.

In the US, benefits usually run out at 26 weeks. Congress took note of the Great Recession and extended that to 39 weeks, or 48 weeks in states with over-6-percent unemployment, but that extension expires at the end of this year.

And Americans only get unemployment benefits if they are laid off; if you quit or are fired for cause, you’re screwed.

I would like to point out that whether or not universal health care is brought to the US (it’s scheduled to kick in under Obamacare, but if the Republicans win they can effectively kill it), the fee-for-service model of paying doctors will have to go away, because right now that model is one of the things running up the cost of private health insurance here. The insurance companies, faced with rising costs, can either impose more restrictive rules about what they will or will not cover, or they can hike their premiums.

In the former case, they’re doing the same thing that a government agency would do, except that people generally change insurers when they change jobs... meaning that any care that costs money up front but would prevent problems five or ten years down the line is not worth spending money on, because some other insurance company would be picking up the savings.

In the latter case, middle- and upper-class families see more of their paycheck going to insurance, while people who can’t afford the premiums but aren’t poor enough for Medicaid just go without insurance, depend on the emergency room if they really really need something, and risk getting bankrupted by medical bills if a serious condition does appear.

(Which is why Obamacare was passed in the first place.)

From WW2 to the early 1970s, there was a two-party consensus on government intervention in the economy, and that consensus moved “right” even before Reagan. (One of Carter’s legislative accomplishments, for example, was deregulating airline fares.)

On the other hand, the country has moved “left” on social issues. Can you imagine any politician in 1975, outside of the most extremely liberal districts, saying that same-sex couples should have legal protections equivalent to those of a married couple? And now that seems to be the “safe” position for right-wing Democrats and left-wing Republicans to take. The ERA hasn’t passed, but the courts have been more critical of laws that have a disparate impact on men and women (the technical term is “intermediate scrutiny”).

Regarding protracted military interventions in foreign countries, the parties seem to have moved “left” in the aftermath of Vietnam and “right” again with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

(As a man, I thought this was a very insightful observation... when I first read it... many years ago. :-)

I forgot to mention that such a code would actually help borrowers, in the following way: For countries in a debt crisis, the lenders holding 90% of the debt may realize that they aren’t going to get paid back in full, and therefore would agree to a settlement where at least they get something back. But the ones holding the remaining 10% can pound the table and say “no, we want payment in full, and we’re legally entitled to it”... which leads the 90% bloc to say “well, if they’re still entitled to payment in full, we’re not going to be suckers and settle for less”... which leads the indebted country to say “we can’t possibly pay you all in full, so screw you all, we’re defaulting”.

For sovereign countries, unfortunately, there is no such procedure. If a government borrows money on the international credit market, its taxpayers can be on the hook for perpetuity. I would like to see those taxpayers have at least as much protection as private-sector borrowers—especially when the taxpayers of a democratic government are on the hook for the debts of its authoritarian or corrupt predecessors.

* TeleAtlas, which is in bed with Google

* Navteq, which is owned by Nokia, which has a deal to provide maps to Bing

So now maps is one of the few areas where both Google/Android and Microsoft/Nokia have a blatant advantage over Apple. Why would they want to give that up?

Suppose that data source A has a point for “Logan Airport” and data source B has a point (a few hundred feet away) for “General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport” and data source C has a separate data point for every terminal.... on a case-by-case basis it’s not hard to resolve questions like this, but when you try to come up with an algorithm that scales to tens of millions of map features, you spend a lot of time scratching your head saying “why did it do THAT?!?!”

(And I know that for all its faults, Nokia is smart enough to apply human QA to their mapping system, because in my last job I worked on the Web site that those human contractors used.)

(He didn’t actually assault me, but I later learned that one MIT fraternity had nicknamed him “the NAMBLA man”, and a while after that there was an article in the school paper reporting that he had just done time for rape.)

People who already have power do not need props and schemes, because, well, they have power. I know that if I grab my boss’s crotch during a meeting and he says ”you have thirty seconds to convince me not to fire your sorry ass right now”, every witness to the event and everybody above him in the corporate hierarchy will back him up.

A man tempted to do the same thing to a woman less powerful than himself does not have the same assurance that he will suffer consequences for his bad behavior, and you can’t just create that sense of assurance by fiat. (As the Readercon debacle indicated, even written policies are no guarantee.) So people of good will are still trying to figure out how to hack the social environment to achieve a better culture, and until the rules of that culture become second nature to us all, then those social hacks will seem like, well, hacks.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/july-21-1969,10515/

Suppose you were hired to do X, and after doing X for a few years, you have developed the skill to do Y instead. But that skill does not guarantee that your current employer will have an opening for a job doing Y. Even if they do have the opening, from their point of view, if they let you transfer, they will definitely need to hire a replacement X, and you might turn out to suck at Y. So a rational manager will feel a strong pressure to leave well enough alone and let you keep doing X.

There are a variety of ways for an employee to escape this situation, but the simplest one is just to find another company with an opening for Y.

I just found out today about Calcutta time, which until 1948 was GMT+05:30:21, but I didn’t realize it could be even worse than that.

And I’m not sure it’s possible to have a completely unambiguous language for dealing with relationships between human beings. The architects of Lojban have made some heroic efforts in this regard, and while that language does a lot to delimit ambiguity (e.g., if a sentence has no explicit tense markers, then it is not asserting whether the event is past, present, or future), but it can’t eliminate it entirely.

“Exclusive content” is the same idea: the only difference is that the discounted price is zero.

On the one hand, I did wish I had some code to show off, because a significant proportion of the companies that looked interesting wanted to see some nontrivial thing I had written as a precondition to an interview; “send us a link to your Github page” was not uncommon. On the other hand, I did get interviews and I did accept an offer from a place I genuinely thought was a good fit (and not just “well, it’s a good escape from the previous employer”), so it is possible.

However, FB Inc. is structured so that Zuck will retain a majority of the voting rights, even if every other investor stands against him (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/02/face...), so even if the price goes down to a dollar a share, investors’ only recourse will be to sell before it drops to fifty cents.

By getting into a car and driving you assume a non zero risk of being sued for damages caused by a car accident.

Best Buy is selling 27" monitors for about $300 and 30" monitors for about $1,500. As a percentage of a full-time developer’s salary, depreciated over three years, $600 is pocket change and even $3,000 is defensible. So if a company is nickel-and-diming its developers over this kind of thing, what does that say about the overall attitude of the management?

The kicker, of course, is that my employer WAS THE COMPANY THAT MADE THE CELL PHONES.