I recently drove from my home near DC to Manhattan and back. Exiting the Lincoln Tunnel and heading north, my expectations of "normal" traffic behavior were shattered. I wondered why there aren't bodies littering the streets and hulking wrecks of naive visitors' cars abandoned, leaking, everywhere. It was truly mind-expanding. NYC pedestrian deaths are on the rise, says Google.
Meanwhile, I look out my window as I type this and see the suburban road adjacent to my group of homes being resurfaced. It's a beautiful expanse of asphalt they're laying down. It's smooooove, and fast. The neighborhood toddlers want to cross that road, and parents have trouble explaining to them that this road in sight of their homes is just too dangerous. We live in a town renowned for its planning and quality of life.
I don't really have a point, but something is obviously amiss.
Commonsense dictates that you would have more people on foot rather than in their cars ( especially single-occupant driving cases ) if cities actually paid attention to the plight of persons on foot, on sidewalks.
It has to be said that I am uniquely referring to cities like SF known for their less than splendid sidewalk conditions. I am discounting the fact that SF is quite hilly and thus not very conducive for walking, unlike other flatter cities.
SF is notorious for its grubby, thrash-discharged, excrement-laden and generally deplorable sidewalks.
Anyone familiar with SF knows that whether you are on the sidewalks abutting the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society and right next to an upscale mall or in seedier parts of Inner/Outer Mission, you can never take a pleasant walk for granted.
Prominent sidewalks are openly defecated on.
Casual violence of vagrants and the professionally-homeless is quite common.
Entire sections of neighborhoods are poorly-lit, with dodgy surfaces to boot.
All this not even accounting for the unenthusiastically enforced sit-lie ordinances [2], a thriving homeless industrial complex supported by the city's SROs and rising crime in parts of the city [3]
This irks even otherwise civic minded, forward-thinking residents who have all but given up on the city's frowziness and its celebration of the unhygienic and unsanitary.
I think there is a strong Well that is SF for you. If you don't like it, go live in Marin ethos prevalent here (and in other cities like SF). And that is not one bit helpful.
On that note, I run barefoot barefoot (no vibrams or such) in SF a couple of times a week and it is perfectly fine. I don't know what everyone is whining about.
The real issue with SF sidewalks is that they are made with those cement slabs and thus have giant cracks that make it extremely unpleasant to longboard.
You're forgetting the voice recognition. What if there's no barcode to scan? The Fire TV voice search is excellent -- I used it last night -- and if the Dash has similar tech then it might actually be a useful supplement to the apps.
Eh, looks pretty good to me. Our wants are diametrically opposed: Voice search (do care -- Apple TV search is painful), tech specs (non line-of-sight remote -- Apple TV is line-of-sight), games (eh, might be a nice diversion for a few minutes after an episode of Walking Dead), and I don't have an HBO subscription.
I know the Apple TV came with a remote, but I never use it, because I have an iPhone. The RF remote isn't a huge win for people that use their phones to control the TV, which, as time goes on, will eventually be "everybody".
This is a kind of ridiculous article. It entirely ignores NASA's Earth Science work, which gets the largest allocation of science funding in the FY2014 budget (almost $2B).
Caveat: I work with a team of NASA & contractor Earth scientists. I think they'd all tell you they don't need to go search for a justification; justifications are self-evident. Here's one: Maintain the climate record.
Perhaps my memory is wrong, or the emphasis less that I recall, but I remember fundamental change in NASA's direction in the late 90s or early 2000s that explicitly focused NASA's work on Earth.
Some of this was a result of remote sensing tech coming into it's golden age, some as a result of climate change needs, and a lot was a result of NASA needing to find a source of funding.
But I can't find anything extensive about that on the web at this moment.
Science 5,017.8
Aeronautics 565.7
Space Technology 742.6
Exploration 3,915.5
Space Operations 3,882.9
Education 94.2
Cross Agency Support 2,850.3
===============================
Total Request 17,715.4
To break down "Science":
Earth Science 1,846.1
Planetary Science 1,217.5
Astrophysics 642.3
James Webb Space Telescope 658.2
Heliophysics 653.7
By comparison, most of the "Exploration" budget is spent on the development of the Space Launch System -- which some sarcastically refer to as the "Senate" Launch System, because it is designed to spread money among the states. Just the SLS alone is bigger than the Earth Science budget.
> which some sarcastically refer to as the "Senate" Launch System, because it is designed to spread money among the states
I thought it was because the project was invented in the Senate version of the NASA budget, where Senate staffers made up arbitrary requirements for its design and functionality.
>If someone in the NSA abuses his powers, it is very likely that nobody will ever know.
You mean, besides his family, friends, and loved ones when he loses his job and potentially ends up in prison. You're underestimating the amount of training and internal oversight that occurs.
Folks have lost clearances and jobs. I don't know about prison time. But I do know the fear of these things happening is a motivating factor not to cross the line. But I'm just some guy...
The problem here is that you trust the organization to police itself, whereas it has little incentive to actually do so effectively.
The cases of caught individuals seem to have gone under-punished, as they sound worthy of prison time.
Also, even if the NSA polices against personal abuses, why would it police against systematic abuse for government's purposes against the constitution?
Self-policing does not work well, especially without elaborate mechanisms to enable it to work, and especially with a combination of secrecy and lack of oversight.
I'm not saying I trust it to police itself. I'm trying to suggest that the environment in which NSA analysts work does have a (positive) material effect on their behavior. Non-systemic transgressions are not common. When Snowden said he was able to check Obama's email, that angle was lost.
Now, systemic problems are a different issue. But the article we're all talking about here is written by an analyst from his own perspective.
Seriously, you can't win. Here you have an actual former NSA employee giving a first-hand account of his time there -- and not only his account doubted for no reason other than failure-to-comply with known-biases and unverifiable journalism, but some guy is now providing psychological analysis of him as well!
Some know-nothing armchair psychologist who read the NYT is telling this guy -- who has made an honest effort to be utterly transparent -- that he's cognitively dissonant and that comment is going to receive a hundred votes because it makes people feel good about the things they think they know. It's not truth, just an exercise in mass delusion.
Don't insurance companies have highly trained and highly paid actuaries? My understanding is they look at numbers, not headlines. I'm sure there is some sort of professional ethical standard they are expected to uphold.
You aren't looking at the whole picture. In fault states, the insurance company would have to pay out to the other party in the case of an accident. That money needs to come from somewhere, namely the premiums, which is why they go up after there is reason to believe it could happen again. This isn't about emotions or ethics but rather cold logic
Yeah, but I find it hard to believe they hadn't already included some amount of fire probability in their calculations. Isn't it possible their assumed probability is higher than the actual, since it was perhaps based on the track record of internal combustion cars? I'm out of my depth here. IANAAA - not an actuarial analyst, nor an automotive engineer.
It's about future likelihood, not prior probability, and the fact that an issue was discovered means that the likelihood is much higher than if it were some isolated incidents.
To put it differently, if it were entirely random, the premiums would not change, but if there were a systemic problem (which appears to be the case here) the premiums should change to reflect the risk
Meanwhile, I look out my window as I type this and see the suburban road adjacent to my group of homes being resurfaced. It's a beautiful expanse of asphalt they're laying down. It's smooooove, and fast. The neighborhood toddlers want to cross that road, and parents have trouble explaining to them that this road in sight of their homes is just too dangerous. We live in a town renowned for its planning and quality of life.
I don't really have a point, but something is obviously amiss.