As someone who made the mistake in working for an international office, and caught the train out almost 10 years ago now, I agree. I escaped one set of layoffs and then kept thinking I'm next.
I was next.
Got fired at end of financial year, along with a couple thousand others. Had a new job before the day was out (another result of said anxiety).
Am I missing something? They are the exact same thing. The company decides to terminate your employment contract, as opposed to you making the decision.
"For cause" usually means something much worse than "poor performance". That term is generally harassment, fraud/embezzling, other illegal acts, gross insubordination, etc.
Being fired because you are performing poorly in your job is, crazily enough, not "fired for cause" but simply "fired".
Being fired "for cause" usually makes one ineligible for unemployment income.
Thanks. I used the "for cause" a little sloppily. A sales person who misses quota will still be able to get unemployment benefits, while another salesperson who likes to walk around the office without pants will probably not.
Additionally, being laid off usually results in at least a respectable severance package. Being fired generally means you only get the minimum legally owed to you.
Being one of 14,000 employees let go because they chose to eliminate that entire half of the company doesn't necessarily mean anything. Being one of four engineers chosen to be let go from a team of 20 can say something about your skill level.
The practical difference is the ability to collect unemployment benefits. If you're fired you may not be able to collect benefits depending on the situation and state where you live.
Another luxury goods market that's reporting a significant decline. Private planes are also down a lot, real estate in Manhattan is dropping. SF real estate not dropping, but not increasing as it used to either. Spending on luxury goods down a lot. Let's go down the list:
Gold prices up ... check. Lots of money flowing (or attempting to) into government bonds ... check. Corporate profits down ... check. Corporate lending up by a LOT ... check. Energy down (demand-side problem) ... check. Goods shipping down (a lot) ... check. Lending standards tightening ... check (except for central bank lending). Spending down ... check. Bankruptcies up ... check. Luxury goods markets down ... check. Asset prices generally going donw ... check. "Sin" stocks rising (alcohol, gambling, ...) ... hmmm ... yes, sort of ... not yet totally pervasive (although CSH is doing almost suspiciously well)
We're in a recession ! Also : f*ck, I was looking at changing my job around.
And ... major wtf: stock prices ... all time high. That's weird.
One of the weird things about the stock market is that its success is no longer in any sort of relationship with economic reality. The economy continues to hobble around, and economic growth is not only low, it may be permanently stunted.
But the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq all closed at historic highs today - the first time all three have on the same day in 17 years. [0] Does the US economy and consumer confidence (and hell, general health of the middle class) feel at all like we should be seeing record market highs?
The way I would put it - a delicate framing - is that the market is honest, not correct. The situation is such that most people think they can stay in a little longer even as the analysts are pointing to all sorts of warning signs. There is always theater around the economy in election years, and they might succeed again in propping things up for the next president to handle.
Maybe people simply have different goals. For instance, it seems pretty obvious to me that no mass-layoffs (and thus a limit on productivity increases in that company) was a condition of the Obama administration's helping out of GM, and the same goes for the various Euro governments who did the same.
Yes totally for 3D games. We see the Superbook as more of a productivity tool. You would most likely still play your games on your phone. But for video watching, no. There's virtually no lag. See our Surface demo to get a sense of how well it works: https://vimeo.com/176370847
Btw because we use DisplayLink, you can also use the Superbook as a secondary monitor / keyboard / mouse for windows tablet,s laptops, and PC sticks.
This does nothing to solve the real problem. The issue isn't (or wasn't) that we couldn't cure MRSA at all, it was a gradual evolution. In the 1960's we had 5 working drugs that would kill essentially any bacteria.
And then we had 4. We discovered new ones, at one point I believe up to 7. But resistance made it go down pretty much by one per decade, but each next one ended faster. And then it hit zero, in 2012 I believe.
Now we may (maybe) be back up to one. Big whoop. Not going to last.
The problem is that evolution is out-researching us, the problem is that we're losing the war, not any particular battle. Antibiotics used to last 3-5 decades. Now we're down to years. While we do find new antibiotics on a regular basis, the problem is the speed of adaptation. The problem is that science is losing/has lost the "battle with darkness" as it was called 700 years ago. We are now in the situation that there are people dying because they entered hospitals for unrelated reasons (where they were exposed to these bacteria).
The problem is that we need to let millions of people die of curable diseases constantly or risk a Spanish flu like incident that can be reasonably expected to kill somewhere between 500 million and a billion humans today.
>Biggest use of antibiotics today is in food production(agriculture etc.), not in hospitals. And it's also completely unregulated.
Completely false - antibiotic (and all drug) use in animals is absolutely regulated in nearly all countries, including the US [1,2,3]. Said regulations may not be what you'd like, but to claim they don't exist is silly.
True, but it must go down or we will never have functional antibiotics.
It seems to be possible, in Italy they use 50 times more antibiotics per pig than here in Sweden, due to the stricter regulation. Denmark is doing good but still uses twice as much as in Sweden.
This is due to our regulations, and it costs more to keep the pigs healthy, but due to EU:s strict trade rules, there are no way we can protect our farmers from the cheaper meat.
And somehow Italian ham is considered to be of higher quality...
AFAIK bacteria aren't developing a way to get resistant faster; the problem is antibiotics over-use (and misuse). Also, if an antibiotic for which resistance was developed doesn't get used for a long enough time, the bacteria lose the resistance.
The bottom line is that we need to use newly developed antibiotics more carefully, continue researching new ones, and no Spanish flu like incident will happen (even without considering that the Spanish flu was a virus, not a bacterium).
We are basically applying selective breeding in order to create the bacteria that will wipe the humanity out, and we are doing a very good job at that..
You realize people died from bacterial infections before antibiotics, right? Bacterial resistance to antibiotics doesn't make the bacteria more likely to kill us than before.
Well, when you pass a variable around, it doesn't and cannot change. This means that different threads can't get in eachothers' way anymore, for instance, but also that you can't make a big chunk of mistakes at all.
They also have serious disadvantages : they can't be memory managed in the traditional way (since they tend to reuse other instances' memory in complex ways), and thus require a GC (refcounting can work, but ...). They are VERY allocation intensive, and they are worse than most non-persistent data structures. Assuming an O(1) allocator they can match non-persistent data structures in O-ness (ie. when making an invalid assumption that is quite popular in academia. In practice memory allocation is O(1) for small values, then O(n^2) once you get close to the system's memory capacity (scanning for holes in a long list) but don't go over it, and then O(oh fuck it let's just reboot this bloody BOAT ANCHOR) when crossing that line).
Why would anyone use machine learning if not to create systems they don't understand ? That's the whole point of doing it. Not having to understand complex system to understand -or even predict- them is a very good thing indeed. I don't know anything about how to mathematically analyze pixel values to read text, but I can create such a formula using machine learning. After creating the formula I know nothing more about it. So the same person can create programs to read text, transcribe audio, predict loan repayment, ...
And when it comes to the bias in the data - bias in the system thing, well, same thing goes for human judgement. Another way of putting this would be garbage in-garbage out. Humans might be able to tell you of bias in the inputs, rather than just using it, but this ability rapidly deteriorates when the dimensionality of the inputs rises. You can tell if there's something weird about combinations of 3 numbers, but you can't tell if there is something off about 150 number sequences.
Along these lines, I think these classes of algorithms might have much broader applications and could possibly solve problems that we don't even have good definitions for yet. I'm particularly curious to see how the field develops new techniques for systems that start off with poor quality results but evolve with new data to produce better results.
btw, I vouched for and upvoted the parent. It makes an excellent point and, frankly, I'm baffled by the downvotes/dead status.
Perhaps. But the inability to verify or predict output is a real concern, especially in the nascent stages of applying the tech to an increasing number of critical situations.
Look at the interest rate. Now look at inflation (not "core" inflation, the one you pay). Saving, money in bank, is not a good investment atm. Or put differently, it's at best as good as gold bars under the bed.
So yes, you not only have to save the money. You need to invest it.
I was not going into explicit detail, but pontificating on the idea of saving as opposed to spending.
With that said, one of my banks offered me a 3.00% APY on a CD the other day. Still not really enough for me. I would prefer to throw the money in index funds and wait longer.
Kylix didn't suck per se - the CLX sucked. 2 frameworks that were almost, but not entirely, compatible was a big mistake. Borland were just too clever for their own good. They didn't understand that Linux is a moving target and not being able to keep up to date with the various libs and toolkits killed the product. Try getting Kylix 1.0 to run now... it's not a trivial task. It's painful. I could more than likely install Delphi 2.0 (first 32 bit version, though 3.0 would be "safer" as 2.0 was a bit of a mis-mash) even now on Windows (probably 1.0 on a system that still supported WOW for 16bit apps.)
Sounds like it's pretty much the same as the 4 weeks of fasting into Easter, Lent, which is also based on the lunar calendar. I guess that's where ramadom comes from too, and I hear that one comes from the jewish religion, to remember the flight out of Egypt, away from their religion and slavery. So maybe your prophet got it from the jews. Basically when I was a kid the family would spend pretty much the entire afternoon being together, working on the food for the evening, which was usually delicious because of that. Many days there was church, and church activities. The school would help out with the fast.
I don't agree with you at all that it increases your energy. And yeah it came with lots of completely ridiculous rules, like anything religious. If I was a muslim, with that many rules that onerous, I'd refuse to do it just for that reason alone. Such rules only serve to prove someone else's power over you and nothing more. There is no use or purpose other than that. At one point I actually thought different, and so I simply tested it. Nothing, of course, as there is no God that is so extremely petty and meddling as that.
Fasted last 15 years. In my experience, the first couple of days are tough (mainly due to the body adjusting to different sleeping patterns and the lack of coffee), but after getting over that my energy levels come back. My output as a developer increases because my concentration levels are higher. This continues to increase right through the month. While I'm fasting, I feel like "I" have complete power/purity over my body. Fasting is not only to remember the people in poverty, it is to learn self restraint. The week after Ramadhan I begin to regret going back to old habits (5 cups of coffee a day, thinking about food/snacking during the day etc).
The problem I've found people who test it have, is they try the first day and say it's too hard (it is). You only really experience the benefits after a couple of days.
I was next.
Got fired at end of financial year, along with a couple thousand others. Had a new job before the day was out (another result of said anxiety).