duffbeer703

That CEO guy looks as douche-y as the Facebook guy.

These sorts of unauthorized flights, combined with model rockets from hobby stores and household cleaners could have created a terrorist nightmare. Where are the feds?

Being treated like a human being is "above and beyond" with respect to airlines.

All of this crap is just that... crap. "Teaching for the test/compliance" is the big whine today. 15 years ago, the trend was to give everyone an A so their feelings wouldn't be hurt.

Teachers are all bent because kids aren't doing well on standardized tests, so they get pressure to raise the grades. So they address the situation by drilling the kids to pass the test, and it's obvious that the dumb kids are still dumb and the smart kids are still smart.

You have all of these people making big money analyzing these states to death and coming up with lots of brilliant ideas. At the end of the day, it means nothing because some percentage of kids do well, some percentage are drinking in the boy's room and some people in the middle are penalized/rewarded by some variance introduced by the system.

There are actually some proposals out there to build extra-national trade cities in Africa to encourage Western-style development, minus the intense corruption of African governments.

If the Congress is corrupt, than the state legislatures are a corpulent sewer of corruption and graft. Anything that takes power from them is generally a good thing.

The upside of direct election is that at least there's a chance that good Senators, not subject to the petty whims of the state houses might make better policy. State legislatures were/are generally the products of political machines and tended to appoint Senators who would advance their aims.

In the 21st century, the power of the corporations, unions and trade associations to manipulate the electorate via mass media is at least as powerful as the political machinery that the 17th amendment attempted to fight.

I'm pretty sure that if you get a data logger like this (http://www.microdaq.com/lascar/temperature/usb-thermocouple-...) and combine it with a good thermocouple probe and you should be good to go.

States like California and New York are mostly the victims of politicians in the 60's - 80's who deferred all sorts of costs to the future to make the books work. Welcome to the future.

Examples: "No money to give raises to state workers, cops and teachers." Solution to get contracts signed: Richer pensions, bigger benefits

"Crime is out of control. Drugs are bad. Rural economies are collapsing from de-industrialization." Solution: Build prisons.

"We're enlightened and want the poor to get better healthcare." Solution: Spend more on Medicaid. (In New York, pass the bill down to the county while you're at it)

"The Mayor can't afford a 7% raise to the Police and Fire Departments. The arbitrator will give them 6% that we can't afford if we go to arbitration." Solution: Allow employees to bank unlimited sick time that gets paid out at retirement and free healthcare for life.

Hopefully a crisis will fix things.

Yeah, sure. New York spends a ridiculous amount on education and is bottom of the pack in performance. My sister makes $85k as a teacher, and will retire making $105k on the current scale, with a pension of $65k after that.

Give Caesar his due.

If you aren't trying to make money, you may be able to report it as a hobby, deduct your expenses and avoid self-employment tax.

Another under-appreciated attack vector is flatulence. Load up at the airport Taco Bell and you could easily light a fart that could set guy next to you on fire.

Corporate bureaucracy grows in generational waves. Adams was stuck in the middle. The crew in charge in the early 90's were hired in the early 1960's and defined the old boy's network.

I don't think you know what you are talking about. Google "dod open source".

You don't get how these things things work.

An RFQ (request for quote) by its very nature is a request for specific commodities from an existing purchase contract, which are evaluated on a cost basis.

In it's simplest form related to IT, a server vendor has an part number for a hard drive listed on the GSA contract. Multiple resellers are able to sell that part. A RFQ is a solicitation that says "We would like to purchase 50 units of part #12345". The reseller with the lowest price wins.

When you have a plank, post or beam that has stood in place in an unheated barn for 400 years, it has been subject to the vagaries and every permutation of hot & cold, damp & dry.

These cycles bring out the best and worst of the wood. Obviously you are recovering old wood in a barn for other reasons as well, but in the ladder scenario, they want top notch wood that will last. Since SFFD has ladders that have been in active service since 1919, they obviously have that down.

It sounds like he's a direct report to Zuckerberg. Direct line to the honcho makes a difference in any job.

The longer you acclimate the wood, the tighter the joints are. You also are able to spot flaws in the wood. This is one of the reasons why people recover wood from old barns -- a farmer I worked for in high school was offered a substantial amount of money for wood in a Dutch barn built in the 1600's.

These guys are old-school craftsman who are obsessed with quality. Refreshing in this age of disposability.

About a third of IT staff at my employer are female. That seems reasonable to me.

Where in the US Constitution is the Federal government empowered to regulate the personal travel of Americans within the country?

Where in the US Constitution is the Federal government empowered to compel you to be subjected to dangerous radiation in order to board a common carrier?

And why is this outrage limited to aircraft? I can step in a boat and travel down the local river past all sorts of critical facilities without screening. Every drug dealer in my town gets product from a wholesaler in NYC whose couriers use inter-city busses. You can drive around with legal explosive materials with the exception of some tunnels and bridges.

The bigger the company, the easier it is to do this. I try to track major things that either avoid expenditure or save money while improving services or eliminating useless spending.

Generally, I'm able to hit 3-4x salary. Once I was able to save the place 10-15x my salary by aggressively decommissioning some ancient, expensive to maintain legacy applications. Of course, this work is usually a team effort... but it's still a good feeling.

Sure its possible. The stories written about this seemed credible enough to show that something very wrong was happening.

It's also possible that the US Attorney concluded that the admin at the school was incompetent, but not intentionally acting in a criminal way.

Amazing how clueless the MIT guys can be sometimes.

While compensation and work product are great metrics for economists to argue about, they aren't the only factor driving people. In fact, I think in most instances work output has no correlation to compensation.

People instinctively do things for seemingly intangible reasons that apply in various circumstances. They figure that the best workers are more likely to get promoted, will get the best shifts, want to help their coworkers, are less likely to get laid off and have personal standards.

Think of it this way... soliders, even conscripted soldiers, commit acts of bravery that are above and beyond the call of duty in combat. Instead of staying out of the line of fire, they charge machine guns, throw back hand grenades, and rescue wounded comrades. To an economist, these things are completely irrational or crazy, because all of economics is focused on studying or manipulating a datapoint on a supply/demand curve.

Life is more that supply/demand. Economics influences life, but doesn't consume it.

The headline is a really dumb conclusion to draw. What happened is that the prosecutor (ie. the US Attorney) declined to prosecute. They have the autonomy to do that. The school district managed to levy enough political influence to convince the prosecutor to look the other way.

The conclusion to draw is that justice in the US is up for sale. Another US Attorney successfully prosecuted a the principals of a seafood wholesaler, and imprisoned them for 8 years for importing lobsters in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. (True story: http://www.economist.com/node/16640389/comments?page=2)

It's all about the environment. Offices work great, as long as you have good hallways that force people to walk around. Hallway conversations give you the value of the cube farm without the need to learn about the medical history, marital problems and other minutae that the cube farm's false privacy offers.

That said, I think ops people work better in open plan offices.

This isn't political, they are just making sure that the terrorists don't FOIA bureaucratic minutae.

If the terrorists can read bid proposals from competing vendors after DHS buys 50 million paperclips, they win.

Great, another way for creepy Facebook to know more about me!

I think Facebook has jumped the shark. I have a couple of hundred contacts on FB, and the activity levels are way low compared to what they used to be.

I always found the bleating moral outrage over the nuclear attack more than a little grating and ignorant. As horrific as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the fates of Tokyo and other cities were little better.

The B-29s dropped white phosphorous, napalm, avgas, etc in specific patterns intended to create a firestorm -- a phenomenon pioneered by the British in places like Hamburg and Dresden. The flames were so intense that subsequent waves of bombers were lifted in flight, and the glow could be seen for hundreds of miles. Over 100k are estimated to have died. A million+ were homeless.

This isn't something that was covered up/deempathized, nor was the atomic bombing. Obliteration of the enemy from the air was heralded during and after the war.

That's an unfair assessment. The first-line Soviet armored and motor rifle divisions were well led and disciplined soliders who did their job and moved on.

The second/third line infantry divisions essentially levied anyone who could walk into service, including criminals, POWs, etc. Those units were mostly the ones where summary shootings and no discipline were common.

That wasn't a phenomena unique to the Soviets, either. Life for a German in the French occupation zone wasn't a bag of cherries.

I love how "historians" now troll the media with revisionist re-writings of history with glaring and obvious gaps. The US submarine fleet had so decimated the Japanese merchant marine by 1945 that they essentially ran out of targets. That wasn't news, and the ability for Japan's colonies to supply the home islands had been in decline for over a year.

I'm sure that even a group as disconnected from reality as the Imperial Military Command had figured this out, and gutted the army in Manchuria long before the Soviet land-grab. The Japanese faced veteran Soviet armored armies with no tanks and a few dozen effective aircraft.

IMO the pressure placed on Imperial Japan by the firebombing and nuking of Japan's cities, the impending total destruction of the overseas possessions and destruction of the Navy was enough to flip some key individuals in the General Staff or the Emperor to stop the insanity. The Japanese surrender IMO is all about internal politics and is something we are unlikely to ever understand fully.

What a great school project!