This thread is over 18 years old now!
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This thread is over 18 years old now!
I was 9 years old when this thread started.
My boys were born about 7 months after this thread was started. I've got to update the avatar image - them pulling Arthur's sword from the stone in Disneyworld when they were 4 years old is kind of dated...
So they are about driving age now? Um yea datedQuote:
Originally Posted by szlamany
Yes - they've shared a car for about a year now. I bought them a Chevy Malibu - been working out real good. I think it's actually less $$'s then the Uber-fees they were racking up!
[edit] Actually - if I consider the insurance bill that's not really true!! [/edit]
Yah, that insurance is a killer at that age.
I just quoted someone that has 4 drivers (one is 18 and the other is 16) with 4 vehicles at state minimum liability only for $6.2k every six months. Not a great conversation considering that they weren’t listing the children before hand, got caught (via an accident by the 18 year old), and the company is requiring that they either list the kids or exclude them so they wouldn’t be covered if they drove any of the 4 vehicles.
What you really should have been able to say to them was "you gamed the system and had uninsured drivers in your household - be happy we covered anything let alone offered future coverage!".
I almost got hit tonight by someone backing straight out from the local package store (yeah, look it up. CT colloquialism)
The only people hated more than insurance agents are debt collectors, so when I get conversations like those... they get nasty sometimes. But I never take it personally.
I used be on the debt recovery line for British Gas. I have been called many varied and interesting names.
We also had a small office in reception where people could come in and talk to someone personally. It was laid out so that the desk ran from wall to wall and was very wide so that it would be difficult for someone to jump across. There was an escape door behind the operator that I had to use more than once.
Did anybody ever offer to give you back their gas? That could be done in the office, and no desk is wide enough if the gas is sufficient.
Funny enough, we just elected a debt collector as Representative in the Louisiana House of Representatives. Close race too, but it was 3 points over the runoff mark.
Ironically we also had a city elect a guy for mayor who is a convicted felon that finished his sentence a year ago while simultaneously the state voted to bar felons from seeking public office for up to 5 years after they finish their sentence. Even more ironic is that the city voted overwhelmingly in favor of the amendment to bar the felons.
We had nothing interesting in our elections, but we have an opportunity that I hope we don't pass up.
As everybody knows, I like puns and word play. We are trying to get a new HQ building, and we just elected Brad Little as governor. To get the building, it would be pretty much essential to have the support of the governor, so I think we should offer to name the building after him. That way, we could have the Little HQ building for probably a century, or so. I'm actually thinking that we could just revamp the old building completely, in which case we could have the Little Old HQ building.
I fear people will pass up the opportunity. People can be so stodgy. You rarely get a chance to plaster a joke onto a building for decades, or on anything else, either. It's like when Seattle created the South Lake Union Trolley. They thought it was a mistake!!! They even tried (and may have succeeded) to change the name! Stodgy ol' buggers.
We have stupid voters here in CA that dont read what the actual prop or law is actually about. They see ads and just vote.
We did not pass the prop to repeal a previous gas tax and vehicle registration fee imposed a year ago. $175 on top of your registration fee and $0.xx per gallon tax. Problem was they worded the prop so it was very confusing and sounded like it was to take fund away from road repair and transit etc. Bundled in teh prop was also the requirement to have any new future tax increases be voter approved. Now that it didnt pass they can continue to add gas tax for any reason without any approvals.
Well, that's one interpretation. I don't know about the proposal in CA, but I've long argued that gas taxes are too low. That's the primary source of funding for highways (or it was meant to be). Costs go up, revenues are going down, and we all still drive plenty. Perhaps people weren't as confused as you think.
I'm super excited about self driving vehicles.
I had an idea a while back about implementing a self driving vehicle that used visible light communication to determine the speed limit as well as lane detection combined with proximity sensors to help with collision detection.
But I don't have the money for that...
I'm mostly excited about self driving cars. Every time I pass a crash on the interstate, I realize how fallible we are. You don't get fender benders on a freeway without some inattentive driving. On the other hand, it will certainly open up a whole new, and interesting, section of the law. If you aren't driving your car, then you certainly aren't liable for any accidents, but who is? Some accidents are unavoidable. I was following a canoe carrier that launched a canoe at me while doing 65 mph. Fortunately, the canoe bounced into the ditch, but it could have gone a different direction. Under the right circumstances, there just isn't anything that can be done about it....except that you could armor what is now the windscreen, such that debris is less likely to enter the passenger compartment.
It'll be interesting. Probably better, too, but interesting.
It definitely opens up a whole can of worms, because who would be liable? The driver presumably has no neglect if he/she isn't driving. The car company wouldn't be liable just like gun manufacturers are not liable for homicides with guns. Would the developer have any liability?
My guess is that it would fall under owner of the vehicle (not necessarily the driver).
I would guess that it would fall to the car company. I don't think it would be like guns. If a person uses a gun to kill somebody, the gun didn't fail (unless it jammed and then....but that's being pedantic). If a driverless car hits a pedestrian, then if there was a bug that resulted in the collision, the car company would be liable. If the accident were ruled to be pure chance, such as being struck by parts flying off a vehicle, or a deer bounding into the road without time for the car to stop (it would react, since no deer is that fast, but physics still wins), then it would likely be a no-fault accident. There might be something like an FAA crash investigation, except likely with FAR more data to go on. Similarly, accidents would likely go down as data goes up.
The more I think about it, the more I am optimistic about it....I just don't want to be first.
There’s an argument to be made that the government should have a pool, similar to the high risk pool only polar opposite, and the government pay for the liability. Not only would the car companies be encouraged to start developing self driving vehicles, but if the results show that the number of deaths and disabilities from car related accidents drastically decrease from the decrease in humans driving then government would likely come out ahead in terms of revenue generated from potential taxes (income, sales, etc.) that otherwise would not of existed. Sort of like the same principle as the laffer curve. Of course this would cause some serious moral hazards because people would then have an incentive to attempt to get injured by self driving vehicles and car companies wouldn’t have to worry about any potential liability on them.
I’m telling you, I’m following this closely because it impacts me most. Most of my business is auto insurance.
Yeah, I'd bet that would be of interest, then.
Only if it was an act of code.Quote:
Would the developer have any liability?
It really wouldnt be a problem for most people if they actually used gas taxes for its intended purposes but they dont. they borrow from the fund for stupid things, like the bullet train to nowhere, and never repair the loan. Then the fund is too broke to actually repair or improve roads. so they figure htye need to raise gas taxes again and then the cycle continuesQuote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Yeah I voted to repeal the tax but actually I'm pretty indifferent about most tax cuts. Like you said if one place has money then other entities will find a way to get their sticky little fingers on it. The government, on all levels, is not going to cut back spending. So if the tax is cut in one place it will eventually be raised in other places to make up for the lose. It amazes me how much the American people get caught up in the term "Tax Cut" when in reality there is no such thing without an overall budget reduction (spending cuts). How many times have you seen the State or National budget be less than the prior year?Quote:
Originally Posted by RobDog888
First off, it would require no raises, or reduced services. If everything else were held constant, raises would require the budget to go up unless offset by layoffs. In theory, layoffs could be accomplished through greater productivity, but there's a limit to that. Without pay raises that equal inflation, there is a net pay cut to employees. So budgets pretty much have to go up with constant staffing levels.
The alternative would be cutting things, but when it comes to government, there will be a constituency for pretty much everything. Furthermore, there are loads of people clamoring for a bigger part of the budget (this as CA burns....so we can guess at least one group who will be doing the clamoring pretty soon).
Of course, it's always good to remember that it's all fiction created by society. Most people want more of good things and less of bad things, including hardships.
I'd agree with that.Quote:
Of course, it's always good to remember that it's all fiction created by society. Most people want more of good things and less of bad things, including hardships.
I'm amazed that after all the Tax Cuts our government has given us over the years that we still have to pay any taxes at all. To be honest I'm very apathetic about our government budget/taxes. What ever I owe I pay and don't get emotional about it. But I'm old, if I were 25 I'd be very worried about what financial shape our nation is in. I feel there will come a time when our nation debt will cause the dollar to collapse. Come to think about it, I have kids, grandkids and great grandkids, maybe I should get involved. Oh well, their not that great of kids. :p:p:p
Are you saying that you don't think there's any "bloat" in our government that be cut.Quote:
First off, it would require no raises, or reduced services.
They're grand...but not all THAT grand.
I do think there's bloat in government. What I'm not so sure about is whether or not it can be cut. My thoughts on that are two-fold. For one thing, whenever you get above one, efficient, person, there is a certain amount of waste involved with keeping everybody on the same page. As any programmer knows, adding a second person to a project doesn't double the speed. Add enough people, and each additional person adds nothing at all, and may even slow things down (in fact, they likely will). So, whenever you get a large enough system, there is a certain amount of waste just due to size. Nobody can solve that, so why bother trying?
Except that we DO bother trying, and that ends up creating more bloat. I work with fish hatcheries. State hatcheries can get by with half the staffing that federal facilities require. The reason is that the feds have to jump through a LOT more hoops. You can often see where those hoops came from. Many were good intentions. Some were the result of trying to slim down the government.
I remember having to sign a form saying that I was complying with the paperwork reduction act. In other words, I had to sign a form saying that I was reducing the number of forms I had to sign, even though I have no idea why I would have signed more forms had I not signed that one. Everybody knows where that came from: Some people pressured a politician to do something about the waste in government. The politician passed a bill about reducing paperwork. That bill then had to be implemented by the agencies, who had no idea what they were supposed to do, since the bill would be vaguely written (they almost always are, which is why agencies have to turn bills into rules of action). Agencies asked lawyers what they had to do to comply with the law. The lawyers told them that they had to have a record that they were in compliance...so yet another form was created to record the fact that they were complying with a law that was intended to reduce waste.
Essentially, in a desperate attempt to keep public servants from wasting anything, or getting away with anything that others might not get away with, the government, at the behest of agitators, buries people under such mountains of paperwork that they need extra bodies to keep on top of it all...and so we bloat.
The government will NEVER be streamlines. We won't let it. If it ever became streamlined, a large number of people would be howling about it. That's life.
lol, their pretty grand I guessQuote:
They're grand...but not all THAT grand.
Yeah, what we see as bloat, another sector of society could see as essential. I worked as a Reliability Engineer for a few years and our company main customer was the military. We had to do everything according to Mil-Specs. There was even Mil-Specs for sun glasses. Always mountains of paper work. I know there's lots of waste in the government but I have no real answers. But there's plenty of people smarter than me out there so I think there has to be a way to make progress. Or I should say I have hope.
Progress around bloat will come in small bites around the edges. However, as any dieter knows, any weight you lose will be regained in short order.
The longer I live (and it's been a few decades, by now), the more I see organizations as being almost random. I work with a great group of people. These folks mean well, are dedicated, and are generally pretty nice to be around. Yet they make mistakes, as do we all. In retrospect, there are some significant decisions which should have been made differently, but they were reasonable at the time with the knowledge at hand to the people who made the decision. Some of those decisions resulted in pretty bad waste, they just weren't clearly wrong when they were made.
Another point to that is that within this organization (some 700 people), a few have had outsized impacts from middle-management positions. The guy who hired me had been around for a long time, knew all the rules, knew all the shortcuts, controlled the largest budget in the organization, and was quite the king maker. He got things done that he wouldn't have been able to do had he just worked within the system. He basically bent the rules where he could to get to the place he wanted to be. Had his goal been something shallow, like personal gain, that could have ended up illegal, but his goal was the good of the organization, and his rule bending benefited the organization in tangible, material, ways. My job was one of those bent rules, as he hired a biologist with programming skills for an agency that didn't, yet, believe in computers. Nothing has replaced the programs I wrote those decades back, and they are still in constant use. Where would we have been had he not been so forward-thinking? There are not a lot like him in this organization, or any other, but there are a few. Since everybody is dedicated, then everybody moves things forwards....but some move it forwards faster and more effectively. The result is that a large, purposeful, organization is like a glacier: Grinding slowly forwards, with occasional short lurches. The analogy breaks down when you get talking about direction, though. There is no objective to be reached. Progress is only realized in hindsight, and then it can be hard to decide whether the progress attained was the most that could have been attained, or not.
Is it place for offtopic?
no no, nothing offtopic happening around here, move along now no dawdling !!Quote:
Is it place for offtopic?
I got a new bed frame
My wife and I broke our old one
:D
-queue kool-aid man oh yeah-
If you hadn't gone there, I would have.
You can't add anything ON topic to the Post Race, since there is no topic, so off topic is pretty much all you get.Quote:
Originally Posted by CheeseCakes
This is the second bed we've broken :blush:
Of course we buy them second hand, so...
My last bed was broken...for years. I bought that one second hand, too, and it was okay for the time. At some point, I broke the box spring. As long as it was sitting either on the floor or on the rails of the bed frame, the fact that the box spring was broken didn't really matter. Eventually, it was the mattress itself that did me in. I noticed that my heels were pretty sore, though I hadn't paid much attention to it, and just thought it was due to exercise, or some such. One day, while I was lying in bed, I noticed that my heels were hurting a bit more, and also noticed that the bed wasn't all that comfortable for my heels. A bit of investigation showed that the mattress was so thoroughly crushed that the cushioning was below the wire frame of the mattress. My heels were resting on the wire frame, which meant an unusual amount of weight was pressing against nothing more than a thin, metal, bar.
I went out and got a good mattress and my heels have healed.
Down here everybody bloatsQuote:
and so we bloat
Attachment 163137
I once contracted as a database developer in a place where a single change to the database require 12 different documents (including the database itself) to be maintained by hand. I always regretted that it wasn't 13 because that would have felt more appropriate. You could kinda see how the situation had come about:-
Someone had probably once made a bad change that caused a problem, everyone had panicked and decided that database changes were clearly something that needed proper auditing... so they created a spreadsheet that you had to fill in after you made a change.
Then someone else had made a bad change but forgotten to update the spreadsheet, everyone had panicked and decided that they clearly needed to make sure that any pending change needed to be recorded before it was made... so they created a spreadsheet in which you had to record the change you were about to make.
Then the spreadsheets got out of synch because someone forgot to update one or t'other, everyone panicked and decided it was high time they really got to grips with the problem... so they create spreadsheet in which you could record that you'd updated both the other spreadsheets correctly.
Then they brought in source control...
If I'm being cynical (and I just can't help it) I would say that 90% of this was the fault of one particularly sadistic DBA. That's not just sour grapes, she was a genuinely nasty piece of work and an out and out bully. I watched her reduce one contractor to tears by berating him constantly for over an hour because he'd forgotten one of the 12 documents. She drove my predecessor away and was ultimately the reason I left. When I announced I was going, management actually asked me if I wouldn't mind making a formal complaint about here because they didn't feel they could deal with her themselves. She liked two things more than anything else in the world: Implementing new processes and beating up anyone who failed to follow them.
One way or another, those people are everywhere...though perhaps not quite so extreme.
A long time ago, I noticed that for every process there would be orthodoxy enforcers. You primarily see this in religion, as there are blind followers who will relentlessly (and quite mindlessly) attack anybody who doesn't conform to the orthodoxy. There are others who will stretch and change the orthodoxy such that it can keep growing, but the enforcers are always there, whatever the current state of the orthodoxy is.
What I hadn't quite noticed is how pervasive this is. There are enforcers, iconoclasts (those trying to tear down the orthodoxy), and enlightened (those who work within the orthodoxy, but are not bound by it and can cause it to grow and evolve). These roles are filled EVERYWHERE. On matters large and small, some are seeking to break the rules, others are seeking to mindlessly enforce them, while others are seeking to evolve them. I also note that pretty much everybody fills different roles for different orthodoxy. People may well be seeking to tear down certain establishments while mindlessly enforcing others. Also, when I say 'mindless', I don't mean stupid. What I mean is, "taking action without fully considering all the options and ramifications."
Still, there are some who are far more the enforcer than anything else...and they have an odd affinity for HR and middle management.
:bigyello:I'm going climbing tonight with a friend who's a head of HR. I am sooooooo tellin' on you.Quote:
Still, there are some who are far more the enforcer than anything else...and they have an odd affinity for HR and middle management.
Better not tell him when he could drop you.
Is anybody else bothered that the first post in a thread is post #1? This is a programming forum, shouldn't the first post be #0?
Is this a VB6 question? Perhaps we have Option Base 1 ON.
Nope and yes I am bored
I can see that :bigyello:
You know Im really bored if I start posting cat threads again :lol:
Yeah, Sundays are no fun for us Raiders fans anymore. I can't hardly watch, I started recording the games o I can fast forward through the game.
When WAS it fun to be a Raiders fan? They were showing signs of life last year, but you wouldn't say they were actually GOOD....just on the upswing. Now....well, back to the toilet.
I'd say it all comes down to how they spend that bounty of draft picks.
I'll be heading to Temecula, CA. on the 15th to discuss a potential job opportunity.
I've been presented with a situation where I will still own my insurance agency, have someone run it, and I'd move to California to pursue a job in programming.
I'm really excited because I get the best of both worlds: a 1099 retirement in my business and a W2 programming career.
Plus it would be pretty cool when people look at my code and ask where I graduated from and I get to look at their reaction when I say that I dropped out.
I missed 60 days of my senior year of high school traveling for the programming company I worked for. Had they not had ins with the HS admin I never would have got my diploma. My chemistry teacher was the one most upset with my lack of attendance.