furyg3
Joined 18 years ago
Joined 18 years ago
I'd also add that I struggled with the word 'teach' or 'guide' and settled on 'enable'. Different kids (and parents) have different intrinsic abilities or interest in each of these categories. Doing your best to make it at least possible for a child to see the value of them and possibly even make progress is already a great accomplishment.
Curious; Resourceful; Self-reliant (to feel they have agency in the world); Compassionate; Value personal integrity, themselves, their ideas / wishes, and time on the planet; Able to cooperate, communicate, and work as a team; Able to make sacrifices for the future versions of themselves ("I'm having a bad day today, what can I do to make tomorrow me have a better day?"); Able to enjoy life and find fulfillment (however small) even in bad times.
School subjects, economies, social constructs, technology, they all change. A human who's motivated to develop themselves on topics like the above will be the best person they can be whether they are a CEO or living in a cave underground after an apocalypse.
An example from companies I've worked out is that they make a matrix of competencies and job functions to determine what knowledge (e.g. specific skills or specific business knowledge) is required for particular functions. This isn't there to veto hires because of a buzzword they miss - that would indeed be terrible HR and does happen; it's instead there to structure onboarding, trainings, etc.
Not everybody on the IT team needs to have deep understanding of the billing process, but some do, and the same goes for some support roles and other functions. That means for certain sized organizations somebody in billing needs to have a well-documented overview of how things work, and regularly present it. This seems obvious but for an org that grows from 30 to 100 people it's (somehow) not always so.
Similarly something as simple as saying "Who in the organization needs to be able to present things at a high degree of clarity?". I'd go so far as to say the org NEEDS them to have followed a 1 day training course on how to present properly for their function. It just saves everybody around them so much time and work. Does the receptionist need that? Every support engineer? Every Dev? Maybe, but probably not, but some do. HR defines those capabilities with the org and makes a plan to ensure it happens.
Bad HR definitely exists but it can be done right.
At my org they also organize the Thursday evening drinks session :)
Google has since redesigned this feature so that the history lives on the phone itself, not on their servers (removing the possibility for police officers to request this information from google - search warrant or not).
I don't see any loopholes. There are immigration policies that guide state department employees through a process of deciding who gets a visa. Let's say, theoretically, that a particular visa was meant for one scenario... let's say allowing athletes to live and train in the US with no additional checks or limits based on country of origin. And then let's say that all the sudden this summer we saw the number of people receiving that visa go from 10k / year to 100k in a month.
That would be a scenario where you could say holy cow we need to put a pause on the visa application process because when we created this visa program or wrote the screening criteria we did not envision this at all. In this scenario you could, of course, just put a pause on this particular type of visa while you revisit the intent and criteria.
I was saying that I don't see any evidence for that at all. So any desire by the administration to change what kind of visas are given out, or what the criteria or thresholds should be for those visas, should be adjusted in the normal way of working and not via some huge pause on all visas.
Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways:
1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's cell-phone location history from Google constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.")
2) Delegating "searches" to a private party isn't permitted if they are acting as an "instrument or agent of the Government" (Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association (1989) - also cited in Chatrie).
In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.
In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public. Asking flock for the whereabouts of a specific person seems like it should likewise require a warrant. That's inherently different than a crime being reported and then going to dig up a video from the area from Flock - which is different than seeing someone in that video and asking Flock to find every time they've been captured by any Flock camera anywhere... that would seem to be a 'search' and would require a warrant (which in this scenario would probably be easy to get).
Comparatively, the US is extremely good at 'integrating' immigrants for whatever reason they come (asylum, work, family reunification, etc). There are a lot of factors, but I'd say the biggest one is that the "American" identity is one of immigration and is generally more flexible than say, the Dutch or Norwegian identity. I'd also say the general lack of a safety net compared to more socialist countries mean you pretty much have to hit the ground running and work, which usually means learning English quickly and all of the social components that come with work.
The idea that there is an urgent need to protect the US from a significant number of people abusing the system who come via legal immigration (as is the case in this context) is, to me, pretty laughable. I would assume that any abuse in the system or strategic priority shifts (which I may or may not agree with) could easily be picked up through a more normal policy/procedure/training structure within the state department.
There doesn't appear to be a specific, recent event where a significant number of people were discovered to have gotten through some state department filter or loophole that needs to be IMMEDIATELY closed in the context of some large risk to the US.
Here in Europe, every government and major corporation have recently added their dependance on US platforms to their risk management taxonomy. For the (unlikely) scenario you mention, for the scenario that their company/government somehow runs afoul of the US goverment and this is used as leverage, for espionage reasons, and for other reasons that may have already been in their risk overview (data privacy, compliance, etc) but were seen as manageable but are no longer so.
For some anecdotes: My former employer just moved off of AWS to a EU provider and will likely also move away from Google Cloud for their internal needs, my current employer has started evaluating moving off of Azure at the request of our clients (though they dismissed the idea of moving off of Office 365 internally), and my partner's company (a large corporate) has started prioritizing a transition plan away from AWS.
The conversations are the point.
In SF I used my bell much more aggressively. It was mainly for cars, if I'm in or entering their blind spot and my spidey sense tells me they are considering an action that places me in danger. For example, we all know when driving when the car in front of us is thinking about merging, even before they indicate (often I feel like I know before they do). I also used it for pedestrians stepping out into the street who are maybe looking past me for oncoming cars but somehow don't see me, or when approaching 'blind' situations like a sharp corner, a driver pulling out of a driveway but there is a tree between us, delivery drivers stepping out from their truck, etc. I can't say how many accidents have been prevented (the person may have eventually looked and seen me), but I can say that my bell has triggered people to look and see me earlier than they were going to had I not rang it.
In Amsterdam my bell is used much more sparingly. It's mostly for tourists stepping into (or considering stepping into) the bike lane. If they are already in the bike lane, I almost always prefer just to slow down a bit and dodge them, as ringing the bell often triggers a deer-caught-in-headlight moment or erratic behavior, which increases the chance of an accident or that I have to come to a full stop. The other situation is to express dissatisfaction at cars blocking bike lanes, cars/bikes not yielding, drivers blocking intersections, or other dangerous behavior. This isn't preventing an accident but I'd argue it is still important, as social control affects how often we make bad decisions. Outside the city I also use my bell to let other cyclists know I'm passing.
So yeah, I'd say bells prevent accidents, but obviously not as well as good biking infrastructure, where pedestrians, bikes, and cars have clear separate spaces, and visibility of cyclists to drivers is high.
I then moved to Amsterdam and became the biggest fan of continuous, always-on ANPR speed cameras. On some freeways, your car is recorded at certain checkpoints and EVERYONE driving over the speed limit ALWAYS gets a fine.
Why? Because they are properly implemented (only high-risk areas), very well communicated (tons of signage), consistently applied (no crying your way out of a ticket, no racial profiling), purpose targeted (you get a speeding ticket, not a bunch of other fines at the whim of a cop), and correctly incentivized (ticket revenue does not immediately go to the local police or city).
Tesla's valuation has been nuts for a while. The music was going to stop playing at some point, so something something robotaxis, something something androids, something something AI. Keep the investors duped while you can move money around and leverage it to stay relevant.
Cars are out, social media as well (especially X), but Space is still in, and even more so AI. So let's move the cost center with world domination potential (AI) over to the one company that's making money and has a still has a cash-out potential via an IPO.
I'm just so tired of it all. I actually think 'boutique' businesses (companies that generate real value to real users and are profitable now) are the only thing that can save our economy medium-term, but investors and the government are having none of it. And the result is that these bait-and-switch scams will continue.
If you believe you are being a given an order that is illegal and refuse, you are essentially putting your head on the chopping block and hoping that a superior officer (who outranks the one giving you the order) later agrees with you. Recent events have involved the commander in chief issuing the orders directly, which means the 'appealing to a higher authority' exit is closed and barred shut for a solider refusing to follow orders.
That doesn't mean a soldier isn't morally obligated to refuse an unlawful / immoral order, just that they will also have to pay a price for keeping their conscience (maybe a future president will give them a pardon?). The inverse is also true, soliders who knowingly follow certain orders (war crimes) are likely to be punished if their side loses, they are captured, or the future decides their actions were indefensible.
A punishment for ignoring a command like "execute those POWs!" has a good chance of being overruled, but may not be. However an order to invade Canada from the President, even if there will be civilian casualties, must be followed. If the President's bosses (Congress/Judiciary) disagree with that order they have recourse.
Unfortunately the general trend which continues is for Congress to delegate their war making powers to the President without review, and for the Supreme Court to give extraordinary legal leeway when it comes to the legality of Presidential actions.