Logically speaking if it is the first subsea roundabout then it is also the first Atlantic subsea roundabout. But due to how we normally communicate and interpret things one naturally might assume as you did. Our normal communication/interpretation does not follow rules of logic. It’s interesting that this is so.
Actually you can and this is a good thing in many cases. Though in some cases you end up in a gray area where it’s not so clear what is right. We force doctors to treat people and in certain circumstances they are forced to treat people even if they can’t pay. We force pharmacists to fill prescriptions. We prevent landlords from discriminating against protected classes.
In the case at hand I think the court got it right. I sympathize with the sentiment that a business owner ought to be able to turn down business but I don’t deny that there are situations where this shouldn’t be the case.
I see your point and would be more sympathetic to it if we had proper sex education in k-12 and made birth control and abortions easier to obtain for poor people. Even so, clearly this lady made some poor choices.
Your point makes perfect sense for a teen with an unexpected pregnancy. This lady is 44 with 6 kids. 5 of the children are aged 2-11 years. In other words she just started pumping out babies like it was her job at age 33. She made some poor choices is the optimistic interpretation of this. It's also possible that some point she began to believe that having more kids resulted in proportionally more money from the state and charities. After all when it comes to children we have a habit of waving away this with 'oh, she made some mistakes.. but her kids shouldn't have to pay for that!'
Please don't post ideological trope rants to HN. They're repetitive and come from a galaxy far away from the intellectual curiosity this site exists for.
Can you elaborate here? Because fundamentally I think there is a highly complex issue here. Social systems are in place for those of need. Yet simultaneously these systems suffer the problem that they can create incentive systems for people to engage in undesirable behavior, and they are also open to exploitation by those who normally would not need their aid. One wants to empathize with the person from the article, yet doing so without considering the how and why of them being where they are is akin to trying to solve a variable of two equations while considering only one.
I also think calling the comment a 'trope' is unreasonable. This looks to be an incredible lucid example of possible, if not probable, abuse. Yet that's masked in the appeals to pathos. How is mentioning this anything like a trope? If there is viable reason to believe that empathy/sympathy is being abused, it certainly seems valid to consider it and point it out!
I suppose we need to relive the days of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle before labor rights isn’t viewed as a negative. We really are regressing in this area. If you haven’t already done so please read the book.
One can not credibly equate income taxes to theft. We live in a society and it costs money for the society to function. Police, courts, roads, sewers, military, etc. require funds and everyone with the means to do so ought to contribute. I doubt anything I say can possibly change your mind but if you really think paying taxes is a form of theft then leave the country. You are not forced to stay (unless you are in a place like North Korea). You lose any credibility you have when you equate taxation to theft.
I agree that we need police, courts, roads and sewers. But those are very tiny percentage of your taxes. The vast (over 70%) majority of taxes goes towards: Defense, social security, medicare and medicaid. And although those categories contain some worthwhile things, there's also a lot of waste in there. You really should look into where all this money goes before you assume that we need it.
And there is a point at which it becomes theft, it's just a question of where: 60% of income, 85% of income, 95% of income? As it is right now, in the US we currently pay 38% of our incomes to the govt: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spendi...
And if you live in New York or CA, you can bet, it's much much higher than that, both because the state taxes are higher and because of the higher COT which results in being at a higher federal income tax bracket.
Now, you may not see those income taxes all in your pay check because some of it gets paid by your company: those are lost wages that could've gone to workers. For consumer products, People think that they don't pay taxes that corporations pay. But, in a competitive economy, it's you, the customer that ends up paying for it. There's many many more.
Let's say 50% of your income goes to taxes. It's actually worse than you think. Because with the 50% that's left over, your buying power has been further reduced because any labor you purchase is taxed, which raises the cost of that labor by that amount. That's how you end up in a situation where you can't even afford to work because Day care costs nearly as much as your net salary.
My claim is that taxation is not theft. I’ve not stated any position on whether or not taxation is too high or whether or not our spending proroties are good.
I’ve merely stated that government is necessary, requires money, and that taxation is not theft. Is there any part of this that you find objectionable? If so what part?
EDIT: According to this website in the U.S. we clearly haven’t reached the taxation is theft level so your point doesn’t seem to be apt.
The argument and points still stand. It’s hard to imagine that one can reasonably describe income taxes as theft but not other forms of taxation. I suppose one can call other sorts of taxes as pernicious or akin to theft but in the United States, at the federal level, I don’t think any of those sorts of taxes exist.
I think it’s clear that parent was equating income taxes to theft. The article we are all nominally commenting on is about theft. Parent says he/she can get behind the movement against said theft and that there is a reason that income taxes were unconstitutional. I think I have enough evidence to base my conclusion on. If you really think that I’m wrong in thinking that parent believes that income taxes are theft then why wasn’t this your objection to begin with?
That doesn't provide evidence for it being unconstitutional, especially considering the right of Congress to tax was in the Constitution, and the Sixteenth Amendment explicitly gives them the right to lay income taxes.
I don't want to get into a long debate on this subject but the fallacy you base your argument on is that there is no other way to pay for "society" other than taxation.
Food and housing are essential things "for the society to function" yet are not supplied by the government through taxation, food for thought...
There is no fallacy in my argument because my statmemt is that that taxation is not theft. I’ve not argued that the only possible way for government to get the money necessary to run is via taxation. Though it is true that I think taxation is best way for government to get enough money to run.
Also food and housing are provided by government to some members of society and this requires money. Throughout history in times of great distress government has provided food and housing to the masses. The story of Joseph in the Bible is a great example of this. Of course when government failed to do this sufficiently well revolutions occurred.
Note that from the preface these notes are based on a half year high school course. The high school certainly was a specialized math high school. Soviet education was superb.
I’ve perused the notes and they heavily rely on problem solving to learn the material. It seems like a Moore method style of exposition which I really like. Arnold is a master of mathematical writing and teaching.
We no longer teach the formulas for solving cubic and quartic polynomial equations. Nowadays we just teach linear and quadratic equations. For the most part every algebraic equation you can solve by hand that we teach in basic algebra is an equation that can be reduced to a linear equation or a quadratic equation. It’s amazing how many applied problems can be accomplished by this reduction. With the rise of computers and easy numerical computations this isn’t so important but imagine a scenario in which the useful applications all involved degree 5 or higher polynomials. Would we have progressed much?
You ask a trick question. We view and interpret the world through the tools we have (math). Feynman pointed out this absurdity here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd0xTfdt6qw&feature=youtu.be... ) The ancients used geometry, classical theory tends to analytical expressions, modern theory is mostly fields, and likely future developments will be computational. The old tools will likely go the way of Greek and Latin and geometry and geography.
>imagine a scenario in which the useful applications all involved degree 5 or higher polynomials. Would we have progressed much?
You can always approximate a polynomial around a point with a lower-degree polynomial. They will only diverge farther out. As a result whenever physics produces a high-degree polynomial we can inspect certain behaviors in a lower degree. This doesn't help with every case, but it does enough for the situation that many questions become answerable.
Oh definitely. Thinking it about it more it’s clear that part of my comment was I’ll thought out. I was attempting to wonder if mathematics would have developed enough theory behind it in a universe in which low degree polynomials were difficult to solve or in which most applicable problems involved high degree polynomials. I think the answer is yes.
What-if questions about the conclusions (as opposed to the axioms) of math being different rarely lead to insight, because they unpin too much. The results mostly depend on whatever else you had to change to keep your primary change from contradicting anything.
If all you changed was physics, the Taylor series thing would put quadratics right back into their position of importance.
I didn't downvote but jeremyt's statement is without evidence. It's certainly plausible that the statement could be correct but there really isn't any evidence given to support it.
The news has been full of dozens (maybe hundreds by now) of large and small companies using the tax change to increase employee wages and benefits.
While there's currently no specific press release linking Wal-mart's actions with the tax change, it certainly isn't beyond the realm of possibility (and HN-class conclusion jumping).
> The news has been full of dozens (maybe hundreds by now) of large and small companies using the tax change to increase employee wages and benefits.
No, there have been dozens or hundreds of companies claiming that tax cuts were responsible for employee compensation increases. Many of those were one-time bonuses, but the tax cuts are ongoing. In some cases where the benefits were ongoing (like Walmart's hourly pay increase), you'll find that they tend to coincide with the overall trend of state minimum wage increases. This is just PR: they're getting ahead of the trend and trying to attribute it to tax cuts rather than other forces.
Also, since employee compensation was tax-deductible even before the tax cut, taxes certainly weren't stopping companies from raising wages before the tax cut.
Pretty much. Companies are using the tax cuts to signal goodwill to the market, but in reality the temporary increase in benefits is an expense coming from pre-tax income.
The tax cuts are causing increased employee benefits is a red herring.
That's not quite how it works. Publicly-traded companies don't reduce their net income using a tax cut, because their entire industry is getting the tax cut. The company's market price is tied to how their NI compares to the rest of their respective industry NI.
Stock repurchases are filed on the balance sheet, post taxes, which is why companies take the increase in net income but then use the extra cash to buy back stock. The former keeps the company competitive and the latter increases the stock price.
I guess I read different news than you. I’ve read that most of the money is going toward stock buybacks. The pressure on wages is coming from a tighter labor market. That’s what I’ve read but I don’t know enough to say one way or the other.
You are correct that there have been stock buybacks, as well. But I'm not sure it counts as "most."
First, of the companies that are doing stock buybacks, not all are doing only stock buybacks. Many are doing other things as well.
Second, there's a whole great big world out there called "local news" where you'll see these stories that aren't covered by CNN, Marketwatch, CNBC, etc...
Yes, some big companies are doing stock buybacks, but there's a lot more going on in the business world than the Fortune 500.
This follows a report by benefits consulting firm Aon Hewitt finding that 83% of large companies don’t expect the tax cut to boost salaries at all — just help pay for small bonuses companies like WalMart WMT, +1.98% and AT&T T, +0.70% gave workers, which reporters soon discovered were, themselves, skewed toward higher-paid, longer-tenured employees in many cases.
However one feels about the issue my point still stands. Th comment that started this thread gave no supporting evidence for the claim and thus deserved to be downvoted.
Also the article we are all nominally commenting on is about Walmart which is a Fortune 500 company. Is its tuition plan because of the Trump tax cuts?
"The news has been full of dozens (maybe hundreds by now) of large and small companies using the tax change to increase employee wages and benefits."
Not really. There have been a lot of stories of companies offering one time bonuses to employees, despite the tax cuts being ongoing. And historically, windfalls like that have been used mainly to benefit the higher ups in the company, instead of the workers.
Lots of one-time bonuses. I haven't seen nearly as much (any?) about across the board wage increases.
And it's not like Wal-Mart was hurting for money before. They could have raised pay before. Or they could have kept the tax cut money and paid it out to owners. So I'm not convinced. The tighter labor market makes a lot more sense.
I borrowed $32k was expected to pay near $700/mo on the 10 yr plan. Graduated in 2009 when everyone lost their jobs, nobody was hiring and those who were, got minimum 30% lower salaries. Competition in my field was 400 to one. Not only did a candidate need to be better than 400 applicants, they had to be willing to accept below market wages. Needless to say, the first job I got out of college was not related to my degree but, to 5 years of industry experience and my salary offer was, "this is what we are paying. If you don't want it, we can hire someone else for less. That wage got me on IBR for $129/mo. I paid more than the minimum but, still accrued interest faster. I was lucky to have $15 left at the end of the month, after rent, utilities car payments AND getting my groceeies from a food bank. This system is not sustainable and, if people want to talk about passing the burden on to taxpayers, that would be to the borrower, who has to pay income tax on money they never earned, while the private lender gets a tax credit on the principal. The problem is with the lenders expecting double the interest they used to offer and needlessly skyrocketing tuition and college expenses BECAUSE the U.S. GOVERNMENT stopped providing subsidies to the public Universities and to offset the loss, passed what taxpayers were already paying, onto the students, who are already taxpayers (sheesh)... Then add the price gauging private colleges, who took government loans and made false promises and yes, now the government is paying off those loans to private corporations on behalf of the jipped students.Add in that all colleges have lowered entrance standards, to make the bucks off of people who have no business being in college. I've considered going back to school and found that most colleges accept low C and high D averages. Those kids drop out when the loans run dry. I wanted to find a school that takes education seriously, with a minimum entry requirement of a low B or high C and that doesn't exist. You can basically fail high school and be accepted into college. It's a sad waste of time, money and it detracts from the people who actually go to learn something.
My wife has $4000,000 med school loans. We are on PSLF and payments are 10% of (adjusted gross income minus 150% fed poverty line). She’s an attending now and we do everything we can to decrease our adjusted gross income. Our payments do not cover interest on the loans. The balance increases each month.
In 8 years, if everything goes according to plan, her loans will be forgiven and be near $600,000. It’d be a lot more cost effective for society to just offer free med school and lower doctors’ wages. But our society has opted for inefficiency. Her large doctor salary is necessary to pay for her schooling but when the loans are paid off her salary won’t decline.
It should have but she wasn’t aware of the program until after we met. I researched her options and PSLF is the best one. She works at a Hospital and thus has qualifying employment.
I think AI flown drones is a much more realistic goal now than AI driven cars. It’d certainly make it cheaper and easier for Google and Apple to update maps. Is there anyone working in this space?
Depends what you mean by "AI". Autonomy in aviation is far ahead of what you can get in ground vehicles. Autopilots are commonplace, even in light aircraft. There are established systems like TCAS for traffic avoidance. Aviation remains incredibly safe, despite huge levels of autonomy, because of the regulation involved.
What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or other aircraft (e.g. VFR). The future is not everyone flying drones with proprietary AI collision avoidance. One existing product in this space is FLARM which is used by a lot of glider pilots and light aircraft, they also make a UAV variant: https://flarm.com/products/powerflarm/uav/
Autonomous drones themselves exist, are inexpensive, and can be set to fly a survey pattern based on a number of pre-selected GPS waypoints. Ardupilot will do this. The data is used for mapping at a much higher level of data than online maps. Think agri, ecology, general site surveying, etc.
That said, drones are not ideal for replacing aircraft in the large scale mapping. The flight time is poor. An aircraft modified for surveying can cover hundreds of square kilometres a day. A consumer drone with an hour's flight time (good luck) is going to struggle to compete.
Collision avoidance at the local level (e.g. are you going to hit a wall) is a different issue, and that can be solved by standard depth sensors.
>That said, drones are not ideal for replacing aircraft in the large scale mapping.
You are comparing consumer drones to airplanes. A quick google search tells me you can pick up a drone with over an hour of flight-time for 3.5k-ish (I don't know much about drone pricing so someone may have better options)
Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to 40k (reasonable)
You can purchase 10 drones for the price of one airplane. Which I can't imagine an airplane could out map/survey 10 drones working together. I don't know much about drones or planes though so there are probably other restrictions.
Sure, because the OP called out Google maps and that's how Google maps (at high resolution) is created. Drone mapping does tend to be much higher quality because you get a higher image cadence at a lower altitude.
Fixed wing drones tend to be better in terms of flight time, that's certainly true. And you can get gliders which will last even longer if you manually thermal them.
> Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to 40k (reasonable)
Add on at least another 20k for survey quality cameras (up to hundreds of k) and more for getting your plane modified (hole in the fuselage) and re-certified. Pilots are expensive, fuel is expensive and getting your annual COA (Certificate of Airworthiness, in the UK), insurance etc is not cheap. Google's surveying aircraft have at least five cameras so they can use photogrammetry (structure from motion) to create their 3D maps. As soon as you introduce surveying LIDAR into the equation, add a zero or two onto the cost estimate.
I don't disagree that you could fly a drone fleet instead of an aircraft, but for country-scale mapping, aircraft make a lot of sense.
At the practical end of the scale, I was involved in a project where we were quoted in the region of $25k for a 4 hour LIDAR flight, and my colleagues considerably better versed in the subject than me were reasonably happy this was (i) better value for the region than they expected and (ii) cheaper than digital elevation mapping the same set of discrete areas by specialist drone with the drone operator driving in between. Limited range of current generation drones is the real downside...
The flip side of this unhappy mapping equation is that if you're happy with lower resolution remote sensing data the government satellite programmes are mostly free and libre.
Depends what you want to do with your drones, but 3.5k would be really low end. I think 5k is more realistic, and you're looking at 15-20k if you want high precision (rtk) drones.
On the other end, it's probably not just any plane for mapping, so cost could be higher. Plus the gimbal and sensor cost is going to be non negligible.
Airplanes have to fly higher though, and thus at lower resolutions. The newest satellites are also getting closer to what they do, and they obviously have better coverage, so the market is shrinking.
Core difference is /pixel resolution. Drones can easily produce 2-3cm/pixel. Airplanes don't do that well because they can't get that close to the ground and move too fast. For larger areas, though, airplanes are MUCH faster. Realistically, at those larger areas, though, you run against satellites, too.
> What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or other aircraft (e.g. VFR).
Collision avoidance when in visual conditions is "see and avoid", which is all aircraft's responsibility. CFR 14-91.113.b [0]
There is no solely electronic negotiation of airspace permitted (at least not currently). It is unlikely that the FAA would change the law to require all aircraft to be so equipped and, even if they did, it would be close to two decades before any such deadline would come to be. Look at the slow adoption of ADS-B, which is only required in a select minority of airspace starting in 2020.
Have you seen the size of a transponder? You're not going to put that in a drone doing 1h flights. They're about 1/2kg. 4G is more likely, but coverage can be an issue.
The bigger drones that could carry one are much bigger, and they fly for several hours, but they do not have the same ease of use as the smaller ones.
Flarm and Adsb (mostly in for now, out is more difficult/heavy but there are a few prototypes) are seeing some use. Companies are also trying to standardise around existing aeronautical standards, or to create new ones where needed.
But it's a free market and it's not clear which solution will win in the end. The regulators are also closely following.
> What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or other aircraft (e.g. VFR).
Before that happens, a good first step is to require all drones to transmit an ID linked to a person. I suspect that just that step would help to curb the worst excesses of amateur drone pilots.
Iris Automation has raised money to bring (...) truly self-flying capabilities, to drones used for industrial tasks.
Competitors to Iris in the drone industry specifically include SRI spin-out Area 17 (also known as a17), Intel RealSense Technology, Parrot’s SLAMdunk systems and DJI’s Guidance systems.
Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site.
But I've probably got it kind of backwards. Manufacturing is where unit tests probably come from and we have been slowly adopting them into programming as we realized their value.
> Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site.
You have an optimistic view of the digitalization of construction project management. I attended a talk not too long ago from one of the bigger project management solution players in the field and they reported that the status quo for most construction projects is progress tracking via Excel.
Structured data in a form that could be used together with autonomous drones is still a few long steps away.
In my experience [1], construction project management econpasses a lot more then just testing, and both levels have to deal with structured and unstructured digital information.
There is a lot of Excel and Microsoft project at the higher levels (resource loading, financial tracking), with more specific software tooling for the lower down/more specialized work (think material and labor estimates, load calculations, environmental modeling, other engineering calculations).
It's true, a firm building residential track housing may be working off really simple project management tools, but that may be all you need. Start building things like powerplants, bridges, skyscrapers and you'll see a whole new tool set.
[1] responsible for $100m+ civil entering and construction projects annually
Construction has lots of tests. At least the landfill construction I was involved with.
Each truckload of concrete gets cylinders made. soil/gravel gets sent to labs for testing. Landfill liner welds get field tested and sent to labs to be strength tested for every X ft of welding...
I'm not sure how you would use a drone to help this.
Skydio R1 is actually on sale and has some seriously impressive tracking and sense-and-avoid functionality going on. FliteTest (a well known RC Youtube channel) has several videos where they test it with several interesting use cases, including high speeds, running between trees, going indoors and otherwise attempting to trick it, and it performs very well, not crashing once. If the next version is a little quieter and smoother on the video tracking, it'll be a serious competitor to manually-flown drones for various sports and "outdoor activity" types of videos.
