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Comment Re:This Means Very Little. (Score 3, Insightful) 179

I'll bite on this one. Uber and Lyft are similar, but as shitty as Uber is as a company, they offer a better service. My reasoning? Lyft does not set the rate up front. It's still a range, and you still see surge charging. You still have the option of tipping (and are encouraged to), which is a shitty way to not pay your employees and to pass that responsibility onto your customers. Uber on the other hand ties all of that up into an upfront package. You have a set price before you accept (meaning the driver can't drive you out of your way to increase the bill), and there's no tip question at the end. If Uber raised their rates to treat their contractors better, there would be no contest, performance wise. I realize these are minor changes, but uber has taken a lot of the trouble out of the cab industry. I wish Lyft would copy their (trip) payment model. That said, Uber's CEOs an out of touch asshole, and neither Uber or Lyft treat their employees like proper employees.

Comment Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score 3, Interesting) 548

Agreed. The article definitely leans towards this being more devious than the data itself shows, but they do admit, the data is very anecdotal. As much as I dislike Trump, this isn't a smoking gun but more of a report of someone hearing a bang. It could be a crime, it could be (car analogy) be a car backfiring. I'll be curious to see how this shakes out.

Comment Re:Sounds like a great deal! (Score 1) 94

My first thought was that these would get bought up for amenity spaces in high end multifamily housing. For a single home, sure, it's a ton. But we're already spending $50k on a roof top patch of turf to allow dogs to use the restroom (I'm sadly not even kidding here), why not spend a bit more on something that is slightly more useful?

Comment Re:WTF? (Score 1) 760

To your point, and to kilfarsnar's original comment - His argument is that laws like this target the poor because they are enforced only on the poor and not the rich. That, because they are poor, they have to jump through many more hoops. If you are rich, you are assumed to be doing well, and get a free pass.

Nobody is being prosecuted and thrown in jail for being poor.

I'm taking this a little wider than you intended, I apologize. Being jailed for being poor happens. For a well written, fact checked article on it, please see the following (warning: pdf) https://www.splcenter.org/site...

For a more humorous, assuming you can laugh at the absurdity of it all, take on this, please see the recent John Oliver clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

But for personal anecdote, I remember riding a bus and hearing a homeless person rant and rave about how if you have no money, you are breaking the law here. It sounds silly, until you think about how in many places, if you don't have money, you have no place to sleep, and there are a wealth of laws prohibiting sleeping in public places. Or if you need a restroom and there are no public bathrooms available, where do you go? Or if you are in an area and not buying something, what are you doing? Loitering?

Comment Re:why (Score 1) 324

I'm not sure if you're joking or are honest here. The idea of storing off-peak energy is to save up energy that is being created when there isn't demand. Which is exactly what you are saying, and exactly what is being done here. I'm curious how nuanced this is. Other systems push water into higher reservoirs, which they later flow through turbines to create electricity.
Television

Men Are Sabotaging The Online Reviews Of TV Shows Aimed At Women (fivethirtyeight.com) 858

FiveThirtyEight has an interesting article today which accuses men of sabotaging the online reviews of TV shows aimed at women. The publication cites an example of "Sex and the City", a show which apparently won plenty of awards and ran for many years on TV, getting hammered by males on IMDb. Compared to women, who amounted to 60% of the people who rated the show with an average of 8.1, men gave it a 5.8 rating. It's not an isolated case, FiveThirtyEight says, citing several other instances where the male audience has downvoted shows aimed at women audience. From the article: The shows with the largest proportion of male raters are mostly sports, video game web series, science fiction and cartoons. The programs with the highest proportion of female voters are -- at least the American ones -- mostly from The CW and Freeform, the new name of the network previously called ABC Family. This list is pretty hilarious. Beyond the top 25, shown in the table above, male-dominated shows of note include: "Blue Mountain State" (92 percent male), "Batman: Beyond" (91 percent), "Batman: The Animated Series" (90 percent), "The Shield" (90 percent), "Ballers" (90 percent), "Justice League" (90 percent), and "The League" (88 percent). "Star Trek: Enterprise" is the most male-heavy of the various official live-action Trek enterprises, while "Battlestar Galactica" still managed to grab 15 percent of its ratings from women, which is somewhat shocking. For women, other skewed programming includes "Private Practice" (71 percent female), "Gossip Girl" and "Gilmore Girls" (67 percent each), "Grey's Anatomy" (60 percent), "Scandal" (60 percent), and "One Tree Hill" (59 percent).
Education

Girls From Progressive Societies Do Better At Math, Study Finds (sciencecodex.com) 280

An anonymous reader writes: (edited and condensed)Research by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has found that the 'maths gender gap', the relative under performance of girls at maths, is much wider in societies with poor rates of gender equality. Published on Monday in the American Economic Review, the research shows that the performance gap between girls and boys is far less pronounced in societies that hold progressive and egalitarian views about the role of women. The researchers analyzed the relationship between maths scores of 11,527 15-year-old living in nine different countries and the Gender Gap Index (GGI) in their country of ancestry. The GGI measures economic and political opportunities, education, and well-being for women. The researchers found that the more gender equality in the country of ancestry, the higher the maths scores of girls relative to boys living in the same country. The findings were significant and robust even when the researchers controlled for other individual factors that may affect youths' maths performance. In particular, the results show that an increase of 0.05 points (or one standard deviation) in the GGI is associated with an increase in the performance of girls in maths, relative to boys, of 7.47 points -- equivalent to about one and a half months of schooling.

Comment Re:Racists! (Score 1) 125

I'm not sure where you're seeing this outrage from, or where you're assuming that genetics is that important. TFS (you didn't even have to click through to TFA) repeatedly states that these genetic factors are minor, especially when compared to environmental factors, or

"about nine extra weeks of schooling"

. But don't let that stop you from your passive aggressive racism there.

Comment Re:It's wildly unlikely we should exist (Score 1) 267

You're looking for math advice in the logic of a man who willfully (and wonderfully) fucked with the English language to its breaking point. What he likely means is that the density of the universe is basically zero, because, using your modification, the number of prime numbers is infinite, but it grows by a factor slower than the number of numbers. therefore the percentage of prime numbers compared to numbers as x approaches infinity is such a low percentage that it practically becomes zero.

Anywho, it's meant to be comedy, but if you would ever like to bet on us meeting intelligent life within several generations, let me know. I'd like to set up a college fund for my great-great-grandchildren. Space is big and remarkably empty. The only thing larger than it might be their student loans.

Comment Re:It's wildly unlikely we should exist (Score 4, Interesting) 267

We might not be that complex, but we're still outside of the norm. Which means that even though the total number of beings like us might be numerous, it's still rare. To quote Douglas Adams who does a much better job of describing this:

“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein

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