Comment Re:XKCD (Score 1) 169
It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.
It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.
simply stacked the blocks
I think this is the part you mistakenly think is easy.
There's roughly 2.4 million stones in the Great Pyramid of Giza, some of which weigh up to 80 tons. "Simply stacking" them is anything but.
Without any mod points today the next best thing I can do is to say "Bravo AC, bravo!" and hope someone with mod points mods you up.
It always amazes me that the McCarthy-era Red Scare still lives and breathes in 21st Century America.
Suppose somebody built a nuclear power plant next door to you that had a 1 in 4000 chance of going critical on any one day. That's a median of 11 years, right?
Yeah, sure. But the thing here is that it's not a 1 in 4,000 chance of this asteroid hitting us every day; it's 1 in 4,000 that it'll hit us once. 800-odd years from now.
1 in 4,000 is a small enough chance to be a virtual certainty over a few hours for events happening once a second - does that mean anything at all to a 1 in 4,000 once-in-a-lifetime chance? No. And this event is not even a once-in-a-lifetime event; it's once-in-several-tens-of-lifetimes.
Or to put it another way: People suck at probability assessments.
1. "Taxpayers like me" include you, me, the other employees at said company, and everyone else that pays taxes - the company in question and all other companies as well. The money comes from taxes already paid.
2. The sums involved wouldn't make a noticeable difference to your taxes since it's split several million ways.
3. How is protecting the employees of a failing company "propping up" said company? Either it's bankrupt and is going down, or it can recover and then has to pay back the money the government spent on employee salaries.
On a side note, I find it quite amazing that the McCarthy-era "red scare" still lives and thrives in 21st century America...
Now where did I define "employee protection" as "employees working for free"?
Oh, that's right, I didn't. I even gave an example of how strong employee protection made sure I got paid even though my company couldn't pay me.
In the example I gave, the government paid our salaries while the company negotiated with its creditors; the company then had to pay that money back to the government. I never missed a paycheck; the employees were indeed protected.
Had the company failed in its negotiations with their creditors, it would have had to declare bankruptcy and the state would have covered our salaries during the bankruptcy proceedings. After that, we would be on our own.
Luckily for me, the company succeeded in reducing or cancelling their debts and made a full recovery (which was actually the whole point of the example, to answer the question "do companies recover from a situation where they're unable to pay salaries for a period of time" - yes they sometimes do).
by whom? the company or the employees?
The company of course.
Gah, that's what I get for not proof-reading. The company negotiated with their creditors, of course, to reduce or cancel the company's debts.
Also, I'd like to clarify that the money the government paid for our salaries wasn't a gift; it was a loan and had to be paid back (and has been).
Is it a common thing for employees to stick around when they're not getting paid?
In countries with stronger employee protection than the US, yes.
The company failing to provide pay is not an implicit termination of the employment contract, leaving or not working is.
How often do companies recover from a situation where they're unable to pay salaries for a period of time?
Quite common where I'm from (EU). The company I'm currently working for had to go through reconstruction four years ago; for three months the government paid our salaries while the company negotiated with their debtors to cancel or reduce their debt. In the end we lost about 25% of our employees (some people left voluntarily, some were let go), but the company survived and have been in the black since. In fact, last year was a record year for us; best financial result in the company's history.
Communism is State Socialism. It should be wrong to say that it is the only socialism out there, but it is definitely socialism.
Soviet communism was (corrupted) state capitalism disguised as state socialism.
Russia was truly communist for a few years after the Russian revolution, until the Bolsheviks took over and turned everything on its head and forever corrupted the word "communism". Now, instead of thinking "oh, communal ownership of the means of production so all may be equal", most people think "oh, corrupted state owns everything and represses its people so that a select few can have it unimaginably better than others" - which is so far from (any of) the communistic ideals that it's almost impossible to go any further.
Soviet communism was communistic in name only.
It's not actually that hard to pronounce, "ey-a fjell-a yo-cull" is close enough.
"Fu-dji" is probably still easier though
Aye. My Nexus 5 has a 1080x1920 445 PPI display. Although I didn't know that until just a minute ago when I looked it up, it's not something they make a big deal of in their marketing..
iPhone 5 only has 326 PPI you say? And they brag about the iPhone 6 getting a 416 PPI display?
I'll never understand marketing...
Solution: use natural language to tell the computer what you want to do.
It's hard to wreck a nice beach.
"The Neanderthals or Neandertals [...] are an extinct species of human in the genus Homo, possibly a subspecies of Homo sapiens."
- Wikipedia
You don't want tires if you want to stop quickly.
You could have just linked to this video instead.
(for the click-averse: It's a Leopard 2 tank from the Netherlands demonstrating its emergency brake system by going full tilt towards a line of people (allegedly the inventors of said emergency brake system) and then hitting the brakes).
"Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention.