Well, as TFA says:

There's a lot of research and science on this already. The only people who seem to be confused are Oklahoma politicians, corporate executives, and some Oklahoma geologists who are employed or influenced by politicians.

This is a state that went from 1-2 earthquakes over 3.0 per year to OVER 1500 such quakes in 2009-2014. So, something significant has changed (an increase of over two orders in magnitude is generally not just average variation), and it seems to have changed right around the time that people have started pumping a lot of stuff deep into the ground.

If these are NOT manmade, it's one heck of a coincidence....

It does matter whether it's good or bad, and it seriously is a reason why many of these managers should be fired.

There are numerous scientific studies showing the benefits of breaks, downtime, doing leisure activities, naps, etc. during the workday -- resulting in greater productivity than if workers don't have such things. Managers who insist that workers be productive continuously are actually decreasing their productivity.

Same thing with forcing people to work 7 days per week. Same thing with vacation time. There are a number of studies showing that if people take a few weeks or even a month off from work per year, they more than make up for it in increased productivity after the rest.

I realize that many managers are stupid, but this kind of stupidity is costing their company productivity and thus MONEY. It may be the norm, but it does matter that it's a stupid policy that not only harms workers but often harms the managers and their companies too.

Oh, and guess what -- added stress and fatigue causes injuries and health problems, often leading to more extended leaves due to sickness that end up costing a lot more. What's a big expense for most companies? Health coverage. Not only are you decreasing the effectiveness of your workers during work hours, but you're driving up one of your biggest costs in terms of additional healthcare.

It's inexcusable. Some high-powered companies in finance, law, as well as hospitals with doctors doing crazy shifts, etc. have started to recognize that it's really bad to have your workers coming in 7 days per week or working days at a time. It leads to inferior work and thus some corporations have started actively trying to get people to stay home on Sundays or whatever. (Think I'm kidding? Here's a story from the New York Times about financial firms adopting policies trying to get workers to stay home on the weekends.)

Managers who refuse to acknowledge good scientific studies showing how to make workers productive are bad managers.

(This is not to say that "Easter eggs" are always a good thing or a good use of time or resources. There are many reasons they can be problematic, as others have pointed out, like unintentionally creating problems in the code or whatever. But objections should be founded on reasons relevant to the project or security or whatever, not on bad managerial science.)

Yeah, I'd agree with you if it was 1995, or even 1999. The mid-90s was a time when the first lawsuits and things happened to try to remove things from the internet. They didn't work. Anyone closely involved with the law after the year 2000 or so should know better. In 2015 to make a statement like this actually believing it to be true -- it just shouldn't be reasonable for an educated person (Feinstein has a degree from Stanford).

So, either (1) she's making a suggestion that she knows is impossible for political reasons, (2) she's senile, or (3) she's ridiculously ignorant of what goes on in the world even compared to most people in Congress. But one thing we can't do is excuse her because she's old and clueless -- she's a major public figure and an educated person, and that excuse expired about 15 years ago (right after Al Gore "invented the internet").

I agree with you that GP is being a jerk. On the other hand...

While I absolutely agree with the ideas behind the ADA, in practice it has led to some serious legal abuse. Google "ADA extortion" or something like that, and you'll find dozens and dozens of stories about people -- who often aren't really disabled and go around threatening small businesses with lawsuits in the name of the ADA. Often the accommodations demanded by these folks would require a complete reconstruction or redesign of a building just to make a bathroom a few inches wider or something, so the businesses often "settle" with these thugs, paying out thousands of dollars rather than the tens of thousands or more they might be required to do.

There are many, many of these people who have made a living (i.e., hundreds of thousands of dollars) going around suing or threatening to sue over ADA accommodations. Granted, in some cases they lie or misrepresent the ADA to trick businesses into settling. At other times, they follow overly-strict or selective interpretations of the ADA to force lawsuits. Not saying the ADA should be repealed, but it probably could use some serious tweaking and the precedents around it need some serious attention to get us to a reasonable state.

In any case, these sorts of cases are a huge problem. Heck, if you search for it, you'll find organizations of lawyers complaining about it among the top links.

And when crazy lawsuits have multiplied so much that lawyers are complaining about it, you know something has gone seriously wrong in the legal world....

That's not what I said. There are cases where CPS admits -- after investigation -- that they found "no evidence" of abuse or neglect.

Yes, and that's what they do. But that doesn't change the fact that they are basically admitting that 1/3 of child removals are done without any substantiated evidence.

Don't get me wrong -- if a child seems in imminent danger, perhaps CPS needs to step in. But the policy with CPS nowadays seems to be "take kid first, ask questions later," which if you're a parent who hasn't done anything wrong seems... well, wrong. Doesn't it?

Okay, yeah. I know there are other things wrong in the world. But the topic of TFA is kids not going outside enough. One reason they may not be outside as much is because parents can't always be around their kids, and nowadays society seems to be saying if you can't personally supervise your kid until he/she is 16, you can't have them out of your sight (like outdoors). The abuse of people with mental illnesses and other "wards of the state" is another significant problem, but I'm not sure it's particularly related to TFA.

"Being there" and "taking care" of a kid also involves gradually giving them the freedom to make their own choices and do their own things as they grow. If you don't do this, you end up with kids who never learn to take care of themselves and are still living at home in their late 20s or 30s.

Anyhow, this needs to be based on age and maturity level, obviously. But nowadays we can't trust a 10-year-old to play outside with a 6.5-year-old younger sibling or to walk home from a park together (and yes, the parents ultimately were found responsible for neglect), nor can we trust an 11-year-old alone in a car for a few minutes while Mommy goes into the store.

Etc., etc. Sadly, these stories are not uncommon. There are things like this that come up on a regular basis across the U.S., and if you search a bit you can also read some of the harrowing stories of parents who are force to spend months or years struggling to get their kids back or living under draconian state "supervision" by CPS when they do.

Yes, as parents, you need to supervise your kids when they are little, and then you gradually allow them more freedom. It's called "growing up." But nowadays, people call the cops if they see a kid younger than 16 without a parent around, and CPS comes knocking.

You don't think that's extreme?

It's not just Fox News, and it's not just pedophiles. If you've been keeping up with the news in recent years, you know that the newest trend is for do-gooders to call the police when they see even a 9 or 10-year-old walking alone (e.g. back from the park) or sitting in a car reading while Mommy's doing some shopping.

And guess what happens in too many cases? Parents get arrested for neglect. Children sometimes get removed for a while by protective services and parents may need to fight to get them back.

I'd be much more scared of police or child protective services kidnapping my child than "pedobear," because that's certainly the case. (In case you think I'm exaggerating, look up the stats. Roughly a HALF MILLION kids are removed by CPS for short or long term every year in the US... And CPS's own stats admit that in a full 1/3 of those cases, after review there is NO evidence of abuse or neglect... Not counting the cases where the claims are questionable, just the removals where the removals are completely unwarranted.)

Also, here's a blog that keeps track of some of the more egregious stories in the news.

While it's a good idea in theory, be certain to do it correctly. I've heard a number of stories about bad crawlspace encapsulations that have made things worse or created new problems. It's only become common in recent years, so be sure to get a contractor who is experienced with this sort of thing... And don't just go with the cheapest option. If you screw something up, you can end up trapping even more moisture in your crawlspace, depending on the individual situation. Some houses are much more complicated to implement this than others. And I'm also of the mind that "if it ain't broke..." -- e.g. if you have a 75-year-old home and no major moisture issues, it may not be a great idea to mess with something that's been okay for decades. I'd recommend getting a moisture meter and humidity monitor -- and go check it out yourself and/or have a qualified inspector look for moisture issues first. All crawl spaces have some dampness, but intervention isn't always necessary and when done poorly could make things worse.

Exactly. I'm tired of these oversimplified analyses that don't take into account the various effects.

A first-past-the-post system for voting may tend toward a two-party system, but there's no guarantee that those two parties will always be the same two parties or that they will have stable platforms. If you vote for a candidate that has a specific platform for a particular party, you are implicitly endorsing that party and that platform. How do you expect there to be change if you endorse the given system in the given party?

Sometimes strategies require a longer outlook in games. Is the goal to govern for the next few years or to begin a trend that could nudge the system in a better direction. If you vote for one of the offered candidates "as-is," you are only slightly more useful than the guy who doesn't even bother to vote.

And keep in mind there are a LOT of those out there... Clearly the majority of Americans don't care enough to vote in most elections. So if you nudge the system in such a way that attention comes to candidates who might excite even a small fraction of that silent part of the electorate, you might eventually find enough people to overpower even a major party.

But yeah, if all you focus on is the current candidates rather than the broken system that offers no real choice, of course you're going to keep getting the same old crap.

In an ideal world, that's what employers might (should?) think.

In the real world, employers often have to worry about things like liability. You have an application from someone saying they committed a crime in the past. If they commit a similar crime again while doing anything related to that job, could you be held liable? You had prior knowledge that this person might be dangerous/unstable/willing to commit whatever (fraud, deceive customers, etc.), and then that person did it again. Are you responsible? Or, if the previous crime was something that could directly harm your business, would you take that risk?

For many employers, even if such a risk is very low, it might be a deciding factor. We can (and should) argue about when such reasoning is flawed, but that's the logic that would happen in the real world. Employers are not going to be looking for reasons to hire the ex-con; they'll be trying to figure out whether it's possible to take on that risk (however minimal) *before* they even consider how the ex-con stacks up against other candidates.

Precisely. There's often a lot of talk about allowing blue-collar workers to be empowered to transition or work their way up to white-collar jobs -- through education, training, etc.

So why not train blue-collar criminals so they can work their way up to white-collar crime? They need a career after all. And dealing drugs on the street corner is not a way to pay your bills, let alone moving up in the world. Why be stuck mugging people and earning $20 or $50 or whatever, when they could be embezzling, commiting financial fraud, or peddling bad investments and making millions?

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[Citation needed]

It's NOT illegal to discriminate against ex-cons. Otherwise, how it is that so many companies get away with running criminal background checks? Are you saying that all these companies pay to run background checks but then can't actually use them in the hiring decision process??

Things are changing a bit, though, and it is getting a little harder to discriminate overtly. For what's really happening, see for example, here:

In sum -- there's no explicit law against discriminating against ex-cons. It *IS* illegal to discriminate against minorities, and since a disproportionate number of ex-cons are minorities, the federal government has said businesses need to be careful.

In practice, however, what this means is now many companies tend not to do a background check immediately upon receipt of an application, but rather do some sort of interview or other screening first, then only do the background check later in the process.

At that point, employers still often toss people out of the pool of applicants for previous convictions. There's no federal law preventing that, particularly if the company gave them "fair consideration" early in the process before doing the background check. (Some states and cities have more policies to prevent such discrimination, such as the "Ban the Box" movement, but if a company can justify running a background check, it's hard to prevent discriminatory actions.)

THIS.

I'm actually NOT in favor of the death penalty. But I'm tired of stupid arguments surrounding this debate. You want to argue against the death penalty? Great -- I applaud you. But learn some basic logic skills.

Most of the times that the government has a law which requires a citizen to do something, it is likely doing something which would be illegal for private citizens to do. To wit:

- If police officers arrest people and detain them (for specific reasons), it is legal. If you do this as a private citizen, it is generally considered "kidnapping." As the parent says, same goes for prisons. Same thing goes for a court summons that requires citizens to show up (or be compelled by police to do so).

- If police officers are forced to restrain people physically (for specific reasons), it can be legal. If you do this as a private citizen outside of imminent threats to yourself, it is generally considered "assault."

- If the government requires you to give it money in exchange for not taking your property away, it is called "taxation." If you do this as a private citizen, you're probably guilty of "extortion" or perhaps some other form of "racketeering."

Etc.

Generally speaking, unless you're an anarchist, you accept that the government has powers to do things that would be "crimes" if private citizens would attempt them. The government is empowered to do these things to maintain order in society, to provide services for society, etc.

I'm sure people will disagree about the exact scope of these powers and governmental authority, but especially if we accept the notion of any "police power" in the state, we are acknowledging that the state will go around kidnapping ("arresting") people, extorting money from them ("fines"), or perhaps confining them for long periods against their will.

Should such possible state actions extend to killing people? Most people again tacitly allow such actions in the case of war -- as long as we are killing "the right people." Does the state's power extend to killing its own citizens? Well, until the past century or so, it was common to "summarily execute" (murder?) soldiers for things like desertion or aiding the enemy with relatively little due process. Nowadays we are having similar debates about "enemy combatants" and drone strikes which may target and/or inadventantly kill American citizens.

So, the death penalty is simply another place some people might want to draw the line. You may think the state should not have such a power. But it is ridiculously naive to argue that any action the state takes against criminals should be subject to the concept of "hypocrisy"... unless you're ready to accept that police should start having discussions like -- "Well, gee, this guy kidnapped someone and put her in handcuffs... so, well, it would be hypocritical for us to put him in handcuffs and force him to come to jail... so, well, I guess we just let him go! Can't be hypocritical, after all!"

I'm no fan of the death penalty, however...

Hmm... and yet in your previous post you say that anti-death penalty people tacitly approve of the current dysfunctional system rather than actually "fixing" it (which could make it more humane, decrease abuses and errors in the system, etc.) because you endorse the complete abolition which would be more "fair and sensible in some alternate universe."

Perhaps your "alternate universe" is more likely than the GP's, but clearly you also are willing to accept an intermediate system that might be a stepping stone toward a better one.

I rarely say something like this, but that is an insane argument. Forcing people into absolute positions is rarely helpful. You're clearly an absolutist on this issue, and that's fine. But pretending there can't be more than one other possible alternative position is ridiculous.

It's like animal rights activists who believe that consuming animals for food is murder. Some of them refuse to acknowledge that there could be anything like "humane" farms that also slaughter animals for food.

But I think the a huge number of people around the world would disagree. It's possible to condone the eating of animals for food AND also think it's wrong to cause an animal to needlessly suffer for its entire life. Just because you like to eat meat once in a while doesn't mean you MUST approve of people who torture animals for fun before killing them. There are more possible positions of morality in the world than two absolute polarized ones on most issues.

Similarly, I think it's logically possible for a person to admit that the current death penalty system is SO dysfunctional that it is is fundamentally unjust, yet not disapprove of the entire concept of the death penalty system in every possible incarnation. You may regard such arguments as unpersuasive -- but insisting that such a person must be lumped together with some conservative wacko who wants to streamline the process to get more minorities in the electric chair faster is ridiculous.

Why is the radius "more logical"? It depends on the practical use of the relationship. It seems "more logical" to use a radius as a primary circle measurement if you're using a modern mathematical definition of a set of points equidistant (by the radius) from a central point. And it seems logical to adopt this measurement if you constructed a circle in this manner.

On the other hand, if you are confronted with an existing circle and wish to determine the circumference, measuring the diameter is more straightforward than measuring the radius. (Fix one point on the circumference, and use your straightedge, rope, whatever to find the longest distance on the opposite part of the circle.) Sure, finding the radius is simply dividing by 2, but that's an extra step.

I don't know if this is the rationale for using the diameter in the pi definition, or if it might also have to do with the formula for circle area (pi*r^2), which is slightly simpler without the additional factor of 2, or whatever.

Nowadays, there seem to be many good mathematical reasons for defining the ratio of circumference to radius as more fundamental. However, most of these were unknown or not primary concerns when pi was first adopted as a primary ratio. There's no "logical" priority to one or the other measurement -- it depends on practical usage for calculations, and I suspect that pi was probably just used slightly more often than 2*pi in practical calculations centuries ago.