You made the wrong assumption that an exoskeleton suit is only useful if it is fully mobile like a car, HOWEVER, there are already LOTS of practical application for a suit that only works well when plugged-in, or with very short battery duration (e.g. 15 mins)

E.g. Old people or disabled people, with a plugged-in suit, can live a mostly normal life within their homes, rather than needing a 24-hour nurse just to take them to the bathroom.

I would guess that people with paralysis or legs disabled would celebrate the day they can effectively walk around their own home with such a suit. Especially if the home is retrofitted with enough power sockets for plugging in the suit where ever they go around the house.

Parental involvement.

I wish coal power killing people was just a strawman, cuz then those people won't be dead. Unfortunately, your reply illustrated some of the problems I just mentioned.

"Call for" is the operative word here, because calling for a magic pony won't make it true, any more than "calling for" alternative energies like "wind, water, solar and organic" would make them suddenly economical *and* scalable to be a realistic alternative to coal.

Gas, while may be feasible in replacing coal, is unfortunately not economical. If it were, we wouldn't have so many power plants burning coal right now. Even many first world countries (i.e. the richest and thus most likely to be able to afford it) cannot afford to replace ALL coal power plants with gas plants, what hope is there for developing countries like China or India?

So when you "call for" using those other alternative power sources while clamoring to close a nuclear plant, you are, for all practical purposes, asking for using coal power to replace nuclear.

If the anti-nuke crowd is really serious about the alternatives to coal, they should be yelling for *building* the alternative power sources rather than *closing* down the nuke plants, cuz if the alternatives really work, flooding the power market with power from alternative sources would make nuke plants *and* coal plants no longer economical and people will shut it down without any demonstrations. But of course this is not happening.

I found this to be a very easy indicator to find out if I am talking to someone with real science knowledge, or someone who just sprout anti-whatever nonsense.

Those who are anti-GMO and anti-nuclear power share a common problem, they usually refuse to apply the same safety yardstick to the currently in-use alternatives. "Proven safe" is the term you often heard from these guys, yet is *anything* ever "proven safe"?

We know pollution from coal power is killing people, we know coal mines are killing people, yet those same anti-nuke guys rarely call for closing coal power plants when they call for closing nuclear power plants.

We know chemical pesticides are harmful, we know people have been using even less controllable approaches to alter the genes of plants (chemical or radiation), we know people are starving to death because they don't have crops that grow well in their region, and we know most staple food we eat every day come from plants that are already hugely modified from its natural ancestors. Yet anti-GMO crowd sweep all these under the rug when clamoring against GMO crops, calling for them to banned until "proven safe".

Claiming the splicing in genes is more dangerous than radiation is akin to saying modifying a program by replacing a subroutine with one from another program is more dangerous than randomly flipping bytes everywhere in the program binary. It can only sound plausible if you assumed the person doing to splicing is intending on doing harm.

Agree with you on all points, and I will add one game-breaker I gleaned after completing the game a few times, for all the great promise of the new XCom game, this is the killer that made me stop playing it -- the AI cheats.

That's right, it cheats. Not in the strategy game purest sense of cheating like it knows the position and gears of my team before they can see them (it does), but in the much more serious way as teleporting its units, literally, behind your back. So you can have your units partition the map into two, heard enemies on the left half in one turn, and sudden have then appear on the right the next turn!

Higher level snipers can get a motion sensor that reveals enemies, and the game is bugged in that it considered enemies revealed by motion sensor as still hidden. So you will get to see how the AI moves (i.e. teleports) those units to ALWAYS JUST out of sight of your units!

So instead of the strategic thinking the original XCom encourages, the new XCom just have one way to play without having your squad getting killed, which is to prepare and respond to having enemies popping up from any direction, even from parts of the map which you have cleared already!

P.S. Mind Control, don't even bother. You only get to control the alien for a few turns, not enough to make a real difference. The option of keeping one or two mind controllers in the team sitting at the starting location and just control aliens as they were spotted and use them is no longer viable. Since you cannot drop equipment now, mind controlling one to have it disarm itself is also not possible. Dropping a grenade on itself is the most useful thing you can do.

So problem solved, right? Let's have the teacher's union promote the use of this metric!

Everyone like to parrot this, but the fact is basically every university looks at SAT scores as a major factor (not only, but still major) in deciding which student to accept. Unless you are going to claim that all universities are crazy, it IS a strong indicator that YES, standardized tests IS A USEFUL MEASURE of a student's ability (not to claim it is the ONLY measure, but a USEFUL measure nonetheless).

Furthermore, even if you insist that whatever a standardize test measure is still useless, you cannot dispute the fact that a good score WILL help the student in getting into the university he/she wants to, which itself is of great use.

So because we don't fully understand a thing, we should even TRY to measure it?

Well, politics is also a very ill defined concept, yet it doesn't stop people quantifying them as a single number (number of votes) and hold elections to decide who gets to be the POTUS. By your logic, we should just do away with election and have a tenure for POTUS.

That IT person can complain all he wants, and is free to leave for another job. Yet you wouldn't say that because a shitty metric
is used, that IT person should have a lifelong tenure at this job, would you?

Yet in the discussion here, you only see the argument for NOT doing assessment at all because the metric is shitty, but you rarely see any counter-proposal for a non-shitty metric. Just coincidence? I think not.

You tried to use "make money" as a bad thing to try to confuse the issue, but the core issue is that performance assessment CAN BE DONE in spite of all the excuses, and it can be made very clear if we just change a few words:

the bank teller and salesperson and programmer all work for entities who are in business for one reason and one reason only: to fulfill the objective of the organization. If the organization cannot achieve the objectives, they are not going to waste time assessing the clerks, they're either going to do something to achieve the objectives or they'll go out of business.

And surprise, surprise! A school has the objective of educating the students, and schools that cannot do that deserve to be closed down just the same. And teachers who failed at educating students deserved to be fired just like a salesperson who cannot make a sale.

For their gainful employment?

I mean, why pay for a UI designer if the UI never changes and thus don't need any design?

Can the minor UI additions that came from new functions enough to justify the pay for the designers currently employed? If not, you can surely understand that they would feel anxious about losing their jobs, right? How long would it take for them to figure out that, by entirely redesigning the UI, they can keep themselves employed? And what's more, the UI can be redesigned over and over again until hell freezes over, thus all the UI designers now are able to keep themselves employed for life! (Or until Mozilla finally goes bankrupt after it alienated all remaining FF users)

Almost EVERY SINGLE JOB IN THE WORLD IS LIKE THAT, it must be news to teachers who never worked other jobs.

Every salesperson in a store can only work with customers that come in the store. Every bank teller can only work with customers coming into the branch. Every programmer can only work on projects they were assigned to. etc, etc.

That doesn't stop all other professions' performance from being assessed.

To the similar extent that a usual worker has in choosing their work, teachers also get the negotiate which classes they will teach next year, influenced by their capability and school needs. This is no different from how much a programmer can negotiate which projects they can work on.

To the similar extent that a teacher has little control of the environmental factors, guess what? Most other professionals don't have such control either? Can a programmer choose what kind of projects/schedules the company has going? How much control has a salesperson on the products he has to sell?

Hey, if you don't like the class you are being assigned, you can also quit. Oh, but the tenure is just too attractive? Welcome to the real world.

They should have known about the lack of change management, and the company culture of hiding problems.

Why pay the top executives so much if they are NOT responsible for the screw-ups?

The HR department would be responsible for the incentives, employee training and grievance processes, all of which directly contributes to the culture of the company when employees found problems -- report it or hide it?

Then they doesn't deserve the name and reputation of the "GM" name, and should just dissolved the company and start a new one. You can't have it both ways.

And how many of those 15 are in the C-level, or PR/HR departments?

No, no, no, no, NO! *EVERYTHING* IS upper management's responsibility. You can delegate a task but you can never delegate your responsibility.

If a middle manager feels that it is to his best interest to hide a problem, rather than to put the spotlight on it so the problem get fixed, IT IS THE UPPER MANAGEMENT'S RESPONSIBILITY, because it is the upper management that had created the incentives for the middle manager, and obviously there was no incentive for reporting problems.

For every case of a middle manager hiding a problem, you can be *damn sure* that there was precedence in the company where some middle manager got scapegoated in the past for reporting problems and rocking the boat.

When you have an *engineer* hiding a problem that have *safety* implications, you can be damn well sure that hiding problems has already become the pervasive company culture, and NO A SINGLE upper manager wants to hear about any real problems in the company.

What this public firing would accomplish is to enhance everyone's CYA activities, and little else, as the same group of upper managers that don't want to hear problems in the first place are still mostly there in the top.

OTOH, 100-level college humanities are useless if you are not continuing along the progression of studies, it's like learning the alphabet of a language and going no further. The only advantage might be that they could offer an opportunity for the kids to save themselves by switching majors, though those introductory classes usually test the resolve of even those committed to the subject. STEM majors don't need more distractions, they should be focused on qualifying for or conning their way into a job.

See, it works both ways.

BTW, GP was calling for Humanity majors to take 200+ level Math classes, not 100-level.