The biggest pollution problems are in big cities in poorer countries.

They have the same problems there we did early in our car eras... that streets aren't wide or good, safety is nonexistent etc. Compared to our early car eras they have far less time to act. And they mostly don't have the public transit infrastructure as a guard against congestion.

The answer is actually very simple. To improve infrastructure for what is, other than walking, already the dominant mode of transport, bicycling. Costs a heck of a lot less than car infrastructure, cheaper to maintain, works better in high density areas anyway since they take so much less room and are so much less dangerous to pedestrians.

And if they want some evidence of the viability of the approach in a modern city, and look for ways to make it work well, they should go to Amsterdam. And it's not an isolated thing, bicycling is enjoying a mini-resurgence all over the world. Hard to say how far it will go, but it should be another clear sign that rushing headlong toward cars has MAJOR downsides.

The executives and investors are good villains in the story because some are in fact, just that, and there's a broken phenomenon culturally based on a buddy system at the board level so that even those who don't act on craven impulses to cash in more still come in with a ridiculous compensation package and aren't exactly clambering for lower salaries (would you?).

But another HUGE part of the problem in medium or even high skill white collar areas with flat or declining compensation is one of medical costs. Because employer premiums in employer group medical insurance plans is tax deductible, you don't see that part of your compensation on a regular paycheck, but it's usually quite large, and has always grown faster than inflation.

We're up at 18.2% of gdp folks. Not all of that is in your group plan, some of it is medicare spiraling out of control, but no matter how you slice it, it's way more than any other first world country spends for better results. This entire sector of the economy is overpriced give or take 2X and it's making the rest of us a lot poorer.

Spoken as an orthodox Jew I'll happily take you on a tour of bad language (Yiddish is really good for expressing put-downs), rough attitudes (for instance, toward ignorant putzes like yourself of course :) ), bad smells (consider for a moment a bunch of bearded men in long coats and top hats after a walk in summer who couldn't do a hot water shower that morning or the night before crammed together talking incessantly while eating creamed pickled herring and drinking cheap whiskey), and hard work (having the Sabbath, a REAL escape lets you do this).

Perhaps undermined the last point reading AND posting to slashdot, but no more than the parent...

We have two cars, parking for one, and variable (relatively low) needs.

I actually looked into this, but our cars are too high mileage (they limit to 120K and we racked up miles quickly prior to our move) to rent out through their service.

But when one dies, this will probably be better vetted in practice and if it's still going this provides two more options for me depending on frequency of need.

1: More convenient and cheaper rental
2: A way to partially offset the cost of the newer car.

Either way, I like.

Wow, that's a terrible link. I mean, it's true that a home is not an investment by itself. But (except when the market was at it's most stupid) people don't buy homes to sit unoccupied... they buying them to live in them. So, rent savings is not a footnote, it's the primary freaking motivation. And by the way, their example is transparently stupid because it factors in inflation on money you haven't even put into the house (since in their example you used a 20% downpayment) as necessary to "break even". The math changes rather significantly without that obvious 55,000$ mistake.

It's not for everyone, but if you're in a city with good fundamentals for employability prospects and a reasonable purchase price to rent ratio, I think it's poor to steer someone away from buying right now. Just buy something modest (like what you would rent) and it will be cheaper than rent fairly quickly... if it isn't from the start. And it's important to do so while employed full time with a regular salary so you can qualify for conforming loans and take advantage of the frankly ridiculously cheap mortgages right now.

Fines have to be of the right order of magnitude or they do precisely nothing to change behavior.

I mean, take a gander at these financials!
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/financials.asp?ticker=CMCSA:US.

18.548 BILLION dollars gross profit in 2011, and that's not even their best year. So, do the math, and based on 2011 this is the amount of money that comcast makes in.... oh I see, less than 23 minutes.

Relatively free form key value pairs except some other stuff that matters for your domain works just fine in a relational db, you just have to query for it when you need it. If you already have a db and an ORM, which would be the common case in any enterprise environment, you'll get your getters and setters for free once you specify class/member->table/column and you can have an attribute table in the without breaking step. How this would be hard to set up or use compared to a key/value store is a mystery to me.

I've worked on a couple apps that were admin configurable via extended properties and did exactly this against a relational db at runtime. It works fine. Actually, better than fine. Let's say in the future you want to use them in aggregates or use them to filter rows on large datasets. Keeping everything in a relational db, dealing with that need after the fact is easy, and efficient if you choose to make it so. Split your stores and not so much.

YMMV always, but I think your vendor just sucks if your keys and indexes aren't encrypted along with the data. Anyways, if you want to encrypt/decrypt in the application you can, the nosql folks who haven't gotten around to supporting that (or COMPRESSION in some cases, really) like that argument.

But hey, let's say you want really, really unstructured data without any mapping into your model? Fine, use a lob, and pardon me while wretch. Point is the tool doesn't actually have any simple functional shortcomings compared to a key/value or simple document store, it's just that it gives you the option to impose a little more discipline, and from painful experience most people have chosen that option.

I'm not saying these things don't have a place, but it's more limited than acknowledged, and purported advantage of being schema-less is pretty stupid. The only related argument I've heard that has any sense to it is about uptime, but ultimately that fails for me, too. First 99% of schema changes are simple additive ones that have no impact on uptime. Second even the 1% can be handled pretty well in most cases restricting writes on a limited basis. Lastly, if this update outage is really putting you in knots you can keep modification dates (or just add them for this use case) do the 99.99% of the data transfer ahead of time then the write outage window can be TINY because the final set of data to transfer is so small.

Chassidism was basically the reform movement of the 19th century. There were many sects as noted and the local rav always has a special place as the representative of that authority, but centrality around the rabbinic dynasty is actually the smaller part of the equation than the newly inclusive, intuitive, spiritualist, and distinctly joyful impulse that drove the initial branching centering around an intensely affable mystic, the Baal Shem Tov.

There's a wonderful compendium of tales by Elie Wiesel called Souls on Fire on the subject first of that, and all the fantastically intense people and personalities that drove it's evolution into yet more branches.

The externally visible aspects are small in modern terms, but the size of the philosophical split is hard to overstate. And the chassids you're most likely to run into, Chabad-Lubavitch that are hardly the fearful hermits people are thinking of here. They value identity, but teach with a positivist tone and go out to and bring non-observant Jews to observance all the time and everywhere.

There are a lot of things you can do to loose weight and be healthier, more energetic, etc.

But most people are not obsessive and don't have time/energy/willpower to do 10 different things, 5 different things, or most of the time, even two different things.

So do just one thing, start eating a good amount of vegetables and low calorie fruits (strawberries, canteloupe, and the like). At minimum eat something in this category at the start of every meal.

What's a good amount for you? See how you feel. The goal of eating is to feed and nourish your body and your body will tell you when you're not doing it right. The amount of fruit and vegetables that feel right will initially not be all that high, you'll get gassy etc.. but over time, assuming you don't have any medical conditions making your tract unusually sensitive, it will adjust and then you'll be able to comfortably eat more, and displace more of the garbage calories in your diet with this better nutrition. Your body will thank you.

There was a lovely mug capturing that sentiment displayed prominently by a (very successful) sales guy the last place I worked. "MBA: when you BS can't take you any farther."

Except here it was the BS that got street cred??? He didn't get or even claim to get an MBA that I can tell. Maybe it's not the degree holding me back, maybe I suck (or just don't know how to lie well enough).

OK so upside is cheap and transportable, downside is colossal fire hazard.

Decisions decisions.

Let's say organic food costs only 10% more. Most of these people are very poor don't have any money in their budget and thus would have to eat 10% less. You are NOT smarter than they. Values have a precedence. Survival today comes first.

Yes and no.

Is the problem broken down into high level pieces you can quickly describe?

Is what any given snippet of code does and why easily understandable little to no searching?

Are there tests in place to validate the program's behavior?

Are there clear boundary lines that prevent erroneous input, error appropriately and minimize corner cases you have to manage?

Are all side effects cleanly sandboxed and limited to what is necessary to solve the problem?

Has repetition been avoided?

Have standard approaches and standard libraries been used whenever possible?

At the end of the day, is this something you feel good about having done and good about someone else inheriting?

Of course they'll pick the most sensational examples, but there is a strong social trend over decades that has taken us to significantly longer sentencing. That gives prosecutors tremendous leverage.

Prosecuters doubtless feel that they're the good guys, they know, so that's ok. Most of the time that's true, most of the time it's like COPS, but sometimes it's not and they're making educated guesses with info they have on hand at the time.

Of course you have to be convicted to get the sentence, that's true, but it's hardly like no jury ever convicted an innocent person. Happens all the time, especially disadvantaged folk who think (rightly) that they will have a very hard time getting their side told. And the prospect of serving out that inflated sentence is (by design) made too awful.

For those that are blase about this and insist someone who isn't guilty shouldn't worry, remember, jurors are not experts and most can't help but make unconscious judgements of a defendent that influence their thinking almost immediately. And the end of the day, they think what they think, and they want to go home.

And yes, that is a massive indictment of trial by jury as well. But at least the evidence has a chance to be heard and it's not just one person with all the strings in what's supposed to be a free society.