Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."
The entire TSA paradigm is flawed. It requires an impossibility for it to succeed. For the TSA model to work, every single possible means of causing danger to an aircraft or its passengers must be eliminated. This is an impossibility. While passengers are being frisked and digitally strip-searched a few dozen yards away, cooks and dish washers at the local concourse âChiliâsâ are using and cleaning butcher knives.
This report is one of the main reasons I have swapped down from .40 to 9mm:
Conversely the 9mm can probably be fired fastest of the common calibers and it had the most rounds fired to get an incapacitation (2.45). The .40 (2.36) and the .45 (2.08) split the difference. ... If a person takes an average of 5 seconds to stop after being hit, the defender who shoots a lighter recoiling gun can get more hits in that time period. It could be that fewer rounds would have stopped the attacker (given enough time) but the ability to fire more quickly resulted in more hits being put onto the attacker. It may not have anything to do with the stopping power of the round.
You can't shoot a fraction of a bullet; 2.45 rounds of 9mm and 2.36 rounds of .40 both round (ha!) up to 3 rounds. Might as well have 15 in the mag instead of 13, and get faster followup hits. Via An Alternate Look at Handgun Stopping Power.
One of my favourite sections of the book was Harfordâs discussion of accidents. Most of the problems Harford examines in the book are complex and âloosely coupledâ, which allows experimentation with failure. But what if the system is tightly coupled, meaning that failures threaten the survival of the entire system? This concept reminded me of work by Robert May, which undermined the belief that increased network complexity led to stability.
The concept of ânormal accidentsâ, taken from a book of that title by Charles Perrow, is compelling. If a system is complex, things will go wrong. Safety measures that increase complexity can increase the potential for problems. As such, the question changes from âhow do we stop accidentsâ to how do we mitigate their damage when they inevitably occur? This takes us to the concept of decoupling. When applied to the financial system, can financial institutions be decoupled from the broader system so that we can let them fail?
(Emphasis mine.) via Harfordâs Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.
Considering the situation we are in today, the size of government, the level of our debt, the continuous violations of our economic and personal freedoms, free-market advocates should be breathing fire everyday and fight for truly smaller government. This plan isnât enough.
It doesnât balance the budget in the next ten years. ...
It will spend $4.9 trillion in 2022. ... Thatâs only 13 percent less than the presidentâs plan.
It focuses on a few villains like high-speed rail and the presidentâs healthcare law but it fails to propose the elimination of programs, agencies, or departments that should be terminated either because they are the responsibility of the state and local governments or the private sector.
It once again fails to reform Social Security. ...
It reneges on sequestration-induced reductions in military spending (it finds the âsavingsâ elsewhere). I think a serious plan would put everything on the table. ...
This plan doesnât close the emergency loopholes. This means that spending cuts brought about by the BCA caps or the Ryan budget can be easily restored by claiming that the spending is an emergency.
On Medicare reform: Why push off urgent reforms for a decade? ...
This is a good example of dessert-now-spinach-later policy. In this case, however, older people are the only ones eating desert and younger people are left with the spinach and little prospect of any dessert at all.
The proposal includes no credible plan to force future Congresses to implement its reforms.
... Considering the level of compromises and the amount of watering down that Congress will do once they put their hands on this or any budget, the original document should have been much stronger.
via A Critical Look at the Ryan Plan - By Veronique de Rugy - The Corner - National Review Online.
March 8 was International Womenâs Day. On what was suposed to be a celebration of the brilliance, beauty and achievement of the female sex, we [American women] were complaining about our entitlement to insurance coverage for contraception. We let our newly anointed spokesperson Sandra Fluke tell the world that there is a malicious war on women in the United States of America.
In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive or use public facilities when men are present. If their bodies are not completely covered, they face verbal and physical harassment from the religious police. Jordanian women live in fear of honor killings from their husbands. In Egypt today, women wonder if they will see their hard-fought rights removed when the new constitution is drafted by an Islamist-majority parliament.
On International Womenâs Day, these people were victims of the real war on women.
If the job description does not mention "Framework X," you should probably avoid answering that you use "Framework X" to solve the problem presented to you by the interviewer. If I ask you to perform a simple task, such as parsing a string in a well-known format, saying "Framework X does that for me" is likely to be seen as a negative.
You should be able to do the simple things in PHP itself (e.g. parsing strings). As interviewers, we generally care about your proficiency with the language, not with how much you like the framework of your individual choosing.
Saying that you use a feature of "Framework X" for simple things is a negative. It sounds like you're dependent on that framework for basic tasks. That means we (the employers) will need to train you how to do it without that framework, and that's a hassle for us.
One caveat here is that if the employer has already specified that they use "Framework X" then they probably do want to see that you're familiar with it. Alternatively, if you are going to be the only person on the team, you're also probably fine. But in collaborative, team environments, it is unlikely that the employer is already using the framework you, individually, prefer.
On this page about Visual Presentation, under "Related Resources," the authors note my article on Line Length, Volume, and Density. I'm surprised and pleased. :-)
War is where the enemy decimates your numbers â like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.
War is where you are kept from learning â like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.
War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.
In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment â by law â in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.) Women live longer than men. Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men. Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays. (This by the way is a complete reversal of the âpenaltyâ of sex which used to fall mostly on women.) And if he doesnât pay, he goes to jail. Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly. Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.
If this is war it is war on men. And Iâve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.
Sarah Hoyt, War Is Hell | According To Hoyt.
This is great news. Congratulations to both projects!
Announcing phpDocumentor 2 â the merging of the old (phpDocumentor) and the new (DocBlox).
With the first alpha release of phpDocumentor (2.0.0a1), the new âResponsiveâ default template sports a new page layout, along with the useful layout improvements that the original DocBlox templates provided (which remain available) over the old phpDocumentor templates (which will retire with old phpDocumentor).
via DocBlox is unmasked ⦠it is really phpDocumentor 2! : DocBlox.
Big-government advocates will say that as society grows more complex, laws must multiply to keep up. The opposite is true. It is precisely because society is unfathomably complex that laws must be kept simple. No legislature can possibly prescribe rules for the complex network of uncountable transactions and acts of cooperation that take place every day. Not only is the knowledge that would be required to make such a regulatory regime work unavailable to the planners, it doesnât actually exist, because people donât know what they will want or do until they confront alternatives in the real world. Any attempt to manage a modern society is more like a bull in a darkened china shop than a finely tuned machine. No wonder the schemes of politicians go awry.
F.A. Hayek wisely said, âThe curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.â Another Nobel laureate, James M. Buchanan, put it this way: âEconomics is the art of putting parameters on our utopias.â
Barack Obama and his ilk in both parties donât want parameters on their utopias. They think the world is subject to their manipulation. That idea was debunked years ago.
âWith good men and strong governments everything was considered feasible,â the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote. But with the advent of economics, âit was learned that ... there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must taken into account the laws of nature.â