- > He has an estimated net worth of $3M.
Now do his stepchildren, and exactly how much of their net worth came from Bernie's "campaign contributions".
The way the game is often played is to hire other family members as "consultants" at extremely high salaries (Bernie didn't invent this, by any means -- take a look at how many congresscritters have relatives on the campaign payroll) . In theory, you can't spend campaign money on yourself, but paying it to "consultants" is allowed. And if those "consultants" happen to be relatives, and they happen to use some of their "salaries" to buy luxuries for Dear Old Dad, that's perfectly fine.
Another good one is to set your relative, or even yourself, up in some ancillary business (e.g. advertising or printing). The late Oral Roberts (a TV preacher) was the innovator there. He was always crying about how he sent free Bibles and other religious stuff all over the world, and how many millions it cost. This was absolutely true.
What he never mentioned is that his non-profit ministry hired his very-much-for-profit printing company to print all this stuff.
As far as the government goes, there are pretty strict rules against paying actual government money out to relatives (though it does happen). The rules against paying out campaign contributions are a lot more lenient.
- > If you're too feeble to walk, you're probably too feeble to drive.
Again: patent nonsense.
Do you even know any old people?
- In the future, when you're old and quite possibly disabled, you might rethink the whole "walkable cities" thing.
I mean, it's easy to say "just walk (or ride a bike)" when you're 22 years old and in prime health, but the population in most First World countries is rapidly aging.
- Putting an item up for sale to the highest bidder insulates a seller from future claims that the item was sold for a low-ball price in some kind of sweetheart/kickback deal.
- Woz is a technical genius, no doubt about it.
But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some) of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team at Atari). But only Apple survived.
Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if there had been only one Steve, and I agree.
Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.
- Definitely location dependent.
I estimate mine is about 50% USPS, 25% UPS, and 25% Amazon's own delivery service. The proportion that's Amazon-delivered has been increasing noticeably over the past year or two.
- Yep, came here to say this. I don't use it often, but it's pretty handy from time to time (e.g. checking to see if an important package requiring a signature is coming that day, so I can be home or arrange for someone else to be there).
- > The shotgun needs to be reloaded.
Eventually, certainly, but you can put it off for a while without much trouble.
You can get 20 round drum magazines for 12 gauge shotguns, and keep hot-swapping 'em until your barrel overheats.
> Phalanx_CIWS
But that's 1980 technology. I bet a current GPU could outcompute it by orders of magnitude.
Range is definitely an issue with shotguns. On the other hand, you're dealing with low-speed drones, not enemy missiles.
- Thanks for giving the OP some firsthand advice that answers his question and might actually work, rather than chiding him with some variant of "You shouldn't have trusted YouTube in first place ('you big dummy', implied)". That type of "advice" accomplishes nothing, other than maybe boosting the ego of the person making it.
- Well, it depends on what you consider challenging:
Most work in terms of hours spent: compilers (you had to write one from scratch)
Hardest due to inherent difficulty of the material: theory of computation. Turing Machines and the Halting Problem and such weren't too bad (well, duh) but some of the more advanced stuff was pretty challenging, at least to me.
Hardest due to the material being a collection of bizarre recipes and jumping all over the mathematical map: tie between an undergrad numerical methods course and a graduate modeling and simulations course. It wasn't conceptually difficult to write the code, but understanding exactly why it worked was a different story. I've never been good at memorizing stuff unless I understand how it works (advanced statistics suffers from a similar glut of "magic recipes", in my experience).
Edit: the compilers class was the one that's proven to be the most useful over the rest of my life. I've written specialized parsers and so on a bunch of times.
I've never used the stuff from theory of computation again, nor can I imagine that anyone would who wasn't a researcher in that area.
I could see numerical methods being useful if I did a lot of down and dirty work with the physical world, but I mostly haven't done that..
- You can't open the door if you don't have the key
You can't open the door if the battery is dead (or, presumably, the battery has removed by a would-be car thief).
I'm not sure why one of these is a "failure of the car" but not the other.
If the Tesla cars defaulted to "doors open" when the battery was dead/removed, people would be complaining about that.
In both cases, the end outcome is exactly the same: the window gets bashed out by the fire department.
- IMO, the FDA's authority should be limited to making sure that the snake oil does indeed contain genuine oil from genuine snakes.
They could put a label on it to the effect of "We don't think this stuff works, and it might even be harmful", but they should not be allowed to ban it outright.
The current situation is one-sided:
FDA approves something harmful -> people are harmed and their friends and family start calling for the FDA's heads.
FDA doesn't approve something helpful -> people are also harmed, but most of them don't even know they were harmed. There's little chance of an angry mob showing up at the FDA's door.
The FDA is biased in favor of rejection, not approval.
- I personally think FOSS software is a fine thing, while not being overly fond of the GPL.
If you allegedly "give" me something for "free", but still assert the right to tell me what I can do with it afterward, it's not "free" in either sense of the word. It's not "free as in beer", nor is "free as in freedom".
Stallman's monomania on this subject became tedious and counterproductive decades ago.
Yes, he wrote some great software. So did dozens of others.
- The "critical difference" here is that in other cases the car wasn't manufactured by Elon Musk, the currently-designated Emmanuel Goldstein who needs to be the focus of a Two Minutes Hate every time his name is mentioned.
Edit: when a friend of mine locked her kid inside a conventional car a number of years ago, and the fire department broke the window, I assure you the incident did not even make the local news, much less go national.
- How is it "not remotely the same"?
In both cases the child is in the car and the door cannot be opened.
In my city, the fire department solves the problem by bashing out a window, just as in this case. I know this because that's what happened when a friend locked in her baby.
That seems more like "exactly the same" than "not remotely the same" to me.
I'll bet it happens dozens of times across the country every single day.
- It's possible to recognize Stallman's accomplishments without necessarily conferring sainthood on him.
- Firearms grant their owners the right to say "No".
Tyrants hate that.
Before firearms the world was mostly ruled by "nobles" (i.e., those who had extorted enough from the peasants to afford weapons and armor, and had the free time for the required years of training).
Now, it isn't. That didn't happen because the "nobles" suddenly decided to turn into nice guys.
- You can make firearms in your garage, and there's nothing at all pedantic about that fact.
- > Why McDonalds still profitable in Italy and other places famous for great food?
Because McDonalds is cheap, fast, and tastes good. Seems obvious. They haven't sold billions of Big Macs because they taste terrible, no matter how much food snobs would like to pretend otherwise.
Even if you have "great food" sometimes you want a change. Something that might be "great food" to a tourist can be boring to a local.
- > Try to respond honestly
Oh, do be quiet.
Trying to excuse this childish temper tantrum and exculpate the infantile perpetrators with "herp, derp, the paintings weren't damaged at all" is what was dishonest.
Bye now!