Many of the cars are assembled in the US, at least partially. And even for cars wholly made overseas, we benefit. The foreign ship full of cars made from foreign parts by foreign workers will sail into a US port. The workers on the ship buy goods from US merchants while in a US port, and the ship pays fees to unload in US docks. American workers unload the cars from the boats, and load them onto American trucks, driven by Americans who probably went to a truck-driving school in America. They drive to American car dealerships, where Americans unload them, detail them, and sell them. American marketing firms promote the cars on American television, American radio, and American newspapers.. Americans come buy them, probably having some American soda or American bottled water while looking and sitting on American-made furniture. In the end, they choose a foreign-made car, and pay the American dealership.
Maybe the US gets to keep a little more of the pie if you buy an American car, but if you buy any car in America, you’re helping the American economy. And don’t even get me started on service…
(Oh, and GM, Ford, and Chrysler come in first, third, and fifth, respectively, in terms of new sales under the program. The program has moved 184,304 cars off of the lot in a week’s time, apparently.)
Does anyone else find themselves pathologically incapable of answering multiple-choice opinion questions? I just tried taking the “Political Spectrum” quiz that I keep seeing on Facebook. I can’t get past question 3, though:
In nearly every instance, the free market allocates resources most efficiently.
In a considerable majority, I agree emphatically. In a small-but-really-important minority of the time, the free market does a horrendous job, and it’s very important for government to intervene to keep the train on the tracks.
The question sort of appears to say what I’m saying, but not quite. If I agree, it sounds like I’m saying that laissez-faire economics almost always works. The exceptions are too notable to brush off, though. But if I disagree, it sounds like I support a Communist-style central control model, which would be even worse.
So instead, I answered “Neutral” and marked the issue of extremely low importance. That’s not right, either: it seems to make it seem that I’m apathetic about the economy.
I think I tend to spend way too much time looking into how questions will be interpreted, and how they might impact the results, rather than answering from my gut. I didn’t do it on standardized tests since it would muck up the works, but on tests in school, I periodically found myself writing comments on multiple choice questions. On one Physics exam or something or the sort, I wrote in, “This assumes the question refers to the atmosphere on Earth,” which not all questions did. Multiple choice questions shouldn’t leave me making assumptions.
Consider Question 50: “A person’s morality is between that person and God only. Government should not get involved.” I really, really want to write in, “If, and only if, their behavior does not harm others.” If we’re talking morality in terms of what someone does in a bedroom or the type of language they use, government should absolutely be kept away. But I tend to think that not going around lopping everyone’s head off with a machete is moral behavior, and the government is rather involved in restricting that practice. Government should enact laws that keep people safe. Many of those laws may reflect the society’s morals, but only to the extent that they actually serve the best interest of the people.
I’d be interested in watching someone else take this. There are some questions where I waffled. After seeing some of the blatant lies presented by some political activists on their talk shows, “Radio stations should be required to present balanced news coverage.” sounded like a good idea. I leaned towards yes. But “balanced” in whose eyes? The far-right hated “MSM” (mainstream media, a favorite target of extremists on both sides, and maybe people with brains on both sides, too) because it did nothing but attack the President and ignore their conspiracy theories about Obama being a Satanic Freemason. The far-left hated the same MSM at the same time because it wasn’t critical enough of the President and the wars, and because it kept showing Obama with the caption “Osama bin Laden.” You can’t really legislate “balanced.” Plus, there’s that whole First Amendment that suggests that this effort would be incredibly unconstitutional. So I spent a long time mulling this survey question. Others (“If our leader meets with our enemies, it makes us appear weak.”) had intuitive answers that I chose without any thought, because I already knew the answer.
And interestingly, I’m finding that the questions that hint at contemporary political issues are ones that I mark as being very important, while the Ivory Tower questions are of low importance to me.
Of course, other questions just stump me. “It is wrong to enforce moral behavior through the law because this infringes upon an individual’s freedom.” Not killing people is moral behavior, and a law against that doesn’t trample individual freedoms. On the other hand, things like laws against same-sex couples or interracial marriages were sometimes thought of as “morals,” and those definitely don’t belong as laws. It’s too vague of a question to really be able to answer.
And here’s a perfect example of the questions I think too much about: “Whatever maximizes economic growth is good for the people.” I ended up disagreeing strongly, because economic growth shouldn’t be the primary driver. (For example, people dumping nuclear waste into the water supply would save companies lots of money on waste disposal and lead to economic growth, but it would kill people in the long run. And probably short term, too.) But I worry that this answer leaves open the implication that economic growth is not important, and that I’m more focused on adding regulation than having growth.
Oh, and “The lower the taxes, the better off we all are” is another one. On some level I agree, but I think the real metric is what we’re getting for those services. If we had anarchy, we would have a 0% tax rate, but perhaps absolute mayhem, too. I can’t answer this question as-is.
I get the psychology of why some questions are asked, but they’re not really about politics. “It is a problem when young people display a lack of respect for authority.” I think it’s normal and I think it perhaps ties into a healthy distrust of authority, more or less an important principle of democracy. But what does it have to do with politics?
I bought my brother a new camera. His never seemed like a premium one, but recently took a turn for the worse. My mom’s is nearly ready to kick the bucket, too.
I initially went into Best Buy and looked. And they don’t have any meaningful data on the cards. The main difference between cameras, as far as they care, is resolution.
My camera is apparently 10 megapixels. I’m not actually sure, because it’s unimportant to me. All I know is that I have it turned down to “Medium” resolution. My brother’s new camera is 9 megapixels, so I turned his down to Medium, too. Down at about 6 megapixels, with a new 2GB SD card, he can take over 1,000 shots. On the computer, the images still require zooming around the screen to see in whole. So really high resolution is essentially a bother to me. Camera makers, are you listening?
But it seems they aren’t pouring all of their resources into megapixel wars. Most (!) decent point-and-shoot digital cameras now have gyroscopic image stabilization on the lenses. I don’t know how it compares to the IS/OS on a $2,000 lens, but it’s surely better than nothing. ISO sensitivity has really expanded, too: a considerable number of mid-range point-and-shoots go to ISO1600 or further. Until recently, this was pretty much the exclusive province of much pricier cameras. More than a few have HD-range (usually 720p) video recording, and some have amazing zoom, sometimes along the lines of 35-600mm equivalent.
The things in that paragraph get me excited. They’re the neat, advanced technologies. Bumping up your megapixel count is not.
When you build a piece of hardware with a web management GUI, you’ve got to set a default password. Otherwise no one could get into it.
The problem is that it seems not many people bother to change it. If you know the model of the thing you’re trying to connect to, there’s probably a greater-than-50% chance that you can Google “modelname default password” and get in. Things that people might not normally think of logging into, like VoIP phones, network printers/copiers, and network infrastructure, are generally left wide open.
There’s a fairly easy way to solve the problem, though: make the default password be the device’s serial number. This isn’t infallible, since you know the password will fall within a certain range, but it makes getting in much harder. For those who want to set the password, they need only see the big label saying “Serial Number / Default Password: ABC123XYZ” or read the manual. And for the 75% of people who never bother, they won’t be insecure by default.
As an alternative, for things that require setup before they work, demand that a password be set before networking is enabled. The problem with this is that most people will probably use “password” to get past the screen, with some thinking “I’ll set that later, but for now I want to get this up and running,” and most never thinking twice.
At least half the time I’ve got a polarizer on my lens, it does nothing. In a few cases, it does harm, by letting in a bit less light. But here’s an example when I was surprised by the difference:
I really love Markov chains, largely because they often produce text that resembles intelligible text just enough that we try to make sense of it only to realize that it’s absolute nonsense.
So I find Garkov to be sheer brilliance. It takes drawings from old Garfield cartoons and generates text using Markov chains. And comics are the perfect medium for this because they rarely make sense to me anyway.
When I heard the Gates-Crowley thing, I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that it was a petty squabble that didn’t seem to involve race. I stopped caring. I don’t know who thought to ask the President what he thought about the borderline-justified arrest of someone for disorderly conduct in their home. But this ridiculous story just won’t go away.
I haven’t — and won’t — taken the time to read it, but it’s apparently turned into a multi-hour liveblogging session for major news outlets, complete with coverage of protests, allegations of sexism (the female 911 caller, who gave her tearful speech about the emotional anguish that ensued, was not included), and even news coverage about the absurd level of news coverage.
There’s a big movement in software development to do rapid release cycles. We tend to release every two weeks. If we ahve major work to do, we can expand the window, and sometimes we have just a small sprint and code, test, and release in a week.
Software, be it a simple website or a complex platform, is never done, it seems. You draw a deadline for a batch of features and release them. The next time around, you fix the bugs the last release introduced that your QA process missed, introduce some new features, and probably slip in a few new bugs.
Why do we do this? Why do we need patches and updates? We bought a fairly high-end toaster a while ago. It’s sat in our kitchen for a few years making toast. (Err, making many pieces of toast on many occasions, not spending several years making one piece of toast.) There have been no updates or patches or service packs. It has zero bugs and no security vulnerabilities.
I started thinking about how you’d write code like that. And my conclusion is that you’d have to stop “rapid iteration.” At some point you have a feature freeze, and then you spend months testing, and fix every single little bug, even the, “The bug might affect 2 users ever, but the fix has the potential to break some core functionality in subtle ways…” ones. You’d spend a lot of time making trivial fixes, and a lot of time testing against unlikely uses.
A big problem we find is that we can easily test functionality, but that the real world does things we would never try. People try to stuff bananas into toasters in some cultures and they jam. People bring the toaster to Europe and plug it into a much higher voltage than expected and it blows up. Some lunatic has his outlets wired for DC, and the toaster short-circuits. When you use the toaster inside a cryogenics freeze locker, it never gets the toast warm enough. Some of these are so ludicrous that they’re not worth fixing, but others are legitimate uses that no one ever considered. And yet, somehow, toaster makers never run into these problems. There’s a pretty well-defined set of conditions in which a toaster should operate, and they’re tested in all of them.
But the big thing with the toaster is that you know that it’s got to just work, because you don’t have the option of pushing out a patch release. If people run into bugs with their toaster, they’re going to return it and use the money to buy something from a competitor. They won’t submit a bug report or wait for a patch.
I don’t think this process is going away, but it’s something I find interesting to think about. If you only had one shot to get it right, how would things be different? Do rapid release cycles just make it too easy to release imperfect code?
When I get gas, I swipe my credit card at the pump, fill up, get my receipt, and drive off. Since the filling up process takes a couple minutes, I find myself observing other people.
One thing I’ve noticed is that most people do not pay at the pump. They pull in, look around trying to find the pump number, and then walk inside to pre-pay. This always seemed odd to me, but maybe it’s because pay-at-the-pump was a nearly ubiquitous feature when I got my license. Besides the fact that it’s an unnecessary waste of time to walk across the lot to go inside, wait at line, and pay, I also never understood the concept of prepaying for something when no one can predict how much it will cost. Even if I drive exactly the same route at about the same speed, and the price of gas hasn’t changed, my gas bill fluctuates by several dollars. Paying for $25 of gas might leave me with the pump shutting off before I’m done, or it might leave me contemplating overfilling my tank to get my money’s worth. All in all, the process of going inside never made sense to me, but maybe I’m missing something.
Why do people go in? Do they insist on paying cash? Do they enjoy the company of the attendant? Having gone inside to buy a bottle of water or a pack of gum periodically, this seems quite unlikely to me. The only truly reasonable explanation I can think of is that the people who go inside buy something else while they are inside, like coffee or a newspaper. But very few of the people I watch going in come out with anything in their hands, so that theory is ruined, too.
Is it a generational thing? The older generation grew up going inside to pay for gasoline before pumping it, so they keep doing it, and I’m young and never knew the old way? But isn’t pre-paying a new concept, fueled (pun intended) by drive-offs, an issue ignited (pun intended) by the soaring price of gasoline? Is it the user’s irrational lack of trust of the gas pump, like how I refuse to deposit checks into ATMs for fear that they’ll vanish into the ether?
I sort of want to start polling people next time I’m filling up. But I’ll start here. Do you go in to pay, or do you pay at the pump? And, much more importantly, why do you make that choice?
When I have the time, I find that I actually enjoy helping people with computer problems. It’s something that comes naturally to me, and often people are one stop short of terrified of the errors they’re seeing. But here is some advice on asking for help:
Please provide context. What program were you in and what were you doing? When you say, “I press the button and it says something is not found,” no one has any clue at all what you’re talking about. It would be like calling your car mechanic and saying, “When I move the thing, it rattles.”
In general, “My ___ isn’t working” is about as unhelpful as you can get, except for “an error popped up.” Why isn’t it working? What did the error say? The more specific you can be, the better the odds that I’ll be able to help.
We usually need to know things like what operating system you’re running (Mac? Windows 95? Windows XP? Vista?). Knowing the version of the program you’re running helps, too.
Computers are not like cars. Telling me you have a “2007 Compaq” conveys absolutely no useful information to me. Unless you’re having hardware problems or your computer is a decade old, I can’t think of a single time when knowing the manufacturer helped.
If you get an error, it’s really important to relay what the error says. I can’t tell you how many times people complain that “some gobbly-gook came up” or “it showed an error” and seriously expect me to be able to help. Odds are very good that if you can’t communicate what the message said, no one can help you with it. Would you go to the pharmacist and say, “Hello, the doctor said I needed some medication” and expect that this was all they needed to know? Or walk into a library and say, “Hello, I’m looking for a book that a friend recommended. I don’t know what it was, but my friend is tall and has brown hair.”
If you received an error message, did you try Googling it? Most of the time I’m able to answer my own question by copying-and-pasting the error message into Google. The good news is that I can often solve peoples’ problems in record time, without even understanding them, by Googling them and sending them the first thing that comes up, which happens to tell them exactly how the fix the problem. The bad news is that they could have done this themselves.
My computer knowledge extends to in-depth knowledge about some specific computer programs, and then a general understanding of how computers work. I have absolutely no clue how you beat level 17 of the game you found online.
If the problem isn’t happening anymore, please don’t ask for help. This one really puzzles me, but several times lately I’ve had people complain of issues, and when I asked for more information about the problem, they told me that they didn’t remember because it happened weeks ago and hasn’t happened since. Huh?
