That's great for marginal costs. What about fixed costs?
The lobby needs to be mopped. The parking lot needs light. The lawn probably should be kept from turning into a forest. The heat should run in winter, and the cooing in summer.
Which hospital users get stuck paying for those things? What is your fair share?
You're missing the point here. The idea is that for you to have an a chest x-ray done, or an appendectomy, or a hip-replacement, is priced at the same rate as if I have the same work done. That they're not charging my insurance company X, while charging your insurance company Y, and Medicare Z, for the same service.
That does seem kind of neat, but it still doesn't make sense to me. You have to carry a poison supply that will run out. You need 12 mL per starfish.
Is that really more effective than just injecting lots of seawater? You could pump in seawater by the kL, not mL, and you'll never run out. The starfish will surely die after all bodily fluids have been washed out with seawater.
The other idea that comes to mind is a needle with an electrified tip. Depending on voltage and current, this kills in various different ways. You can heat the animal, zap the nerves, or (via electrolysis of salt) fill the animal with either chlorine or sodium hydroxide.
Water or electricity don't lead to infection in other nearby starfish, which is probably needed here because it's going to be hard for a robot to find and kill all, or enough, of them. Which at the same point is also something to take care of: I hope the inventors checked the range of starfish etc, so that this won't lead to massive starfish death in places far away from the coral reef being meant to be protected.
12 mL worth of battery ought to be able to handle most of those methods. That's about break-even, but better because you refill the same way you refill the computer and propulsion. Charge the battery and you're ready for more action, mess-free. If you can do the job with less than 12 mL of battery, it's a definite win.
The really sad thing is that we build on our best farmland. If you want to grow apricots, the best place is San Jose. That whole area in fact is mighty good for farming.
People need to eat! Californians ought to be living in the foothills of the Sierra mountains. This puts them close to water and saves the more farmable land for farming.
Good farmland is flat, is not full of annoying boulders, and has nice weather. We thus pour slab foundations for giant 1-story McMansions and dig holes for giant swimming pools. Doing that in the foothills would be a short-term expense, so instead we'll destroy our best farmland forever.
Well, farmland exists to support the population, not the other way around. If farmland exists in adequate and sustainable quantities now, which it does, there's no need to push people to live in less pleasant locations to make room for more of it.
If the offender has only ever committed one crime, and they did so while a teen, then OK. Give them another chance, provided they have a workable budget that includes a non-criminal job.
If the offender repeated the crime while being older than 25, then no. There is no realistic hope that the person will ever be non-harmful. Never let them free.
(cases between those two extremes are questionable)
I would be extremely wary of making such cosmological, sweeping generalisations about anything. "Realistic hope that the person will ever be non-harmful" really depends on a gazillion other variables.
And why start with a semantically negative presumption, anyway? A world of difference in attitude can be reaped from daring to ask whether a person might harm again, rather than if they will "ever be non-harmful".
You missed the word "repeated". Also, some participants in drunken fights act in self-defense or as part of a fighting sport, and so would not be criminals.
So it's actually like this:
You reach 25. You assault somebody. You serve time in prison. (now a questionable case) We decide to give you a second chance. You feel no need to follow the law, and you enjoy assaulting people, so you do it again. OK, at this point we know what kind of person you are. You didn't just make a bad decision one day. Simply letting you out into society is pretty much the same as assaulting a random person, because that is clearly what you are going to do.
Standard algorithms are standard for very good reasons. They are 100% reliable and at least reasonably fast, if not the fastest.
Failure to learn the standard algorithms impedes progress. You are unlikely to do well in the next course if you are slow and can't handle numerous cases.
Learning alternate algorithms is great... once you have the standard algorithms down solid and are ready to prove equivalence.
Concrete illustrations based on things in your world -> procedural methods (your algorithms) -> formal proof seems to work in my teaching of basic maths to adults.
Have a look at the sample chapter from David Tall's book...
OK, but this is not Japan, and if you are skipping or skimping on tips here in the US, chances are you're screwing over a relatively poor person. US law allows restaurants to pay waiters and waitresses well below minimum wage, under the assumption that their tips will make up the difference.
How about doing it the other way around? The restaurant includes a fixed percentage charge for the service on all items, announces it prominently, requites waiters to refuse any additional tips.
One can argue that, because the advertised prices would be, say, 18% higher, the restaurant would fail due to customers preferring restaurants with lower advertised prices. But at least the experiment could be run in this case in a more or less ethical manner (costs to the business itself could be absorbed by a speculative insurer that is convinced business will not decrease for that particular restaurant). Might not even matter for really high end restaurants, since they don't advertise prices anyways.
If you make less than minimum wage because you're not getting enough tips, your employer is legally supposed to pay you the difference so that you would still make the minimum. Whether places actually abide by those laws is a different story I imagine.
While this is true, waiters, particularly in higher-end establishments tend to make much more than minimum. It's small comfort that your manager has to create a floor if you're used to $15/hr and due to some bad tippers you end up at $10/hr for the night.
"US law allows restaurants to pay waiters and waitresses well below minimum wage, under the assumption that their tips will make up the difference."
Except on the West Coast... Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Minnesota and Montana all have the same minimum wage for tipped and non-tipped employees.
Probably not, because assholes like me make it a point to tip anyone who does me any personal service, even when abroad, and even when it isn't of a profession that typically demands it.
I don't know why I do it, and I don't really attempt to justify it beyond "This guy did something nice for me and made me believe he enjoyed it, so that is worth at least something" mixed with not wanting to worry about whether or not a tip is expected.
Apologies if I'm screwing up life for everybody else. I do at least pocket tips when I'm told that they aren't required/desired/expected/wanted, but I would much rather err on the side of over-tipping than under.
Yes, your behavior is insulting in many cultures and is the reason we even have a law in the US that allows minimum wage exceptions for waiters. Over-tipping is worse than under-tipping on a macro scale.
This might be news, but I'm pretty sure that most people, when they receive a larger than expected cash tip just lie about it and pocket the difference.
Otherwise, sorry that my immoderation has caused so much irreparable harm. Regardless, I'm not likely to change until/unless the system is changed.
Most developed countries have a minimum hourly wage.
Here in Ireland for example it would be illegal to pay someone less.
I still tip the pizza delivery guy though. I guess cus they are providing a service directly to me. I suppose pizaa delivery is a pretty low paying job and I have a pretty cool decently paying job so I'm just being nice.
It's horribly insecure to keep the company's source code on a computer with a connection to the Internet. For example, this is how the F-35 secrets wound up in China.
The locations are Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Maryland. Note that the Florida location would let you afford a big house in a decent neighborhood that is near both work and the beach. This is ONSITE. We hire INTERNS, experienced/old/PhD, and everything in between.
Most of our work is low-level. We deal in assembly language (assembler) for MIPS, ARM, x86/x64, PowerPC (ppc), MSP430, 8051, AVR32, and many many others. We write debuggers, disassemblers, emulators, hypervisors, static analysers (for both source and binary), and similar bug-finding tools.
You can run the OS of your choice. Overtime is fully paid and optional, so you can earn more if you wish or just enjoy your hobbies/family/sleep. Extreme flex-time lets you wake up late and/or run errands during the day.
Do you have any recommendations for a web developer who's looking to get into low level programming? After focusing on higher order languages like Javascript and Java for so long, it's hard to know where to start.
That's a tough one. Maybe you could help work on a JIT for Javascript or Java. This would get you into working on the low-level stuff while still making use of your existing knowledge. Another option is to pretend you are back in school. Find a course with syllabus and homework assignments posted online, buy the book that goes with the course, and do all the assignments. The aggressive approach is to just sit down and write your own boot loader or maybe jump into a capture the flag (CTF) problem with IDA Pro. In case you want to learn from a simple OS, look into xv6 from MIT. Add a few features, possibly as suggested for various courses that use the OS for teaching. You could add a debugging interface. Another idea is to write a disassembler.
No, really. He put out CDs and all. Technically he's a former rockstar I guess, but close enough. He rocks.
We still lack a ninja. We have been unable to find one who could do low-level programming and get a US (not Japanese!) security clearance. So far we've had to settle for Nerf dart skills, which really isn't up to ninja standards.
The lobby needs to be mopped. The parking lot needs light. The lawn probably should be kept from turning into a forest. The heat should run in winter, and the cooing in summer.
Which hospital users get stuck paying for those things? What is your fair share?