Learning how to make concise, effective infographics is a part of learning technical writing.
A picture may not always be worth exactly 1000 words, but images with high cognitive density are usually worth putting into your document.
9,179 karma · joined November 13, 2013
A picture may not always be worth exactly 1000 words, but images with high cognitive density are usually worth putting into your document.
I suppose if you were just starting a blogspam recipe site, you could initially pay freelancers for the first articles, and use them as your training corpus. But since this sort of templated recipe site is already evil, just scrape all the other recipe sites and use their articles as your corpus.
"When we vacationed in { madlib( international_city ) }, we ate a { r.Name }, and it was delicious. When we returned home, we tried to recreate the recipe, but it was never quite right. After months of trying, it's finally perfect."
"As a child, I remember my grandmother making { r.Name } and eating it with all my cousins. It was her secret recipe. She never told anyone. When she died, we were all very sad because we thought the recipe was gone forever. But I found this in her old { madlib( noun ) }, and now I'm the most popular cousin at the reunion."
Repeat ad nauseam.
That's why you shouldn't expect to make a cent from creating a new recipe, unless you have a chef and photographer/artist lined up, or own your own restaurant chain.
So the business model is to take facts from the public domain, wrap it in bullshit prose, and then SEO the bullshit to have higher ranking than the naked source facts, for more unique visitors and ad revenue.
Making comments about "providing recipes for free" are exactly as useful as comments about "providing phone numbers for free" or "providing mailing addresses for free" or "providing the original text of 'Little Women' for free" or "providing the steps of the long division algorithm for free".
Obfuscating the public domain is not a valuable service. Automatically removing the obfuscation is valuable. A "Project Gutenberg" style repository of recipes would be recurringly donation-worthy.
The hypothesis is that "clock molecules" in the bloodstream provide a global age-clock for about five other tissue-specific age-clocks in the body. Spoofing the global clock signal for a long enough period tricks the subsystem clocks into thinking they are younger than they really are, including the native global age-clock mechanism.
Completely replacing your own blood with a young person's blood, repeating if necessary, would also accomplish the same trick, more expensively.
The real question is whether old tissues can function like young tissues when tricked into trying.
The other major influence was the slave patrol. This is why there is such a strong overlap between the membership rosters of the KKK and police departments.
As policing expanded, and the institutions intermingled, the former was corrupted by the latter.
It is impossible to uphold #7 in an organization that implicitly divides "the public" into "citizens to be protected", "citizens to be ignored", and "savages".
The only way we can get there from here is to completely dissolve municipal police departments, and rebuild them from scratch, without re-hiring anyone that has ever served as a cop, training them specifically to be wardens of the whole community, rather than employ the "everyone is trying to kill you" videos that they show the young cop-cadets to make them twitchy and paranoid whenever anyone has a non-visible hand or is within 7 yards of them.
We are still living the legacy of the Great Depression, then the New Deal, and then also the attempts to unravel the New Deal.
To address your comment more directly, companies can't fire all poor people. They are needed to run the businesses (until their automaton replacements are built). But one of the reasons poor people are poor is that they cannot afford to not work for long enough to make potential employers hurt enough to offer them higher wages.
One point of a minimum wage is to put a stop on the race to the bottom for wages. Raising the minimum wage will certainly put some people out of work, many of them permanently. All those who cannot generate enough labor value to pay for the cost of their employment will lose their job, if they had one, and be unable to find other work.
But companies that require wage laborers will have to pay them enough to live on, without the fear of being undercut by someone more desperate.
But then you still have the problem of all those people who are unemployable economically, because they're just not productive enough to work for an employer, and lack the capital, credit, or capability to support themselves with self-employment.
So you have to pair minimum wage with something, so that those people don't resort to crime, the career of last resort. Whatever that is would certainly be sustainable, if and only if the employers that are setting the prevailing wages were somehow made to pay the costs of the externalities they force upon the society in which they operate, mostly brought on by ruthlessly cutting their labor costs as closely as possible to the bone, and diverting a greater proportion of their revenues to owners and managers. For the most part, for non-luxury goods and services, labor cost funnels into customer disposable income. You can't sell mass-market consumer-grade goods and services unless someone pays their workers enough to afford them.
And that's what the minimum wage does. It forces all employers into a cartel, such that everyone must pay their workers enough to survive on, plus a little extra disposable income to spend on stuff that no one needs, but requires economies of scale to exist. If the rich owner of a business likes blockbuster movies with big production budgets, they can pay the hundreds of millions of dollars all by themselves, or they and all their rich buddies can pay their workers enough that they can all afford a $10 movie ticket once in a while. If the rich owner of a business likes fine dining, they can pay for a personal chef and the upkeep for kitchen and pantry, or they and all their buddies can pay their workers enough that they can all afford a $50 meal once in a while. When Wal-Mart pays poverty wages, they are reneging on the cartel agreement. Their lowest-paid employees can't even buy a Big Mac without budgeting for it in advance, much less go to the movies or eat a steak dinner. Those employees cannot support other types of business when all their pay goes to rent, utilities, public transportation, and food.
Prior to that point, increases in worker productivity positively correlate (at least weakly) with improvements in the purchasing power of worker wages. Afterward, working class purchasing power went flat or dropped even as their productivity shot through the roof. The owner class acquired the ability to capture everything, and they chose not to let it trickle down, by the terminology of the time. They didn't spend it. They loaned it or invested it, such that it never fully left their control.
After the abolition of slavery and advent of industrialization, labor movements have occasionally been able to claw back more of the workers' share of trade in the specialist economy, and then keep more equitable sharing of revenues going for a while afterwards, but the working class hasn't caught any breaks for a solid 40 years now, and unions are now relatively weak, compared to their historic peaks.
Prior generations got peanuts for their extra efforts, but they did at least get something.
But there is some question as to whether the availability of treatment allows the man to ride the horses harder, with less regard for their welfare, than would otherwise be possible.
Metaphorically, the vet should refuse to treat injuries brought on by recklessness or cruelty, unless the person responsible pays.
Unwinding the metaphor, Wal-Mart should be forced to pay the cost of entitlement programs to the extent that its employment practices make administering those programs to its workers more necessary. There are many ways that goal may be approached.
It's not "theft" by any definition of the word, but when the situation is described to the modal individual, they are likely to say "they're stealing from the welfare system!"
If a task normally takes 10 minutes, and an employee completes it in five, is that a donation of effort?
Is it theft to titrate the productivity of your labor to fit the rate of pay you receive for it? Employees do not get paid more for effort that exceeds par.
If I get paid $7/hour, I can easily reduce my productivity until one hour of my labor produces $21 for the employer. Or maybe I work two hours to produce $160 and slack off for six.
Two consecutive generations of not being rewarded for contributing additional effort for the benefit of the company has taken its toll, culturally. Nobody is willing to uphold a string work ethic for an unethical employer.
The employers burned through all their credit with labor, and are trying to refinance by redefining all the rules. It won't work. It's time for them to pay up.
Intentionally paying an employee less than a living wage, with the expectation that someone else will be charitable enough to make up the shortfall, is indeed not theft, but it is unethical. There is a popular movement to make that behavior illegal, via reforms to employment law.
The obvious impediment here is that poor employees have little lobbying/campaign cash, as compared with the mega-corporations that underpay their laborers. So I feel confident that "Fight for $15" and similar movements will fail without more unionization.
The debt load on young people is greater than the cost of raising a child to adulthood. By the time it is paid off, the urge to procreate has gone.
And those who turned baby-raisin' into a soulless, for-profit industry can choke on their sins, too.
Now, tuition and text can only be paid with 100% or less of a full-time wage job if you are an in-state student at a public university, or attend a community college. And then, no time or money left over for lectures, study, or basic survival.
In terms of student labor hours per semester, college tuition and textbooks have increased an average of 4%-5% per year from JoeAltmaier's 1976 numbers to 2020. Due to advances in efficiency, infrastructure, and technology, that metric should be decreasing every year for most goods. Some see large downward jumps as machines are invented that allow one person to do jobs that formerly required more laborers.
What the hell have universities been doing? Do they not all have economics departments and business schools?
If Russia started consciously farming carbon sinks across Siberia, they could burn tires in St. Petersburg, too.
Japan and Holland could farm algae and plankton in their oceanic EEZ, I suppose.
A sufficient proportion of the US is willing to let those kids fall by the wayside, rather than do whatever can be done to boost them over this hurdle. It won't be adding another school year, and it won't be lowering the bar. It might be by providing housing, food, and petty spending allowance for over-18 kids still attempting to finish their high-school diploma.
Not every kid is willing and able to live with their current parent or guardian after they are legally able to either move out on their own or be evicted.
It's not a law of physics, but there are a lot of pitiable kids out there who have never even caught a whiff of good fortune in their lives, and the US lacks the social sensitivity to make them feel secure enough to add another year of high school to their pile of problems.
The flash does not originate at Discovery and propagate outward as light, but begins before the ship appears, from a diffuse source, constructively interferes at Discovery's normal-spacetime discontinuity, and generates a holographic illusion between the observer and the nebula that just appears to be a flashbulb reflection.
Every Star Trek problem may be resolved by sufficient application of technobabble (a.k.a. [TECH] in the script). It's space opera. Apply the MST3K rule. (It's just a show; I should really just relax.)
The space-mushroom dimension is the same as the gate network from Stargate SG-1, or the wormhole-traversal tech and Leviathan starburst from Farscape. It's the plot conceit that allows the cast to instantly move from one set to another without any of the boring and unremarkable travel time. The exact nature of the instant-transport is dependent on the dramatic series plot arcs that the show-runners came up with in case they ever got past the pilot episode. The cool CGI visual effect used to signal to the viewer that sci-fi is happening now is flawed. Not everyone can pull off the Stargate-opening vortex.
Discovery and Picard are very much darker than pure Roddenberry, in that they portray The Federation as something far short of a perfectly ethical Utopia. In my opinion, this is a decision that allows for a far wider range of character development. An imperfect Starfleet can employ a monstrous starship captain that murders to keep its secrets. Klingons can be more than just a racial stereotype to be used as a script proxy for 1960s Russia (and the language has already been constructed, so might as well use it).
They can see with their own eyes what he could only imagine and speculate upon, and then some. And what they see is that not only are factory-owners richer than non-owners, who aren't really even "workers" any more, but that some owners have insignificant need for labor, and that even they are inferior to the owners of the machine specifications and procedures, the holders of patents and trademarks.
They can also see the output of factories that produce modern war materiel. Pilotless aircraft can carry missiles aloft, linger a while, and then rain fiery hell down upon people who never even knew they were up there. A single bomb can end tens of thousands of lives in a flash of light. Even a single person can unremarkably buy enough firepower from the consumer supply chain to terrorize an entire city for a few hours, from a rented hotel room. A private company can reach orbit. A religious cult can synthesize and deploy chemical weapons. Seaworthy cities, powered by uranium, with miniaturized airfields as their roofs, are becoming obsolete, thanks to machine-controlled weaponry.
Nobody is that visionary, as to predict the politics of a world that has reached the bounds of human imagination, and then continued to progress another 50 years.
When people stay home, and don't go to work--either voluntarily or laid off--for fear of a global pandemic, the stock market still rallies. The event that is as near to a general strike as I have seen in my lifetime is being dismissed as a temporary inconvenience to business owners. We all saw how the former Soviet Republics delivered up all their capital into the arms of a few oligarchs within a matter of years as the former government order crumpled. Who now has the power to wrest control of Gazprom from Vladimir Putin?
The youth in the US need never have even heard the name Marx. They can come by their new brand of communism completely from scratch, just by reflecting upon the history of the last 50 years, and extrapolating the simplest of models into future decades, and onto additional simple models of water use, housing starts, and climate change. It is easy to see that a mere handful of people are looting the entire planet, and if that is allowed to proceed unabated for a few more years, an inflection point will be passed, such that even a concerted, aligned, and organized effort by 99.9% of the human population cannot stop it peacefully via the existing institutions.
Thanks for the good luck wishes. I could really use some.
They're pushing for communism, because it is increasingly apparent that they have been screwed by the existing system from a moment dating to some time before their parents were born, and they'd prefer not to be. Since no other system has been publicized such that it has given them some hope of not being screwed, they are increasingly choosing the option of being slightly less screwed personally at the cost of the whole economy being more screwed.
It's just the Nash equilibrium. Once the voting leverage for screwed people passes a tipping point, their choices will become reality, and everyone who might prefer some other option will have no better chance of a President of the United States trying to get a Supreme Court justice appointed within the last two years of their term, when a unified voting bloc controls Congress.
Fun days are somewhere in between. You need your group to have its time off all at the same time, but sometimes a service employee needs to be working at that time.
I'd think that in Mexico, those resort workers would probably prefer that everybody get Sundays off. But resort guests and management would prefer that services be available every day of the week, including Sundays.
The described arrangement appears to be that full staffing is equal to 6/7 of the employee roster. Or, conversely, that the employee roster is 7/6 (117%) of the daily staffing requirement. How difficult would it be to expand the roster to 7/5 (140%) of the requirement, or 7/4 (175%), for two or three days off per week, respectively? That still wouldn't address the non-synchronized schedule, but it would provide more downtime.
I haven't yet tried fixing it, because honestly, nobody really needs to see any of... this. As I gesture vaguely at myself.
Video conferencing is vastly overrated. I'd rather share an image of my desktop or a drawing canvas.
Subterranean nuclear testing produced rock fatigue from the unusual stresses and strains.
It's one of the few geologically detectable effects of the anthropocene era, like increased atmospheric CO2, and the discontinuity in the baseline C-14/C-12 ratio. If human civilization were to be erased from Earth, a future researcher would still be able to determine that at some point, something dug up carbon fuels and burned them for power, and at a somewhat later point, something detonated nuclear weapons in the open atmosphere, and in underground tests.