Cheaper than building your own datacenter, or buying your own server space and paying a dedicated engineering team to monitor a cluster for you. I can do things on my own or with a small team that would be well out of my reach without AWS or GCE.
Thermite is dangerous, essentially impossible to extinguish until it burns out, and would burn through any realistic oven. It also emits a dangerous amount of UV so you need welding goggles and distance from the burn. If you really wanted to burn a body (illegal in most cases) it’s a matter of good airflow and the right accelerant. And disarticulstion of the limbs and head, which for me at least, would be a difficult thing emotionally. Once you’ve hacked your loved one into roughly even pieces, dig some ditches lined with steel drums, get some charcoal and wood, wrap the pieces of your loved one in natural fibers soaked with jet fuel, and light it up. Make sure that you layer their “chunks” on a scaffold or logs, and try to make sure that there is a clear “intake” and exhaust at opposite ends for airflow. If needed take the remaining remains and subject them to a second pass with jet fuel.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be able to do that to a total stranger, never mind someone I cared about.
What I had in mind is you buy a bag, put the person in it and it does its thing totally automatically. You’d need to do it outside city limits of course and in open air and you’d carefully watch the direction of the wind. I’m not really suggesting people should pursue it, I was merely wondering if it’s even legal.
TBH, I don’t see why human remains can’t be disposed of the way other garbage is disposed of, through the same garbage processing facilities. Just literally take the deceased to the garbage processing center and chuck them into the shredder along with their old mattress.
When it comes to remains, I don’t consider them to be “my loved one”, that part is gone. I will honor whatever wishes they’ve had before they died, but my own wish will be that my loved ones just quickly get rid of my body at a minimal cost and move on. To remember me, just celebrate what I’ve left behind.
There are a few reasons, the most important three are these:
Public health. Corpses are breeding grounds for some very unpleasant pathogens, and you want to protect people from them. People working with the corpses or the machines to process them would be at risk. Back in the days of unregulated burial, it wasn’t uncommon for earthquakes and floods to cause large numbers of shallow burials to erupt. So, public health on a number of levels is a concern.
Emotion. Most people don’t have your attitude towards the deceased, although it’s fair to say that some do. It’s also true that how people think they’ll react may differ from the reality of their reaction when they’re grieving. Most people wouldn’t be comfortable casually disposing of their loved one’s corpses. There are many cultures around death in the world, but few could be thought of as treating the deceased remains casually.
Politics. The first and second reasons combine with cultural and sometimes religious norms and make such a proposal as yours difficult if not impossible politically.
Regarding public health, I’m not convinced dead humans are any worse than dead cattle TBH.
I do agree on the other two points you’ve made. This is one of those things that are fraught with irrationalities and taboos, and have been for millennia.
This article is critiquing the unstructured get-to-know you interview. It is not critiquing highly structured interviews with clear goals, nor technical challenges, nor references checks or past performance.
In your example, how would you structure a series of questions and procedures to limit the risk of marrying someone who will abandon you or cheat on you? I think you can apply good interview process techniques to this quite well!
1. Have they been divorced or cheated on someone before? People who have been divorced before are much more likely to divorce again. The 50% divorce rate in the US is slightly misleading, as many of the divorces are concentrated in repeat divorcees. In fact, among younger (early to mid twenties) first-time marriages, the divorce rate plummets to something like 15-20%.
2. Have their parents been divorced or cheated? Children of divorced parents are much more likely to get divorced themselves.
3. Have they been physically, emotionally, or sexually abused as a child? People with traumatic early childhood experiences are much more likely to develop trust issues with long-term partners, especially if they never had extensive counseling.
4. Do they have a good relationship with their family? People who have a difficult or unstable relationship with multiple family members are more likely to see tumultuous relationships as a norm.
This is all equivalent to reference checks in a job.
Then a long dating / engagement period is necessary. How do you they treat you during this period? Do they cheat? Are they abusive? Do they leave you during a period of difficulty? Do you have the same religious views? Do you split housework evenly? Do you both want kids? How do you view money? The three most common reasons for a fight among couples are 1) money, 2) housework, 3) free time (and how to spend it).
People who are otherwise happy and well-adjusted adults who get married and then divorce bitterly after 10 years are not the norm. Most divorces can be predicted. And most divorces happen before 2 years of marriage. If you are aware of the warning signs and are not blinded by a "gut instinct" I think you can definitely minimize the potential for marrying a snake -in-the-grass.
The trouble with this advice is that, while it's accurate if your one and only goal is to predict the likelihood of someone divorcing or cheating on you, it seems profoundly unfair.
To examine this "unfairness", let's imagine it at its most extreme: a society in which divorcees are so stigmatized that it's practically impossible to ever re-marry; in which children of divorcees are likewise stigmatized; in which victims of child-abuse are further victimized by a society that considers them potential "snakes-in-the-grass". Do we really want to live in such a society?
Obviously I don't think you were advocating this. But it's a thought experiment which demonstrates a classic class of problem: what's good for the individual isn't always good for society, especially taken to extremes.
Isn't that true for any system you use to predict? If you rely on "gut instinct", then you filter out people who aren't good at fooling gut instinct. Ugly people, short people, people with poor social skills, autistics, etc. That's hardly fair either.
If you want to make the most accurate predictions possible, you absolutely should not use gut instinct. If you want to be fair, then have a lottery or select randomly. You can't have both. There's nothing remotely fair about gut instinct. See, e.g. judges giving unattractive people twice the sentences of attractive ones. I can provide tons more examples of stuff like that. Gut instinct should be illegal.
The other problem is that it assumes that divorce is a bad outcome to be avoided, while a long marriage must be successful and happy; neither are axiomatic.
I'm not sure I see your point. What GP is proposing is a risk assessment strategy. If your partner ticks all of those boxes (for example), then you better think long and hard about whether the relationship is viable without being blinded by "love".
Anyone from any background can either rise above their circumstances or fail regardless of the help they get. This should never prevent is from thinking clearly and logically about our future with these people based on their backgrounds or past actions.
Point 1 is saying that if you're younger when you get married and it's your first marriage, the marriage is less likely to end in divorce. This is the opposite of what you'd expect if getting divorced was just a matter of time, as younger people have more potential time in which to get divorced.
I know a couple that divorced because one of them didn't want to be monogamous anymore. They tried to make it work, first one way, then the other, but in the end they couldn't. Do you think the other one is more likely to cheat or file for divorce than someone who's never been married?
Children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced, but I've never seen that statistic controlled for personal and cultural attitudes about divorce.
What I've read suggests that whether someone has experienced a healthy relationship is more predictive of relationship stability than whether they've experienced trauma.
A flawed heuristic may be better than no heuristic, but too much confidence in a flawed heuristic can backfire.
(Incidentally, most divorces happen after 8 years for both first and second marriages.[1] The 50% figure applies to first marriages as well.[2] That doesn't tell the whole story, because young adults now are divorcing less than young adults a generation ago. On the other hand, we don't know if that will remain true; divorce later in life has increased.)
My favorite stat about micromorts is that motorcycle travel and canoe travel pose the same risk when measured by distance. That is, one mile of motorcycling has the same risk of death as one mile of canoeing.
I don't remember the exact numbers anymore, but in Australia at least the statistics suggest that if you:
Don't ride under the influence, Don't ride without a license, Ride with a helment, and Don't ride an unregistered bike,
Then you have decreased your risk by more than 50%. So using the articles methods, you will be exposed to less than 200 micromorts.
Servicing your motorcyle and having taken a motorcycle saftey course just once also increases your liklihood of survival.
Another key part of the dangers are where you ride, being more likely to die in the CBD than anywhere else, and likely related, just under 50% of accidents are caused by other motorists than the rider. Many riders seem to think it's skewed much more toward cars being at fault, it's useful to know that's not the case.
A final tidbit I recall is that the biggest risk group is 40-60 year old, returning riders. Not younger new riders as you might have expected.
The interesting part of all of that though is knowing such broad stats can not truly reveal your personal risk factor, and that there is a lot you can do to help your cause.
There are other factors too. The less powerful your bike, the safer you are. That one is actually a pretty significant factor.
I was interested in riding a motorcycle once, but I found that even if I assumed I was at the safest end of the spectrum, my risk was still many times that of driving. And the comparison is not apt because many of the risk factors I mitigate on a motorcycle I also mitigate in a car, for e.g., by being a careful driver, minimizing the amount of driving I do, driving slowly, and never driving drunk. So it's not like the motorcycle has become safer relative to the car. It's just that both skew less risky for me.
So I decided I would not do it. Maybe when I'm older and other risk factors are more pressing.
I probably put in about 100k miles on motorcycles over the years and never had an accident/incident. I do not agree that a less powerful bike makes you safer (I only rode sports bikes btw). The slower bikes (250cc or so) generally had much worse brakes and couldn't accelerate if needed. I found 600cc bikes were the easiest to control and "safest." That of course is only true if you are going the same speed as the counterpart (which is difficult especially if you're riding a 1000cc).
I had a similar experience. The impetus for me was always building bikes rather than actually riding them though, so the compromise was getting a project car instead! I haven't calculated the micromorts of circuit racing mind you..
> I don't remember the exact numbers anymore, but in Australia at least the statistics suggest that if you: ..., Don't ride without a license, ..., and Don't ride an unregistered bike
How does lack of a piece of paper increase your chances of dying?
I suppose there is some correlation there, but stating it like that makes it sound like causation since there is a causal relationship between deaths and the other two things presented in the same statement.
That's the important bit to remember for a lot of these motorcycle statistics - so a squid with no gear might think "whatever man, I took the motorcycle safety course and I wear a helmet! I can lane at a delta of 40mph no problem!" Rather, all of those things combined (helmet wearing certificate-bearing registered-bike-owning) are the traits of a safe rider anyway, not necessarily the things that cause them to be a safe rider.
That was the understanding I had, that not being in the group of people who do those types of things is what lowers your risk. But all of this is inferred by "what we know about the people who died" which as the article alludes to, is not a perfect measure.
It does not, it tags you with attributes usually associated with the safer group. That's how statistical correlation works. It does not have any power, not in this sad amagic tyrannical causal universe we find ourselves in. Its a pity really, I'd sacrifice a horizontal vestal virgin for a piece of paper like that.
I was hoping to learn something like this. I was hoping to see other comparable activities though. Driving is actually much less dangerous than I expected in comparison to riding a motorcycle but I think there are other factors, mostly that injuries are not considered, only fatalities.
I've ridden many many miles on a motorcycle and maybe one mile in a canoe and this statistic surprises me. I would have assumed canoeing would be much, much safer!
That's partly because you travel so much more distance in a motorcycle per unit of time. (Probably at least 20x depending upon how the statistics were derived.)
It also points to another problem with this sort of data. While there are certainly deaths in challenging whitewater, a lot of canoeing deaths involve combinations like alcohol+no PFDs+cold water at night.
I think of all canoe trips as "gentle trips on the lake" when I read this. I suppose most canoers think of motorcyclists as "that guy doing triple the speed limit on the crowded interstate"...
I don't know how the author can draw this conclusion. He seems to say that employees engaging in shady practices is the inevitable conclusion of requiring a certain amount of accounts to be opened, and then blames the employees for doing it instead of those who wrote the policy.
The article quotes:
"Wells Fargo has strict quotas regulating the number of daily "solutions" that its bankers must reach; these "solutions" include the opening of all new banking and credit card accounts. Managers constantly hound, berate, demean and threaten employees to meet these unreachable quotas. Managers often tell employees to do whatever it takes to reach their quotas. Employees who do not reach their quotas are often required to work hours beyond their typical work schedule without being compensated for that extra work time, and/or are threatened with termination.
"The quotas imposed by Wells Fargo on its employees are often not attainable because there simply are not enough customers who enter a branch on a daily basis for employees to meet their quotas through traditional means."
This reads to me like damning culpability. Then he says, "But obviously no one in senior management wanted this." Well of course they don't, now that they've been caught! But it was a pretty good scheme at the time raking in millions of dollars.
The purpose of cross-selling is to make money, and that's why salespeople are incentivized to do it. The total amount of extra fees that were charged due to this is $2.4M (i.e. negligible to WF), or $1.14/fake account, or $450/dishonest employee.
If an underperforming employee earned $450 in pay that they did not deserve, WF lost money on this. As matt levine explains:
If your customers have a checking account, and a savings account, and a credit card and online banking, all in one place, then they'll probably use each of those products more...when they want a...mortgage...or investment advice -- they're more likely to turn to the bank where they keep the rest of their financial life...No one feels extra loyalty because they have a banking product that they don't use or know about.
In website terms, this is roughly equivalent to the head of marketing buying fake traffic so he can tell his boss that he did a good job with SEO and ask for a raise.
This ignores the fact that Wells Fargo is a publicly traded company and has an incentive to make their numbers look good for their shareholders.
... And to be clear, your assertion is that thousands of employees across different branches all independently decided to commit fraud and risk their jobs all for an additional 450 per pay check? That is your alternative explanation?
On the contrary, I think they committed fraud to keep their jobs. The $450 is a break-even number; if not getting fired resulted in the employees getting an extra $450 in pay, then WF lost money.
I could be missing something here but whether or not Wells Fargo was losing money on each account opening in the short term or even overall is orthogonal to the issue. It might call into question the wisdom of how they structure bonuses but that's not relevant to the real victims which are the customers and bond holders.
The author highlights why Airbnb is the right company to use to talk about it.
> Often arbitration clauses are invoked in cases where consumers feel they have been financially slighted—seeing charges on their phone bills for services they never wanted, for instance—but the Times investigation found arbitrations used in more serious cases of medical malpractice, theft, hate crimes, and discrimination. The Airbnb situation highlights how far the practice extends.
Other companies (like car dealers) have used arbitration for smaller scoped purposes, but Airbnb is essentially opting out of the 14th amendment.
Being held accountable to metrics will incentivize some behaviors over others. It's not surprising that when Arts and Phys Ed are not on the test, they are dropped from the curriculum. I think student, teacher, doctor and patient happiness should be one of the key metrics that is measured and reported along with test scores and mortality rates. That would incentivize schools and hospitals to take a more balanced approach.
> I think student, ... happiness should be one of the key metrics
I have seen it first hand. Students are always happiest when a charming instructor provides bland infotainment that allows them to sustain a pretense of high achievement without trying very hard. The second hapiest students are those of mediocre teachers who give good grades to everyone so no one is very motivated to rock the boat. As a matter of fact, the teacher has to descend pretty low in terms of incompetence so the students will actually be less happy than if presented with a lecturer that knows their subject and expects them to put an actual effort in learning.
Of course, all things being equal, stern lecturers are more disliked than more relaxed instructors. This is not what I am taking about.
