U.S. Senate
See Full Big Line
(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
See Full Big Line
(D) Michael Bennet
(D) Phil Weiser
60%↑
50%↓
Att. General
See Full Big Line
(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Jena Griswold
(D) David Seligman
40%
40%
30%
Sec. of State
See Full Big Line
(D) A. Gonzalez
(D) J. Danielson
(R) Sheri Davis
50%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
See Full Big Line
(D) Brianna Titone
(D) Jeff Bridges
(R) Kevin Grantham
40%
40%
30%
CO-01 (Denver)
See Full Big Line
(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
See Full Big Line
(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Trisha Calvarese
(D) Eileen Laubacher
90%
20%
20%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
See Full Big Line
(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
See Full Big Line
(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
See Full Big Line
(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
See Full Big Line
(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Manny Rutinel
(D) Yadira Caraveo
45%↓
40%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
December 07, 2011 04:42 PM UTC
59 Comments
Allison Sherry reports from Washington that
What am I missing here? Why are these people getting unemployment and food stamps in the first place?
http://blogs.denverpost.com/th…
perhaps the GOP can explain how these unemployed wealthy are “job creators”.
Lottery winnings are exempt in some states.
And remember: unemployment compensation is insurance, not welfare. There’s no means testing.
in Colorado, you do have to report any hours worked, wages paid, or self-employment income and then it’s deducted from your biweekly unemployment check.
Unemployment is insurance. Your employer pays into it every month for everyone, those making minimum wage and those making $10,000,000 per year (though the amount employers stops after the first $10,000 of each employee’s earnings). I think high income people should get unemployment for the very same reason that high income or assets persons get social secuirty. They pay for it, they should get it. So, recognize when you take on high income people for unemployment, you are taking on high income people for social security. If you want to means test unemployment, why not social security too??? (Actually, I favor means testing for Social Security). So, if an employee makes ten million in the first six months of the year and then is fired without good cause as defined in the unemployment statutes, s/he is entitled to unemployment payments for that period of the year when s/he didn’t work. It will be maximum benefits too, because their prior salary was maximum.
Seems to me what’s sause for the goose is sause for the gander. If you means test unemployment, you have to means test Social Security too. I’m in favor of means testing both. I would guess the vast majority of people aren’t. From my point of view, to treat the two differently is inconsistent, plain and simple. You can’t just take your pick.
As for food stamps, there is nothing in this post that indicates that any of the examples given were receiving food stamps. Theorhetically this should not be possible as there is both and income and asset test. Now, I suppose of some gambler made $10,000,000 one year and lost it the next he might qualify, but I think food stamps are appropriate in that case. Same thing could happen with a real estate investor who loses everything. S/he might have millions in phantom income from the forgiveness of debt which he receives and is taxable income, but no assets whatsoever. I think s/he gets food stamps as well if s/he is truly wiped out. I think this is OK assuming he has no other assets because he needs the food stamps once he has “lost everything.” But, food stamps aren’t only an income test, they’re a means test as well. So, if someone has no income, but millions in assets, they already aren’t getting food stamps. Show me someone who really has millions sitting around and is still on food stamps, and I’ll show you someone who has committed fraud and is subject to criminal penalties already.
In short, I think this is a nonsense bill. We already have laws in place to disqualify food stamps from anyone with any real income or assets. And, I don’t think we should means test unemployment, unless we are going to means test social security too.
The insurance distinction is, no matter how unfair this seems and how easy it is to jump to conclusions (as I did), quite valid. In fact, there was a campaign when social security was introduced featuring wealthy celebrities voicing their intention to accept social security benefits to convince the public that there was no shame in accepting these benefits because they were not charity.
Perhaps we could use this angle to convince the GOP that they really ought to support extended unemployment benefits. Anything that benefits the wealthy should be fine, right?
by a Republican friend this morning. But at the end of his response he added, “but other than that, it beats the hell out of me.”
When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners?
And every once in a while one of them goes byebye, runs out of fuel, and crashes in Iran.
When they start using unmanned drone airliners, I’ll stop flying.
Ain’t no machine gonna replace Sully in my book.
With today’s technology, a Borg would have a much easier time doing what Sulley did. It’s a miracle because a human did it. I would think a machine would be much better at holding the plane level than a human would, which is the key to a water landing – not dipping a wing in the water as you land, thus cartwheeling the plane.
sending wrong info.
Like when the pilot is over the legal limit to fly? I would guess it happens about that often.
When it comes to flying on a pilotless commercial airline for the first time, be my guest. You first.
Are caused by pilot error? Doesn’t really seem that your position is logical, not that I don’t agree with you.
being blamed on pilots’ over-dependence on auto functions and resulting lack of experience, making timely, human hands on corrections when the computer starts spitting out wrong info, due to some glitch, problematic?
And I don’t know the answer. But we will soon hit the point where the automated system makes better decisions than a human. And when that happens it’ll switch.
my confidence is less than high in blissful freedom from glitches any time soon.
. . . is another man’s superstition.
Keep the faith, bro.
and why can’t a toaster be consistent?
I use machines and computers. But, I have little confidence in machines and less every year as they consistently disappoint me
error free most of the time but that’s not much comfort. Only an actual human can determine if, suddenly, the info the machine is coming up with just doesn’t make any sense. At that point, the human had better be more than just a meter reader. The human had better be someone with lots of experience and expertise to take over from the faulty machine.
The question is when do computers do better than people. A good example is the anti-lock breaks that are in every car now. When you slam on the breaks it actually turns then on/off very quickly to break as fast as possible without going into a skid (which makes breaking less effective).
No human can match what the computer can do in this case. So we are safer because the computer controls the breaking rather than a person trying to figure ho hard to press to stay just short of skidding.
This actually has very little to do with your linked article, since the driver is still in control of the steering and the brakes.
brakes
BRAKES
I know you’re in programming so you’re accustomed to helping things break, but we want the computer to help us brake.
than it would cost you in lawsuits from families of dead passengers, we’ll switch.
dad is a retired airline pilot. Cool, right? Not very political, but it would be interesting to get his take on it.
Anyway, I’m with you. I’ve had way too many one-sided conversations calmly explaining (more than once, showing) how there most certainly was a CD in that drive.
for about 20 seconds. Click on a link, regardless of the site, and at least one out of 10 times the whole browser just hangs, including all other tabs.
Firefox is used by millions of people every day. It has lots of brilliant programmers providing support and updates and fixes. And yet it’s been broken for years.
I just took an online training, which was programmed by a company specifically contracted out to do it. Walked away from it for 10 minutes, and instead of getting a timeout error (which is fine) I get an infinite loop of popup error messages which can only be fixed by logging out and logging back in.
I don’t want a computer program flying my goddamn plane. If anything, computer software written by professional programmers is a lot buggier than anything that would have been released 20 years ago.
And not allow any 3rd party add-ons? Because then you could get a browser that is rock solid. You’re facing the same thing as cell phone dropped calls – people are willing to accept imperfections in return for a significant reduced price where appropriate.
For flight, medical, nuclear, and other software they level of effort put into writing and testing that is about 1,000 times what is put into most code. And it should be for those cases. But it would also be a bad trade-off to do it elsewhere.
As to your online training software, that is bad programming. But there you’re facing the issue that there is a gigantic difference between really good and average programmers. I doubt anyone picked working for the online training company over Facebook…
I deal with lots of software that is contracted out to professional programmers and completely breaks if you don’t click all the buttons in exactly the predicted sequence. They pay a shitload of money for this stuff, from companies you’ve probably heard of.
If you want to somehow guarantee none of the programmers are going to be average at a big company getting lots of substantial business from companies and governments, then sure, run my life with your perfect programs. But first of all, I don’t believe what you say because nothing in my experience supports it, and secondly, lots of things on Facebook are broken too.
Holy crap, I just realized Facebook is your example of great programming, and you want my plane being landed by a programmer. Half the time when I try to open Facebook on my phone, the application crashes before reaching the loading screen. You’re trying to kill me!
To give a specific example, when Microsoft decided to ship Windows 3.1 the majority of us on the programming team said it wasn’t solid enough. And in a big meeting management asked if people using Windows 3.0 would prefer to stay on 3.0 for another year as we made it a lot more solid, or if they would prefer 3.1 that day.
As everyone in the room was using 3.1 on their own machine instead of 3.0, it flipped everyone’s opinion. So that’s one part, people are better off with good enough today than perfect tomorrow.
Then there’s retaining market leadership. Facebook has Google and others constantly trying to overtake it. The winner is not the one that is rock solid with limited features, it’s the one that has every feature you want. Right now Facebook could put a lot of people on testing, or put them on creating something like Google circles. To maintain leadership so you continue to use Facebook they put everyone they can on implementing new features.
Then there’s cost. About 15 years ago there was a study that determined writing flight or medical software cost about 1,000 times what commercial software costs. People won’t pay that price for commercial software. Instead they’ll take the discount that comes with bugs.
Finally there’s allowing anything to be installed on a system. There is a very solid version of Windows you can get – it only runs on a few certified servers with very specific hardware. And u can only install a limited set of software on it. But if u want a rock solid copy of SQL Server running with 5 9’s reliability, that’s the (very expensive) solution.
So far they’re all basically the same, someone in the control room talks a woman into pulling the joystick backwards.
“Oh my God, we’re gonna crash and the control panel is just showing a blinking blue screen!”
“OK, I want you to reboot the airplane and call back once you have done this.”
“But I already…”
[click]
yeah, our plane is going to crash
please hold
because of the heavy accent of tech support somewhere halfway around the world . . .
Just great if you’re a Wall St. firm.
And it’s going to impact the economy big time. From Forbes – The Rise of Developeronomics
that your brave new world that’s got all the rest of us chattel out of work
can’t contemplate the near future demise and obsolescence of human programmers (if not even, gasp, CEOs)?
and it will be completely free of inane shit:
What do we do when 70% of the workforce can provide for 100% of the people? We don’t know of a workable economic system for that.
until only the top 1% is provided for, and then profit!
We totally have an economic system for that.
and, I am not “ready to believe”.
I have heard this same stuff about shortages of engineers since I graduated in 1971 (into the crappiest engineer job market ever). You know what? Pay is still where it has always been. Better than average, but not great.
nameless paper publishes correction saying the Bartels story (without mentioning her name) should have made clear that while current US House Reps will continue to serve in their current districts, they will campaign to represent their new districts in 2012.
http://newssun.suntimes.com/93…
Didn’t the last guy get less than five? Seems a bit steep, but I am glad he’s going to be actually punished.
his own hairbrush.
Oh, the comeuppance for this scoundrel. Almost feel sorry for him.
because he couldn’t help but mouth off about how unfair it all was and how unrepentant and/or unable to accept guilt he was.
Just read your linked article and by federal law, he has to serve 85% of his sentence. He is going to be an old man by the time he leaves prison. If he didn’t so richly deserve this, I’d almost feel sorry for him.
I’d just like to say…who you callin’ “old”? Blago will be a mere 67. I plan to still have a decent figure by then. With that out of the way…
Blago has no one but himself to blame. If he had tearfully apologized for his mistakes at the close of the trial instead of refusing to admit there was a thing wrong with anything he did and if there was it was someone else’s fault, he’d have received just afew years.
On how hot you’ll be. Why, that practically goes without saying but since I dug myself a nice big hole, I have a little work to do to unbury myself here…
Oh, and also agreed on the fact that he deserves everything he’s getting. After growing up in Illinois and seeing this shit around every corner, it’s a nice change of pace to see a judge drop the hammer on this crap and hand out the kind of sentence Blago so richly deserves.
he just wasted about 10 years of his life through nothing but pure hubris. Jesus, just admit you fucked up !
But at this point it was a little late to look sincere.
As my dad used to say.
as MY dad STILL SAYS TODAY !
Hmmm, like that’s a bad thing.
my use of the term “figure” makes me 🙂
Now I’ve really got to get out of these stays and there’s no way to get comfortable in this bustle.
Oh wait…not helpful. Back to my hole I go.
WWII war hero, and the first candidate to be swift boated falsely, has been released from hospital in SD
Just didn’t want to wait until Friday to share: