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Its amazing how someone can write an article that long and not even cover Amazon's lawsuit a few months ago.

The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.

Come on, man, this is just blatant FUD. "Periodically" meaning 3 real incidents, EVER. Compare deaths from nuclear to constant deaths from solar (workers falling off roofs), wind (workers falling of turbines), hydroelectric (workers falling off dams, dams failing and wiping out entire towns), natural gas (workers dying in fires), coal (workers dying in fires AND dying in mines AND bystanders dying from lung disease), and you see that nuclear is far and away the safest energy source out there. Three completely separate references for you, all of which concur:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

There are a few good reasons to be wary of nuclear - frequent schedule/budget overruns being chief among them. There's also a huge cost for facility decommissioning that hasn't really been handled adequately. But safety concerns are outright lies - nuclear energy is literally and provably the safest form of energy that exists. That argument is bad and you should feel bad for making it.

Hmm, sounds a little Randian. SWAT teams aren't generally used for possible zoning or pollution violations, if that's what you were going for.

Wanna bet on that?

Cherry picking? Just going to accuse without backing it up? Here's my source. What's yours? https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

The biggest taxpayer was the most profitable: Apple, which reserved $15.8 billion for income taxes on $59 billion in operating income.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/c...

Foxconn and others know that things slow down after the holidays, but this is more than usual - so they ALL say. Now if Apple normally told the truth or spoke at all about sales transparently, this wouldn't be in dispute. But since they hide the truth, well...who knows? Samsung didn't even cut the 50% that others have had to. Maybe they're hoping to sell those OLEDs yet.

Hate to break it to you, but it actually proves we don't have a thorough-enough understanding of planetary systems to be able to make reliable predictions 100 years or more in the future.

I guess it was just an accident then that a relatively simple climate model from 1967 was able to make pretty accurate predictions of the climate.

The first climate model turns 50, and predicted global warming almost perfectly

Only recently it was accidentally discovered by a NASA satellite that the accelerated Antarctic ice-melt rates that had been blamed on AGW were actually being caused by a monster-sized magma plume rivaling the Yellowstone magma plume underneath the ocean floor under the Antarctic.

What evidence do you have that this magma plume is a recent phenomena that caused a sudden increase in Antarctic ice melt rates rather than something that has existed for thousands of years?

Is this some new self-parking car where everyone's supposed to get out of the car and, presumably, then standing around to watch in awe while the car parks itself after pushing a "Park" button on the key fob?

Yes. Driverless self-parking already exists in some cars. It works exactly as you describe, except you can use a smartphone or smartwatch rather than a key fob. Self-park will be standard in a few years.

The rear cameras are still optional features on a lot of new cars.

Not in America. They have been mandatory in all new cars manufactured and sold in America since January 1st, 2018. If cameraless cars were manufactured before Jan 1st, dealers have up to May 1st to clear their inventory. After that, you will no longer be able to legally buy a new car without a backup camera.

The cost benefit of the backup cameras, in reduced injuries, fender-bender repairs, and less congestion in parking lots, far outweighs the cost of the cameras and displays (~ $200 / car), so this is a sensible requirement.

Taking on a fresh developer takes a lot of resources - not only do they need to learn company routines, all the tools, how to work with teams and how to actually do development in a non-school setting, but they also need to learn how to actually work: Show up, what's not acceptable for taking days off, how to interact with all sorts of internal and external stakeholders etc.

As the average time a developer spends before switching jobs decreases - apparently Job Hopping Is the 'New Normal' for Millennials - the commitment from companies will go down too. Why spend a lot of time and resources to groom someone if he's probably going to leave anyway? Why not just get someone who's past that in the first place?

This is the real elephant in the room:
https://www.bizjournals.com/da...
Bezos and Buffet have buddy buddy in some interesting ways lately, if the blockchain supply chain fires up under Amazon, it's a done deal. Forbes on same thing:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b...

Check out the articles. The supposed $3B (for all manufacturers, not just Tesla) in the latter article didn't pass, and of the former $4,9B, half of it applies to all EV or solar manufacturers (mainly solar), and the other half is your standard "incentives for you to build your factory in our state" game that all major companies play ($1,3B incentives for the battery gigafactory, $1B for the solar gigafactory). For comparison, for Amazon's new headquarters, Atlanta offered over $1B, Chicago offered $2B, Newark offered a freaking $7B incentive, etc. But hey, let's pretend that Tesla is the only company that plays this came because, ooooh, evil Tesla!

http://www.latimes.com/busines...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

Let's parse.

Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times.

So you start off by pretending that SpaceX and Tesla are the same company. Clever move! What is this "government support"?

New York state is spending $750 million to build a solar panel factory in Buffalo for SolarCity. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company will lease the plant for $1 a year. It will not pay property taxes for a decade, which would otherwise total an estimated $260 million.

Wow, OMG, a state government gave financial incentives for a large company to build a factory in their state. This has never happened before in the history of business! Except bloody always, but apart from that, OMG!

Nevada has agreed to provide Tesla with $1.3 billion in incentives to help build a massive battery factory near Reno.

Stop the presses again!

That's nearly half of the $4,9B in the article, and it's just your standard "incentives to get a large company to move to your state" game that all large companies play.

The federal government also provides grants or tax credits to cover 30% of the cost of solar installations. SolarCity reported receiving $497.5 million in direct grants from the Treasury Department.

All solar installers received this; it is nothing SolarCity specific. You could start a solar installation company yourself today and receive tax credits.

The Palo Alto company has also collected more than $517 million from competing automakers by selling environmental credits.

Same story. The other automakers wouldn't have sold credits had they actually made the ZEVs that the legislation was intended to make them produce. And any automaker could get the credits.

Meanwhile, everyone shoulders the huge financial costs of air pollution from fossil fuel power (the healthcare costs alone from the worst coal plants can be up to 45 cents per kWh). But I know you want to slap down renewables with everything and give fossil fuels a pass for everything, so let's keep going!

Since 2006, SolarCity has installed systems for 217,595 customers, according to a corporate filing. If each paid the current average price for a residential system — about $23,000, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists — the cost to the government would total about $1.5 billion, which would include the Treasury grants paid to SolarCity.

Oh, so now we're taking in subsidies to consumers and pretending that they're subsidies to SolarCity? Clever girl! But okay!

But wait, that article was just for $4,9B (and that includes SpaceX). Where did your other $3B come from? Oh right, this:

The California state Assembly passed a $3-billion subsidy program for electric vehicles, dwarfing the existing program.

So we can now play the game where we pretend that Tesla gets all of that! But of course, we know that there are other other EV manufacturers; again, any company cam make EVs and get incentives. But let's go with it. How much money does Tesla

Agreed. However, that does not mean that there is not a considerable risk attached to this approach too. One serious failure and it could all come crashing down.

That's precisely what happened when the dotcom bubble burst. A very low percentage of startups are successful. Information regarding that:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/n...
https://www.quora.com/What-per...

Don't worry Wisconsin is a Republican controlled state. As we all now Republicans are the party of low taxes, small government and restraint in state expenditure. We can therefore rely upon them to vote no to this vast expenditure of money from the state treasury on the grounds that it makes no sense from a business point of view, that it is an intolerable government interference in the workings of the free market and that it is not in harmony with their long treasured Republican ideals of small government and limiting expenditure from the state treasury. Sir, you may rely upon the Republicans to be the voice of reason in this matter.

There are different factions in the GOP. The one that believes in free trade and no subsidies has essentially lost out to a populist wing which wants to use tax and tariff policy to bring jobs back.

Will it work? Well it did for Apple - they were forced to pay US taxes on their offshore cash which convinced them to bring it onshore and invest it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

A mix of tighter controls on immigration, higher tariffs on imports, lower taxes on US companies and higher taxes on US companies overseas operations in low or no tax jurisdictions is being pursued. It's completely the opposite of the free market approach where you have open borders and low tariffs. Both sides aimed at having lower taxes. Trump cut corporate taxes massively and most individual taxes but not by as much as most Republicans would have wanted. That's because the plan had to be revenue neutral so it could be pushed through under reconciliation rules.

Still there have been studies that show that reducing corporate tax rates increase growth. E.g. this one of Canadian provincial governments

https://ntanet.org/NTJ/65/3/nt...

We examine the impact of the Canadian provincial governments' tax rates on economic growth using panel data covering the period 1977-2006. We fi nd that a higher provincial statutory corporate income tax rate is associated with lower private investment and slower economic growth. Our empirical estimates suggest that a 1 percentage point cut in the corporate tax rate is related to a 0.1-0.2 percentage point increase in the annual growth rate.

I.e. what Trump is doing is pretty different from standard small government Republican policy.

There is nothing to prove there: there is something improper about the warrant.

Not until you prove it.

Prove what? The fact that they omitted to say that dossier was paid by political adversaries of Trump? The fact that they omitted to say that the corroborating source Yahoo News was in fact the same source? The fact that Steele was a known critic of Trump, per Ohr testimony? They used a libellous source at best.

No one has yet proven that any substantial amount of the material in the Steele dossier is actually false.

Because it is mostly unverifiable and the author knew it when he wrote it. The few verifiable parts are false, like the fact that Trump's lawyer was in Prague to meet Russian officials. The rest is just unverifiable gossip (e.g. who can prove the existence of a Russian dossier on Trump to blackmail him, if not the Russian themselves?) retold by anonymous sources.

Warrants are frequently granted on the word of known drug addicts and petty criminals, they're not the most trustworthy people, but if the evidence seems credible enough, then further investigation is warranted.

If that is not worrisome to you, I do not know what to say. However in this case it is not just unverified information, it is also a matter of unverified sources. A drug addict probably knows a given drug dealer, so he may not be trustworthy, but he is surely an informed source. In this case the source is an anonymous guy, who claims to know everything about the most protected secrets of the Kremlin. It is untrustworthy the information and the source.

When you sell out, good business decisions take a back seat to the constant pressure to increase profits - and thus the stock price - at all costs.

There is no good evidence to support that publicly traded companies have worse long-term returns due to a concentration on short-term stock price.

"a new study of more than 900 funds raised since 1986 finds...no significant return difference between private equity and an equivalent portfolio of publicly traded stocks." (source).

We have observations of that phenomen since 1917: https://www.forbes.com/sites/s...

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly and does change in market share. In fact, if you look at consumer computing devices as a whole, instead of focusing only on classic style desktops, Microsoft has dropped way more.

The history of electrical utilities is that as soon as the government lightened up regulations to allow more competition, more competition happened. That's a pretty strong argument that it's been the regulation saying no one is allowed to compete in an area driving the lack of competition, not the other way around. Electrical generation is a lot more competitive now that the government allows it. The government still enforces local monopolies in electrical distribution. Why do they need to make that legally enforced if it's a natural monopoly, meaning no competition would arise if it wasn't illegal? Back in reality, there is still competition creeping in from local solar and natural gas installations who setup right where the power is needed, rather than using the monopolized distribution lines. It's pretty bold to claim "No competition could naturally arise, so therefore we must make any competition illegal!" That contradicts itself, as there would be no need to make competition illegal if it was actually a case of a natural monopoly.

Insurance companies in the US now can't refuse to issue or charge more based on pre-existing conditions. As well, they must, in general, pay out 80% of the premiums they collect in claims and, if they pay out less than 80%, must rebate the difference to their policy holders. This leaves up to 20% of premiums for administrative costs (claims processing and validation, customer service, statements, payment processing, leases, utilities, facilities), marketing (including negotiating with providers) and sales, and profit.

It's pretty hard to blame insurance companies for much since the imposition of the PPACA and, at most, you can only blame them for LESS than 20% of the cost. Remember that Medicare and Medicaid which have virtually no marketing costs and no profit motive and have the power of government to coerce private providers to accept their terms unilaterally still have administrative costs. Although proponents of Medicare sometimes assert that its overhead is only 2% vs. private insurers 15-20%, that analysis has some serious flaws.

Also, many (perhaps most -- although the more sophisticated providers have learned how to game the Medicare system to maximize payments -- sometimes with ridiculously inefficient tricks) medical providers can't survive on Medicare, let alone Medicaid, payments alone which is why many practices limit in some way the number of such patients they accept. What this means is that some percentage of private insurance money is subsidizing Medicare and Medicaid.

For example, there is one procedure that most healthy people will have once a year that my provider bills $150 for, my insurance knocks it down to a negotiated rate of $79 and Medicare either pays nothing for (claiming it is bundled with other related services) or about $15 (if it truly is provided in an "unbundled" situation). The actual cost to the provider is almost certainly well below the $79 and above the $15 price points.

Another example is that experienced by someone I know who transitioned to Medicare from employer insurance. On employer insurance, they went in for some routine office visits for a particular (non life threatening and more just annoying) medical condition and saw the doctor, they talked, the doctor did an exam and the visit was over and the provider got something like $150 or so negotiated rate from the insurer. Immediately upon transitioning to Medicare, the entire experience changed -- the doctor still saw the patient but for a bit less time, but then a lower skilled person (I don't think they were even a PA) spent much longer with the patient. The doctor only collected about $30 for the visit, but the whole package ended up through some clever billing, ended up costing Medicare about $150 still but was much less efficient for all involved.

Yeah, 52 grand is pretty expensive. And by investing in your house you are making your property taxes go up, so you will pay again. Elon Musk had this comment: "The economics are not yet compelling where housing and utility costs are low and property taxes are high."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sleasca/2017/05/16/tesla-solar-roof-cost/2/

Tesla is arguing that the roof defrays its own cost by generating electricity; and if you live in a sunny area and put in enough solar cells, the roof will pay for itself (and actually return a profit eventually). But with time value of money it's not a good investment at current prices.

So, right now, this is a roof for rich people who don't mind dropping a chunk of money that will take a long time to pay back. If you are building a mansion that will cost over a million bucks, why not throw a Tesla roof on it? It would be less than a 5% increase in cost, the roof is durable and looks nice, and you can feel that you are helping combat climate change. And if your neighborhood loses power, you can still have lights on in your house.

For people like me, and you I'm guessing, this is just too pricey right now.

Remember how Tesla's first car was a toy for rich people. Baby steps. If this roof product does well, they can ramp up production volume and bring costs down.

Or not

I will believe global warming is a real threat when the governments of the world deploy nuclear power in large numbers. Presumably these government officials have more information on the threat than any one reading this forum. The zero CO2 output of nuclear power is undeniable, or rather it's as close to zero as any other energy source that's being called "zero carbon".

There are a lot of climate activists who agree with you.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2017/08/03/the-real-climate-consensus-nuclear-power/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/03/climate-scientists-support-nuclear-power
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/189068-climate-scientists-to-green-activists-embrace-nuke-power
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists/index.html
https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-and-global-warming

...by the Scientific calisthenics required derive a working AGW theory, that hasn't been show to be true by any empirical evidence.

The basic global circulation model incorporating the effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (what you call "AGW theory") has been around for fifty years now (the peer-reviewed publication was in two papers by Manabe and Wetherald, in 1967). That's long enough for the predictions to be compared with measurements.

Guess what? Over fifty years, the theory is pretty well matching measurements.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly/
https://climategraphs.wordpress.com/2017/11/06/evaluating-the-prediction-of-manabe-and-wetherald-1967/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/mar/19/global-warming-accurate-prediction-1972

Anytime some authority insist that you give up freedom or money and the best they can do to justify it is to say, "It's complicated and you wouldn't understand, Trust Us", you know that something isn't right.

As it turns out, climate scientists have published extensive explanations of what they do, how they do it, how the models work, and all of the source code for their models. They don't say "trust us", they say "here's all the work we did, take a look at it."

As a starting point, look here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 and then for the actual details, start reading some of the thousand references cited.

The DOE performed basic research in the 1970s that led directly to our leadership in today's fracking technology

You seem to suggest, no one would've researched those technologies, if the government hadn't done it. Are you ready to support this suggestion with citations and other evidence?

Don't even try. Your own link states:

In all the hoopla, Steward’s point has gotten lost. He is quick to acknowledge that fracking's success came through the hard work of people at Mitchell Energy, building on the advances of others. Fracking technology has existed for more than a century, and the first commercial fracking job was done in 1947. His comment that “the DOE started it” refers to the Eastern Gas Shales Project, a research effort in the Appalachia Basin from 1979 that proved shale rock was rich in natural gas. The DOE-supported project tested the use of nitrogen foam to fracture shale formations, and its analysis led to a deeper understanding of natural shale fractures.

Sure, if the government has already done something and published the results, it would be stupid not to use them. But to imply, as you do, that the government's contribution was somehow unique and irreplaceable is to misrepresent the facts.

The DOE performed basic research in the 1970s that led directly to our leadership in today's fracking technology. Basic research funded by the government can be critical to a nation's technology and economic strength. As the articles note, it's not about choosing technologies, but helping them along. This is an important distinction, but it's clear that industry does not always fund basic research very well, esp. that with a long time to pay off. http://www.aei.org/publication... https://www.forbes.com/sites/l...

This transaction closes another chapter in the Big Blue Book of Missed Opportunities: https://www.forbes.com/sites/c... Just one question: How much Xerox paid to their Top Executives (in the 70's and 80's) for squandering their world changing technical discoveries?

Care to try and defend that?

Okay. Insurers and providers don't have high profits. I posted this the other day in response to someone blaming everything on the ACA, but: Health insurer profits, which were never extraordinarily high, are down since 2007. I don't have a convenient link for hospitals, but they're also in the 5% range.

Pharmaceuticals are the most profitable sector of the healthcare industry (by a pretty good margin), and they are responsible for a good portion of the increase in costs in recent years, but even they can't be blamed for everything. A lot of it is just ridiculous inefficiency: you've probably heard that filing health insurance claims, just doing the paperwork, costs hundreds of billions per year. Some of it is high salaries - that competition in staffing that you're talking about doesn't work very well, since patients can't really comparison shop between doctors. And doctors who work in hospitals can demand compensation based on how many patients they bring in... which is independent of how much they charge those patients, since the patients can't comparison shop.

Anyway, if you need to blame a single industry then you can blame the pharmaceutical industry, not health insurers, but that's not really accurate either. It's a big complicated problem without an easy scapegoat.

*cough* I mean, y'know.

*cough* I mean, y'know. $15 an hour.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

It's really unfortunate that science and research into cannabis and hemp extracts has been hampered for so long, since the more we analyze these plants, the more we understand just how beneficial some of their cannabinoids are.

I bring this up because an increasing number of patients and doctors are discovering the ability of CBD (cannabidiol, non-psychoactive) to relieve pain. Take the case of long-time professional baseball pitcher, David Wells: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... There is plenty of additional evidence to the efficacy of CBD - just search online. But here's an additional example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...

My hope is that more people will become aware that CBD can be a very effective alternative to opioids for pain relief, since CBD has very few negative side effects and is not habit-forming the way opioids are. And in fact, while CBD extracted from cannabis is only legal in some states, CBD extracted from hemp is legal in all 50 states. For those curious, the only real difference between marijuana and hemp is that the former has more than 0.3% THC content, whereas the latter has less than 0.3% THC content. THC is the psychoactive cannabinoid - the one that makes you feel high.

Americans are prescribed opioids at 10 times the rate of other developed nations (except Canada which is becoming more like the US in overusing opioids).

So, there is either a HUGE underlying medical issues that Americans face, which Europeans do not, or the medications are being over prescribed.

My money is on opioids being overprescribed, not surprisingly, there is a lot of money in the prescription opioid game, just look at the family which owns Purdue Pharma

Wireless #G networks are used extensively to access Internet and this would be a way for the Government to easily shut that down and/or restrict access to it. Several times Trump has called for an Internet "kill switch" or other measures. From Snopes (and other places):

On 7 December 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addressed a crowd of supporters at the U.S.S. Yorktown in South Carolina. During that appearance, Trump invoked a vague approach to campaign issues as he proposed restricting access for some individuals to the internet:

"We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way Somebody will say, ‘Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people." -- Trump

Trump calls for internet to be cut off for terrorists
The Law That Could Allow Trump To Shut Down The US Internet

etc...

I think that if that government wanted to do things sanely, they'd handle emergency room visit costs and the like

You are wrong about insurance companies profiting from the ACA. Health insurer profits, which were never extraordinarily high, are down since 2007. The most profitable sector in health care is pharmaceuticals, thanks to their sacrosanct ability to charge anything that they want for drugs, but even they can't be blamed for everything.

The ACA is indeed a mess, but that is because our health care system is extremely extremely messy. (Before you say, "No one could have known that." just... don't. Don't say that.) If you need a single thing to blame for the increase in costs it's drugs, but blaming a single thing is not going to really get you anywhere.

Because when I hear "regulated like the tobacco industry", I immediately think of regulations which will be, at best, an annoyance to the established players (ie. Facebook) but devastating to any potential small businesses that could one day be competitive with the big guys. This is exactly the way the tobacco industry has been regulated--the Democrats are a bunch of useful idiots to Big Tobacco, happily instituting whatever regulation seems like a good way to "stick it" to smokers and tobacco companies without the slightest consideration of the long-term consequences or economic effects. Let's look at some examples:

The FDA bans flavored cigarettes, supposedly to keep kids from trying cigarettes, yet for some reason doesn't ban menthol, which is the number 1 flavor that people try when they start smoking. But I guess we can't do anything that might hurt our buddies in Big Tobacco, eh? The actual effect is to put small, niche tobacco firms out of business--less competition for Big Tobacco.

All the ridiculous scare mongering over vaping, because even though it's obviously safer than smoking, it might not be totally 100% safe, and we can't allow anything to be sold that hasn't been proven to be completely 100% safe. Why isn't this standard applied to alcohol or tobacco? Oh, right, I forgot, we can't do anything that might hurt our big corporate friends. Better ban vaping now!

What's that? People got sick of the obscene taxes on cigarettes and switched to rolling their own from loose tobacco. That's a good thing, right? less money in the pockets of big tobacco companies, wasn't that the whole reason we made these regulations? Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot we really made these regulations so Big Tobacco wouldn't have to compete. We better hike takes on loose tobacco by more that 2000%!

The bottom line is that if you want Facebook (or anything, for that matter) to go away, please, for the love of God, do not regulate it like we have regulated tobacco. The tobacco regulations we've made thus far have been nothing but neatly wrapped gifts to big tobacco conglomerates, sold as "onerous rules and regulations" to a public that won't bother thinking about them for five seconds and will support it as long as it has the superficial appearance of "sticking it" to big tobacco companies.

I expect the same will happen with tablets: the majority of users eventually will use a tablet as their primary computing device.

LOL, so did Steve Jobs, about 10 years ago... He was wrong.

In fact, it seems not a year goes by without someone claiming that "this is the year PCs will die and be replaced by tablets."

http://time.com/3643693/tech-p...

https://www.theguardian.com/te...

http://www.datacenterjournal.c...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...

I personally find the debate comical... what does "PC" stand for? Personal Computer; what is a tablet, if not a computer that is personal?

Some folk would argue over anything.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of...

US is given as the 9th worst for cost out of the 90 countries measured.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/n...

Forbes measures 196 countries and puts the US at 114th, so the 82nd worst in the world.

But what do you get for this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Wikipedia says it's the tenth fastest... out of a list of ten.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Statistica says the same.

https://www.fastmetrics.com/in...

Fastmetrics gives a shade of puke.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...

Forbes says ninth.

But the speed is about half and the cost more than double that of either South Korea or Sweden. Anyone who has run cable knows a cable running machine can do quite a bit more than someone shinning up a mountain (and speeds in the Swedish countryside can reach 40 gigabits per second).

So the Value For Money is a quarter that of rival technological nations. Well, when you're nickel-and-diming your infrastructure, the odd quarter should be expected.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of...

US is given as the 9th worst for cost out of the 90 countries measured.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/n...

Forbes measures 196 countries and puts the US at 114th, so the 82nd worst in the world.

But what do you get for this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Wikipedia says it's the tenth fastest... out of a list of ten.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Statistica says the same.

https://www.fastmetrics.com/in...

Fastmetrics gives a shade of puke.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...

Forbes says ninth.

But the speed is about half and the cost more than double that of either South Korea or Sweden. Anyone who has run cable knows a cable running machine can do quite a bit more than someone shinning up a mountain (and speeds in the Swedish countryside can reach 40 gigabits per second).

So the Value For Money is a quarter that of rival technological nations. Well, when you're nickel-and-diming your infrastructure, the odd quarter should be expected.

In spite of it being perhaps more difficult to exploit, I have the impression that large data centres operating virtual private servers (commercial and corporate alike) have good reasons to be seriously concerned about Spectre.

Citing Forbes, Wikipedia’s article on Spectre says: “Spectre has the potential of having a greater impact on cloud providers than Meltdown. Whereas Meltdown allows unauthorized applications to read from privileged memory to obtain sensitive data from processes running on the same cloud server, Spectre can allow malicious programs to induce a hypervisor to transmit the data to a guest system running on top of it.”

By contrast, Wikipedia’s article on Meltdown says: “Meltdown attack cannot be used to break out of a virtual machine.” (Of course, Meltdown is nonetheless a critical problem, for other reasons.)

I had the misfortune of working at Zuora, so I've got a leg up on this.

Zuora is a dot com that handles subscription-oriented payments. They invented this model - the "subscription economy" - and, basically, they want everyone to become a renter of everything. That's the future they are pushing. "Renter economy" would be more honest.

'How The Subscription Economy Is Disrupting The Traditional Business Model', https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...

Also: 'The Subscription Economy', https://www.zuora.com/vision/s...

Internally, Zuora is more of a sales organization than a software organization. Technical support is also huge. More on that, below.

When I was there the Sales Team had a ship's bell, and they would ring it whenever they got a sale, and have a loud celebration - this, in an office where everyone except the executives were in one large room, with tables crammed together, in rows, back-to-back, like a school cafeteria full of workstations. Imagine trying to design an infrastructure in such an environment!

Technical Support was huge because the software had problems. So did the infrastructure. There was a mailing list for software developers, it was all the output collected from the running JVM, and it was pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of runtime errors, thousands of errors that nobody had time to fix because they were too busy getting rich to do it right.

While I was there Zuora had huge plans to roll out their infrastructure at some place outside Las Vegas. Their lead guy had brought some confidential plans from his former employer, eBay, on how to rack things. I sensed that Las Vegas was more about hookers then it was about infrastructure. The whole thing seemed pretty flaky. Supposedly it had military level security. Yawn.

I don't mind saying that, despite the military security, the root password on EVERYTHING was "zuora123", that everyone knew what the root password was, and that Zuora had a VPN direct to Shanghai, where all of their Java programmers were - which basically meant that the Chinese mainland had a direct channel into the heart of the infrastructure that I was tasked with protecting. The CEO is Chinese, you see.

It's not clear to me what the consequences of mainland China having direct access to the credit information of every gwailo wealthy enough to live this sort of a subscription-based lifestyle, but I'm sure it was useful for Chinese intelligence in refining their human intelligence.

So, welcome to the subscription economy. Credit cards only. The future is here. Get in line, please ... and bend over.

subsidizes the manufacturing of American solar panels then the tariff effectively inflates the cost of a new solar panel in America. Sounds like a bum deal to me and it does to these guys too - https://www.wired.com/story/wh... Also bear in mind that while producing power through solar panels in America is heavily subsidized, the manufacturing of the solar panels is not. Forbes notes that solar production is heavily subsidized by the American tax payer. I'm sure that hurts some people's feelings but honestly I think anything that creates a real incentive for Americans to invest in real green technology should be labeled A Good Thing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

Elites, mainstream media, ...

Fox News IS the mainstream media. They are the #1 Cable news network.

Elites? WTF are the elites?

Fox News makes people uninformed; NPR informs them. I know, I know, Forbes is a Liberal rag.

Or how Fox News makes folks less informed than those that don't even watch the news! Again, NPR for the best informed.

And I don't know about you, but I consider Rupert Murdoch to be an elite himself - you know, a billionaire who has huge amounts of political power.

After reading the article, summary and the non-hidden comments, I noticed that Microsoft was only mentioned once. It was mentioned in the article, only in passing reference to reforms surrounding litigation.

This is ridiculous. Microsoft, Intellectual Ventures, and their trolls have been a tax to innovation for decades.

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In addition, they use their global footprint to avoid taxes on multiple continents.

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How can the summary and so many comments utterly fail to mention this?

If it keeps this up, it will take a lot of hot weather to make up for this...geez its cold in the south!!!!

You're forgetting the fundamental definition in the AGC community -- if the temperatures in an area are warmer than average, it's climate change. If the temperatures in an area are lower than average, it's just weather. And NOAA will ensure, through it's ongoing and declared practice of "adjusting" improperly-recorded historical temperature data, that the temperature record shows an ongoing rise in temperature 'proving' AGC.

No sarcasm intended

You are not 110010001000, are you?

His objection (sincere or sarcastic) was not the diminishment of anonimity, but simply the alleged illegality.

they accept cash. Cash = anonymity

Not quite... Many taxi companies keep record of where each ride originated and ended. And many (most?) take at least a picture of the passenger, if not a video of him. Such video-equipment is a booming business.

Of course, Uber and others are doing it too. Get used to it — with very few exceptions, whatever can be legally perceived, can also be legally recorded...

Apple Watch has the highest sales of any smart watch or luxury watch. I see them everywhere.
Seven million units according to Forbes.

because there's been a big push into digital/online adverts and they have to be obnoxious to have any impact. It looks like the push is coming from old media dying off. Radio is going away and TV's taking a hit from Netflix/Hulu/etc. e.g. services that are subscription based instead of ad supported. It'll be tough for them to go the cable route and introduce ads on top of the subscription fees since that risks driving folks back to cable. The high cost of internet service combined with the death of Net Neutrality and bandwidth cap regulation means cutting the cord isn't much cheaper anymore. A coworker just did it and he's saving about $25/mo (and only that much because he doesn't think he'll go over the newly instituted caps and trigger those fees).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/p...

South Korea banning trading, China already banned the exchange of cryptocurrencies and crypto mining operations, and Japan is still considering banning ICOs. Tough row to hoe for crypto folks in Asia!

"Literal trillions of dollars as calculated by whom? You magnify the "subsidies" of fossil fuels while handwaving over alternatives."

If you're going to persistently refuse to understand the subject whilst insisting you're right regardless I'm going to stop wasting my time. As I said - a simple Google search will find you hundreds of results, so to answer your question in terms of whom, literally every journalist and scientist that's ever objectively studied the subject. As Google is apparently way too confusing for you though, I'll make it easier:

The IMF: https://www.wsj.com/articles/i...

National Academy of Sciences: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10...

Side note on the above: "The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress." - you argue oil is better than coal, it's really not, presumably when you say you like fossil fuels what you really mean is that you're an oil man if you believe what you said.

Forbes Journalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

MIT Economics Prof: http://news.mit.edu/2016/carbo...

World Nuclear Association: http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

Union of Concerns Scientists: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-e...

Skeptical Science: https://skepticalscience.com/p...

Cambridge University: https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/bus...

How long do you want me to keep going before you decide to stop being in denial? You can't pretend this is bias or partisanism - as I've said all along, there's a reason why left and right come to the same conclusions when they study this. You cannot pretend the likes of Forbes to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the US government to the IMF, and Cambridge University to the World Nuclear Association are somehow bedfellows that all sit on the exact same end of the political spectrum - they don't, that's nonsense - they all agree because it's true, and if you disagree it's because you're being irrational.

I did as you said regarding earthquakes from dams, and yes, whilst I'm willing to admit I hadn't appreciated quite how harmful some of them had been, I think you still fundamentally fail to understand the differences in scale - we're talking less than a million deaths from them across all time, and yet fossil fuels kill tens (possibly squeezing into hundreds) of millions globally not just in one off incidents, but on an ongoing basis every year. There's still not even a remotely equivalent comparison - the externalities of fossil fuels are still many orders of magnitude higher on healthcare alone - even if you reject the global warming argument, and ignore the geopolitical strife caused by fighting over fossil fuels, you're still seeing orders of magnitude more externalities (and deaths) on fossil fuels based just on the topic of healthcare and nothing more alone. When you factor in the other realities - war, climate change and so forth, it's like comparing a spec of sand to the size of the plant and saying the two are equivalent.

I've Google'd the shit out of trying to find any kind of study showing that other fuels externalities are equivalent to fossil fuels. Guess what? Nothing, whilst it's consistently poss

One would think so. It is a rather incredible decision. Here's a legal summary which includes a link to the full text of the decision: https://apps.americanbar.org/a...

[U]nless a person has a pre-existing right to be free of the threatened economic harm, threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay for a legitimate service is not extortion.

WTF??? What is a "legitimate service"? I guess the mafia has been doing it wrong this whole time. If only they had been offering a "legitimate service" with a threat of economic harm, rather than a questionable service with a threat of physical harm, they would have been in the clear.

Perhaps I'm missing something though. Here's another article about it, where they talk about this ruling being beneficial to protect review/complaint websites in general: https://www.forbes.com/sites/e...

I can see a need to protect the right of people to publish grievances with businesses, but this specific decision seems rather lopsided.

There was an interesting report on Seattle's minimum wage which found that while employment for Seattle grew, employment for people affected by the minimum wage grew less fast.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

But now we have a report on exactly what has been happening in Seattle's labor market.

Seattle's labor market has thrived since the city became the first major metropolis in the country to pass a law setting its minimum wage on a path to $15 per hour.

The city's job-growth rate has been triple the national average, for example.

Much of that success, though, can be attributed to trends separate from the minimum-wage law itself, such as the growth of Seattle's tech sector and its construction boom, according to a new report that University of Washington researchers presented to the City Council on Monday.

I have no problem with any of that. Employment is up, unemployment is down. But those other factors entirely swamp the effects of a minimum wage change. The report also notes:

Pay for low-wage workers climbed more in real Seattle than in synthetic Seattle, while their employment rate and hours climbed slightly less.

That's the important finding here. Employment rates and hours climbed because the economy is booming. But they climbed less in areas where the minimum wage was raised than they did in areas where it was not. The difference between those two is the employment lost to the higher minimum wage.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/0...

In 2014, Seattle voted to gradually hike its minimum wage to $15 an hour, with the rate jumping from $11 to 13 last year. Yet on average, low-wage workers have made $125 per month less.

That's a key result of a new University of Washington study that found that the hourly wage hike could in fact be costing jobs. The study, released last week, examined low-wage employment within the city of Seattle from 2014 to 2016.

"What we found," study co-author Mark Long explained to CNBC's "On the Money" recently, "is that employees increased wages, which you'd expect given the mandate of the law, but they also cut hours and they cut jobs."

Long, a professor of public policy at the University of Washington, added that as a product of fewer hours and available jobs, "the net amount paid to low-wage workers declined instead of increased."

Which is exactly what you'd expect to happen. If the government pushes up the minimum wage businesses that are short of cash will cut hours to try to stay running. So it's quite possible that people on minimum wage will see their take how pay drop. Add in the fact that a lot of minimum wage work is in principle replaceable with automation.

E.g. McDonald's have demoed machines to replace cashiers - and the signs are the public prefer them.

So you could cut staff for a restaurant down to just the kitchen staff and a manager. Next step is a burger producing machines and having the management done remotely.

I.e. if you increased the minimum wage enough you could cut the number of people a McDonald's employees from half a dozen to less than one.

Not to mention that most people working in a non famous chain restaurant are illegals and aren't getting paid the minimum wage - those restaurants just employ illegals and pay the fine if caught. McDonald's has to at least have the pretence that it doesn't break the law. Then again it could push the 'employing illegals' stuff onto franchisees and then cancel the franchise if they are caught.