Hectares are common everywhere. Scientists and engineers everywhere use hectopascal. In quite a few languages you order 30 deca(grammes) of ham just as you would order 10 ounces in the US at the butcher's till, or 5 deci(litres) of wine in a restaurant.
SWIFT is an interchange and netting network owned by the financial institutions that do the interchange and netting. If SWIFT (and similar networks) were not in place, they'd do the same transactions via 1-to-1 agreements.
The real abuses of power come not from SWIFT's shareholders but by the EU and US government putting pressure on it to use it for their goals. This would be not better but a lot worse if SWIFT were a government agency...
It is neither sovereign, nor fiscally independent - its income mostly comes from the national treasury, the taxes of people employed there go to the national treasury, the tax rates are set by the national treasury.
And it is not for-profit either - it is a municipal local authority, with the only anomaly being that its corporate tenants get votes in the council too (since it has so few residential tenants compared to corporates).
Make no mistake, life will "flourish" even after 3 billion humans have starved. Nobody's arguing that life will stop -- or even human life; they just point out that the flooding of Bangladesh and the droughts in Subsaharan Africa might be avoidable...
Even people who are not fans of US propaganda must admit that "those communists" were only successful in striking back against Germany due to the massive military aid from the US and Britain. Lend-Lease supplied Stalin with about 4,000 Sherman tanks, 15,000 artillery guns, 350,000 Studebaker trucks, 150,000 jeeps etc etc -- when almost all of the Soviet production base was occupied by Germans...
That's 15 billion dollars over 30 years, with costs shared by all global powers and the US pitching in a 9% share.
I.e. the US in all likelihood pays less than 50 million a year towards it. (Less than the cost of a single fighter jet per year, not a big sacrifice when you already have 3000...)
The data at shadowstats is bullshit. A back-of the envelope calculation will show it. Take their "shadow CPI" average over the last 30 years, compound it, and multiply a shopping basket from 30 years with that number; the outcome will show you how the numbers are made up from thin air by a guy who wants to sell newsletters.
The Apple malaise illustrates the diversity and selection part - all that the "think different" and "i'm a Mc" advertising has achieved is that everyone who has $2000 burning a hole in their pocket is buying the same McBook+ipad combo, whether it suits their needs or not, and in a positive feedback effect two thirds of the PC shelf space in electronics stores is now taken up by those two items. Any selection disappears. Drawing the analogy to magazines is left as an exercise.
Your leaf computer is lying to you. There are 36.6kWh of heat in a gallon of gasoline, the computer claims to have converted 32.5 of those into electricity. This means a combustion efficiency of almost 90%. Theoretical limit for a single-stage car engine is 37% afaik, and on average even the best cars don't get more than 20%-30%...
You're either ignorant or trolling. Apple forced the e-book industry to convert to agency pricing. This raised prices for consumers and was probably illegal.
Qualcomm Mirasol is pretty much there (full color, stable without electricity, 15fps), but so far they've only scaled it up to 6 inches; I think you'll have to wait 3-5 years to have a 24 inch version...
The core CPI doesn't measure these things -- but GP was not talking about core CPI, therefore your objection is irrelevant.
Your CPI anecdotal is cute, but wrong. Anecdotally (and in reality), a lot of prices are still below the 2008 level - gasoline, for instance, is still 20% cheaper than at the 2008 peak. (And electronics, of course, are half the price or less for the same performance.) Out of the top-level CPI categories in the US, housing, transportation and recreation are at the same level as in 2008.
The bezel could shrink - but only if your new screen tech consumes a lot less juice. The iPad's dimensions and weight are determined by the massive battery needed to get a 10 hour run time for the LCD, not mechanical constraints. (This is also why smaller tablets like the Fire only run for 6-8 hours.)
If bezel width were determined by mechanical reasons, the bezel wouldn't need to be any wider than an iPhone bezel...
Source? Last thing I heard they were completely dependent on Samsung and desperately trying to get TSMC to step up in case Samsung pulls the rug out. Even the PWRefficent people that they hired were chip designers, not manufacturers.
Hey, have you ever heard of pigovian taxes? Some taxes are levied with the exact purpose of "distorting" the economic system in order to discourage activities with negative externalities that cannot be internalized. Tobacco taxes, alcohol taxes, fuel duties in more enlightened countries... this proposed tobin tax is serving the same purpose - discouraging an activity with negative externalities. (Those being destabilizing financial markets, diverting skilled work and computing resources into an economically unfruitful zero-sum game, and making investment flows more volatile.)
But the solar panels need smoothing and storage, if you want to have electricity at night. That smoothing is provided by hydro plants on dams. There were plenty of accidents where dams broke and made city uninhabitable or killed a large amount of people -- as opposed to Fukushima's radiation which killed no one so far.
In fact, I'm almost certain that the Goldman Sachs stock you're talking about does not give you voting rights.
You just dunning-krugered yourself. Me, I am quite certain that you are wrong and that GS common stock entitles you to vote. (Of course, a 1 in 100mn voting share won't help you a lot - each GS employee has at least hundred times as much...)
No you wouldn't, unless you could export the machine and had unique know-how about its manufacturing.
If a machine doesn't save time and money vs. burger flippers, it doesn't get used. In the scenario that you described, McD would have to employ more skilled labour than they did in terms of burger flippers before -- why would they do that? In the workplace, the entire purpose of technology is to do more with less.
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Ergo: speak for yourself.
The real abuses of power come not from SWIFT's shareholders but by the EU and US government putting pressure on it to use it for their goals. This would be not better but a lot worse if SWIFT were a government agency...
I know better than to whoosh you, but to be a good pedant, you'd need to be technically correct...
And it is not for-profit either - it is a municipal local authority, with the only anomaly being that its corporate tenants get votes in the council too (since it has so few residential tenants compared to corporates).
Make no mistake, life will "flourish" even after 3 billion humans have starved. Nobody's arguing that life will stop -- or even human life; they just point out that the flooding of Bangladesh and the droughts in Subsaharan Africa might be avoidable...
Even people who are not fans of US propaganda must admit that "those communists" were only successful in striking back against Germany due to the massive military aid from the US and Britain. Lend-Lease supplied Stalin with about 4,000 Sherman tanks, 15,000 artillery guns, 350,000 Studebaker trucks, 150,000 jeeps etc etc -- when almost all of the Soviet production base was occupied by Germans...
I.e. the US in all likelihood pays less than 50 million a year towards it. (Less than the cost of a single fighter jet per year, not a big sacrifice when you already have 3000...)
The data at shadowstats is bullshit. A back-of the envelope calculation will show it. Take their "shadow CPI" average over the last 30 years, compound it, and multiply a shopping basket from 30 years with that number; the outcome will show you how the numbers are made up from thin air by a guy who wants to sell newsletters.
The Apple malaise illustrates the diversity and selection part - all that the "think different" and "i'm a Mc" advertising has achieved is that everyone who has $2000 burning a hole in their pocket is buying the same McBook+ipad combo, whether it suits their needs or not, and in a positive feedback effect two thirds of the PC shelf space in electronics stores is now taken up by those two items. Any selection disappears. Drawing the analogy to magazines is left as an exercise.
No, it's one of the moons of Jupiter.
Your leaf computer is lying to you. There are 36.6kWh of heat in a gallon of gasoline, the computer claims to have converted 32.5 of those into electricity. This means a combustion efficiency of almost 90%. Theoretical limit for a single-stage car engine is 37% afaik, and on average even the best cars don't get more than 20%-30%...
You're either ignorant or trolling. Apple forced the e-book industry to convert to agency pricing. This raised prices for consumers and was probably illegal.
Qualcomm Mirasol is pretty much there (full color, stable without electricity, 15fps), but so far they've only scaled it up to 6 inches; I think you'll have to wait 3-5 years to have a 24 inch version...
Read the 'pedia page and its sources about the Millennium Challenge 2002 and LtGen. Van Riper.
Your CPI anecdotal is cute, but wrong. Anecdotally (and in reality), a lot of prices are still below the 2008 level - gasoline, for instance, is still 20% cheaper than at the 2008 peak. (And electronics, of course, are half the price or less for the same performance.) Out of the top-level CPI categories in the US, housing, transportation and recreation are at the same level as in 2008.
If bezel width were determined by mechanical reasons, the bezel wouldn't need to be any wider than an iPhone bezel...
by the way, they are baking their own ICs now
Source? Last thing I heard they were completely dependent on Samsung and desperately trying to get TSMC to step up in case Samsung pulls the rug out. Even the PWRefficent people that they hired were chip designers, not manufacturers.
Hey, have you ever heard of pigovian taxes? Some taxes are levied with the exact purpose of "distorting" the economic system in order to discourage activities with negative externalities that cannot be internalized. Tobacco taxes, alcohol taxes, fuel duties in more enlightened countries... this proposed tobin tax is serving the same purpose - discouraging an activity with negative externalities. (Those being destabilizing financial markets, diverting skilled work and computing resources into an economically unfruitful zero-sum game, and making investment flows more volatile.)
Looks like it requires a subscription to Amazon Prime, but won't cost anything extra.
The OSM maps for my home city, at the least, are massively better than Google's, especially in terms of pedestrian/bike routes.
But the solar panels need smoothing and storage, if you want to have electricity at night. That smoothing is provided by hydro plants on dams. There were plenty of accidents where dams broke and made city uninhabitable or killed a large amount of people -- as opposed to Fukushima's radiation which killed no one so far.
In fact, I'm almost certain that the Goldman Sachs stock you're talking about does not give you voting rights.
You just dunning-krugered yourself. Me, I am quite certain that you are wrong and that GS common stock entitles you to vote. (Of course, a 1 in 100mn voting share won't help you a lot - each GS employee has at least hundred times as much...)
If a machine doesn't save time and money vs. burger flippers, it doesn't get used. In the scenario that you described, McD would have to employ more skilled labour than they did in terms of burger flippers before -- why would they do that? In the workplace, the entire purpose of technology is to do more with less.
An HTC Desire?
Lots of good sources are linked in the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire