TFA expressed shock that someone might have their natural lens removed. This is a routine operation, usually done because of cataracts.
My wife has had this done. She developed cataracts at a relatively young age, and they got bad enough that the insurance company signed off on the cataract surgery.
Noteworthy in my wife's case: we paid the extra money to get a vision-correcting lens in each eye. The usual replacement lens is a neutral lens, but her eyes are now correcting her vision from the inside. Before she had this procedure, she needed glasses all the time for everything. (Or contact lenses of course.) After the procedure, she only needs glasses for reading; they had to pick a distance for the correction to work at, and the default is to leave you able to walk around and drive and such without glasses, but need glasses to read. (Makes sense to me!)
She now has the best vision she has ever had in her life. She grumbles about needing reading glasses but I remind her she used to need glasses all the time for everything; this is a win.
I am seriously considering having this done myself as an elective procedure. I have some presbyopia and I now need glasses to read fine print. There are artificial lenses available that are flexible and restore the ability to focus on near things; these are called accommodating intra-ocular lenses (IOLs). It would be nice to get my close-up vision back. In the USA the available accommodating IOL is called the Crystalens.
I have been calling my wife a "cyborg" as she now has technological lenses rather than natural ones.
Returning to the news story: TFA is absolutely terrible, just awful. It fails to answer the most basic question: what is the purpose of this invention? The link given in TFS shows what seems to be a one-page PDF, but if you use the crude-looking navigation controls on the left you can browse forward and backward through the patent.
Here's the abstract. The PDF appears to be all image, no selectable text, so I just typed all this in.
An intra-ocular device includes an electronic lens that can be controlled to control the overall optical power of the device. The device can be installed within a flexible polymeric material shaped to conform to the inside surface of a lens capsule of an eye. Accommodation forces applied to the device and/or polymeric material via the lens capsule can cause a change in the optical power of the device and/or polymeric material. Further, such accommodation forces can be detected by an accommodation sensor of the device and the optical power of the electronic lens can be controlled based on the detected accommodation forces. Operated in this way, the device and polymeric material can restore a degree of accommodation to the eye that is related to existing mechanisms for controlling such accommodation, i.e., forces exerted by the eye via the lens capsule.
If I'm understanding that correctly, this is a very complicated way to get a lens that adjusts its focus in response to the normal movements of muscles in the eye to adjust focus.
I don't know why someone would want this rather than a purely passive device like a CrystalLens. I guess this would be more fine-tunable, so might provide the ultimate in vision focus; but it's tremendously more complex and would seem to require an external power supply, rather than being a simple piece of flexible clear material (of just the right shape and implanted in just the right place).
Intel was caught napping by the mobile revolution, and they were late to the party. Thanks to iPhone and Android devices, ARM is the standard for mobile.
Now, that by itself doesn't force out Intel. But ARM is very inexpensive, and available from multiple vendors. Intel's business model is to make chips that you need, that you can only get from Intel, and then charge a very profitable margin on those chips. Intel does not want to compete on price in a commodity market; that's not what they do.
So now Intel was trying to carve out a share of the mobile chip market, and it was competing against a chip design that is available from roughly six different companies. Their desired end game would be for the mobile companies to buy Intel chips, get locked in so they depended on Intel chips, and pay a profitable margin to Intel for those chips. But none of the mobile manufacturers wanted that... why would they? Why not just keep using ARM, which is getting more and more powerful anyway?
Intel basically had to pay companies to use the Atom. A few took Intel up on it, but those devices did not shake up the market at all. Basically a mobile device with an Atom was about as good as a mobile device with an ARM chip.
The only way this could possibly have worked would have been for Atom to be better than ARM, and not just a little better; it had to be so much better that it was a clear slam-dunk win, such an amazing chip that it would be worth the risk of entering into an entangling agreement with Intel (and being on the hook for Intel raising the prices on the chips). I see no evidence that Atom was really better at all than the ARM chips, let alone that much better.
So Intel is now going to stop paying companies to build with Atom, and is giving up on that whole market.
P.S. I would love a small form-factor PC running a 64-bit ARM chip with completely passive cooling and running Linux. I'd buy that. I might even buy it if it was called a "ChromeBox" and came with Chrome OS pre-installed, but it would be an easier sell if I could get drivers for plain Linux for all the hardware.
x86 looks pretty safe on the desktop for now, but give it a few years and we'll see if that's still true.
RE slates: I agree that slates during nomination phase can have a high impact. I still disagree that the anti-Puppy slate was not a slate or was okay somehow or was justified.
And I have never said anything good about the Rabid Puppies. I'm not a fan of them. This year they gave us Space Raptor Butt Invasion, which I'm sure they think is very funny, but I am not amused.
RE block voting for "No Award": I am amazed that you are even entertaining the theory that it was an organic movement. Toni Weisskopf received a record number of votes, and her record was shattered by the even more amazing 2:1 "No Award". And you think that just happened? You think it is actually more likely that 2500 people are familiar with her work, and so convinced it's terrible that they felt "No Award" was better than her? It's at this point that I give up trying to convince you.
Editor Toni Weisskopf is a professionalâ(TM)s professional. She has run one of the main sci-fi publishing houses for a decade. She has edited hundreds of books. She has discovered, taught, and nurtured a huge stable of authors, many of whom are extremely popular bestsellers. You will often hear authors complain about their editors and their publishers, but youâ(TM)re pretty hard pressed to find anyone who has written for her who has anything but glowing praise for Toni.
Yet before Sad Puppies came along, Toni had never received a Hugo nomination. Zero. The above mentioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden has 8. Toniâ(TM)s problem was that she just didnâ(TM)t care and she didnâ(TM)t play the WorldCon politics. Her only concern was making the fans happy. She publishes any author who can do that, regardless of their politics. Sheâ(TM)s always felt that the real awards were in the royalty checks. Watching her get ignored was one of the things that spurred me into starting Sad Puppies. If anybody deserved the Hugo, it was her.
This year Toni got a whopping 1,216 first place votes for Best Editor. That isnâ(TM)t just a record. That is FOUR TIMES higher than the previous record. Shelia Gilbert came in next with an amazing 754. I believe that Toni is such a class act that beforehand she even said she thought Shelia Gilbert deserved to win. Fans love Toni.
Logically you would think that she would be award worthy, since the only Baen books to be nominated for a Hugo prior to Sad Puppies were edited by her (Bujold) and none of those were No Awarded. Last year she had the most first place votes, and came in second only after the weird Australian Rules voting kicked in (donâ(TM)t worry everybody, they just voted to make the system even more complicated), so she was apparently award worthy last year.
Toni Weisskopf has been part of organized Fandom (capital F) since she was a little kid, so all that bloviating about how Fandom is precious, and sacred, and your special home since the â70s which you need to keep as a safe space free of barbarians, blah, blah, blah, yeah, that applies to Toni just as much as it does to you CHORFs. You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?
By giving 2,496 votes to No Award.
I've spent far too much time on this, so I am not going to dig through all the blog postings from last August and collect a bunch of blog postings about why the Puppies needed to be slapped down. It seems it wouldn't convince you anyway.
Look: you dont seem to know entirely what a slate is in the context of the Hugos and why it matters.
Oh, feel free to educate me. I will read what you write and give it due consideration.
IMHO a negative slate is still a slate. "You can vote for anything you want to, as long as you don't vote for anything the Puppies nominated" is a slate.
lots of people liked the 3 body problem
So what? There were at least 2000 people voting in lockstep to slap down anything nominated by the Puppies. The "No Award" vote total was over 3500 in some categories. Now, look at the vote totals for Three Body Problem; I gave you the link. I don't fully understand the way the voting system works, but I think that 2000 to 3000 votes for "No Award" would have locked in the win on the first cycle, leaving Three Body Problem and the others recalculating for second place.
Why do you think it matters whether people liked the novel? They were on a crusade. Do you really think that Toni Weisskopf is such a horrible editor that "No Award" is a reasonable choice rather than voting for her? Nobody thinks that, but plenty of people felt that it was more important to slap down the Puppies than to give out a Hugo. (I read on a blog comments to the effect that the Sad Puppies should feel ashamed for nominating Toni Weisskopf, since now the true fans were going to slap her down; they should have left her to be nominated by someone else so it wouldn't be necessary to vote against her.)
The self-appointed protectors of the Hugo felt that the Puppies must not be allowed to "get away with" nominating things because the Puppies did it "wrong". The crime the Puppies were accused of: nominating a slate. The solution was to vote perfectly for a pre-arranged list, which wasn't a slate, no not at all.
Maybe people liked Three Body Problem but voting it for Best Novel after Vox Day nominated it? That would never happen. The slapdown was nearly perfect, just a popular movie escaped from it... would they hand Vox Day a victory? Would they leave Vox Day able to say "the Sad Puppies were shut down completely, but I and the Rabid Puppies were able to pull out a win for the most presigious category, Best Novel." The answer is no, no chance of that, none.
If you really believe that the crusade would have given Vox Day a win just because the novel is good, you haven't read the same blogs I read right around the Hugos last year. But I'm guessing you didn't read them because you seem to genuinely believe that "there was no anti-Puppy slate, just an anti-s*** slate". And I've spent far far too long writing on this and I'm not going to try to persuade you further.
P.S. I plan to register to vote for the Hugos, and vote for whatever I like from the nominated works. I will not vote against something because of who nominated it. I don't believe that "protects" anything... they tried it last year and look where we are now.
It didn't call itself a "slate" but I call it that. The recommendations in that slate were followed and Puppy-nominated works were outvoted, by 2:1 in several cases. It was an unprecedented number of votes any way you look at it and the anti-Puppy slate voting absolutely was organized.
In the entire previous history of the Hugo awards there had been only 5 "No Awards" voted. Then last year the "Puppy-Free" slate recommended "No Award" in 5 categories; enough people voted the slate that all 5 categories passed "No Award" rather than allow even a single Puppy-nominated person to win any category.
There was exactly one deviation from the "Puppy-Free" slate. The popular movie "Guardians of the Galaxy" was voted for best movie Hugo.
Since the Puppies seem to have made a huge amount of nominations, I conclude that if there is such an anti-Puppy conspiracy it is a rather incompetent one.
It's true that the Sad Puppies surprised everyone, even themselves, by sweeping several categories in the nominations and getting most of their picks on the ballot. After that, the anti-Puppy faction really got organized, with the results shown above.
And there was no "anti puppy" slate, only an "anti shit story" slate.
Factually incorrect. The slate that won was advertised as the "Puppy-Free" slate, only they didn't call it a slate. They claimed to be against slate voting.
Of course the Sad Puppies nominations had vote totals all over the map, and then the "Puppy-Free" list was exactly followed in actual votes by 2400-3500+ people.
There was one exception: Guardians of the Galaxy was so popular that it was voted for even though it was recommended by Puppies. That was it. No other Puppy-nominated work won anything.
The thing is, that never happened outside some fantasy of yours.
As documented above, exactly one Puppy-nominated thing won, and that was the hugely popular movie Guardians of the Galaxy.
On what basis do you think something different would have happened for Best Novel? Why do you think that Best Novel, arguably the most prestigious Hugo, would have triumphed over the slate when the rest of the Puppies nominations were defeated at roughly 2:1?
I didn't personally think those were the best works those years either, but do people really need to get so riled up about it?
Well, I agree with Larry Correia: the Hugo award could be the award for the best work, or it could be the private award of a group of people who attend WorldCon every year, but it can't be both. And if it's going to be the award of a clique, they should be up-front about it, and not try to claim that it represents the "best" anymore.
It used to be every SF writer's dream to win the Hugo. It has now become clear that if the clique doesn't like you, you can't win a Hugo. Remember, the justification for the voting slate last year was that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies had to be stopped to "protect" the Hugo, and multiple people publicly bragged that they didn't read any Puppy-nominated books before voting against them.
the Puppies made things infinitely worse by deciding to stage their campaign
What should they have done instead? "Just accept that conservative or libertarian writers will never win" is not a good answer.
Scalzi's tweets, are certainly silly and juvenile (and really, you don't expect people to be silly and juvenile on twitter from time to time?) but they don't actually seem to be directed at Correia, just the Puppies in general.
The Sad Puppies 2 campaign was pretty much a solo effort by Larry Correia. That year, taunting over the results was taunting Larry Correia.
If you disagree, then please tell me whom you think Scalzi had in mind when he wrote: "I NEVER WANTED THE AWARD THAT'S WHY I'VE WHINED LIKE A KICKED DOG ABOUT IT FOR A COUPLE YEARS RUNNING."
So Among Others and Redshirts were not part of some "SJW conspiracy." They were just "good" pandering to the fans who usually vote for the awards.
First of all, Sad Puppies posits a "cabal" of those "fen" you mention, who noticed how few votes it would take to sway the Hugo awards and started voting in blocks behind the scenes. The cabal tends toward liking SJW stuff and favors various specific people and companies. This is different from saying that some "SJW conspiracy" infiltrated fandom and started controlling things.
Anyway: you give a plausible explanation. However, this doesn't convince me that there's no cabal, because Tor Books got so many more nominations than other publishers, Scalzi and Glyer get so many Hugo nominations.
Should Scalzi have 30% more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke? Does Glyer deserve 51 Hugo nominations, when Stanley Schmidt was an editor for three decades and didn't get nominated until he retired?
The thing is that the fen are not being intentionally cliquish. They're happy to welcome new _individual_ members with open arms.
This whole thing started when the cliques failed to welcome Larry Correia with open arms.
...my first book had made a big splash with Baen readers, so they nominated me. Most of WorldCon didn't despise me then because at that point they hadn't heard of me yet.
Then my name showed up on the shortlist so they looked me up... Hoo boy. It was the end of the freaking world. Most of them didn't actually read my book to know they needed to vote against me. They found out I was an outspoken, right wing political blogger, and gun rights activist. Critics came out of the woodwork. Smofers actively campaigned against me. If you voted for Larry Correia, you were a bad person. I was accused of misogyny, racism, hatey-hate-mongery, and why wouldn't I keep my Jesus out of their uterus! My favorite post however was from a British blogger who said that "if Larry Correia wins the Campbell it will end literature forever".
What problem? For all of your complaining about "cliquish pseudo-academic types", McMaster (published by Baen) is in fact tied in first place with Heinlein for largest number of Hugo wins ever.
As I understand it, the Sad Puppies think that a cabal has been rigging votes for about a decade and a half or so. Let's assume that the rigging started around the year 2000.
Lois McMaster Bujold is the one author by Baen that can be nominated for a Hugo. She also hasn't won a Hugo for best novel since the year 2000. Only two books published by Baen have ever won a Hugo, both of those were Lois McMaster Bujold, and both of those were over two decades ago.
Since the year 2000, three books published by Baen have been nominated (all written by Lois McMaster Bujold), plus the Sad Puppies campaign nominated one book by Larry Correia in 2014. That's 4, or 3 if you don't want to count a Puppies nomination.
Also since the year 2000, 24 books by Tor have been nominated, with 6 winners. Some of those were no doubt on the merits (I hear nothing but good about last year's Three Body Problem and even Vox Day thinks it was the best novel of 2015) but again, I refuse to believe that Redshirts was the finest novel published in 2013.
So, the Hugos have in fact been recognising stuff published by Baen, and that was before the puppies of any sort got involved.
I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists - it's a catch-all for "any work that discusses topics or espouses positions that we are uncomfortable with".
The typical Sad Puppies member is not so much decrying "left-wing" as decrying SJW-ish works. Have you read "If You Were a Dinosaur My Love"? I refuse to believe that it was the best short fiction in its year, but it got nominated for the Hugo. Was it because it checked the right boxes... SJW themes, written by a woman?
The other part of it is that they hate Scalzi because they believe he is connected with the behind-the-scenes clique or cliques that used to decide who got the Hugo. I've never met anyone who genuinely believed that Redshirts was the best novel of its year, deserving of Hugo status; I've heard it is a light and fun read ("swashbuckling" maybe?) but it can't have been the best novel published that year. Somewhat more egregiously, Scalzi published a book of stuff from his blog and that won a Hugo also, and then as part of the Sad Puppies firestorm the cliquish types claimed that some of the Sad Puppies nominations were not sufficiently scholarly and were an insult to the Hugo. I don't know about you, but I hate double standards, and here a double standard was applied to the benefit of Scalzi.
I suspect they don't like Lois McMaster Bujold very much either, since she frequently explores gender issues - but most of her books are also pure space opera.
Oh no, not at all. The Sad Puppies are not a homogeneous bunch, but on the whole they love Lois McMaster Bujold. If you know only one thing about a book, that it was published by Baen, you know that the Sad Puppies probably like that book. Not a slam dunk, but that's the way to bet.
Lois McMaster Bujold writes entertaining books. The Sad Puppies like entertaining books. Her books aren't loaded down with SJW freight; it's interesting to see how a strong and independent woman from Beta Colony reacts to the strangely backward society of Barrayar.
Remember how the Sad Puppies nominated Toni Weisskopf? She's the senior editor at Baen. She edited Lois McMaster Bujold's books. The Sad Puppies nominated her for a Hugo for editing.
How about defending a puppie nominee which lost to no award rather than straw manning? Try to read this novella, I dare ya.
Okay, I took your dare. I didn't read the other nominees so I don't know that I would have voted for it to get the Hugo, but I liked that story pretty well. I didn't like the beginning, but I stuck with it, and a few pages in it hit its stride and was pretty engaging. It's an old-fashioned sort of story, a kind of travelogue where we are seeing a world through the eyes of someone from outside that world (someone from the frozen north visiting the "Warm Lands"). As a story it was pretty good once you got past the rough beginning, and as world-building I thought it was excellent.
It sounds, however, like you are claiming that the story is so bad that there is no way it was nominated in good faith, that it must have been nominated to prove some kind of political point. If that is your theory, please explain just what that point might be, because I didn't see one.
Personally, I think the book Starship Troopers is more libertarian than right-wing. I have argued that point here on Slashdot.
Reason also counts Heinlein as a libertarian. "I'm so libertarian I have no use for the libertarian movement," said Heinlein.
P.S. It's a sobering thought to realize that Starship Troopers couldn't possibly win a Hugo today. I'm certain that people would literally bus in additional voters if that was what it took to make sure it didn't win, because the modern SJW thinking is that Heinlein was a right-wing fascist misogynist racist. Never mind that he wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, never mind that he wrote strong women (possibly modeled after his wife, who was a strong woman in real life), and never mind that his works do feature minority characters. (In the short story "Water is for Washing", written not very long after World War II, the protagonist rescues two children and himself from a watery disaster, with help from a hobo. One of the children is a Japanese-American, and the protagonist says something like "He's a Jap!" The other child, a white girl, says "No, that's Tommy." Heck, the novel Starship Troopers has a Filipino protagonist and the future armed forces are completely racially integrated.)
go and actually LOOK at the nominees from the Sad Puppies.
Yes, but I think this is now mostly about Rabid Puppies, who successfully nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion.
The Rabid Puppies pretty much packed the nominations... some of the nominated works were on the Sad Puppies list so they are likely good, but some of them are just trolling in-jokes. I'm pretty sure the Space Raptor one is just trolling.
Every slot filled by Rabid Puppy trolling is a slot that wasn't filled by a good work worthy of a Hugo. This is much worse than last year.
The "Rabid Puppies" and "Sad Puppies" have about as much to do with each other as "JavaScript" and "Java". That is, nothing but a confusing similarity of name.
Charges that Sad Puppies needs to control Vox Day are simply unfair. How are they supposed to do that exactly? Vox Day is an independent adult and there is no reason why the Sad Puppies would have the ability to control him. See above point.
Last year, the Sad Puppies pleaded with Vox Day not to burn the Hugo Awards to the ground. Then the science fiction fandom got really organized and burned the Hugo Awards to the ground. Vox Day got everything he wanted and they did the work for him.
The Sad Puppies have always been about recommending the SF works that you enjoyed the most. Sad Puppies 4 continues this tradition.
Rabid Puppies, on the other hand, seems to be a trolling campaign by Vox Day. (Vox Day seems to have a knack for saying things that are so beyond the pale that they literally enrage people. I suspect he's trolling because his statements are so perfectly calculated to enrage. And now "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"?)
One final point, submitted for your consideration: The novel Three Body Problem won a Hugo. It was Vox Day's favorite novel of the year, and had he read it a little sooner, he would have nominated it for a Hugo. It would then have lost the Hugo to "No Award" as the organized fandom was voting an "anti-Puppy" slate.
The organized fandom and their organized "No Award" campaign claimed that they had to award an unprecedented number of "No Awards" to protect the Hugo, but how would denying the Hugo to Three Body Problem have protected anything? What was protected when Toni Weisskopf was denied her Hugo? And here we are, with the Rabid Puppies causing worse trouble than ever, and some fraction of fandom repelled by the No Award and wooden asterisk plaque antics, and walking away from the whole thing.
Until the rich realize the poor have a lot more money and raise the prices. It's the first thing I would do.
Unless you get the government in your pocket, the next thing you would do is watch your competitors charge lower prices and take all your customers. (If you can get the government to give you a monopoly, or require all your competitors to charge as much as you want to, then you're golden.) The closer the market is to a free market, the worse your plan will work.
I think inflation does cause prices to go up, but I don't see any mechanism whereby inflating by giving the money to the people would force prices up more than inflating by giving the money to a few banks.
Right now, when the government wants to expand the money supply, the Federal Reserve just sort of dumps money on the biggest financial institutions. Then it pays them a small interest fee for their service of having use of the money (0.25% according to this Investopedia article).
If the government really must inflate the money supply, then it seems to me that the best way to do it would be to spread the new money evenly among the citizens. It's just part of reality that when you have lots of money, it's easier to get more money, so almost all the time when we are talking about the economy, everything benefits the rich more than the poor. Here would be a direct payment that would definitely benefit the poor more than the rich.
Inflation effectively steals part of the value of the money. This is hardest on the poor, and people trying to live on a fixed income. Directly paying the inflation to the people would offset the harm, at least partially.
P.S. I'm a minarchist libertarian, so I don't really like seeing the government messing with the money supply at all. I'd rather just see prices deflate, so that maybe a hamburger would go back to costing a dime, and even a small income would be enough to live on. However, I'm not a trained economist, and apparently Milton Friedman believed we need to inflate the money supply as the economy expands. If you have to bet on whether Milton Friedman was right or I am right, you should bet on Milton Friedman. And if we accept that we need to inflate the money supply, I'd just as soon do it by paying the new money out to all the citizens.
Oh so emission standards is obamas fault? i don't recall him passing any.
The Obama Administration has officially taken credit for making the CAFE standard tougher.
The Obama Administration today finalized groundbreaking standards that will increase fuel economy to the equivalent of 54.5 mpg for cars and light-duty trucks by Model Year 2025. When combined with previous standards set by this Administration, this move will nearly double the fuel efficiency of those vehicles compared to new vehicles currently on our roads.
I recall how in the eary 70's emmissions standard were going to destroy the automobile with engines getting terrible gas mileage, and no power.
It's true that engines have come a long way since the early 70's. It's also true that back then, most people didn't imagine just how far it would be possible to go.
However, I think we really are running up against some hard limits here. You can keep ratcheting the laws upward but at some point it really is impossible to comply.
In my opinion, the best way to clean up the air is to look at the whole system and try to get the area under the curve to shrink. The strategy being pursued by the Obama administration is to demand the cleanest engines they can get away with demanding, even if this makes cars more expensive; combine that with a sucky economy and new cars are selling more slowly. That means that older cars are staying on the road longer. I would favor a strategy of leaving the standards where they are, or possibly even easing them just a little, and watching competition float the cost of a new car downward a bit. Less-expensive cars means more cars being sold means more clean cars being driven.
At the same time, we need to get more serious about punishing drivers of really polluting old cars. This disproportionately punishes the poor, as for the most part only the poor will be driving the really polluting really old cars. I read somewhere that the nasty blue smoke from just one of those old cars is polluting like three dozen new cars; I just Googled for a reference on that, and while I didn't find one, I did find this: 25% of cars produce 90% of car pollution
Suppose a car is 99.7% clean. Suppose that you could force the car company to make the car 99.9% clean, but the cost of the car would go up $3000. Would you do it? I'm not sure I would, but the Obama administration I believe would go for it.
Those cheating VW diesels emit too much pollution, but they are much cleaner than older diesel cars. It is a better deal for me if my neighbor gets rid of his old diesel and buys a new cheating VW diesel. Even better still if he gets one of the cars that doesn't cheat, but those cost more.
I hate it when I see an old "beater" car go by with a noxious cloud of blue smoke coming from the tailpipe. I would love to see all those cars off the road. To speed up the process, stop making new cars more expensive.
P.S. I can't take credit for the idea of looking at the effect of the cost of new cars on the total behavior of the system; I got the idea from this blog post.
P.P.S. I look forward to electric cars becoming common. If electricity is cheap and electric cars are cheap, pollution will drop even more.
It sure looks like Hillary Clinton engaged in a conspiracy to migrate classified information off of the secure network and onto her insecure email server. She instructed subordinates to summarize information and send it as new emails, which of course were not marked as classified.
She's not dumb and she's a lawyer, so she knew what she was doing was illegal.
In the first e-mail, Clinton curtly instructs Sullivan, "It's a public statement. Just email it." Minutes later, Sullivan responds, "Trust me, I share your exasperation. But until ops converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can't even access it."
"ops" means the "operations" group in the State Department, where apparently Hillary Clinton had people reading emails on the secure system and then sending a summary to her insecure server. "converting" to the unclassified email system.
If that last story is correct, Hillary Clinton's personal email server could have lead to disastrous consequences or death for real human beings. We're way, way beyond anything excusable.
I've read articles speculating that Apple might be re-designing the Mac Pro again as many of its intended users are disappointed that it has no internal expansion at all. So Apple could be sitting on a design refresh, waiting for these new chips.
I even read speculation that Apple would cancel the Mac Pro product line, but IMHO that is very unlikely. Apple sells a lot more notebooks than Mac Pros, but I just can't see Apple walking away from a very high-margin product.
So now that there are refreshed Xeons, maybe we will see a refreshed Mac Pro.
P.S. I was surprised that Apple didn't release a standard enclosure for lots of hard drives or whatever. You should have your Mac Pro and then one box with one cord, rather than a half-dozen boxes and a half-dozen cords. But I guess Apple left that for third parties such as Sonnet. I watched the video for that Sonnet product I linked... it said that Sonnet followed Apple's guidelines for how to best mount a Mac Pro. Therefore, Apple has guidelines for third party vendors for Mac Pro mounting products.
Even so, it's amazing how complicated the Sonnet enclosure has to be to solve the problem. Thunderbolt connectors can pop out, so they invented a retaining device that uses a bolt to keep the plug in. You need to run multiple Thunderbolt cables inside the box. And they said they were not able to offer a passthrough for Thunderbolt because Thunderbolt won't work with one (they didn't elaborate, something about needing active circuits on both ends of the connection, but I don't know why that rules out a passthrough).
And oh boy is that an expensive way to go: buy an expensive Mac Pro, then spend another $1500 on the enclosure.
There have been other firearms made that look like a cell phone.
Here's a rather old video of a fake phone that can fire four rounds of.22 ammo. I'll bet accuracy is terrible with no sights and probably no rifled barrels.
The new one is presumably firing something bigger than.22, but it's still not the first time something a gun/phone has been made. It may be the first time someone has planned to mass-produce such a thing, though.
Even back in the World War II days there were single-shot.22 weapons made to look like pens.
I remember the controversy about the WingDings TrueType font that Microsoft made. It had a bunch of random little pictograms, and as this was long before Unicode support was common, it had the pictures mapped to random characters.
Someone noticed that if you typed "NYC" and then changed the font to WingDings the result was a skull-and-crossbones, a Star of David, and a hand making a thumbs-up gesture. So obviously, this was a shorthand way of saying: death to Jews in New York City is a good thing. And obviously, this was done on purpose by some black-hearted person at Microsoft.
foreign countries also have monuments to their cultural or political heroes too.
It's a fair point: if our President visits a foreign country, he will be photographed in front of political art in that foreign country. When Reagan visited the Soviet Union, he was photographed in front of art of Lenin, and Lenin had an even higher body count than Che Guevara.
But the charge I level against President Obama is that he his helping the government of Cuba without getting anything at all in return. When Nixon went to China, I don't think he helped the government of China, but in any event China was one of the three superpowers and he was there to negotiate. (As I understand it he wanted to make sure that China and the USSR didn't become too cozy.) President Obama could have ignored Cuba, or at least stayed away; there is nothing of value at stake.
As I understand it, President Obama believes that normalizing relations with Cuba will, in the long run, benefit the people of Cuba. I truly hope that he is right and I am wrong about this. I would rather be wrong and have the people of Cuba benefit, than be right and have them continue to suffer.
I read through that article. It doesn't seem relevant. The Bitburg thing was a unique scenario: Reagan was paying back a favor, nobody realized at first that there might be SS buried in the graveyard, the German people overwhelmingly were in favor of the visit going forward, Reagan changed his speech to address the controversy, and Reagan visited a concentration camp afterward.
Imagine being [a Cuban-American] and seeing celebratory images of Guevara all around you. Imagine—even further—being the son or daughter of someone whom Guevara personally executed. There are such people in the United States. Or imagine—further yet—being a Cuban political prisoner, and knowing that masses in free countries were wearing Che on their chests.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA expressed shock that someone might have their natural lens removed. This is a routine operation, usually done because of cataracts.
My wife has had this done. She developed cataracts at a relatively young age, and they got bad enough that the insurance company signed off on the cataract surgery.
Noteworthy in my wife's case: we paid the extra money to get a vision-correcting lens in each eye. The usual replacement lens is a neutral lens, but her eyes are now correcting her vision from the inside. Before she had this procedure, she needed glasses all the time for everything. (Or contact lenses of course.) After the procedure, she only needs glasses for reading; they had to pick a distance for the correction to work at, and the default is to leave you able to walk around and drive and such without glasses, but need glasses to read. (Makes sense to me!)
She now has the best vision she has ever had in her life. She grumbles about needing reading glasses but I remind her she used to need glasses all the time for everything; this is a win.
I am seriously considering having this done myself as an elective procedure. I have some presbyopia and I now need glasses to read fine print. There are artificial lenses available that are flexible and restore the ability to focus on near things; these are called accommodating intra-ocular lenses (IOLs). It would be nice to get my close-up vision back. In the USA the available accommodating IOL is called the Crystalens.
I have been calling my wife a "cyborg" as she now has technological lenses rather than natural ones.
Returning to the news story: TFA is absolutely terrible, just awful. It fails to answer the most basic question: what is the purpose of this invention? The link given in TFS shows what seems to be a one-page PDF, but if you use the crude-looking navigation controls on the left you can browse forward and backward through the patent.
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20160113760
Pub. No.: US 2016/0113760 A1
Pub. Date: Apr. 28, 2016
Filed: Oct. 24, 2014
Here's the abstract. The PDF appears to be all image, no selectable text, so I just typed all this in.
If I'm understanding that correctly, this is a very complicated way to get a lens that adjusts its focus in response to the normal movements of muscles in the eye to adjust focus.
I don't know why someone would want this rather than a purely passive device like a CrystalLens. I guess this would be more fine-tunable, so might provide the ultimate in vision focus; but it's tremendously more complex and would seem to require an external power supply, rather than being a simple piece of flexible clear material (of just the right shape and implanted in just the right place).
Speculation: this m
Intel was caught napping by the mobile revolution, and they were late to the party. Thanks to iPhone and Android devices, ARM is the standard for mobile.
Now, that by itself doesn't force out Intel. But ARM is very inexpensive, and available from multiple vendors. Intel's business model is to make chips that you need, that you can only get from Intel, and then charge a very profitable margin on those chips. Intel does not want to compete on price in a commodity market; that's not what they do.
So now Intel was trying to carve out a share of the mobile chip market, and it was competing against a chip design that is available from roughly six different companies. Their desired end game would be for the mobile companies to buy Intel chips, get locked in so they depended on Intel chips, and pay a profitable margin to Intel for those chips. But none of the mobile manufacturers wanted that... why would they? Why not just keep using ARM, which is getting more and more powerful anyway?
Intel basically had to pay companies to use the Atom. A few took Intel up on it, but those devices did not shake up the market at all. Basically a mobile device with an Atom was about as good as a mobile device with an ARM chip.
The only way this could possibly have worked would have been for Atom to be better than ARM, and not just a little better; it had to be so much better that it was a clear slam-dunk win, such an amazing chip that it would be worth the risk of entering into an entangling agreement with Intel (and being on the hook for Intel raising the prices on the chips). I see no evidence that Atom was really better at all than the ARM chips, let alone that much better.
So Intel is now going to stop paying companies to build with Atom, and is giving up on that whole market.
P.S. I would love a small form-factor PC running a 64-bit ARM chip with completely passive cooling and running Linux. I'd buy that. I might even buy it if it was called a "ChromeBox" and came with Chrome OS pre-installed, but it would be an easier sell if I could get drivers for plain Linux for all the hardware.
x86 looks pretty safe on the desktop for now, but give it a few years and we'll see if that's still true.
RE slates: I agree that slates during nomination phase can have a high impact. I still disagree that the anti-Puppy slate was not a slate or was okay somehow or was justified.
And I have never said anything good about the Rabid Puppies. I'm not a fan of them. This year they gave us Space Raptor Butt Invasion, which I'm sure they think is very funny, but I am not amused.
RE block voting for "No Award": I am amazed that you are even entertaining the theory that it was an organic movement. Toni Weisskopf received a record number of votes, and her record was shattered by the even more amazing 2:1 "No Award". And you think that just happened? You think it is actually more likely that 2500 people are familiar with her work, and so convinced it's terrible that they felt "No Award" was better than her? It's at this point that I give up trying to convince you.
Larry Correia summarized it:
I've spent far too much time on this, so I am not going to dig through all the blog postings from last August and collect a bunch of blog postings about why the Puppies needed to be slapped down. It seems it wouldn't convince you anyway.
Look: you dont seem to know entirely what a slate is in the context of the Hugos and why it matters.
Oh, feel free to educate me. I will read what you write and give it due consideration.
IMHO a negative slate is still a slate. "You can vote for anything you want to, as long as you don't vote for anything the Puppies nominated" is a slate.
lots of people liked the 3 body problem
So what? There were at least 2000 people voting in lockstep to slap down anything nominated by the Puppies. The "No Award" vote total was over 3500 in some categories. Now, look at the vote totals for Three Body Problem; I gave you the link. I don't fully understand the way the voting system works, but I think that 2000 to 3000 votes for "No Award" would have locked in the win on the first cycle, leaving Three Body Problem and the others recalculating for second place.
Why do you think it matters whether people liked the novel? They were on a crusade. Do you really think that Toni Weisskopf is such a horrible editor that "No Award" is a reasonable choice rather than voting for her? Nobody thinks that, but plenty of people felt that it was more important to slap down the Puppies than to give out a Hugo. (I read on a blog comments to the effect that the Sad Puppies should feel ashamed for nominating Toni Weisskopf, since now the true fans were going to slap her down; they should have left her to be nominated by someone else so it wouldn't be necessary to vote against her.)
The self-appointed protectors of the Hugo felt that the Puppies must not be allowed to "get away with" nominating things because the Puppies did it "wrong". The crime the Puppies were accused of: nominating a slate. The solution was to vote perfectly for a pre-arranged list, which wasn't a slate, no not at all.
Maybe people liked Three Body Problem but voting it for Best Novel after Vox Day nominated it? That would never happen. The slapdown was nearly perfect, just a popular movie escaped from it... would they hand Vox Day a victory? Would they leave Vox Day able to say "the Sad Puppies were shut down completely, but I and the Rabid Puppies were able to pull out a win for the most presigious category, Best Novel." The answer is no, no chance of that, none.
If you really believe that the crusade would have given Vox Day a win just because the novel is good, you haven't read the same blogs I read right around the Hugos last year. But I'm guessing you didn't read them because you seem to genuinely believe that "there was no anti-Puppy slate, just an anti-s*** slate". And I've spent far far too long writing on this and I'm not going to try to persuade you further.
P.S. I plan to register to vote for the Hugos, and vote for whatever I like from the nominated works. I will not vote against something because of who nominated it. I don't believe that "protects" anything... they tried it last year and look where we are now.
You seem to assume that there is an "organized fandom" voting on an "anti-Puppy" slate. Care to provide evidence about that?
"The Puppy-Free Hugo Award Voting Guide" blog posting still exists; see it for yourself: http://deirdre.net/the-puppy-free-hugo-award-voters-guide/
It didn't call itself a "slate" but I call it that. The recommendations in that slate were followed and Puppy-nominated works were outvoted, by 2:1 in several cases. It was an unprecedented number of votes any way you look at it and the anti-Puppy slate voting absolutely was organized.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf
In the entire previous history of the Hugo awards there had been only 5 "No Awards" voted. Then last year the "Puppy-Free" slate recommended "No Award" in 5 categories; enough people voted the slate that all 5 categories passed "No Award" rather than allow even a single Puppy-nominated person to win any category.
There was exactly one deviation from the "Puppy-Free" slate. The popular movie "Guardians of the Galaxy" was voted for best movie Hugo.
Since the Puppies seem to have made a huge amount of nominations, I conclude that if there is such an anti-Puppy conspiracy it is a rather incompetent one.
It's true that the Sad Puppies surprised everyone, even themselves, by sweeping several categories in the nominations and getting most of their picks on the ballot. After that, the anti-Puppy faction really got organized, with the results shown above.
Try to read this novella, I dare ya.
It turns out that if you took away the "No Award" votes, "Flow" was the clear winner. http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf
Clearly there are at least 1179 people who disagree with you on the merits of this story.
Apologies but my reference link to document the votes didn't work... I must have made a typo in the HREF tag or something.
Here's the URL so you can check on the vote totals: http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf
And there was no "anti puppy" slate, only an "anti shit story" slate.
Factually incorrect. The slate that won was advertised as the "Puppy-Free" slate, only they didn't call it a slate. They claimed to be against slate voting.
http://deirdre.net/the-puppy-free-hugo-award-voters-guide/
Of course the Sad Puppies nominations had vote totals all over the map, and then the "Puppy-Free" list was exactly followed in actual votes by 2400-3500+ people.
There was one exception: Guardians of the Galaxy was so popular that it was voted for even though it was recommended by Puppies. That was it. No other Puppy-nominated work won anything.
The thing is, that never happened outside some fantasy of yours.
As documented above, exactly one Puppy-nominated thing won, and that was the hugely popular movie Guardians of the Galaxy.
On what basis do you think something different would have happened for Best Novel? Why do you think that Best Novel, arguably the most prestigious Hugo, would have triumphed over the slate when the rest of the Puppies nominations were defeated at roughly 2:1?
I didn't personally think those were the best works those years either, but do people really need to get so riled up about it?
Well, I agree with Larry Correia: the Hugo award could be the award for the best work, or it could be the private award of a group of people who attend WorldCon every year, but it can't be both. And if it's going to be the award of a clique, they should be up-front about it, and not try to claim that it represents the "best" anymore.
It used to be every SF writer's dream to win the Hugo. It has now become clear that if the clique doesn't like you, you can't win a Hugo. Remember, the justification for the voting slate last year was that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies had to be stopped to "protect" the Hugo, and multiple people publicly bragged that they didn't read any Puppy-nominated books before voting against them.
the Puppies made things infinitely worse by deciding to stage their campaign
What should they have done instead? "Just accept that conservative or libertarian writers will never win" is not a good answer.
Scalzi's tweets, are certainly silly and juvenile (and really, you don't expect people to be silly and juvenile on twitter from time to time?) but they don't actually seem to be directed at Correia, just the Puppies in general.
The Sad Puppies 2 campaign was pretty much a solo effort by Larry Correia. That year, taunting over the results was taunting Larry Correia.
If you disagree, then please tell me whom you think Scalzi had in mind when he wrote: "I NEVER WANTED THE AWARD THAT'S WHY I'VE WHINED LIKE A KICKED DOG ABOUT IT FOR A COUPLE YEARS RUNNING."
So Among Others and Redshirts were not part of some "SJW conspiracy." They were just "good" pandering to the fans who usually vote for the awards.
First of all, Sad Puppies posits a "cabal" of those "fen" you mention, who noticed how few votes it would take to sway the Hugo awards and started voting in blocks behind the scenes. The cabal tends toward liking SJW stuff and favors various specific people and companies. This is different from saying that some "SJW conspiracy" infiltrated fandom and started controlling things.
Anyway: you give a plausible explanation. However, this doesn't convince me that there's no cabal, because Tor Books got so many more nominations than other publishers, Scalzi and Glyer get so many Hugo nominations.
Should Scalzi have 30% more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke? Does Glyer deserve 51 Hugo nominations, when Stanley Schmidt was an editor for three decades and didn't get nominated until he retired?
http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/04/did-i-get-too-many-nominations/
The thing is that the fen are not being intentionally cliquish. They're happy to welcome new _individual_ members with open arms.
This whole thing started when the cliques failed to welcome Larry Correia with open arms.
What problem? For all of your complaining about "cliquish pseudo-academic types", McMaster (published by Baen) is in fact tied in first place with Heinlein for largest number of Hugo wins ever.
As I understand it, the Sad Puppies think that a cabal has been rigging votes for about a decade and a half or so. Let's assume that the rigging started around the year 2000.
Lois McMaster Bujold is the one author by Baen that can be nominated for a Hugo. She also hasn't won a Hugo for best novel since the year 2000. Only two books published by Baen have ever won a Hugo, both of those were Lois McMaster Bujold, and both of those were over two decades ago.
Since the year 2000, three books published by Baen have been nominated (all written by Lois McMaster Bujold), plus the Sad Puppies campaign nominated one book by Larry Correia in 2014. That's 4, or 3 if you don't want to count a Puppies nomination.
Also since the year 2000, 24 books by Tor have been nominated, with 6 winners. Some of those were no doubt on the merits (I hear nothing but good about last year's Three Body Problem and even Vox Day thinks it was the best novel of 2015) but again, I refuse to believe that Redshirts was the finest novel published in 2013.
So, the Hugos have in fact been recognising stuff published by Baen, and that was before the puppies of any sort got involved.
Yep. Before. Long, long before.
I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists - it's a catch-all for "any work that discusses topics or espouses positions that we are uncomfortable with".
The typical Sad Puppies member is not so much decrying "left-wing" as decrying SJW-ish works. Have you read "If You Were a Dinosaur My Love"? I refuse to believe that it was the best short fiction in its year, but it got nominated for the Hugo. Was it because it checked the right boxes... SJW themes, written by a woman?
http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/
http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2015/02/10/the-hugo-awards-dinosaurs-and-me/
I would absolutely classify most of John Scalzi's books as "swashbuckling fun", but they hate Scalzi.
I think it's not so much that they hate his books, and more that they hate Scalzi the man, and that pretty much because he hated them first.
My respect for Scalzi plummeted when I read him taunting Larry Correia on Twitter. I've met 5-year-old children with more good manners and dignity.
Larry Correia collected the juvenile taunts in this blog posting: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6846396-hugo-aftermath-post
The other part of it is that they hate Scalzi because they believe he is connected with the behind-the-scenes clique or cliques that used to decide who got the Hugo. I've never met anyone who genuinely believed that Redshirts was the best novel of its year, deserving of Hugo status; I've heard it is a light and fun read ("swashbuckling" maybe?) but it can't have been the best novel published that year. Somewhat more egregiously, Scalzi published a book of stuff from his blog and that won a Hugo also, and then as part of the Sad Puppies firestorm the cliquish types claimed that some of the Sad Puppies nominations were not sufficiently scholarly and were an insult to the Hugo. I don't know about you, but I hate double standards, and here a double standard was applied to the benefit of Scalzi.
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/03/31/sad-puppies-update-the-melt-down-continues/
I suspect they don't like Lois McMaster Bujold very much either, since she frequently explores gender issues - but most of her books are also pure space opera.
Oh no, not at all. The Sad Puppies are not a homogeneous bunch, but on the whole they love Lois McMaster Bujold. If you know only one thing about a book, that it was published by Baen, you know that the Sad Puppies probably like that book. Not a slam dunk, but that's the way to bet.
Lois McMaster Bujold writes entertaining books. The Sad Puppies like entertaining books. Her books aren't loaded down with SJW freight; it's interesting to see how a strong and independent woman from Beta Colony reacts to the strangely backward society of Barrayar.
Remember how the Sad Puppies nominated Toni Weisskopf? She's the senior editor at Baen. She edited Lois McMaster Bujold's books. The Sad Puppies nominated her for a Hugo for editing.
How about defending a puppie nominee which lost to no award rather than straw manning? Try to read this novella, I dare ya.
Okay, I took your dare. I didn't read the other nominees so I don't know that I would have voted for it to get the Hugo, but I liked that story pretty well. I didn't like the beginning, but I stuck with it, and a few pages in it hit its stride and was pretty engaging. It's an old-fashioned sort of story, a kind of travelogue where we are seeing a world through the eyes of someone from outside that world (someone from the frozen north visiting the "Warm Lands"). As a story it was pretty good once you got past the rough beginning, and as world-building I thought it was excellent.
It sounds, however, like you are claiming that the story is so bad that there is no way it was nominated in good faith, that it must have been nominated to prove some kind of political point. If that is your theory, please explain just what that point might be, because I didn't see one.
Personally, I think the book Starship Troopers is more libertarian than right-wing. I have argued that point here on Slashdot.
Reason also counts Heinlein as a libertarian. "I'm so libertarian I have no use for the libertarian movement," said Heinlein.
P.S. It's a sobering thought to realize that Starship Troopers couldn't possibly win a Hugo today. I'm certain that people would literally bus in additional voters if that was what it took to make sure it didn't win, because the modern SJW thinking is that Heinlein was a right-wing fascist misogynist racist. Never mind that he wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, never mind that he wrote strong women (possibly modeled after his wife, who was a strong woman in real life), and never mind that his works do feature minority characters. (In the short story "Water is for Washing", written not very long after World War II, the protagonist rescues two children and himself from a watery disaster, with help from a hobo. One of the children is a Japanese-American, and the protagonist says something like "He's a Jap!" The other child, a white girl, says "No, that's Tommy." Heck, the novel Starship Troopers has a Filipino protagonist and the future armed forces are completely racially integrated.)
go and actually LOOK at the nominees from the Sad Puppies.
Yes, but I think this is now mostly about Rabid Puppies, who successfully nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion.
The Rabid Puppies pretty much packed the nominations... some of the nominated works were on the Sad Puppies list so they are likely good, but some of them are just trolling in-jokes. I'm pretty sure the Space Raptor one is just trolling.
Every slot filled by Rabid Puppy trolling is a slot that wasn't filled by a good work worthy of a Hugo. This is much worse than last year.
The "Rabid Puppies" and "Sad Puppies" have about as much to do with each other as "JavaScript" and "Java". That is, nothing but a confusing similarity of name.
Charges that Sad Puppies needs to control Vox Day are simply unfair. How are they supposed to do that exactly? Vox Day is an independent adult and there is no reason why the Sad Puppies would have the ability to control him. See above point.
Last year, the Sad Puppies pleaded with Vox Day not to burn the Hugo Awards to the ground. Then the science fiction fandom got really organized and burned the Hugo Awards to the ground. Vox Day got everything he wanted and they did the work for him.
The Sad Puppies have always been about recommending the SF works that you enjoyed the most. Sad Puppies 4 continues this tradition.
Rabid Puppies, on the other hand, seems to be a trolling campaign by Vox Day. (Vox Day seems to have a knack for saying things that are so beyond the pale that they literally enrage people. I suspect he's trolling because his statements are so perfectly calculated to enrage. And now "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"?)
One final point, submitted for your consideration: The novel Three Body Problem won a Hugo. It was Vox Day's favorite novel of the year, and had he read it a little sooner, he would have nominated it for a Hugo. It would then have lost the Hugo to "No Award" as the organized fandom was voting an "anti-Puppy" slate.
The organized fandom and their organized "No Award" campaign claimed that they had to award an unprecedented number of "No Awards" to protect the Hugo, but how would denying the Hugo to Three Body Problem have protected anything? What was protected when Toni Weisskopf was denied her Hugo? And here we are, with the Rabid Puppies causing worse trouble than ever, and some fraction of fandom repelled by the No Award and wooden asterisk plaque antics, and walking away from the whole thing.
Until the rich realize the poor have a lot more money and raise the prices. It's the first thing I would do.
Unless you get the government in your pocket, the next thing you would do is watch your competitors charge lower prices and take all your customers. (If you can get the government to give you a monopoly, or require all your competitors to charge as much as you want to, then you're golden.) The closer the market is to a free market, the worse your plan will work.
I think inflation does cause prices to go up, but I don't see any mechanism whereby inflating by giving the money to the people would force prices up more than inflating by giving the money to a few banks.
Right now, when the government wants to expand the money supply, the Federal Reserve just sort of dumps money on the biggest financial institutions. Then it pays them a small interest fee for their service of having use of the money (0.25% according to this Investopedia article).
If the government really must inflate the money supply, then it seems to me that the best way to do it would be to spread the new money evenly among the citizens. It's just part of reality that when you have lots of money, it's easier to get more money, so almost all the time when we are talking about the economy, everything benefits the rich more than the poor. Here would be a direct payment that would definitely benefit the poor more than the rich.
Inflation effectively steals part of the value of the money. This is hardest on the poor, and people trying to live on a fixed income. Directly paying the inflation to the people would offset the harm, at least partially.
P.S. I'm a minarchist libertarian, so I don't really like seeing the government messing with the money supply at all. I'd rather just see prices deflate, so that maybe a hamburger would go back to costing a dime, and even a small income would be enough to live on. However, I'm not a trained economist, and apparently Milton Friedman believed we need to inflate the money supply as the economy expands. If you have to bet on whether Milton Friedman was right or I am right, you should bet on Milton Friedman. And if we accept that we need to inflate the money supply, I'd just as soon do it by paying the new money out to all the citizens.
Oh so emission standards is obamas fault? i don't recall him passing any.
The Obama Administration has officially taken credit for making the CAFE standard tougher.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/08/28/obama-administration-finalizes-historic-545-mpg-fuel-efficiency-standard
And I didn't edit this Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy#2009_Obama_Administration_directive
You don't have to agree with me, but I'm not just making stuff up.
I recall how in the eary 70's emmissions standard were going to destroy the automobile with engines getting terrible gas mileage, and no power.
It's true that engines have come a long way since the early 70's. It's also true that back then, most people didn't imagine just how far it would be possible to go.
However, I think we really are running up against some hard limits here. You can keep ratcheting the laws upward but at some point it really is impossible to comply.
In my opinion, the best way to clean up the air is to look at the whole system and try to get the area under the curve to shrink. The strategy being pursued by the Obama administration is to demand the cleanest engines they can get away with demanding, even if this makes cars more expensive; combine that with a sucky economy and new cars are selling more slowly. That means that older cars are staying on the road longer. I would favor a strategy of leaving the standards where they are, or possibly even easing them just a little, and watching competition float the cost of a new car downward a bit. Less-expensive cars means more cars being sold means more clean cars being driven.
At the same time, we need to get more serious about punishing drivers of really polluting old cars. This disproportionately punishes the poor, as for the most part only the poor will be driving the really polluting really old cars. I read somewhere that the nasty blue smoke from just one of those old cars is polluting like three dozen new cars; I just Googled for a reference on that, and while I didn't find one, I did find this: 25% of cars produce 90% of car pollution
Suppose a car is 99.7% clean. Suppose that you could force the car company to make the car 99.9% clean, but the cost of the car would go up $3000. Would you do it? I'm not sure I would, but the Obama administration I believe would go for it.
Those cheating VW diesels emit too much pollution, but they are much cleaner than older diesel cars. It is a better deal for me if my neighbor gets rid of his old diesel and buys a new cheating VW diesel. Even better still if he gets one of the cars that doesn't cheat, but those cost more.
I hate it when I see an old "beater" car go by with a noxious cloud of blue smoke coming from the tailpipe. I would love to see all those cars off the road. To speed up the process, stop making new cars more expensive.
P.S. I can't take credit for the idea of looking at the effect of the cost of new cars on the total behavior of the system; I got the idea from this blog post.
P.P.S. I look forward to electric cars becoming common. If electricity is cheap and electric cars are cheap, pollution will drop even more.
It sure looks like Hillary Clinton engaged in a conspiracy to migrate classified information off of the secure network and onto her insecure email server. She instructed subordinates to summarize information and send it as new emails, which of course were not marked as classified.
She's not dumb and she's a lawyer, so she knew what she was doing was illegal.
"ops" means the "operations" group in the State Department, where apparently Hillary Clinton had people reading emails on the secure system and then sending a summary to her insecure server. "converting" to the unclassified email system.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423417/hillary-staffer-wary-sending-classified-info-just-email-it-andrew-c-mccarthy
http://nypost.com/2016/01/24/hillarys-team-copied-intel-off-top-secret-server-to-email/
Some of the emails were "SAP" classified. Some were "HCS-O".
http://bigstory.ap.org/e19abf78b6fe43e7b7719f059901630d
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3413033/Hillary-s-emails-contained-classified-information-HUMAN-SPYING-State-Department-says-won-t-meet-deadline-publish-emails.html
If that last story is correct, Hillary Clinton's personal email server could have lead to disastrous consequences or death for real human beings. We're way, way beyond anything excusable.
The Mac Pro is now ridiculously stale. ("Days since last release: 833")
I've read articles speculating that Apple might be re-designing the Mac Pro again as many of its intended users are disappointed that it has no internal expansion at all. So Apple could be sitting on a design refresh, waiting for these new chips.
I even read speculation that Apple would cancel the Mac Pro product line, but IMHO that is very unlikely. Apple sells a lot more notebooks than Mac Pros, but I just can't see Apple walking away from a very high-margin product.
So now that there are refreshed Xeons, maybe we will see a refreshed Mac Pro.
P.S. I was surprised that Apple didn't release a standard enclosure for lots of hard drives or whatever. You should have your Mac Pro and then one box with one cord, rather than a half-dozen boxes and a half-dozen cords. But I guess Apple left that for third parties such as Sonnet. I watched the video for that Sonnet product I linked... it said that Sonnet followed Apple's guidelines for how to best mount a Mac Pro. Therefore, Apple has guidelines for third party vendors for Mac Pro mounting products.
Even so, it's amazing how complicated the Sonnet enclosure has to be to solve the problem. Thunderbolt connectors can pop out, so they invented a retaining device that uses a bolt to keep the plug in. You need to run multiple Thunderbolt cables inside the box. And they said they were not able to offer a passthrough for Thunderbolt because Thunderbolt won't work with one (they didn't elaborate, something about needing active circuits on both ends of the connection, but I don't know why that rules out a passthrough).
And oh boy is that an expensive way to go: buy an expensive Mac Pro, then spend another $1500 on the enclosure.
There have been other firearms made that look like a cell phone.
Here's a rather old video of a fake phone that can fire four rounds of .22 ammo. I'll bet accuracy is terrible with no sights and probably no rifled barrels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd1SRtkhh-U
The new one is presumably firing something bigger than .22, but it's still not the first time something a gun/phone has been made. It may be the first time someone has planned to mass-produce such a thing, though.
Even back in the World War II days there were single-shot .22 weapons made to look like pens.
http://www.sadefensejournal.com/wp/?p=2287
I remember the controversy about the WingDings TrueType font that Microsoft made. It had a bunch of random little pictograms, and as this was long before Unicode support was common, it had the pictures mapped to random characters.
Someone noticed that if you typed "NYC" and then changed the font to WingDings the result was a skull-and-crossbones, a Star of David, and a hand making a thumbs-up gesture. So obviously, this was a shorthand way of saying: death to Jews in New York City is a good thing. And obviously, this was done on purpose by some black-hearted person at Microsoft.
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/wingdings.asp
The moral of the story: no matter what you do, someone will find a way to get upset by it.
foreign countries also have monuments to their cultural or political heroes too.
It's a fair point: if our President visits a foreign country, he will be photographed in front of political art in that foreign country. When Reagan visited the Soviet Union, he was photographed in front of art of Lenin, and Lenin had an even higher body count than Che Guevara.
But the charge I level against President Obama is that he his helping the government of Cuba without getting anything at all in return. When Nixon went to China, I don't think he helped the government of China, but in any event China was one of the three superpowers and he was there to negotiate. (As I understand it he wanted to make sure that China and the USSR didn't become too cozy.) President Obama could have ignored Cuba, or at least stayed away; there is nothing of value at stake.
As I understand it, President Obama believes that normalizing relations with Cuba will, in the long run, benefit the people of Cuba. I truly hope that he is right and I am wrong about this. I would rather be wrong and have the people of Cuba benefit, than be right and have them continue to suffer.
But at the moment I agree with this piece: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/03/21/i-was-a-prisoner-of-castros-regime-obamas-visit-to-cuba-is-a-mistake/
Bonus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitburg_controversy_(1985)
I read through that article. It doesn't seem relevant. The Bitburg thing was a unique scenario: Reagan was paying back a favor, nobody realized at first that there might be SS buried in the graveyard, the German people overwhelmingly were in favor of the visit going forward, Reagan changed his speech to address the controversy, and Reagan visited a concentration camp afterward.
Why should we care about this photo of President Obama:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/433048/barack-obama-che-guevara-american-people
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/215531/che-chic-jay-nordlinger
Imagine the above-mentioned people seeing this photo of President Obama.