Obviously, they need to be forced to do the right thing...can't have people choosing to do things they want all willy-nilly...that's what government is for...
“When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong, every single time." Lois Lowry, The Giver
“a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” [American Economic Review poll of economists, 93+% agreed]
Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. The agreement cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek on the “right” to their fellow Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Party’s welfare state, on the “left.”
Myrdal stated, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.”
His fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”
"I would like to opt out of Prop 13's protections against high property taxes in the future in exchange for a lower property tax today. Where do I sign up?"
At the same place I signed up to opt out of Social Security benefits in my old age in exchange for not paying FICA taxes today?
"Not in California. We have Prop 13, which means that young people with families pay far higher property taxes than their older and richer neighbors living in a nearly identical house."
Since Prop 13 was put forth and approved by California voters, in true democratic fashion (lowercase intentional, but uppercase D was probably also involved) I'm reminded of this quote:
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. H. L. Mencken
Those have worked so well every other time we've done that. I suppose housing projects are like communism, they just haven't been done right yet, but this next one, yeah that's the ticket.
The Cassini probe May have disrupted the delicate balance of the rings when it flew by. That butterfly's effect of gravity cascaded into all the rings collapsing into the planet. We should just stay home?
Yes, 19.19% voted for Pres. Trump (~62.9M / 327.8M). And 20.07% voted for Sec. Clinton (~65.8M / 327.8M).
But, of course, according to the rules of the game the all knew they were playing by, Trump garnered more of the Electoral College votes. In sports terms, Clinton moved the ball well between the 20s and built up a few more yards of total offense, but failed to score in the red zone. Plus, she turned the ball over 5 times (she lost 5 states that Obama had won twice). Sure 500 yards of offense looks nice in the box score and gives one a sense of moral victory, but the 5 turnovers led to the scoreboard difference.
She--the most qualified person ever to run for the office (so said Obama)--lost 5 states that Obama carried twice, to perhaps the worst candidate ever to run for the office. Clinton, the wily political veteran and consummate politician, who had spent pretty much her entire life preparing for her Presidential run, lost to a blowhard billionaire, a rookie she outspent by about 4:1. Many people voted for him simply because he wasn't her.
OTOH, even in a race between a turd sandwich and a giant douche, one of them's gonna win.
Puddle-jumper airlines need to make multiple flights back and forth. Can't include an 8 hour recharge time. Maybe that would work for some sort of charter plane instead of private jets where the executives will be on the ground overnight or something.
A number of the website that I have used for a long time seem to recently have taken a HUGE turn for the worse when they unveiled new "app-ified" look and feel and operational flows. These are not widely-used sites, things like the tee-time scheduler at my favorite golf course and the portal site my employers contract with for unified benefits access.
These sites used to be pretty well done, and even as a professional software developer (albeit one who mostly does radar signal processor development) I had few complaints. But over the last year or so, all these sites trashed their old implementations for new ones that look like they've been slapped together by tweens on crack who's only test platform is an iPhone. It may look fine on a phone to have 20mm by 20mm buttons to touch, but those huge buttons mean nothing to my desktop. Having to run through 15 different "next" screens because you can only fit just so many 20mm x 20mm buttons on a phone screen and still present any meaningful information or functions is NOT an improvement when I've got three 27-inch monitors hooked to my desktop.
And it's pretty clear none of the developers have actually USED these appy-apps, even on their phones because they just freaking don't work. For example, the legacy golf course website let you setup "buddy lists" so if you were reserving a foursome (or 2), you could just click 3 or 7 buddies from the list and bam you're done. The new appy-app preserved the buddy list, but it takes two clicks to access, and you can select one and only one buddy per access...each time to click a buddy he is added, but you're also dropped immediately back to the top menu and and you have to continue and make those multiple click for each person. If any of them had ever used the app, they'd realize immediately that "hmm, maybe we can allow multiple selections here before dropping back"...but they didn't have any more room for yet another 20mm x 20mm button...
"I boycott fast food kiosks; I want humans to be employed"
What about all the kiosk designers, engineers, installers, maintainers? What about when the kiosks are upgraded? Who are you putting out of work by boycotting them?
Indeed, one measure of a hurricane's impact is the overall cost of damage. Ruining a bunch of $1M houses on a beach is somehow worse than ruining 10 times as many $100K houses. The US has a lot of expensive real estate in hurricane-prone areas.
“2006: Expect Another Big Hurricane Year Says NOAA”—headline, MongaBay.com, May 22, 2006 “NOAA Predicts Above Normal 2007 Atlantic Hurricane Season”—headline, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration press release, May 23, 2007 “NOAA Increases Expectancy for Above-Normal 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season”—headline, gCaptain.com, Aug. 7, 2008 “Forecasters: 2009 to Bring ‘Above Average’ Hurricane Season”—headline, CNN, Dec. 10, 2008 “NOAA: 2010 Hurricane Season May Set Records”—headline, Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, Fla.), May 28, 2010 “NOAA Predicts Increased Storm Activity in 2011 Hurricane Season”—headline, BDO Consulting press release, Aug. 18, 2011 “2012 Hurricane Forecast Update: More Storms Expected”—headline, LiveScience, Aug. 9, 2012 “NOAA Predicts Active 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season”—headline, NOAApress release, May 23, 2013 “A Space-Based View of 2015’s ‘Hyperactive’ Hurricane Season”—headline, CityLab.com, June 19, 2015 “The 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season Might Be the Strongest in Years”—headline, CBSNews, Aug. 11, 2016
“NOAA: U.S. Completes Record 11 Straight Years Without Major Hurricane Strike”—headline, CNSNews, Oct. 24, 2016
Tip of the hat to “Best of the Web” from The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto.
*EVENTUALLY* they had to get one right...2016 was the "strongest in years" but was still pretty much meh, except for Matthew's impact on Haiti.
Actual activity in 2016: 15 named storms, 7 hurricanes, 4 CAT3+ Average (1981–2010[1]) 12.1, 6.4, 2.7 Record high activity 28, 15, 7
Also 2017 was pretty well above average: 17, 10, 6. But obviously it followed close to 12 years (2005, Hurricane Wilma) without a major hurricane strike in the US as it produced 3 major impact storms (Maria, Irma, Harvey).
"2018 Hurricane Season Expected to Be More Active Than Usual, CSU Forecasters Say"
2018 so far: 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes, 2 CAT3+ (Michael, Florence)
2107 and 2018 have actually been right around average for major hurricanes.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is the richest man in the world. But that's not because he is paid outrageously, indeed, for a man running a $1T+ company, his compensation is relatively minuscule.
From Salary.com Jeffrey P. Bezos Executive Compensation As Chief Executive Officer, Director at AMAZON COM INC, Jeffrey P. Bezos made $1,681,840 in total compensation. Of this total $81,840 was received as a salary, $0 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $0 was awarded as stock and $1,600,000 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2017 fiscal year.
Bloomberg:
Amazon.com Inc. founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos received $1.68 million in total pay last year, unchanged from 2012, including $81,840 in salary and $1.6 million to cover security arrangements.
Of course, he is fabulously wealthy due to his ownership share of a trillion-dollar company: Bezos currently holds 78,893,033 shares or 16.3% of the shares outstanding. His wealth can fluctuate wildly as the share prices change--in either direction. In fact, at this point today, the price is down $21.95 per share, so just today Bezos has lost $1.731B, so far. On a good day he may come up positive to the same tune.
Based on salary and other compensation, Bezos earns about 5 cents per second, so the "10 seconds" notion is just plain wrong. His on-paper wealth may indeed rise and fall rapidly, Bernie Sanders Sanders' claim that Bezos' wealth increases by $275 million every day may be true for certain days. But he can lose $275 million per day on bad days, too.
P.S. His salary (not counting security costs for which he is reimbursed) is way less than what his long-time critic Sen. Bernie Sanders makes in his job as a US Senator, and Sanders doesn't ever see the bill for his security costs.
"The problem is that he points out citizens as "enemies" and when you do that to an audience of millions there will always be a bunch of nutjobs that takes him seriously."
Meh. His former opponent--a politically savvy, well-connected, well-funded, and "the most qualified candidate ever" but who still lost to a political neophyte--called millions of people "deplorable" and compared members of a civil rights group to terrorists, and once told Anderson Cooper during a CNN interview that she considered members of the opposing party her enemies and that she was proud of that.
But it was a follower of that nice but a little crazy white-haired man who wanted to give everyone free college who went and tried to assassinate as many members of Congress of the opposing party as he could.
Yep nut jobs will be nut jobs, no matter what politicians say.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, they need to be forced to do the right thing...can't have people choosing to do things they want all willy-nilly...that's what government is for...
“When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong, every single time." Lois Lowry, The Giver
“a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” [American Economic Review poll of economists, 93+% agreed]
Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. The agreement cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek on the “right” to their fellow Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Party’s welfare state, on the “left.”
Myrdal stated, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.”
His fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”
[https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html]
"I would like to opt out of Prop 13's protections against high property taxes in the future in exchange for a lower property tax today. Where do I sign up?"
At the same place I signed up to opt out of Social Security benefits in my old age in exchange for not paying FICA taxes today?
"Not in California. We have Prop 13, which means that young people with families pay far higher property taxes than their older and richer neighbors living in a nearly identical house."
Since Prop 13 was put forth and approved by California voters, in true democratic fashion (lowercase intentional, but uppercase D was probably also involved) I'm reminded of this quote:
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. H. L. Mencken
Those have worked so well every other time we've done that. I suppose housing projects are like communism, they just haven't been done right yet, but this next one, yeah that's the ticket.
Good point, especially the American football one. Should have used a soccer or Fortnite analogy.
The Cassini probe May have disrupted the delicate balance of the rings when it flew by. That butterfly's effect of gravity cascaded into all the rings collapsing into the planet. We should just stay home?
That's the ticket.
I thought the Big Bang Theory was about the blonde chick and the nerds?
Spiders?
Bees?
Quicksand?
Yes, 19.19% voted for Pres. Trump (~62.9M / 327.8M). And 20.07% voted for Sec. Clinton (~65.8M / 327.8M).
But, of course, according to the rules of the game the all knew they were playing by, Trump garnered more of the Electoral College votes. In sports terms, Clinton moved the ball well between the 20s and built up a few more yards of total offense, but failed to score in the red zone. Plus, she turned the ball over 5 times (she lost 5 states that Obama had won twice). Sure 500 yards of offense looks nice in the box score and gives one a sense of moral victory, but the 5 turnovers led to the scoreboard difference.
She--the most qualified person ever to run for the office (so said Obama)--lost 5 states that Obama carried twice, to perhaps the worst candidate ever to run for the office. Clinton, the wily political veteran and consummate politician, who had spent pretty much her entire life preparing for her Presidential run, lost to a blowhard billionaire, a rookie she outspent by about 4:1. Many people voted for him simply because he wasn't her.
OTOH, even in a race between a turd sandwich and a giant douche, one of them's gonna win.
Yep.
What high-paying job does a gender studies degree qualify one for? Or sociology? Or art history?
Puddle-jumper airlines need to make multiple flights back and forth. Can't include an 8 hour recharge time. Maybe that would work for some sort of charter plane instead of private jets where the executives will be on the ground overnight or something.
It's turtles all the way down.
A number of the website that I have used for a long time seem to recently have taken a HUGE turn for the worse when they unveiled new "app-ified" look and feel and operational flows. These are not widely-used sites, things like the tee-time scheduler at my favorite golf course and the portal site my employers contract with for unified benefits access.
These sites used to be pretty well done, and even as a professional software developer (albeit one who mostly does radar signal processor development) I had few complaints. But over the last year or so, all these sites trashed their old implementations for new ones that look like they've been slapped together by tweens on crack who's only test platform is an iPhone. It may look fine on a phone to have 20mm by 20mm buttons to touch, but those huge buttons mean nothing to my desktop. Having to run through 15 different "next" screens because you can only fit just so many 20mm x 20mm buttons on a phone screen and still present any meaningful information or functions is NOT an improvement when I've got three 27-inch monitors hooked to my desktop.
And it's pretty clear none of the developers have actually USED these appy-apps, even on their phones because they just freaking don't work. For example, the legacy golf course website let you setup "buddy lists" so if you were reserving a foursome (or 2), you could just click 3 or 7 buddies from the list and bam you're done. The new appy-app preserved the buddy list, but it takes two clicks to access, and you can select one and only one buddy per access...each time to click a buddy he is added, but you're also dropped immediately back to the top menu and and you have to continue and make those multiple click for each person. If any of them had ever used the app, they'd realize immediately that "hmm, maybe we can allow multiple selections here before dropping back"...but they didn't have any more room for yet another 20mm x 20mm button...
Compressed video...You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
"I boycott fast food kiosks; I want humans to be employed"
What about all the kiosk designers, engineers, installers, maintainers? What about when the kiosks are upgraded? Who are you putting out of work by boycotting them?
Indeed, one measure of a hurricane's impact is the overall cost of damage. Ruining a bunch of $1M houses on a beach is somehow worse than ruining 10 times as many $100K houses. The US has a lot of expensive real estate in hurricane-prone areas.
“2006: Expect Another Big Hurricane Year Says NOAA”—headline, MongaBay .com, May 22, 2006 .com, Aug. 7, 2008 .com, June 19, 2015
“NOAA Predicts Above Normal 2007 Atlantic Hurricane Season”—headline, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration press release, May 23, 2007
“NOAA Increases Expectancy for Above-Normal 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season”—headline, gCaptain
“Forecasters: 2009 to Bring ‘Above Average’ Hurricane Season”—headline, CNN, Dec. 10, 2008
“NOAA: 2010 Hurricane Season May Set Records”—headline, Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, Fla.), May 28, 2010
“NOAA Predicts Increased Storm Activity in 2011 Hurricane Season”—headline, BDO Consulting press release, Aug. 18, 2011
“2012 Hurricane Forecast Update: More Storms Expected”—headline, LiveScience, Aug. 9, 2012
“NOAA Predicts Active 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season”—headline, NOAApress release, May 23, 2013
“A Space-Based View of 2015’s ‘Hyperactive’ Hurricane Season”—headline, CityLab
“The 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season Might Be the Strongest in Years”—headline, CBSNews, Aug. 11, 2016
“NOAA: U.S. Completes Record 11 Straight Years Without Major Hurricane Strike”—headline, CNSNews, Oct. 24, 2016
Tip of the hat to “Best of the Web” from The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto.
*EVENTUALLY* they had to get one right...2016 was the "strongest in years" but was still pretty much meh, except for Matthew's impact on Haiti.
Actual activity in 2016: 15 named storms, 7 hurricanes, 4 CAT3+
Average (1981–2010[1]) 12.1, 6.4, 2.7
Record high activity 28, 15, 7
Also 2017 was pretty well above average: 17, 10, 6. But obviously it followed close to 12 years (2005, Hurricane Wilma) without a major hurricane strike in the US as it produced 3 major impact storms (Maria, Irma, Harvey).
"2018 Hurricane Season Expected to Be More Active Than Usual, CSU Forecasters Say"
2018 so far: 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes, 2 CAT3+ (Michael, Florence)
2107 and 2018 have actually been right around average for major hurricanes.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is the richest man in the world. But that's not because he is paid outrageously, indeed, for a man running a $1T+ company, his compensation is relatively minuscule.
From Salary.com
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Executive Compensation
As Chief Executive Officer, Director at AMAZON COM INC, Jeffrey P. Bezos made $1,681,840 in total compensation. Of this total $81,840 was received as a salary, $0 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $0 was awarded as stock and $1,600,000 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2017 fiscal year.
Bloomberg:
Amazon.com Inc. founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos received $1.68 million in total pay last year, unchanged from 2012, including $81,840 in salary and $1.6 million to cover security arrangements.
Of course, he is fabulously wealthy due to his ownership share of a trillion-dollar company: Bezos currently holds 78,893,033 shares or 16.3% of the shares outstanding. His wealth can fluctuate wildly as the share prices change--in either direction. In fact, at this point today, the price is down $21.95 per share, so just today Bezos has lost $1.731B, so far. On a good day he may come up positive to the same tune.
Based on salary and other compensation, Bezos earns about 5 cents per second, so the "10 seconds" notion is just plain wrong. His on-paper wealth may indeed rise and fall rapidly, Bernie Sanders Sanders' claim that Bezos' wealth increases by $275 million every day may be true for certain days. But he can lose $275 million per day on bad days, too.
P.S. His salary (not counting security costs for which he is reimbursed) is way less than what his long-time critic Sen. Bernie Sanders makes in his job as a US Senator, and Sanders doesn't ever see the bill for his security costs.
That was funny in high school, too.
One fourth each, right?
"The problem is that he points out citizens as "enemies" and when you do that to an audience of millions there will always be a bunch of nutjobs that takes him seriously."
Meh. His former opponent--a politically savvy, well-connected, well-funded, and "the most qualified candidate ever" but who still lost to a political neophyte--called millions of people "deplorable" and compared members of a civil rights group to terrorists, and once told Anderson Cooper during a CNN interview that she considered members of the opposing party her enemies and that she was proud of that.
But it was a follower of that nice but a little crazy white-haired man who wanted to give everyone free college who went and tried to assassinate as many members of Congress of the opposing party as he could.
Yep nut jobs will be nut jobs, no matter what politicians say.
Opensecrets.org
Top Organizations Funding Outside Spending Groups
Rank Donor $Total $To Conservatives $To Liberals %To Conservatives %To Liberals
1 Carpenters & Joiners Union $27,702,409 $612,500 $27,079,909 2% 98%
2 American Action Network $21,949,926 $21,949,926 $0 100% 0%
3 Environment America $19,812,000 $0 $19,812,000 0% 100%
4 Senate Leadership Fund $18,697,545 $18,697,545 $0 100% 0%
5 Action Now Initiative $16,656,000 $0 $0 0% 0%
6 National Education Assn $16,051,193 $0 $16,001,193 0% 100%
7 Laborers Union $13,684,305 $775,000 $12,904,305 6% 94%
8 Republican Governors Assn $13,385,000 $13,385,000 $0 100% 0%
9 One Nation $12,800,000 $12,800,000 $0 100% 0%
10 National Assn of Realtors $12,378,282 $2,500 $0 100% 0%
11 SENATE MAJORITY PAC $9,835,159 $0 $9,835,159 0% 100%
12 League of Conservation Voters $9,384,189 $0 $9,384,189 0% 100%
13 American Federation of State/Cnty/Munic Employees $9,069,720 $2,000 $9,067,720 0% 100%
14 American Federation of Teachers $7,892,500 $0 $7,892,500 0% 100%
15 American Bridge 21st Century $7,333,125 $0 $7,333,125 0% 100%
16 NextGen Climate Action $7,256,007 $0 $7,255,507 0% 100%
17 Service Employees International Union $7,160,507 $0 $7,160,507 0% 100%
18 Operating Engineers Union $6,533,094 $375,000 $6,148,094 6% 94%
19 Citizens for A Working America $5,464,500 $5,264,000 $200,500 96% 4%
20 Democratic Governors Assn $5,350,000 $0 $5,350,000 0% 100%
21 Freedom Partners $5,080,085 $5,080,085 $0 100% 0%
22 United Steelworkers $5,025,198 $0 $5,025,198 0% 100%
23 Greater New York Hospital Assn $5,021,776 $521,776 $4,500,000 10% 90%
24 America Votes $4,575,900 $0 $4,575,900 0% 100%
25 Koch Industries $4,540,000 $4,515,000 $0 100% 0%
26 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers $3,917,500 $60,000 $3,857,500 2% 98%
27 United Food & Commercial Workers Union $3,682,920 $0 $3,692,920 0% 100%
28 Hillwood Development $3,500,000 $3,500,000 $0 100% 0%
29 Club for Growth $3,380,978 $3,380,978 $0 100% 0%
30 Planned Parenthood $3,240,299 $0 $3,240,299 0% 100%