Insulation plastic falls apart after a year? Hm, tell that to the PSU for my Macbook Pro bought in 2012... Still in perfect condition. But then, I never wind the cable using the ears, I always just wrap it around the PSU itself while leaving a generous loop from where the cable exits the PSU.
It has nothing to do with how you wind it. I've seen Apple power supplies that were never wound up at all where the outer insulation became brittle and flaked off in large chunks. I'm not sure if it was sun exposure or heat exposure, but something causes the jackets on the early MagSafe cables to chemically break down.
Case in point: Mac laptop chargers have been known to suffer from frayed cables due to Apple's insistence on a design that
lacks adequate strain relief. This has been a known engineering defect in their chargers since the PowerBook G3 series design almost two decades ago...
FTFY.
As far as I'm aware, Apple has never in its entire history built a good laptop power supply:
The original PowerBook 1xx series had connectors that kept breaking. IIRC, the 5xx series was similar.
The G3 series had a ferrite choke a quarter inch from the plug, and that quarter inch of wire constantly broke, causing fires, so they recalled the entire lot of them and replaced them with the yo-yo power supply.
The yo-yo design had no real strain relief, and even better, had thinly insulated wires inside a steel-braided shield that over time wore through the insulation, resulting in cables that sparked internally. In a dark room, you could see little blue electrical arcs in the middle of the wires.
The iBook power supplies had inadequate strain relief and broke right at the plug end.
The T-shaped MagSafe connectors had the same problem.
The L-shaped MagSafe connectors were usually more reliable, though they still eventually fail at one end of the wire or the other, but the MacBook Air version was notoriously bad.
And MagSafe 2 is a disaster of failed strain relief.
So saying that third-party Mac laptop supplies are worse than the real thing might be true, but it is like saying that a Pinto is worse than a Corvair. They do, however, build reliable USB power supplies... but their cell phone power cords are even worse than their laptop power cords. Fortunately, there are many third-party manufacturers building Lightning cables that are actually built to last.
Part of what makes these problematic is largely that they're trying to look like Apple products. Apple makes really small power supplies, which makes it much harder to create knock-offs that work. Nobody makes knock-offs of Android supplies; they just make cheap USB power supplies. Because they aren't trying to hit an absurdly small form factor, they don't cut corners to the same degree, and the supplies tend to be more reliable at a given price point. That said, the Apple USB supplies cost $19, and the usable third-party branded supplies usually start at about $12, so there's not a lot of savings to be gained even when you take away the form factor.
More significantly, because they're trying to look like Apple products (and often pretending to be Apple products), they can't be branded. If they were, Apple would go after them for violating their design patents (and trademark violations if they use the Apple logo). That entire selling model is incompatible with branding. As a result, there's no hit to their reputation if the product doesn't work. They just change the name on their Amazon or eBay account and go right back to fooling people. So there's also no incentive to make a quality product.
So how come it continues to charge after hitting 80%?
Because that's a lot of capacity to lose. I doubt that the difference between stopping at 80% and stopping at 100% is enough to be worth the rather significant loss of capacity.
That said, the OS already does various tricks to minimize the damage caused by fully charging the batteries. For example, in OS X and iOS, IIRC the top several percent are hidden. When the charge level hits about 95% (I forget the exact number, and it might even vary depending on the age of the battery), it says 100%, but it continues to charge for a while at a slow speed until it reaches a true 100% charge. As the pack discharges, it gets down to about 95% before the UI stops saying 100%.
The reason for this is that the charge circuits in the devices won't even start charging until the pack's charge drops below about 95%, because continuously trickle-charging batteries to keep them at 100% will burn them out rather rapidly, whereas letting them cycle by five or ten percent is much less abusive on the batteries. However, it would be confusing to users if their batteries rarely read 100% after a full charge, so they fudge the numbers so that 95% is treated as fully charged.
This is why the only way to fix such a broken system is to get the people so mad that they self-organize to overthrow the bad leaders and stick their heads on pikes as a sign to anyone else who would go down the same path. It worked reasonably well in France, among others.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work very well if the government has tanks and fighter jets, which is why Russia's arms sales to various Middle-Eastern regimes represents such a grave threat to real, long-term stability in the region.
Keep in mind that California's budget is in the triple-digit billions of dollars every year. A mere $4 billion dollars is chump change. That's like somebody who makes $100 grand a year taking out a loan on a low-end used car. The economy was in the toilet, and California was bailing water just to stay afloat. Taking out a little temporary debt to avoid massive cuts in services was the fiscally responsible thing to do.
But in addition to that, he also pushed for changes to the law that required a certain portion of revenue in unexpectedly profitable years to be saved instead of getting spent, so that in future lean years, the state won't have to take such drastic measures to keep from having to cut essential services. That's fiscal conservatism.
It should be that the user HAS to have purchased the item. Why would you do it any other way?
Because sometimes there are very useful reviews by people who chose a different product (or chose to not buy a product at all) after discovering serious flaws in the product while looking at it in a brick-and-mortar store.
The GP's point was fundamentally invalid, because the proposed law didn't regulate anything. The law gave the FCC the authority to create future regulations that promoted diversity in ownership if its commissioners determined that doing so would serve the public good.
Arguing that it was an attempt at banning right wing radio is like arguing that passing a federal law that allows states to pass laws that recognize gay marriages is a nationwide ban on Christians. It's pure and utter nonsense.
I learned that the point of the electoral college was to insure that a candidate would have to win support from a wide variety of voters, and not just a numerical large group in large cities. If there were no electoral system, candidates would campaign almost exclusively in New York, Chicago, LA, and a hand full of other large cities where large numbers of people live.
Even with the electoral college, they still do that. The only difference is that they campaign almost exclusively in Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, Jackson (MS), and other large cities in low-population states and ignore the big cities in all the high-population states.
I certainly hope so. I hope a lot of other states do the same. Giving taxes to the federal government just to have the cash given back is inefficient and pointless. Otherwise, we'd be better off lowering the tax rates and letting the money stay here (I live in California).
Yes and no. When we talk about how much goes back into the states, we're including military spending, federal government contracts, interstate highway improvements, etc. The federal government owns the interstate highway system, employs the military, etc., all of which at least arguably needs to go through the federal government. And the federal government pays money to contractors in various states to build things that it needs. So it really isn't anything like getting a tax refund.
Either way, my point is that there's a huge discrepancy between the richest states and the poorest states, with the poorest states getting back several times what they put in, and the richest getting back only about four-fifths of what they put in. It is basically federal redistribution of wealth from the richest states to the poorest states. And the poorest states keep voting for people who say that they're against redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. They're voting exactly contrary to their best interests, and if they ever actually truly got their wish and California and a few other blue states stopped propping up their governments, most of the southern states would have to immediately declare bankruptcy; they're only solvent because of policies that they claim to be against.
None of those cities have problems because of high taxes. In order:
Detroit's problems are largely the result of white flight in response to the race riots of the 60s. The city never really recovered, and as a result, there are entire formerly wealthy neighborhoods that are nearly abandoned.
Chicago's problems (and really, all of Illinois) are mostly the result of Democrats who voted like Republicans by massively outspending their revenue, racking up ridiculous amounts of debt. Add some corruption and cronyism in there to make things even more messy.
Baltimore's story is similar to that of Chicago, but with more corruption.
Amusingly, California almost got into trouble the same way—by taking on too much debt without adequate stockpiles of cash to weather economic downturns. One of the better surprises in California politics was getting two fiscal conservative governors in a row—Schwarzenegger and Brown—who have pushed some useful reforms that will really help the state over the long term.
It's unfortunate that the Republican party has drummed out most of its fiscal conservatives in favor of Reaganite faux conservatives who are even more fiscally irresponsible than the worst of the Democrats. If there were a non-negligible number of actual fiscal conservatives in the Republican party, the red states wouldn't be in nearly as bad shape as they are. Both parties need more fiscal conservatives.
The truth is that California spends all its money on handouts for other states...
This. California gives on the order of $60 billion more every year to the federal government than they get back, most of which goes to prop up the red states' failing economies that are broken largely because of Republican economic mismanagement. The reason California pays so much more in taxes is that the overwhelming majority of Californians make significantly more money than the national average for their particular field. The economy is in much better shape than most other states, in part because of high tech, in part because of the music and movie industries in L.A., and in part because the varieties of produce that California grows are in high demand relative to production levels.
But more than that, California has benefitted immensely from Democratic governments throwing huge amounts of money into higher education back in the 1970s, all of which cranked up taxes, but resulted in a more educated population that was better able to weather the economic changes brought by a post-industrial world. What I don't understand is how anybody still believes that Republican economic policies work in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, both at the state level and at the federal level. The notion that high taxes stifle the economy is a fiction. If it were true, California would be bankrupt and Florida would be extremely wealthy. Instead, the tech industry has actively migrated from Florida to California over the past twenty years or so, because the higher standard of living resulting from those higher taxes more than makes up for the cost of the higher taxes.
If California had that $60 billion per year back, we could give a free UC education to every California high school graduate. If we did that, the rest of the country would never catch up. In fifty years, even the eastern seaboard would be third world by comparison. And for our generosity in giving up that huge advantage to support our red state brethren, we get only a quarter as many electors per capita as Wyoming. The electoral college is thus fundamentally biased in favor of Republicans. The only reason Democrats ever win is because the Republicans are so incredibly bad at governing that Democrats overcome herculean odds stacked against them. Were the electoral college actually fair, no Republican would ever win a presidential election, nor (because representative count is tied to delegate count) would they ever hold the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, or even come close. Let that sink in for a moment.
And yet, the costs for buying land to build the infrastructure is still considerable. The industry is trending very strongly towards generating power closer to the point of consumption in spite of fun things like superconducting power lines that bring the losses to essentially zero. No reduction in coal regulation is likely to change that reality.
Correct. Ultimately, nothing short of a human-readable ballot is acceptable for verifiability unless you trust that the people certifying the machines aren't crooked.
Sure there is! The proper application of cryptography will solve these issues. Only allow signed firmware to run and have each machine have it's own key (stored in an MCU). On voting day after all the machines are put out, you use a simple NFC device to do an authentication exchange. If the authentication fails, then the machine has been compromised. It requires plenty of time and money to bypass the security of one device, much less thousands.
That's not anywhere near sufficient. The most likely way to hack a voting machine would be to take the little card that they give you for transferring your vote from the machine to the central DB, swap it for one that contains malicious data that exploits a buffer overflow in the voting machine, go through the voting process, and overwrite the software on the machine while it is running in such a way that it continues to behave normally, but skews the votes when it actually writes them to the cards in the future. And because the entire compromise would be in RAM, it would be completely undetectable after the machine gets shut down, and would not be prevented in any way by any amount of firmware signing.
The only way to make voting systems even moderately secure would be to have them boot from a RAMDisk stored on a signed PROM, with the hardware designed to ensure that it is impossible to modify any part of the firmware except by physically replacing the PROM, and with the card presence switch controlling power to the machine so that when you stick a new card in, it performs a cold boot from ROM. And even then, it depends on the card being wiped securely every time to prevent it from being a vector for continuous re-exploitation.
We're doing the national equivalent of "rolling coal" by electing Trump-Pence. Hopefully the rest of the world will stay patient with us, as it is but a phase.
The sad thing is how many people voted for Trump believing that he would bring back coal—believing that environmental regulations are the reason that coal is dead—when nothing is further from the truth. Coal is dead. Natural gas killed it. Forget the environmental issues; natural gas plants are much cheaper and easier to set up.
You can stick a natural gas cogen plant right next to the business that needs extra power, and the neighbors don't sue you for putting up a nasty, soot-belching smokestack in a residential neighborhood and lowering property values. The proximity also means you don't have to run extra high tension lines and you still have less transmission loss. And so on. Those cost differences add up.
Digital signatures help, but they are not sufficient. What is needed for proper digital security is multiple independent counts that can be independently verified, using equipment produced by different manufacturers. For example:
Voting machine by manufacturer A. Vote is signed with voting machine's digital signature.
Validator machine by manufacturer B. Voter takes electronic ballot card and walks it over to that machine to verify vote recorded correctly. Vote is re-signed or a revocation vote is signed with that machine's digital signature.
Vote counter machine by manufacturer C that processes the final vote and records it in a centralized database along with the entire signature audit trail.
Each device boots from a RAMdisk image stored on an EPROM that cannot be modified by the device itself, and reboots itself after every vote.
This would mean that someone would have to compromise all three systems in such a way that the voting machine displayed one vote but recorded a different vote, the validator displayed one vote but recorded a different vote, and the vote counter recorded the real vote without detecting whatever additional annotations were recorded by the compromised machines to allow the validator machines to show the voter's intended vote instead of the recorded vote. And they would have to do it in such a way that the compromise gets written to the memory card by the device that erases it before subsequent votes (which should be impossible without someone tampering with its EPROM).
An ideal implementation would involve four or five different manufacturers for each of these products, with a rule that each polling station must have more than two manufacturers' products, and that the validators cannot be made by the same companies as the voting machines.
Historically he was your typical wealthy New York Democrat.
And historically, Hillary Clinton was a Republican. Even her record in Congress (e.g. the failed video game violence ban that she sponsored) seemed pretty far to the right of center. This election seemed completely and utterly bizarre to everyone who was paying attention.
I know this is off-topic, but the solution for lobbying is not to ban lobbying, but rather to ban our congresspeople from Washington D.C. I've said it before, and it is no less true now than when I first said it.
If all of our congresspeople were required to spend at least 330 days per year in their districts, participate in floor debates via videoconferencing, and vote remotely from their office in whatever district they serve, it would effectively be equivalent to a successful ban on lobbying. Big companies would have to send lobbyists on expensive tours around the country, raising the cost of lobbying by more than two orders of magnitude, whereas citizens within each district would suddenly gain the easy access to their representatives that the founding fathers envisioned when they designed Congress as a part-time job.
That shift in the balance of access would fix roughly 99% of what's wrong with our federal government today with a single law.
You give away copies of your books in exchange for reviews, don't you?
Actually, I haven't gotten around to it yet.:-) I'd like to be able to do so, as giving away books is pretty much the only way for new authors to get reviews, period. And literally every non-bestselling author eventually resorts to it; whether in the form of Goodreads giveaways, making the Kindle edition free for a day/week/month, or whatever, the net effect is the same—you're giving away copies of your book in the hopes that some of those people will review it.
There's no meaningful difference between making your books available electronically for free for a week and mailing out copies to willing reviewers except that the people who get a physical copy of the book feel more obliged to actually read the book and comment on it honestly, rather than just storing it on their hard drives and never getting around to reading it. The value of those incentivized reviews to the author (and, I suppose, to people looking at reviews) obviously decreases as you get more reviews, but that's really true for the early reviews of any product. After all, even things like computers get silent revisions that render early reviews incorrect. That's triply true for indie books. But there's definite value to having some reviews rather than none, even if you know that the first few reviews are going to be biased.
The SNR is shit, and it's a pain in the ass. As far as I'm concerned, getting rid of these incentivised reviews means one set of sub-optimal reviews that I don't have to slog through, so I'm all for it. There may still be good information to be extracted from these reviews, despite the incentive-induced bias, but I do not have the time.
So you'd rather have no reviews? I'd rather have organic reviews if possible, but I'd much rather have a paid review than no reviews at all. I'd rather buy a product knowing that at least one person out there has obtained the product, used it, and given an opinion of it (even if that opinion is biased by having gotten it for free) than buy something completely blindly.
Besides, the SNR is going to be terrible no matter what. By eliminating reviews by people who are given the product for free (except through Amazon's Vine program, which gets an explicit exception):
Only companies big enough to participate in Vine can get enough reviews to get people to consider the products.
Only companies that pay Amazon for reviews can get enough reviews to get people to consider the products.
The small companies that manage to get products reviewed will invariably be paying people to write reviews who may not have even seen the product, rather than merely sending out free samples.
The authors who do get reviews will now rely entirely on family and friends, who are even less neutral than the incentivized reviewers.
The reality of the matter is that no matter what you do, the first few reviews are going to be biased. The first few reviews of a new author's books will invariably be written by family and friends, just as the first reviews of products are usually written by employees, their family members, or members of the press in exchange for product loans or donated copies or whatever. And this is true for all but the largest companies.
The irony is that the incentivized reviewers don't have a strong incentive to give all positive reviews or to accept every book/product for review, whereas all the other folks on that list do. So the SNR for early reviews will be worse under this system, not better, because either products won't have reviews (less signal) or the reviews will be lesser quality reviews by shills or family members instead of by people who merely got free products (higher noise). There's no plausible scenario in which this improves the SNR. At all.
Worse, the pay-to-play nature of this scheme borders on payola, because Amazon is re
The reality of the matter is that incentivized reviews aren't really a problem, and actually prevent much worse problems. Incentivized reviews (where people get, for example, a free product in exchange for a review) serve a crucial purpose in the industry—allowing products from new publishers, new manufacturers, etc. to get reviewed by someone competent early on so that people will actually consider that product. (Most people won't seriously look at a product that has no reviews.) By banning them, Amazon is basically saying that new publishers, new authors, new manufacturers, etc. need not bother to sell there.
Worse, a ban on incentivized reviews significantly increases the pressure on small businesses to use truly unethical means of getting reviews, such as hiring companies that pay people to buy the product and write fake reviews. Lots of seriously bad products invariably have dozens of obviously fake five-star reviews, and that abuse of the system makes it even harder for legitimate businesses to get their foot in the door.
The only way this decision doesn't represent an absolute abandonment of Amazon's duty to protect consumers from outright fraud is if they also make participation in the Vine program free and available to anyone who asks, whether they are Amazon vendors or not. Otherwise, this ban just encourages outright fraud by eliminating the one legitimate means that most small businesses have for getting reviews.
And the policy isn't just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer. The notion that the difference between 4.74 stars and 4.36 is meaningful is laughable. Star ratings are completely meaningless in aggregate (at least without a standard deviation), because a product could have three five-star ratings that says "This product is great" and a one-star rating that says "This product burned down my house", and in aggregate, that product would have a 4.5-star rating. Everybody who actually buys products understands the fallacy of comparing star ratings, and instead reads the highest-rated high, low, and average reviews to see what they actually say about the product.
Moreover, anybody serious about buying the right product also does keyword searches looking for aspects of the product that interest or concern them. For this reason, consumers are served best by having as many reviews as possible, paid or otherwise, because (with the exception of very bad products) each review is likely to provide information about some aspect of the product that no other review provides. So deleting incentivized reviews is not just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer, because it reduces the amount of information available to consumers about products that they are considering buying.
I'm absolutely blown away at the absolute cluelessness of this decision. It is as though their management never actually bought a product on their own website, never sold any product anywhere, and couldn't be bothered to ask consumers or sellers what they thought. The resulting decision is utterly naïve.
Corporations don't really pass on taxes to the consumers.
Don't kid yourself. The biggest corporate taxes are on people—the Medicare tax and the Social Security tax. Those come out of the bottom line, and you bet they pass every penny of that on to the people who buy their products. Same goes for property tax, etc. And even with corporate income taxes, if you assume that the goal of a corporation is to make money, then it stands to reason that any increase in those taxes will result in the leadership raising prices so that their after-taxes profit remains the same. That's why corporate taxes are fundamentally regressive.
The problem with taxing corporations is that the people who are getting taxed are effectively the same people who set the prices. By taxing individual income, you avoid that problem. Cranking up the capital gains tax rate to be the same as ordinary income means that the people who are getting taxed largely lack the power to raise prices to compensate for those taxes, and the cost doesn't get passed on. That's really the only way to keep the people at the bottom from ultimately paying the entire cost of those taxes.
They were wrong. There are only a couple of manufacturers of voting machines, and if any of them has a security hole that can be exploited by inserting media with (for example) a corrupted filesystem or data file, then there's a good chance that someone could craft an exploit that silently causes those machine to show the user one thing, but report something else. That's why any secure voting system needs a printed paper ballot that is human readable—to make votes truly auditable by the voter and after the fact.
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The DC parts of the yo-yos sometimes degraded in the same way, but the internal sparking just darkened the wires without tripping any breakers.
It has nothing to do with how you wind it. I've seen Apple power supplies that were never wound up at all where the outer insulation became brittle and flaked off in large chunks. I'm not sure if it was sun exposure or heat exposure, but something causes the jackets on the early MagSafe cables to chemically break down.
FTFY.
As far as I'm aware, Apple has never in its entire history built a good laptop power supply:
So saying that third-party Mac laptop supplies are worse than the real thing might be true, but it is like saying that a Pinto is worse than a Corvair. They do, however, build reliable USB power supplies... but their cell phone power cords are even worse than their laptop power cords. Fortunately, there are many third-party manufacturers building Lightning cables that are actually built to last.
Part of what makes these problematic is largely that they're trying to look like Apple products. Apple makes really small power supplies, which makes it much harder to create knock-offs that work. Nobody makes knock-offs of Android supplies; they just make cheap USB power supplies. Because they aren't trying to hit an absurdly small form factor, they don't cut corners to the same degree, and the supplies tend to be more reliable at a given price point. That said, the Apple USB supplies cost $19, and the usable third-party branded supplies usually start at about $12, so there's not a lot of savings to be gained even when you take away the form factor.
More significantly, because they're trying to look like Apple products (and often pretending to be Apple products), they can't be branded. If they were, Apple would go after them for violating their design patents (and trademark violations if they use the Apple logo). That entire selling model is incompatible with branding. As a result, there's no hit to their reputation if the product doesn't work. They just change the name on their Amazon or eBay account and go right back to fooling people. So there's also no incentive to make a quality product.
Because that's a lot of capacity to lose. I doubt that the difference between stopping at 80% and stopping at 100% is enough to be worth the rather significant loss of capacity.
That said, the OS already does various tricks to minimize the damage caused by fully charging the batteries. For example, in OS X and iOS, IIRC the top several percent are hidden. When the charge level hits about 95% (I forget the exact number, and it might even vary depending on the age of the battery), it says 100%, but it continues to charge for a while at a slow speed until it reaches a true 100% charge. As the pack discharges, it gets down to about 95% before the UI stops saying 100%.
The reason for this is that the charge circuits in the devices won't even start charging until the pack's charge drops below about 95%, because continuously trickle-charging batteries to keep them at 100% will burn them out rather rapidly, whereas letting them cycle by five or ten percent is much less abusive on the batteries. However, it would be confusing to users if their batteries rarely read 100% after a full charge, so they fudge the numbers so that 95% is treated as fully charged.
This is why the only way to fix such a broken system is to get the people so mad that they self-organize to overthrow the bad leaders and stick their heads on pikes as a sign to anyone else who would go down the same path. It worked reasonably well in France, among others.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work very well if the government has tanks and fighter jets, which is why Russia's arms sales to various Middle-Eastern regimes represents such a grave threat to real, long-term stability in the region.
Keep in mind that California's budget is in the triple-digit billions of dollars every year. A mere $4 billion dollars is chump change. That's like somebody who makes $100 grand a year taking out a loan on a low-end used car. The economy was in the toilet, and California was bailing water just to stay afloat. Taking out a little temporary debt to avoid massive cuts in services was the fiscally responsible thing to do.
But in addition to that, he also pushed for changes to the law that required a certain portion of revenue in unexpectedly profitable years to be saved instead of getting spent, so that in future lean years, the state won't have to take such drastic measures to keep from having to cut essential services. That's fiscal conservatism.
Because sometimes there are very useful reviews by people who chose a different product (or chose to not buy a product at all) after discovering serious flaws in the product while looking at it in a brick-and-mortar store.
The GP's point was fundamentally invalid, because the proposed law didn't regulate anything. The law gave the FCC the authority to create future regulations that promoted diversity in ownership if its commissioners determined that doing so would serve the public good.
Arguing that it was an attempt at banning right wing radio is like arguing that passing a federal law that allows states to pass laws that recognize gay marriages is a nationwide ban on Christians. It's pure and utter nonsense.
Even with the electoral college, they still do that. The only difference is that they campaign almost exclusively in Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, Jackson (MS), and other large cities in low-population states and ignore the big cities in all the high-population states.
Yes and no. When we talk about how much goes back into the states, we're including military spending, federal government contracts, interstate highway improvements, etc. The federal government owns the interstate highway system, employs the military, etc., all of which at least arguably needs to go through the federal government. And the federal government pays money to contractors in various states to build things that it needs. So it really isn't anything like getting a tax refund.
Either way, my point is that there's a huge discrepancy between the richest states and the poorest states, with the poorest states getting back several times what they put in, and the richest getting back only about four-fifths of what they put in. It is basically federal redistribution of wealth from the richest states to the poorest states. And the poorest states keep voting for people who say that they're against redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. They're voting exactly contrary to their best interests, and if they ever actually truly got their wish and California and a few other blue states stopped propping up their governments, most of the southern states would have to immediately declare bankruptcy; they're only solvent because of policies that they claim to be against.
None of those cities have problems because of high taxes. In order:
Amusingly, California almost got into trouble the same way—by taking on too much debt without adequate stockpiles of cash to weather economic downturns. One of the better surprises in California politics was getting two fiscal conservative governors in a row—Schwarzenegger and Brown—who have pushed some useful reforms that will really help the state over the long term.
It's unfortunate that the Republican party has drummed out most of its fiscal conservatives in favor of Reaganite faux conservatives who are even more fiscally irresponsible than the worst of the Democrats. If there were a non-negligible number of actual fiscal conservatives in the Republican party, the red states wouldn't be in nearly as bad shape as they are. Both parties need more fiscal conservatives.
This. California gives on the order of $60 billion more every year to the federal government than they get back, most of which goes to prop up the red states' failing economies that are broken largely because of Republican economic mismanagement. The reason California pays so much more in taxes is that the overwhelming majority of Californians make significantly more money than the national average for their particular field. The economy is in much better shape than most other states, in part because of high tech, in part because of the music and movie industries in L.A., and in part because the varieties of produce that California grows are in high demand relative to production levels.
But more than that, California has benefitted immensely from Democratic governments throwing huge amounts of money into higher education back in the 1970s, all of which cranked up taxes, but resulted in a more educated population that was better able to weather the economic changes brought by a post-industrial world. What I don't understand is how anybody still believes that Republican economic policies work in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, both at the state level and at the federal level. The notion that high taxes stifle the economy is a fiction. If it were true, California would be bankrupt and Florida would be extremely wealthy. Instead, the tech industry has actively migrated from Florida to California over the past twenty years or so, because the higher standard of living resulting from those higher taxes more than makes up for the cost of the higher taxes.
If California had that $60 billion per year back, we could give a free UC education to every California high school graduate. If we did that, the rest of the country would never catch up. In fifty years, even the eastern seaboard would be third world by comparison. And for our generosity in giving up that huge advantage to support our red state brethren, we get only a quarter as many electors per capita as Wyoming. The electoral college is thus fundamentally biased in favor of Republicans. The only reason Democrats ever win is because the Republicans are so incredibly bad at governing that Democrats overcome herculean odds stacked against them. Were the electoral college actually fair, no Republican would ever win a presidential election, nor (because representative count is tied to delegate count) would they ever hold the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, or even come close. Let that sink in for a moment.
And yet, the costs for buying land to build the infrastructure is still considerable. The industry is trending very strongly towards generating power closer to the point of consumption in spite of fun things like superconducting power lines that bring the losses to essentially zero. No reduction in coal regulation is likely to change that reality.
Correct. Ultimately, nothing short of a human-readable ballot is acceptable for verifiability unless you trust that the people certifying the machines aren't crooked.
That's not anywhere near sufficient. The most likely way to hack a voting machine would be to take the little card that they give you for transferring your vote from the machine to the central DB, swap it for one that contains malicious data that exploits a buffer overflow in the voting machine, go through the voting process, and overwrite the software on the machine while it is running in such a way that it continues to behave normally, but skews the votes when it actually writes them to the cards in the future. And because the entire compromise would be in RAM, it would be completely undetectable after the machine gets shut down, and would not be prevented in any way by any amount of firmware signing.
The only way to make voting systems even moderately secure would be to have them boot from a RAMDisk stored on a signed PROM, with the hardware designed to ensure that it is impossible to modify any part of the firmware except by physically replacing the PROM, and with the card presence switch controlling power to the machine so that when you stick a new card in, it performs a cold boot from ROM. And even then, it depends on the card being wiped securely every time to prevent it from being a vector for continuous re-exploitation.
Flattery will get you nowhere. Battery will get you fifteen to twenty.
The sad thing is how many people voted for Trump believing that he would bring back coal—believing that environmental regulations are the reason that coal is dead—when nothing is further from the truth. Coal is dead. Natural gas killed it. Forget the environmental issues; natural gas plants are much cheaper and easier to set up.
You can stick a natural gas cogen plant right next to the business that needs extra power, and the neighbors don't sue you for putting up a nasty, soot-belching smokestack in a residential neighborhood and lowering property values. The proximity also means you don't have to run extra high tension lines and you still have less transmission loss. And so on. Those cost differences add up.
Digital signatures help, but they are not sufficient. What is needed for proper digital security is multiple independent counts that can be independently verified, using equipment produced by different manufacturers. For example:
This would mean that someone would have to compromise all three systems in such a way that the voting machine displayed one vote but recorded a different vote, the validator displayed one vote but recorded a different vote, and the vote counter recorded the real vote without detecting whatever additional annotations were recorded by the compromised machines to allow the validator machines to show the voter's intended vote instead of the recorded vote. And they would have to do it in such a way that the compromise gets written to the memory card by the device that erases it before subsequent votes (which should be impossible without someone tampering with its EPROM).
An ideal implementation would involve four or five different manufacturers for each of these products, with a rule that each polling station must have more than two manufacturers' products, and that the validators cannot be made by the same companies as the voting machines.
And historically, Hillary Clinton was a Republican. Even her record in Congress (e.g. the failed video game violence ban that she sponsored) seemed pretty far to the right of center. This election seemed completely and utterly bizarre to everyone who was paying attention.
I know this is off-topic, but the solution for lobbying is not to ban lobbying, but rather to ban our congresspeople from Washington D.C. I've said it before, and it is no less true now than when I first said it.
If all of our congresspeople were required to spend at least 330 days per year in their districts, participate in floor debates via videoconferencing, and vote remotely from their office in whatever district they serve, it would effectively be equivalent to a successful ban on lobbying. Big companies would have to send lobbyists on expensive tours around the country, raising the cost of lobbying by more than two orders of magnitude, whereas citizens within each district would suddenly gain the easy access to their representatives that the founding fathers envisioned when they designed Congress as a part-time job.
That shift in the balance of access would fix roughly 99% of what's wrong with our federal government today with a single law.
Actually, I haven't gotten around to it yet. :-) I'd like to be able to do so, as giving away books is pretty much the only way for new authors to get reviews, period. And literally every non-bestselling author eventually resorts to it; whether in the form of Goodreads giveaways, making the Kindle edition free for a day/week/month, or whatever, the net effect is the same—you're giving away copies of your book in the hopes that some of those people will review it.
There's no meaningful difference between making your books available electronically for free for a week and mailing out copies to willing reviewers except that the people who get a physical copy of the book feel more obliged to actually read the book and comment on it honestly, rather than just storing it on their hard drives and never getting around to reading it. The value of those incentivized reviews to the author (and, I suppose, to people looking at reviews) obviously decreases as you get more reviews, but that's really true for the early reviews of any product. After all, even things like computers get silent revisions that render early reviews incorrect. That's triply true for indie books. But there's definite value to having some reviews rather than none, even if you know that the first few reviews are going to be biased.
So you'd rather have no reviews? I'd rather have organic reviews if possible, but I'd much rather have a paid review than no reviews at all. I'd rather buy a product knowing that at least one person out there has obtained the product, used it, and given an opinion of it (even if that opinion is biased by having gotten it for free) than buy something completely blindly.
Besides, the SNR is going to be terrible no matter what. By eliminating reviews by people who are given the product for free (except through Amazon's Vine program, which gets an explicit exception):
The reality of the matter is that no matter what you do, the first few reviews are going to be biased. The first few reviews of a new author's books will invariably be written by family and friends, just as the first reviews of products are usually written by employees, their family members, or members of the press in exchange for product loans or donated copies or whatever. And this is true for all but the largest companies.
The irony is that the incentivized reviewers don't have a strong incentive to give all positive reviews or to accept every book/product for review, whereas all the other folks on that list do. So the SNR for early reviews will be worse under this system, not better, because either products won't have reviews (less signal) or the reviews will be lesser quality reviews by shills or family members instead of by people who merely got free products (higher noise). There's no plausible scenario in which this improves the SNR. At all.
Worse, the pay-to-play nature of this scheme borders on payola, because Amazon is re
IMO, this is a bad policy, plain and simple.
The reality of the matter is that incentivized reviews aren't really a problem, and actually prevent much worse problems. Incentivized reviews (where people get, for example, a free product in exchange for a review) serve a crucial purpose in the industry—allowing products from new publishers, new manufacturers, etc. to get reviewed by someone competent early on so that people will actually consider that product. (Most people won't seriously look at a product that has no reviews.) By banning them, Amazon is basically saying that new publishers, new authors, new manufacturers, etc. need not bother to sell there.
Worse, a ban on incentivized reviews significantly increases the pressure on small businesses to use truly unethical means of getting reviews, such as hiring companies that pay people to buy the product and write fake reviews. Lots of seriously bad products invariably have dozens of obviously fake five-star reviews, and that abuse of the system makes it even harder for legitimate businesses to get their foot in the door.
The only way this decision doesn't represent an absolute abandonment of Amazon's duty to protect consumers from outright fraud is if they also make participation in the Vine program free and available to anyone who asks, whether they are Amazon vendors or not. Otherwise, this ban just encourages outright fraud by eliminating the one legitimate means that most small businesses have for getting reviews.
And the policy isn't just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer. The notion that the difference between 4.74 stars and 4.36 is meaningful is laughable. Star ratings are completely meaningless in aggregate (at least without a standard deviation), because a product could have three five-star ratings that says "This product is great" and a one-star rating that says "This product burned down my house", and in aggregate, that product would have a 4.5-star rating. Everybody who actually buys products understands the fallacy of comparing star ratings, and instead reads the highest-rated high, low, and average reviews to see what they actually say about the product.
Moreover, anybody serious about buying the right product also does keyword searches looking for aspects of the product that interest or concern them. For this reason, consumers are served best by having as many reviews as possible, paid or otherwise, because (with the exception of very bad products) each review is likely to provide information about some aspect of the product that no other review provides. So deleting incentivized reviews is not just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer, because it reduces the amount of information available to consumers about products that they are considering buying.
I'm absolutely blown away at the absolute cluelessness of this decision. It is as though their management never actually bought a product on their own website, never sold any product anywhere, and couldn't be bothered to ask consumers or sellers what they thought. The resulting decision is utterly naïve.
Don't kid yourself. The biggest corporate taxes are on people—the Medicare tax and the Social Security tax. Those come out of the bottom line, and you bet they pass every penny of that on to the people who buy their products. Same goes for property tax, etc. And even with corporate income taxes, if you assume that the goal of a corporation is to make money, then it stands to reason that any increase in those taxes will result in the leadership raising prices so that their after-taxes profit remains the same. That's why corporate taxes are fundamentally regressive.
The problem with taxing corporations is that the people who are getting taxed are effectively the same people who set the prices. By taxing individual income, you avoid that problem. Cranking up the capital gains tax rate to be the same as ordinary income means that the people who are getting taxed largely lack the power to raise prices to compensate for those taxes, and the cost doesn't get passed on. That's really the only way to keep the people at the bottom from ultimately paying the entire cost of those taxes.
They were wrong. There are only a couple of manufacturers of voting machines, and if any of them has a security hole that can be exploited by inserting media with (for example) a corrupted filesystem or data file, then there's a good chance that someone could craft an exploit that silently causes those machine to show the user one thing, but report something else. That's why any secure voting system needs a printed paper ballot that is human readable—to make votes truly auditable by the voter and after the fact.