I think he was talking about how Amazon got its start... online books. Amazon used to be just an online book store that had cheaper prices and cheap shipping if you didn't mind waiting a week to 10 days because they negotiated lower prices in exchange for lower quality shipping. Talk about taking a niche market and using it to build out...
But even at the beginning, price wasn't the only factor. The other factor was selection. Amazon was cheaper than the local bookstore but you also didn't have to drive there only to find out that the specific book you wanted wasn't there. Amazon has always been about the "long tail". Brick and mortar cannot compete with the long tail of online sales. Walmart realizes this too which is why they have practically become a seasonal store and now start clearancing swimsuits in July. They know that the even though July/August are prime swimming months, the majority of swimsuit sales are already done by then so they need to move out the swimsuits and start moving in something else with high volume. Walmart has decided that it is better to sell a bunch of stuff in bulk during peak season than it is to try to compete with the long tail.
I assume the concern for the size of the leak is that with a large leak, the "emergency air supply" will run out quickly? Nonsense.
Learn a lesson from aircraft cabin depressurization response, and run the emergency air supply to face masks.
If you don't try to keep the whole cabin pressurized, you (a) don't fight whatever caused the loss of pressure in the first place, and (b) don't continue adding air into the tube outside the passenger compartment, which has the double bad effect of increasing drag (not really a problem for the amount of air leaking, considering the huge volume of the tube) and turning every leak into a mini-thruster which may be forcing the opposite side of the capsule to drag on the tube walls!!!
I think the problem isn't the lack of oxygen but rather the lack of pressure. A facemask would only be effective if you can keep the cabin pressure above 120millibars and likely needs to be even higher than that to avoid fatalities: https://biology.stackexchange....
Unlike a train or plane, a hyperloop is an enclosed tube where collisions *should* be non-existent unless you put multiple cars in the same tube. The most likely failure is likely stalling in which case you will need to have some way of extracting the stalled car but everyone should be uninjured. The mostly likely fatal failure would likely be a break in the tube causing a derailment and the closest we have to that would be roller coasters and large oil pipelines. Looking at the failure rate of large oil pipelines and roller coaster derailment should give a pretty good idea of the failure rate of a hyperloop.
By definition, "planned" means they intentionally did it and then yes, they should be liable. Apple didn't knowingly design phones that would bend so you had to replace them. To use another example, several years ago Ford sold a bunch of trucks where the blue paint started to flake after a couple years. My brother bought one of these trucks used at a discount because of the flaking paint and then got a free paint job from Ford making it like new again. Ford didn't intentionally go and try to create paint that failed after a couple of years. I don't see why they are under any obligation at all to fix an honest mistake that noone planned for and noone knew about at the time of sell. Same with a lot of these ambulance chasers on TV. If you knew a medical device was harmful and sold it anyways and/or it can be shown that you didn't do the proper premarket testing then they should be able to bankrupt you but if you sold a device to make someone's life better and 10 years down the road it is discovered that it has a fatal defect that noone could have predicted, I don't think the device manufacturer should be liable.
No but they did make defective iPhone 6 and 6s models. That is what the class action lawsuit is about. I don't particularly care about the phone contract vs apple warranty argument -- though I do think it would be smart for apple and ATT/Sprint/et al to address that -- as much as I care about defective products. If the axle on an out-of-warranty car cracks during normal use because of a casting/fabrication error, the manufacturer better damn well replace it.
Why should the manufacturer be liable at all? If a defect is discovered after a product is released, why is the manufacturer the one that should have to pay to fix the defect? If I intentionally sell apples with worms in them then that's fraud and I should be liable. If I unintentionally sell apples with worms in them then to maintain my reputation I should probably make it right but there is no reason that I should legally be required to. Same with defects in products. If the defect is unknown, why should the burden to fix the defective product be on the seller and not the buyer? The transaction is complete and the product is now owned by the buyer and the buyer should be the one responsible for fixing it just like it is when you buy a used car with no warrantee.
A space heater is designed to convert as much electricity as possible into heat, a CPU is designed to convert as much electricity as possible into CPU cycles...
Yes, a CPU is designed to use as little energy as possible but that doesn't change the fact that 100% of the energy it uses is converted into heat. A CPU bank that consumes 1500 watts of power converts that 1500 watts into heat with the exact same conversion ratio (100%) as a 1500 watt space heater. The fact that a CPU bank also does useful computations while converting that electricity to heat doesn't change the fact that just like a space heater, all the energy it consumes is converted directly into heat.
The end user has to pay the electricity bill anyways. A processor is no less efficient at producing heat from electricity than a space heater. In both cases, electricity goes in and heat goes out. I would have no problem installing one in my house especially if I got a percentage of the profit as that would just be free money. The only problem I see with this is that my heater only runs about 3 months out of the year. As another poster mentioned, this would seem like a better match for a water heater that runs year around.
Soon we don't need humans in the world, everything can be done by robots.
We are already surpassing the world that's depicted in the TV series Max Headroom.
The smartest robot in the world is still dumber than an amoeba. We have a long way to go before AI can replace people. AI is mostly well defined problems and pattern recognition. Even something as trivial as "unpacking and sorting a box" like in the summary is impossible for robots currently. With the slight exception of vacuuming, there is almost no task in the home that can currently be automated. Cooking, cleaning, folding laundry, putting away laundry, cleaning the toilet, putting dishes away, picking up toys, dusting, etc... Even when we have something like a dishwasher that washes the dishes for us, it still requires a human to babysit it by putting the dishes in and then taking them out and putting them away.
Left unsaid is that turnover is high enough they can wait a few months and the excess workforce will leave, and their numbers won't be hired back because that number of human jobs is no longer necessary. A net number of jobs are lost yet noone was laid off. If they were paying $X to humans before, they aren't going to spend $X plus $Y in robot acquisition/maintenance/operating costs; the new X+Y will always be less than the old X (on paper at least) or else they won't pull the trigger. Thus, less total money goes to humans.
It's not layoffs that are working the magic. It's the fact that amazon is growing at a decent enough rate that it can absorb the extra people. If amazon wasn't growing there would be no way that it could increase efficiency without laying people off.
No, not might. Will. A $200 tax on a $1m transaction will stop if the transaction was done to earn $200 in profit. Look up high frequency trading to learn more.
If someone is doing a $1M trade to make $200 then they are likely doing a MITM attack that shouldn't be legal anyways. For the average person buying $1M of stocks to actually own those stocks, $200 isn't going to matter. Even for a day trader, the stock would only have to move that same 0.02% (0.0002) to get back to even. Most stocks fluctuate 10 times that amount every minute. A day trader isn't going to do a trade that it expects to only move 0.02% (0.0002).
The card says it is not to be used for identification. Which is now a joke.
Your social security number is not supposed to be used for identification. But there is a very simple reason why everyone uses it for exactly that purpose -- it is the only unique identifier that exists.
The problem isn't that it is used as a unique identifier. The problem is that it is used to verify that unique identifier. You should be able to tell anybody and everyone that you are the John Smith with SSN of 499-99-9993. You then should have to prove that someway with a signed key, picture ID, etc... It was a mistake taking SSN off of driver's license. They should be there. They should be on business cards too and mailboxes. SSN is the non-changing number that identifies you as a unique John Smith as opposed to the dozens of other John Smiths that might exist. The problem is you can't have knowledge of a person's unique non-changing identifier also be proof that you are that person. That is absurd. The simplest solution would probably be to have a government database where you can type in a Name and SSN and it pops up a picture and public key of the person in question. This would also be a solution to businesses unknowingly hiring illegal immigrants as well.
If you put a tax on stock trades, it would reduce the amount of trading, making your initial revenue calculations wrong.
It *might* but a $200 tax on a 1 million dollar transaction will likely not have much effect on volume. There is likely other things in the transaction that introduce more friction than this. Same with a 20 cent tax on a $1k transaction. This is likely not enough to actually change trading patterns.
The big problem here is Facebook EU (using a spurious example) pays Facebook Ireland a huge fee for licensing certain proprietary technologies. Facebook EU therefore makes no profit, while Facebook Ireland makes a huge profit, but Ireland has low taxation so they pay far less overall.
You can substitute Microsoft, Google or whatever company you want here. This is how they play the game.
Which is why you short circuit the game. Take whichever entity of Facebook that is actually making the profit to court for tax invasion and say because 10% of their customers are in the France that they are required to pay taxes on 10% of that profit or they stop operating in France. It doesn't matter if that profit is from server farms, Intellectual Property, or some other made up BS. Everyone knows what the profit is. They are a publicly traded company and there aren't shares of Ireland Facebook and France Facebook and USA Facebook. It's all one company and everyone knows it. Pass some laws making these shell games illegal and be done with it.
If you believe in progressive taxation, then the obvious tax to keep is the income tax.
That income tax is progressive is a huge myth. Most of the real wealth is not from people trading their hours for money. It might be slightly more progressive than sales tax but that's about it. If you really want a progressive tax then you need to tax assets or net worth. A yearly tax of 5% of net worth could fully fund the entire federal government with money to spare. Another progressive tax would be to tax the movement of money. By my calculations, the USA could replace all our tax revenue with a single tax of.02% (0.0002) on stock market trades. Not only would it produce a huge amount of tax revenue, it might also reduce the amount of high frequency trading.
That's not how amazon works. Amazon gives the seller a "credit" for the amount of shipping regardless of what the actual shipping is. That credit is sometimes more and sometimes less than what it costs to ship it. If it's less, the seller just has to eat it. If the credit is more (and it likely would be for multiple items shipped together), then amazon doesn't keep that, amazon gives that to the seller who may or may not decide to ship the items in the same box. Strangely, the credit the seller gets is not always the same as the amount of shipping charged to the customer and the seller has very little control over what the shipping charges or credits are. I agree it's a strange system though. It would work much better if the seller could actually set the shipping rate and give discounts for multiple items shipped together like you can on ebay.
Also - taxing revenue would essentially remove all profit from their balance sheets. Essentially dooming them as functioning companies.
Taxing revenue at the same rate as profit would bankrupt them but because revenue is usually significantly higher than profit, you would likely tax it at a different rate. The only problem I see with this is that different industries have drastically different amounts of profit for the same amount of revenue. I think a better solution might be to tax profits of international companies based on the percentage of business done in that country. So if a company has a profit of 20M and 20% of their revenue is from France then 20% of their profit should be taxed in France.
Since in those 20 years time, there haven't been further advancements in this field, I would think that this an idea that is born dead.
There have been billions (if not trillions) of dollars of R&D poured into silicon and existing technology. Even if someone came up with something that potentially could perform better than existing technologies after the same amount of R&D, getting the investment needed to ramp it up to compete with existing technologies would be next to impossible. Unless we hit a brick wall, incremental improvement of existing technologies will likely always be a better path than starting over from scratch with a completely different tech tree.
Using your example, if you have a balanced scale with 1000eV charge on each side, and you can flip it back and forth with a single eV then you are 1000x more efficient than having to move all 1000eV every time you want to flip a switch. This might be more plausible than trying to make 1eV switches.
In theory, if instead of having a state that is overwritten each time, you have a state that "flips" from one state to another then the amount of energy required to flip the state could be significantly less than the energy required to create the state. For instance on a balanced scale with 100 pounds on each side perfectly balanced, a single pound added or removed from one side would cause the state to flip to the other side.
I'll grant you that tablets and phones cover many people's needs, as it's a point I've made before. But ARM is not even on the radar for desktop computing. I've tried using a 64-bit, quad-core ARM as a desktop box, and the systems have neither the CPU power nor the bus bandwidth to actually do the job.
Desktop computing is dying. Most people I know that still have desktop computers, they are gathering dust in the corners. Parents are no longer buying desktops or even laptops for their kids for school. The only consumer market left is handhelds, tablets, and tablets with keyboards. There is still a need for desktop processors in the business/server space and in the cloud space but those spaces have completely different constraints than desktop computing and have freedoms to do things not possible on the desktop.
The answer isn't to keep using antiquated pieces of paper, or to use credit cards. The answer is to use bank transfers, which every developed country on the planet uses.
None of the examples I gave would a bank transfer work better. To pay my local taxes, I do have the option of a bank transfer online but there is a fee for that too. There is no way to pay taxes in person without a check, a money order, or cash. A bank transfer for buying girl scout cookies or something similar is laughable. A bank transfer might work for paying your landlord if that person is set up for that but if the landlord only has a couple units, it's probably more expensive to set up than processing credit cards. Seriously, if checks are obsolete in other countries, what do most countries use for small (in size or frequency) person to person transfers?
It's quaint that people in the US still use checks.:-)
One box of checks usually lasts me 4-5 years. Checks are better than cash for paying small people not set up to accept credit cards like babysitters, lawn care, school fundraisers, school tshirts, friends, etc... Checks are also better than credit cards for larger purchases like rent, daycare, and taxes where that 3% fee is significant.
This is standard. I changed internet providers about 3 years ago. To close my account, they required me to take my router in to their authorized retailer, and he calculated the final bill and gave me a refund for the unused portion of my last month on the spot. But since 1c coins were made obsolete here about a decade ago, he over-refunded me by 1 cent, following good retail practice of erring in favour of the customer. Every month since then, I've received a bill for 0.01. Obviously there is some human review or sanity check before sending accounts to the debt collectors, as they haven't tried to take it any further than sending me a bill every month in the last 3 years, but it is quite amusing that even with a fully automated email based system, it has to have cost them more than 0.01 to keep doing this for so long.
This is no longer becoming standard. I recently noticed my phone company contract has the cutoff at $10 which I actually thought was high. I've also on multiple occasions tried to pay a bill from the local hospital in the $5-$15 dollar range only to find out that the hospital already waived and closed it. They wouldn't even let me pay it. I do occasionally still get checks and bills for under $5 but I haven't seen one under $1 for quite a while. Most banks also have policies where they will close accounts of less than $10 after so many months of inactivity.
and the more folks you can get them to add in on the same plan, the less chance anyone in that group will be able to convince everyone else to go to a new carrier (which usually means new device as well, which means moving all contacts/apps/etc, and the cost to move, and the headache, and coordinating a date when everyone can make that move... it's just not going to happen).
Most multiline plans are designed around a family and many have restrictions like shared data, shared billing, being able to see the location of everyone, etc.. in order to discourage roommates, etc.. from using a multiline plan. This means that in general, there is very little "convincing" or coordination dates needed. Mom, Dad, etc.. just changes everyone. I think the main advantage they get with multiline accounts is that they know that parents are likely not going to shell out $50+ a month for a line for their kid but an extra $20/month gives them $240 they wouldn't otherwise have. I do think this part does help with the lockin though as once you have 4 lines, the odds of all 4 being out of contract at the same time is lower.
Hey, some people can't find spouses and don't have kids. Why should they pay more for phones and phones service?
It's because as the number of lines goes up, the amount used per line tends to drop. Families tend to have one or two heavy users. That's the reason that many carriers tend to make the 3rd and 4th line almost free. They know that those lines are likely going to be used considerably less. Also plans are tailored to the heaviest user. The heaviest user needs unlimited so everyone is on unlimited. If all lines were the same price then only the heavy user would choose the unlimited plan and the rest would go find cheaper plans.
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I think he was talking about how Amazon got its start... online books. Amazon used to be just an online book store that had cheaper prices and cheap shipping if you didn't mind waiting a week to 10 days because they negotiated lower prices in exchange for lower quality shipping. Talk about taking a niche market and using it to build out...
But even at the beginning, price wasn't the only factor. The other factor was selection. Amazon was cheaper than the local bookstore but you also didn't have to drive there only to find out that the specific book you wanted wasn't there. Amazon has always been about the "long tail". Brick and mortar cannot compete with the long tail of online sales. Walmart realizes this too which is why they have practically become a seasonal store and now start clearancing swimsuits in July. They know that the even though July/August are prime swimming months, the majority of swimsuit sales are already done by then so they need to move out the swimsuits and start moving in something else with high volume. Walmart has decided that it is better to sell a bunch of stuff in bulk during peak season than it is to try to compete with the long tail.
I assume the concern for the size of the leak is that with a large leak, the "emergency air supply" will run out quickly? Nonsense.
Learn a lesson from aircraft cabin depressurization response, and run the emergency air supply to face masks.
If you don't try to keep the whole cabin pressurized, you (a) don't fight whatever caused the loss of pressure in the first place, and (b) don't continue adding air into the tube outside the passenger compartment, which has the double bad effect of increasing drag (not really a problem for the amount of air leaking, considering the huge volume of the tube) and turning every leak into a mini-thruster which may be forcing the opposite side of the capsule to drag on the tube walls!!!
I think the problem isn't the lack of oxygen but rather the lack of pressure. A facemask would only be effective if you can keep the cabin pressure above 120millibars and likely needs to be even higher than that to avoid fatalities: https://biology.stackexchange....
Unlike a train or plane, a hyperloop is an enclosed tube where collisions *should* be non-existent unless you put multiple cars in the same tube. The most likely failure is likely stalling in which case you will need to have some way of extracting the stalled car but everyone should be uninjured. The mostly likely fatal failure would likely be a break in the tube causing a derailment and the closest we have to that would be roller coasters and large oil pipelines. Looking at the failure rate of large oil pipelines and roller coaster derailment should give a pretty good idea of the failure rate of a hyperloop.
Ever heard of planned obsolescence ?
By definition, "planned" means they intentionally did it and then yes, they should be liable. Apple didn't knowingly design phones that would bend so you had to replace them. To use another example, several years ago Ford sold a bunch of trucks where the blue paint started to flake after a couple years. My brother bought one of these trucks used at a discount because of the flaking paint and then got a free paint job from Ford making it like new again. Ford didn't intentionally go and try to create paint that failed after a couple of years. I don't see why they are under any obligation at all to fix an honest mistake that noone planned for and noone knew about at the time of sell. Same with a lot of these ambulance chasers on TV. If you knew a medical device was harmful and sold it anyways and/or it can be shown that you didn't do the proper premarket testing then they should be able to bankrupt you but if you sold a device to make someone's life better and 10 years down the road it is discovered that it has a fatal defect that noone could have predicted, I don't think the device manufacturer should be liable.
No but they did make defective iPhone 6 and 6s models. That is what the class action lawsuit is about. I don't particularly care about the phone contract vs apple warranty argument -- though I do think it would be smart for apple and ATT/Sprint/et al to address that -- as much as I care about defective products. If the axle on an out-of-warranty car cracks during normal use because of a casting/fabrication error, the manufacturer better damn well replace it.
Why should the manufacturer be liable at all? If a defect is discovered after a product is released, why is the manufacturer the one that should have to pay to fix the defect? If I intentionally sell apples with worms in them then that's fraud and I should be liable. If I unintentionally sell apples with worms in them then to maintain my reputation I should probably make it right but there is no reason that I should legally be required to. Same with defects in products. If the defect is unknown, why should the burden to fix the defective product be on the seller and not the buyer? The transaction is complete and the product is now owned by the buyer and the buyer should be the one responsible for fixing it just like it is when you buy a used car with no warrantee.
A space heater is designed to convert as much electricity as possible into heat, a CPU is designed to convert as much electricity as possible into CPU cycles...
Yes, a CPU is designed to use as little energy as possible but that doesn't change the fact that 100% of the energy it uses is converted into heat. A CPU bank that consumes 1500 watts of power converts that 1500 watts into heat with the exact same conversion ratio (100%) as a 1500 watt space heater. The fact that a CPU bank also does useful computations while converting that electricity to heat doesn't change the fact that just like a space heater, all the energy it consumes is converted directly into heat.
Who is paying?
The end user has to pay the electricity bill anyways. A processor is no less efficient at producing heat from electricity than a space heater. In both cases, electricity goes in and heat goes out. I would have no problem installing one in my house especially if I got a percentage of the profit as that would just be free money. The only problem I see with this is that my heater only runs about 3 months out of the year. As another poster mentioned, this would seem like a better match for a water heater that runs year around.
Soon we don't need humans in the world, everything can be done by robots.
We are already surpassing the world that's depicted in the TV series Max Headroom.
The smartest robot in the world is still dumber than an amoeba. We have a long way to go before AI can replace people. AI is mostly well defined problems and pattern recognition. Even something as trivial as "unpacking and sorting a box" like in the summary is impossible for robots currently. With the slight exception of vacuuming, there is almost no task in the home that can currently be automated. Cooking, cleaning, folding laundry, putting away laundry, cleaning the toilet, putting dishes away, picking up toys, dusting, etc... Even when we have something like a dishwasher that washes the dishes for us, it still requires a human to babysit it by putting the dishes in and then taking them out and putting them away.
Left unsaid is that turnover is high enough they can wait a few months and the excess workforce will leave, and their numbers won't be hired back because that number of human jobs is no longer necessary. A net number of jobs are lost yet noone was laid off. If they were paying $X to humans before, they aren't going to spend $X plus $Y in robot acquisition/maintenance/operating costs; the new X+Y will always be less than the old X (on paper at least) or else they won't pull the trigger. Thus, less total money goes to humans.
It's not layoffs that are working the magic. It's the fact that amazon is growing at a decent enough rate that it can absorb the extra people. If amazon wasn't growing there would be no way that it could increase efficiency without laying people off.
No, not might. Will. A $200 tax on a $1m transaction will stop if the transaction was done to earn $200 in profit. Look up high frequency trading to learn more.
If someone is doing a $1M trade to make $200 then they are likely doing a MITM attack that shouldn't be legal anyways. For the average person buying $1M of stocks to actually own those stocks, $200 isn't going to matter. Even for a day trader, the stock would only have to move that same 0.02% (0.0002) to get back to even. Most stocks fluctuate 10 times that amount every minute. A day trader isn't going to do a trade that it expects to only move 0.02% (0.0002).
The card says it is not to be used for identification. Which is now a joke.
Your social security number is not supposed to be used for identification. But there is a very simple reason why everyone uses it for exactly that purpose -- it is the only unique identifier that exists.
The problem isn't that it is used as a unique identifier. The problem is that it is used to verify that unique identifier. You should be able to tell anybody and everyone that you are the John Smith with SSN of 499-99-9993. You then should have to prove that someway with a signed key, picture ID, etc... It was a mistake taking SSN off of driver's license. They should be there. They should be on business cards too and mailboxes. SSN is the non-changing number that identifies you as a unique John Smith as opposed to the dozens of other John Smiths that might exist. The problem is you can't have knowledge of a person's unique non-changing identifier also be proof that you are that person. That is absurd. The simplest solution would probably be to have a government database where you can type in a Name and SSN and it pops up a picture and public key of the person in question. This would also be a solution to businesses unknowingly hiring illegal immigrants as well.
If you put a tax on stock trades, it would reduce the amount of trading, making your initial revenue calculations wrong.
It *might* but a $200 tax on a 1 million dollar transaction will likely not have much effect on volume. There is likely other things in the transaction that introduce more friction than this. Same with a 20 cent tax on a $1k transaction. This is likely not enough to actually change trading patterns.
The big problem here is Facebook EU (using a spurious example) pays Facebook Ireland a huge fee for licensing certain proprietary technologies. Facebook EU therefore makes no profit, while Facebook Ireland makes a huge profit, but Ireland has low taxation so they pay far less overall.
You can substitute Microsoft, Google or whatever company you want here. This is how they play the game.
Which is why you short circuit the game. Take whichever entity of Facebook that is actually making the profit to court for tax invasion and say because 10% of their customers are in the France that they are required to pay taxes on 10% of that profit or they stop operating in France. It doesn't matter if that profit is from server farms, Intellectual Property, or some other made up BS. Everyone knows what the profit is. They are a publicly traded company and there aren't shares of Ireland Facebook and France Facebook and USA Facebook. It's all one company and everyone knows it. Pass some laws making these shell games illegal and be done with it.
If you believe in progressive taxation, then the obvious tax to keep is the income tax.
That income tax is progressive is a huge myth. Most of the real wealth is not from people trading their hours for money. It might be slightly more progressive than sales tax but that's about it. If you really want a progressive tax then you need to tax assets or net worth. A yearly tax of 5% of net worth could fully fund the entire federal government with money to spare. Another progressive tax would be to tax the movement of money. By my calculations, the USA could replace all our tax revenue with a single tax of .02% (0.0002) on stock market trades. Not only would it produce a huge amount of tax revenue, it might also reduce the amount of high frequency trading.
That's not how amazon works. Amazon gives the seller a "credit" for the amount of shipping regardless of what the actual shipping is. That credit is sometimes more and sometimes less than what it costs to ship it. If it's less, the seller just has to eat it. If the credit is more (and it likely would be for multiple items shipped together), then amazon doesn't keep that, amazon gives that to the seller who may or may not decide to ship the items in the same box. Strangely, the credit the seller gets is not always the same as the amount of shipping charged to the customer and the seller has very little control over what the shipping charges or credits are. I agree it's a strange system though. It would work much better if the seller could actually set the shipping rate and give discounts for multiple items shipped together like you can on ebay.
Also - taxing revenue would essentially remove all profit from their balance sheets. Essentially dooming them as functioning companies.
Taxing revenue at the same rate as profit would bankrupt them but because revenue is usually significantly higher than profit, you would likely tax it at a different rate. The only problem I see with this is that different industries have drastically different amounts of profit for the same amount of revenue. I think a better solution might be to tax profits of international companies based on the percentage of business done in that country. So if a company has a profit of 20M and 20% of their revenue is from France then 20% of their profit should be taxed in France.
Since in those 20 years time, there haven't been further advancements in this field, I would think that this an idea that is born dead.
There have been billions (if not trillions) of dollars of R&D poured into silicon and existing technology. Even if someone came up with something that potentially could perform better than existing technologies after the same amount of R&D, getting the investment needed to ramp it up to compete with existing technologies would be next to impossible. Unless we hit a brick wall, incremental improvement of existing technologies will likely always be a better path than starting over from scratch with a completely different tech tree.
Using your example, if you have a balanced scale with 1000eV charge on each side, and you can flip it back and forth with a single eV then you are 1000x more efficient than having to move all 1000eV every time you want to flip a switch. This might be more plausible than trying to make 1eV switches.
In theory, if instead of having a state that is overwritten each time, you have a state that "flips" from one state to another then the amount of energy required to flip the state could be significantly less than the energy required to create the state. For instance on a balanced scale with 100 pounds on each side perfectly balanced, a single pound added or removed from one side would cause the state to flip to the other side.
I'll grant you that tablets and phones cover many people's needs, as it's a point I've made before. But ARM is not even on the radar for desktop computing. I've tried using a 64-bit, quad-core ARM as a desktop box, and the systems have neither the CPU power nor the bus bandwidth to actually do the job.
Desktop computing is dying. Most people I know that still have desktop computers, they are gathering dust in the corners. Parents are no longer buying desktops or even laptops for their kids for school. The only consumer market left is handhelds, tablets, and tablets with keyboards. There is still a need for desktop processors in the business/server space and in the cloud space but those spaces have completely different constraints than desktop computing and have freedoms to do things not possible on the desktop.
The answer isn't to keep using antiquated pieces of paper, or to use credit cards. The answer is to use bank transfers, which every developed country on the planet uses.
None of the examples I gave would a bank transfer work better. To pay my local taxes, I do have the option of a bank transfer online but there is a fee for that too. There is no way to pay taxes in person without a check, a money order, or cash. A bank transfer for buying girl scout cookies or something similar is laughable. A bank transfer might work for paying your landlord if that person is set up for that but if the landlord only has a couple units, it's probably more expensive to set up than processing credit cards. Seriously, if checks are obsolete in other countries, what do most countries use for small (in size or frequency) person to person transfers?
It's quaint that people in the US still use checks. :-)
One box of checks usually lasts me 4-5 years.
Checks are better than cash for paying small people not set up to accept credit cards like babysitters, lawn care, school fundraisers, school tshirts, friends, etc...
Checks are also better than credit cards for larger purchases like rent, daycare, and taxes where that 3% fee is significant.
This is standard. I changed internet providers about 3 years ago. To close my account, they required me to take my router in to their authorized retailer, and he calculated the final bill and gave me a refund for the unused portion of my last month on the spot. But since 1c coins were made obsolete here about a decade ago, he over-refunded me by 1 cent, following good retail practice of erring in favour of the customer. Every month since then, I've received a bill for 0.01. Obviously there is some human review or sanity check before sending accounts to the debt collectors, as they haven't tried to take it any further than sending me a bill every month in the last 3 years, but it is quite amusing that even with a fully automated email based system, it has to have cost them more than 0.01 to keep doing this for so long.
This is no longer becoming standard. I recently noticed my phone company contract has the cutoff at $10 which I actually thought was high. I've also on multiple occasions tried to pay a bill from the local hospital in the $5-$15 dollar range only to find out that the hospital already waived and closed it. They wouldn't even let me pay it. I do occasionally still get checks and bills for under $5 but I haven't seen one under $1 for quite a while. Most banks also have policies where they will close accounts of less than $10 after so many months of inactivity.
and the more folks you can get them to add in on the same plan, the less chance anyone in that group will be able to convince everyone else to go to a new carrier (which usually means new device as well, which means moving all contacts/apps/etc, and the cost to move, and the headache, and coordinating a date when everyone can make that move... it's just not going to happen).
Most multiline plans are designed around a family and many have restrictions like shared data, shared billing, being able to see the location of everyone, etc.. in order to discourage roommates, etc.. from using a multiline plan. This means that in general, there is very little "convincing" or coordination dates needed. Mom, Dad, etc.. just changes everyone. I think the main advantage they get with multiline accounts is that they know that parents are likely not going to shell out $50+ a month for a line for their kid but an extra $20/month gives them $240 they wouldn't otherwise have. I do think this part does help with the lockin though as once you have 4 lines, the odds of all 4 being out of contract at the same time is lower.
Hey, some people can't find spouses and don't have kids. Why should they pay more for phones and phones service?
It's because as the number of lines goes up, the amount used per line tends to drop. Families tend to have one or two heavy users. That's the reason that many carriers tend to make the 3rd and 4th line almost free. They know that those lines are likely going to be used considerably less. Also plans are tailored to the heaviest user. The heaviest user needs unlimited so everyone is on unlimited. If all lines were the same price then only the heavy user would choose the unlimited plan and the rest would go find cheaper plans.