That would be terrible for non-commercially viable, however still valid copyrights. Major example would be OSS.
I might want to keep copyrights to my library and distribute it for free, or for a small fee / consulting opportunity. A big company might steal it with that proposal for peanuts.
If I read correctly that do not actually have the *cash* to pay for this takeover, but will finance the operation. Given how recently ToysRUs had a very slow and painful death due to a similar leveraged buyout, I do not expect this one to go well either.
This means it will take 20 years for them to pay off the 60bn debt. This assumes no investment in R&D, staff, or paying dividends. (That is why ToysRUs become unable to compete, they had no profit margin left after payments).
However will they skim from shareholder dividends to pay for Fox operations? It looks like they are already down by about 2%, meaning the idea is not liked on the market.
And this is before anything about the customers. They would want to milk every *value* out of current customers, meaning worse service and/or higher prices across the board.
I do not have any shares in any of these companies, however if I had one, I would have voted against such a merger. (for clarification, I'm no financial expert, this is my personal opinion, don't act on it)
I use a cheap Pentium motherboard (also low power), and a quad intel Ethernet card (a used PRO/1000 for ~$50). It has all the bells and whistles of commercial units (captive portal, easy web ui, etc), but has the advantage of being based on FreeBSD.
This is about having a valid chain of trust. If all parties agree on a public ledger of transactions on the package logistics then the issues on disputes / lost items etc will go down.
The blockchains brought us bitcoin and similar "currencies", however they also brought a way to have a public eye on transactions. Like financial markets, package logistics is a complex business and having all parties agree upon terms and actions might really be useful.
(btw i think I might have some fedex stock, so a disclosure here is probably necessary).
A few years ago, OPT was not strictly necessary, hence I used it for a few months. However now with much more people applying for H1-B, and having a significantly smaller chance to get one, people tend to stay on OPT for longer periods. They have been living here in US for long periods (school + work), maybe 7-8 or more. And I would believe most have already proved their benefit to this country.
I had friends who were contributing members of our society who had to leave for other countries due to losing the H1-B lottery several years in a row. They tend to hang on to OPT as much as possible than have to leave, at least for another year.
For this reason I would prefer merit based, or "auction" based H1-B system. If the company finds the candidate to contribute significant amounts, then they can also "bid" by giving higher salaries. This also answers the question about skilled labor being replaced with foreign unskilled ones. If you cannot pay in the top so much thousand (50K?) positions for a foreign employee, it means the company does not actually value their work so much.
(I would also support separate quotas for engineers, and lower paying important jobs, like skilled teachers).
The Windows 10 update system feels like "free to play" games, where they actually make you pay more than what you would have paid outright if you made an upfront purchase.
While I like the some of the new features (linux support, more responsive UI, remote xbox streaming, etc), they make sure unwanted cruft comes with it, since you can no longer choose to include or not include many components. Also they took away the excellent Windows Media Center which still has no free alternative.
It is now too late, but I wish we stayed with the WIndows 7 model, where a purchase meant a purchase not a subscription.
Apple used to build great computers, however they have then moved onto building great "products", which looks nice, but leave the functionality and usability as afterthoughts. Because of this I have left behind my older MacBook Pro. They seem to have no proper upgrade alternative in that product line.
The new "Pro" does not even have a proper keyboard, dust issues aside, the keys themselves are not fun to type with (I tried using friend's machine). They are too thin giving minimal tactile feedback. There is little spacing among them. In fact they could have replaced the thing with a touch controller... oops, they have already done that for the function keys.
They seem to want everyone to get an iPad Pro with walled gardens, faster upgrade paths, and more limited peripherals. If people do not adhere to their whims, then they seem to be converting the Macbook Pro into an iPad. Slowly, but steadily. They even talk about replacing MacOS with iOS, which is not very assuring.
One funding mechanism for UBI could be punitive taxation on companies whose executive compensation ratios exceed historical norms of about 25:1. This creates an incentive for corporations to cut executive compensation and increase employee compensation, which contributes to part of the purpose of UBI -- that jobs just don't pay enough.
Unfortunately this is easy to work around.
1. Stock options / stock grants are currently employed for non-salary compensation of high level employees (even low level too). I'm sure accountants would be able to stretch these even if the rule would include "total compensation".
2. Getting rid of all low level employees would increase the baseline. The company would outsource the low level tasks. It can even do it "in house" by starting another entity which only employs low level jobs
3. Getting rid of low level jobs, altogether. Given automation they can just no longer have those jobs.
Also limits on employee compensation is the root cause of why we are in the healthcare system hell right now. When companies were unable to compete on salary anymore they gave large benefits, including healthcare. And then the government decided to make this tax-free cementing the relation between work and health insurance.
There are a few more parts of the puzzle, but the first block was more or less because of compensation limits.
I've seen that the market has very strange "karma". However noble the intentions are when people interfere, the opposite of what they want eventually happen. If the government wanted to use a rate limit for compensation, it would most likely have very adverse effects on the lower paying spectrum of jobs.
The 12V bus on the vehicle provides ample power to run small electronics, and even some larger ones. Depending on the model, it is possible to get 100A - 200A current thru an inverter, which will give up 20A over 120V, allowing 2kW continuous operation.
Of course there are some caveats. First the battery is not designed for this kind of load, and it will decrease its total lifespan. Also you need to make sure the parts used are high quality, and able to handle the currents mentioned. (i.e.: very thick cabling, with actual copper in them, instead of aluminum mixes). Also you'd want to watch over the contraption, and of course have circuit breakers in case something goes wrong. Everything needs to be connected directly to the internal terminals, and the car should be in "idle" mode (i.e.: main battery is enabled, not just the 12V lead acid one).
But it will allow you to run your fridge and some lights when the power goes out, even for very extended periods (1-2 days is possible). You can also use this when camping.
The model names are mostly standardized now, even across different manufacturers.
Intel has, for example Core i7-4790K, and Core i7-8700K. AMD would have Ryzen 2950x, and nVidia would have GTX 1070 Ti. There is a similar pattern in all of them.
Intel (desktop) chips read like 4-7-90-K, 4th generation, i7, last iteration (highest performance variant), unlocked (non-K versions are not enabled for overclocking). Then 8-7-00-K would be 8th generation, i7, first iteration.
AMD copied this to an extend. 2-9-50X would ve second generation Ryzen, i9 counterpart, mid-level, but -X suffix seem to mean slightly improved performance (all AMD chips were unlocked for overclocking).
nVidia is similar 970 would be 9th generation GTX, second highest level (geared towards gamers with mid-to-large budgets), while 10-80 Ti would be 10th generation GTX, highest level (geared towards people with serious money), and updated (Ti) edition.
In general, generation increases add significant power reduction, allowing less running cost, and higher performance for the same price. In fact a future i3 might be better than a previous i5.
(I'm skipping Pentium/Celeron which are lower binned silicones of the same design, and Atoms, and of course Xeon server and workstation chips).
Looking at Wikipedia for the CPU/GPU generation gives sufficient detail for differences between offerings. If I'm planning to purchase a CPU to use for many years, I would benefit spending some time understanding those differences.
The market is highly saturated, and what is offered is sub-par compared to other areas of the country. If you're lucky to own one of these "median" homes, it would probably be built around 1960s, and not upgraded since then. The A/C may or may not be there, the plumbing will suck (or not suck, depending on how you look at it), and you'll be far away from any viable public transport.
There is a lot of resistance to building new structures, and this is all across California. According to one study the entire state of California issued less single family housing permits than a single city (Houston) in Texas: http://www.aei.org/publication...
And do not let me start about the state of the infrastructure, power costs (i.e.: pg&e), traffic and roads, etc.
Do not get me wrong, I still prefer Silicon Valley, however housing is one of the worst aspects of it.
They even admit it on Twitter. It was a fork of the open source Signal software, meaning there is a big potential violation of GPLv3 terms by the government:
"PttMessenger, signal tabanl açk kaynak kod kullanlarak gelitirilmitir. PttMessenger, tüm gelitirme haklar ile PTT A..'ye aittir.
Zebrachat, PttMessenger'n gelitirme aamasnda kullanlan proje ve ürün addr."
roughly:
"PttMessenger is developed based on the open signal sources. All rights of PttMessenger belong to the PTT A.S.
Zebrachat is a code name for a development snapshot of PttMessenger."
I could not find the source code to neither PttMessenger nor Zebrachat. If they are indeed based on Signal (which has very good security btw.), this might become one of the highest profile open source copyright infringements.
I have some FedEx stock. This is good news for me:)
On a more serious note, they cannot sit idle while competition will use more automation and lower the delivery costs. Even if the big ones (UPS, FedEx, DHL) do not take up on this, the local ones will probably do so, and become large taking their thrones.
The remaining people are in jail being accused of installing the wrong chat application. Unfortunately the real reason is that they pose a threat to the Erdogan regime.
This initally might not make sense to go into an educated at the moment, however the make up of these people tell a lot. There are thousands of judges, academics, prosecutors, teachers, police officers, journalists who were put away. Looking at this, basically those who can uncover his bad deeds, publish it to the masses, and who can put them into jail for those wrongdoings are taken care of.
I'm still optimistic for the future though. The Turkish people have exercised democracy for over a century, and was heavily integrated with the modern society in the recent decades. These kinds of "blips" happen in the history, but hopefully they don't last long.
PG&E can be overcome, but not all cities have done the necessary work. For example, in Santa Clara, you get power from city owned facilities, making the cost 1/4 of your neighboring cities (at highest tiers, compared to San Jose, and Sunnyvale, etc).
Even at those high prices there were a lot of outages in San Jose last year during the stormy season. I don't believe I remember such frequent events in non-PGE areas.
Also it is alleged that they have caused the recent wildfires in the Northern California due to lack of clearance between power lines and branches.
If that is true, it tells a lot. This much negligence, with these high costs of service can only happen in insufficiently regulated monopolies.
While we discuss how to fund UBI, and who owns the machines, the machines will themselves become self aware and self owning. By then they might or might not choose to write a welfare checks.
By the time all human jobs are automatable, there will be no more need us puny humans.
This is a basic supply issue on the housing market. However I don't see an easy solution. (There are simple solutions but implementing them would be really hard).
The area seems to vote against their longer term interest for small gains in short time. Cities roll over each other to get more tech jobs -- look at what's happening with Amazon HQ2 -- however almost none in the Bay Area want to host the employees of these tech companies in their boundaries. They enact all kinds of barriers against entry, yet what this ultimately causes is pain to existing residents.
The market is about 99% saturated. Any house that goes onto market for rent or sale is gobbled up in about a week or so, and I read that there was only 12 days of rolling supply. If buyers dot not bit ridiculously high prices for buying, or renters want basic amenities to be fixed (like broken sewer system), they lose to the competition. It is a race to the bottom.
The simple solution would be improving the supply. This can be done by updating zoning laws, changing parking limits, and repealing Prop 13 to improve schools, and re-balance economy. However all of them, while simple, affects existing residents in a very bad way, and there is little to no hope of ever getting any of them thru. People have looted their 401k, and went into significant debt to buy falling apart shacks at million dollar prices, and they would not want to wake up to a reality that their property is not actually worth that much.
I had a friend whose laptop (Apple brand), money and passports were stolen from the car. There was at least several thousand dollars of property theft and damage.
Thanks to Apple tracking, they were able to locale the address of the burglar, and asked police to help. Did the police enter the house with a battering ram? No, the knocked the door, asked a few questions, and left. Even though they knew the stolen property was inside that address they did nothing. They did not pursue the case any longer, and my friend was left with no recourse.
And the incident happened in the Bay Area, same area where they behaved much differently to a person who was not even a suspect. I'm not sure what to say about the inconsistency of the conduct.
I recently tried to add an nvidia card to my workstation for a virtual machine, and it turned out that nvidia breaks the driver when they detect the card is in a virtual machine.
Specifically you get an unexplained "Code 43" error, and nvidia's excuse is that there is a bug which they will not fix. However if you spent some time to hide the VM, like removing hypervisor drivers, it would have magically worked. Unlucky as I am, it turns out nvidia also broke that workaround (at least it did not work for me).
There are 3rd party patchers for this thing: https://github.com/sk1080/nvid... which require a lot of involvement, and will probably break at the next update. Given so much effort by nvidia to make sure I would be unable to use the hardware I purchased, I gave up, and removed the nvidia card from the workstation.
Don't blame the shuttles. Unfortunately transportation in the valley is just terrible, and shuttles are part of a solution.
Using public transportation to get from San Jose to Mountain View would take about two hours. And even walking would be at a comparable speed. There are a patchwork of uncoordinated services which require you to switch multiple busses, walk long periods (since the busses to not share nearby stops), and spend a lot of money.
There is supposed to be VTA (valley transport "authority"), but they don't seem to have any real authority over the uncoordinated cities. People cite many reasons for this, including NIMBYism. However the end result is the same. Unless you happen to be exactly on a bus route, using a network of busses is just infeasible.
So the options are then: - Driving in a personal vehicle on the already crowded highway - Biking to work. This is usually much faster than public transport for many people. - Taking an uber. Again much faster, and not much more expensive ($12 vs $15)
Given these limitations many tech companies employ their own shuttle service (including Google). This not only saves a lot of time, it also frees the highways, since the shuttles would rarely be empty, and would take any cars off the highways.
There two major incentives to lease: price, and obsolescence.
When I leased, I got a very steep discount on the vehicle total price, and federal tax credit ($7500) was already factored in without going thru any hassles. Also sales tax (which is very high here in CA) is only paid for the portion that you lease every month, and not the full vehicle price. And, when I finally return the vehicle, there won't be another tax for resale, like one would when you do on the used market. Given the lease financing was about 0%, there were many economical reasons to lease than to buy.
And of course I was expecting the technology to progress fast, like many others, and it would not be wise to be stuck with a short range vehicle (even though I enjoy it in my commute) for the long run.
The manufacturer and the market just pushes you to lease than to buy with all these incentives.
The situation is a bit more nuanced, and I think it is possible birkenstock is more concerned about non-counterfeit items. Specifically from 3rd party resellers.
There are small resellers which buy from liquidators, and sell the items at a lower price. Think about Ross stores, but just some random seller on Amazon. This creates a messy situation, for the manufacturer (birkenstock), and of course the buyers.
1. There are items from actual authorized resellers (or the manufacturer directly) 2. There are items from 3rd party resellers, who bought at a discount (end of season, black friday, etc) 3. There are items, which are authentic, but defective. (returns, misprints, typos, etc). These are problematic, since they could not be marked such, but sold as new. 4. There are counterfeit items.
I think category 3 is the worst for the brand. You'd get a defective item which should not have been sold, and will blame the brand when it fails early, or when it looks a bit off.
And I think category 2 is bad for keeping the "premium" prices. An item that is out of season, and was supposed to be off the shelves will be competing with the new offerings. They are both real, and authentic. So why would people pay $120, instead of getting the $60 one?
Anyway, there is a lot of concern for the manufacturer, so for many brands, Amazon just restricts the sale. (new release Disney items for example).
Bitcoin is dual purpose depending on how you look at it.
Bitcoin as a value, is a currency (or an asset in the eyes of IRS). Bitcoin network is a payment processor. It only works with the Bitcoin currency though.
Initially the Bitcoin as a payment network was more valuable (at least that was my understanding). This is because people would be able to do cheap cross border payments with very low latency. (WU could take a few days, whereas Bitcoin was initially 15 minutes or so). However it is no longer cheap, nor low latency.
Bitcoin as a currency was less valuable (maybe less than a dollar), since people would be expected to "go in and out" during their transaction (at least that was how I would have used it). I could order something from abroad, let's say China, buy some bitcoin to facilitate the payment, and then they could have cashed out on their end. The value, if stable, would be just another measuring stick.
It no longer seems to be the case. The price was first determined by mining. Since there was non-trivial energy costs, and expensive initial investments, miners would not have accepted anything less than what would we profitable for them. (For some hard-ish numbers: a bitcoin mining machine costs more than $1000, and mines about 1 bitcoin in less than a year, this uses about 1.5KW power not including cooling costs. The cost would be ~$400 if you could get 1kWh at 3c). Hence bitcoin currently cannot go lower than $1400 or mining, hence transaction validation would collapse (the actual numbers are rising every day, I might be a bit stale).
Then people came and saw prices soaring. The herd mentality would then be "this is getting more expensive, so I should buy it", no it is the worst time to buy. Buy there is the "fear of losing out". Nevertheless people will probably wake up to a very very very very very very bitter crash. I don't think there is sufficient interest (worth about $300 Billion) in buying all the "invested" bitcoins in the world. Someone will be holding the bag. I hope I will not be that someone.
That is bitter, but that seems to be the recurring truth in asset bubbles.
I don't find the current Bitcoin valuation rooted in reality. Yes there is a real tangible value in Bitcoin as it can be used to purchase online items from retailers like Newegg, but that is getting more and more difficult. As seen in the Steam example, the success of Bitcoin as an investment instrument is damaging Bitcoin as a payment method. The current transaction times and rates are crazy high, and the dream of buying lattes with is no longer seems viable.
I still have a tiny amount of Bitcoin and a few other crypto coins, but don't plan to buy any more. The price just does not make sense.
No device would be perfect. We have gone thru 4-5 different devices at our home, and Samsung Galaxy Gear S2 was the best one for me so far. (The older version, without LTE support).
If you want fitness tracking and some connection to your phone it gives great value. It lets me know when I have sit too much (part of the daily job), and nudges me to take a walk, or do stretches. It will alert me if my hearth rate goes up all of a sudden (first time I put on the device was after a heavy physical activity, and the device not knowing about it warned me of my hr). It will keep track of my sleep habit. And of course it will let me know when there is a phone call, or a text message.
The good thing is I don't need all fancy features like making phone calls on my watch, or using it as a media player, I already have my phone for that.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be terrible for non-commercially viable, however still valid copyrights. Major example would be OSS.
I might want to keep copyrights to my library and distribute it for free, or for a small fee / consulting opportunity. A big company might steal it with that proposal for peanuts.
If I read correctly that do not actually have the *cash* to pay for this takeover, but will finance the operation. Given how recently ToysRUs had a very slow and painful death due to a similar leveraged buyout, I do not expect this one to go well either.
According to their financials, Fox made ~3bn last year in profits:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quot...
This means it will take 20 years for them to pay off the 60bn debt. This assumes no investment in R&D, staff, or paying dividends. (That is why ToysRUs become unable to compete, they had no profit margin left after payments).
Comcast is in a better position with 20bn in profits:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quot...
However will they skim from shareholder dividends to pay for Fox operations? It looks like they are already down by about 2%, meaning the idea is not liked on the market.
And this is before anything about the customers. They would want to milk every *value* out of current customers, meaning worse service and/or higher prices across the board.
I do not have any shares in any of these companies, however if I had one, I would have voted against such a merger. (for clarification, I'm no financial expert, this is my personal opinion, don't act on it)
I use a cheap Pentium motherboard (also low power), and a quad intel Ethernet card (a used PRO/1000 for ~$50). It has all the bells and whistles of commercial units (captive portal, easy web ui, etc), but has the advantage of being based on FreeBSD.
https://www.pfsense.org/
If you were to prefer Linux, it would be possible to use openwrt instead.
This is about having a valid chain of trust. If all parties agree on a public ledger of transactions on the package logistics then the issues on disputes / lost items etc will go down.
The blockchains brought us bitcoin and similar "currencies", however they also brought a way to have a public eye on transactions. Like financial markets, package logistics is a complex business and having all parties agree upon terms and actions might really be useful.
(btw i think I might have some fedex stock, so a disclosure here is probably necessary).
A few years ago, OPT was not strictly necessary, hence I used it for a few months. However now with much more people applying for H1-B, and having a significantly smaller chance to get one, people tend to stay on OPT for longer periods. They have been living here in US for long periods (school + work), maybe 7-8 or more. And I would believe most have already proved their benefit to this country.
I had friends who were contributing members of our society who had to leave for other countries due to losing the H1-B lottery several years in a row. They tend to hang on to OPT as much as possible than have to leave, at least for another year.
For this reason I would prefer merit based, or "auction" based H1-B system. If the company finds the candidate to contribute significant amounts, then they can also "bid" by giving higher salaries. This also answers the question about skilled labor being replaced with foreign unskilled ones. If you cannot pay in the top so much thousand (50K?) positions for a foreign employee, it means the company does not actually value their work so much.
(I would also support separate quotas for engineers, and lower paying important jobs, like skilled teachers).
The Windows 10 update system feels like "free to play" games, where they actually make you pay more than what you would have paid outright if you made an upfront purchase.
While I like the some of the new features (linux support, more responsive UI, remote xbox streaming, etc), they make sure unwanted cruft comes with it, since you can no longer choose to include or not include many components. Also they took away the excellent Windows Media Center which still has no free alternative.
It is now too late, but I wish we stayed with the WIndows 7 model, where a purchase meant a purchase not a subscription.
Apple used to build great computers, however they have then moved onto building great "products", which looks nice, but leave the functionality and usability as afterthoughts. Because of this I have left behind my older MacBook Pro. They seem to have no proper upgrade alternative in that product line.
The new "Pro" does not even have a proper keyboard, dust issues aside, the keys themselves are not fun to type with (I tried using friend's machine). They are too thin giving minimal tactile feedback. There is little spacing among them. In fact they could have replaced the thing with a touch controller... oops, they have already done that for the function keys.
They seem to want everyone to get an iPad Pro with walled gardens, faster upgrade paths, and more limited peripherals. If people do not adhere to their whims, then they seem to be converting the Macbook Pro into an iPad. Slowly, but steadily. They even talk about replacing MacOS with iOS, which is not very assuring.
One funding mechanism for UBI could be punitive taxation on companies whose executive compensation ratios exceed historical norms of about 25:1. This creates an incentive for corporations to cut executive compensation and increase employee compensation, which contributes to part of the purpose of UBI -- that jobs just don't pay enough.
Unfortunately this is easy to work around.
1. Stock options / stock grants are currently employed for non-salary compensation of high level employees (even low level too). I'm sure accountants would be able to stretch these even if the rule would include "total compensation".
2. Getting rid of all low level employees would increase the baseline. The company would outsource the low level tasks. It can even do it "in house" by starting another entity which only employs low level jobs
3. Getting rid of low level jobs, altogether. Given automation they can just no longer have those jobs.
Also limits on employee compensation is the root cause of why we are in the healthcare system hell right now. When companies were unable to compete on salary anymore they gave large benefits, including healthcare. And then the government decided to make this tax-free cementing the relation between work and health insurance.
There are a few more parts of the puzzle, but the first block was more or less because of compensation limits.
I've seen that the market has very strange "karma". However noble the intentions are when people interfere, the opposite of what they want eventually happen. If the government wanted to use a rate limit for compensation, it would most likely have very adverse effects on the lower paying spectrum of jobs.
There are people who have already done this. For example: http://www.mynissanleaf.com/vi...
The 12V bus on the vehicle provides ample power to run small electronics, and even some larger ones. Depending on the model, it is possible to get 100A - 200A current thru an inverter, which will give up 20A over 120V, allowing 2kW continuous operation.
Of course there are some caveats. First the battery is not designed for this kind of load, and it will decrease its total lifespan. Also you need to make sure the parts used are high quality, and able to handle the currents mentioned. (i.e.: very thick cabling, with actual copper in them, instead of aluminum mixes). Also you'd want to watch over the contraption, and of course have circuit breakers in case something goes wrong. Everything needs to be connected directly to the internal terminals, and the car should be in "idle" mode (i.e.: main battery is enabled, not just the 12V lead acid one).
But it will allow you to run your fridge and some lights when the power goes out, even for very extended periods (1-2 days is possible). You can also use this when camping.
The model names are mostly standardized now, even across different manufacturers.
Intel has, for example Core i7-4790K, and Core i7-8700K. AMD would have Ryzen 2950x, and nVidia would have GTX 1070 Ti. There is a similar pattern in all of them.
Intel (desktop) chips read like 4-7-90-K, 4th generation, i7, last iteration (highest performance variant), unlocked (non-K versions are not enabled for overclocking). Then 8-7-00-K would be 8th generation, i7, first iteration.
AMD copied this to an extend. 2-9-50X would ve second generation Ryzen, i9 counterpart, mid-level, but -X suffix seem to mean slightly improved performance (all AMD chips were unlocked for overclocking).
nVidia is similar 970 would be 9th generation GTX, second highest level (geared towards gamers with mid-to-large budgets), while 10-80 Ti would be 10th generation GTX, highest level (geared towards people with serious money), and updated (Ti) edition.
In general, generation increases add significant power reduction, allowing less running cost, and higher performance for the same price. In fact a future i3 might be better than a previous i5.
(I'm skipping Pentium/Celeron which are lower binned silicones of the same design, and Atoms, and of course Xeon server and workstation chips).
Looking at Wikipedia for the CPU/GPU generation gives sufficient detail for differences between offerings. If I'm planning to purchase a CPU to use for many years, I would benefit spending some time understanding those differences.
The market is highly saturated, and what is offered is sub-par compared to other areas of the country. If you're lucky to own one of these "median" homes, it would probably be built around 1960s, and not upgraded since then. The A/C may or may not be there, the plumbing will suck (or not suck, depending on how you look at it), and you'll be far away from any viable public transport.
There is a lot of resistance to building new structures, and this is all across California. According to one study the entire state of California issued less single family housing permits than a single city (Houston) in Texas: http://www.aei.org/publication...
And do not let me start about the state of the infrastructure, power costs (i.e.: pg&e), traffic and roads, etc.
Do not get me wrong, I still prefer Silicon Valley, however housing is one of the worst aspects of it.
They even admit it on Twitter. It was a fork of the open source Signal software, meaning there is a big potential violation of GPLv3 terms by the government:
https://twitter.com/PTTKurumsa...
"PttMessenger, signal tabanl açk kaynak kod kullanlarak gelitirilmitir. PttMessenger, tüm gelitirme haklar ile PTT A..'ye aittir.
Zebrachat, PttMessenger'n gelitirme aamasnda kullanlan proje ve ürün addr."
roughly:
"PttMessenger is developed based on the open signal sources. All rights of PttMessenger belong to the PTT A.S.
Zebrachat is a code name for a development snapshot of PttMessenger."
I could not find the source code to neither PttMessenger nor Zebrachat. If they are indeed based on Signal (which has very good security btw.), this might become one of the highest profile open source copyright infringements.
I have some FedEx stock. This is good news for me :)
On a more serious note, they cannot sit idle while competition will use more automation and lower the delivery costs. Even if the big ones (UPS, FedEx, DHL) do not take up on this, the local ones will probably do so, and become large taking their thrones.
The remaining people are in jail being accused of installing the wrong chat application. Unfortunately the real reason is that they pose a threat to the Erdogan regime.
This initally might not make sense to go into an educated at the moment, however the make up of these people tell a lot. There are thousands of judges, academics, prosecutors, teachers, police officers, journalists who were put away. Looking at this, basically those who can uncover his bad deeds, publish it to the masses, and who can put them into jail for those wrongdoings are taken care of.
It was covered in many places, however the stories are still heartbreaking:
http://www.dw.com/en/turkeys-p...
I'm still optimistic for the future though. The Turkish people have exercised democracy for over a century, and was heavily integrated with the modern society in the recent decades. These kinds of "blips" happen in the history, but hopefully they don't last long.
PG&E can be overcome, but not all cities have done the necessary work. For example, in Santa Clara, you get power from city owned facilities, making the cost 1/4 of your neighboring cities (at highest tiers, compared to San Jose, and Sunnyvale, etc).
Even at those high prices there were a lot of outages in San Jose last year during the stormy season. I don't believe I remember such frequent events in non-PGE areas.
Also it is alleged that they have caused the recent wildfires in the Northern California due to lack of clearance between power lines and branches.
If that is true, it tells a lot. This much negligence, with these high costs of service can only happen in insufficiently regulated monopolies.
Wish I had some mod points.
While we discuss how to fund UBI, and who owns the machines, the machines will themselves become self aware and self owning. By then they might or might not choose to write a welfare checks.
By the time all human jobs are automatable, there will be no more need us puny humans.
This is a basic supply issue on the housing market. However I don't see an easy solution. (There are simple solutions but implementing them would be really hard).
The area seems to vote against their longer term interest for small gains in short time. Cities roll over each other to get more tech jobs -- look at what's happening with Amazon HQ2 -- however almost none in the Bay Area want to host the employees of these tech companies in their boundaries. They enact all kinds of barriers against entry, yet what this ultimately causes is pain to existing residents.
The market is about 99% saturated. Any house that goes onto market for rent or sale is gobbled up in about a week or so, and I read that there was only 12 days of rolling supply. If buyers dot not bit ridiculously high prices for buying, or renters want basic amenities to be fixed (like broken sewer system), they lose to the competition. It is a race to the bottom.
The simple solution would be improving the supply. This can be done by updating zoning laws, changing parking limits, and repealing Prop 13 to improve schools, and re-balance economy. However all of them, while simple, affects existing residents in a very bad way, and there is little to no hope of ever getting any of them thru. People have looted their 401k, and went into significant debt to buy falling apart shacks at million dollar prices, and they would not want to wake up to a reality that their property is not actually worth that much.
So basically no solution in the short term.
I had a friend whose laptop (Apple brand), money and passports were stolen from the car. There was at least several thousand dollars of property theft and damage.
Thanks to Apple tracking, they were able to locale the address of the burglar, and asked police to help. Did the police enter the house with a battering ram? No, the knocked the door, asked a few questions, and left. Even though they knew the stolen property was inside that address they did nothing. They did not pursue the case any longer, and my friend was left with no recourse.
And the incident happened in the Bay Area, same area where they behaved much differently to a person who was not even a suspect. I'm not sure what to say about the inconsistency of the conduct.
I recently tried to add an nvidia card to my workstation for a virtual machine, and it turned out that nvidia breaks the driver when they detect the card is in a virtual machine.
Specifically you get an unexplained "Code 43" error, and nvidia's excuse is that there is a bug which they will not fix. However if you spent some time to hide the VM, like removing hypervisor drivers, it would have magically worked. Unlucky as I am, it turns out nvidia also broke that workaround (at least it did not work for me).
There are 3rd party patchers for this thing: https://github.com/sk1080/nvid... which require a lot of involvement, and will probably break at the next update. Given so much effort by nvidia to make sure I would be unable to use the hardware I purchased, I gave up, and removed the nvidia card from the workstation.
Don't blame the shuttles. Unfortunately transportation in the valley is just terrible, and shuttles are part of a solution.
Using public transportation to get from San Jose to Mountain View would take about two hours. And even walking would be at a comparable speed. There are a patchwork of uncoordinated services which require you to switch multiple busses, walk long periods (since the busses to not share nearby stops), and spend a lot of money.
There is supposed to be VTA (valley transport "authority"), but they don't seem to have any real authority over the uncoordinated cities. People cite many reasons for this, including NIMBYism. However the end result is the same. Unless you happen to be exactly on a bus route, using a network of busses is just infeasible.
So the options are then:
- Driving in a personal vehicle on the already crowded highway
- Biking to work. This is usually much faster than public transport for many people.
- Taking an uber. Again much faster, and not much more expensive ($12 vs $15)
Given these limitations many tech companies employ their own shuttle service (including Google). This not only saves a lot of time, it also frees the highways, since the shuttles would rarely be empty, and would take any cars off the highways.
There two major incentives to lease: price, and obsolescence.
When I leased, I got a very steep discount on the vehicle total price, and federal tax credit ($7500) was already factored in without going thru any hassles. Also sales tax (which is very high here in CA) is only paid for the portion that you lease every month, and not the full vehicle price. And, when I finally return the vehicle, there won't be another tax for resale, like one would when you do on the used market. Given the lease financing was about 0%, there were many economical reasons to lease than to buy.
And of course I was expecting the technology to progress fast, like many others, and it would not be wise to be stuck with a short range vehicle (even though I enjoy it in my commute) for the long run.
The manufacturer and the market just pushes you to lease than to buy with all these incentives.
The situation is a bit more nuanced, and I think it is possible birkenstock is more concerned about non-counterfeit items. Specifically from 3rd party resellers.
There are small resellers which buy from liquidators, and sell the items at a lower price. Think about Ross stores, but just some random seller on Amazon. This creates a messy situation, for the manufacturer (birkenstock), and of course the buyers.
1. There are items from actual authorized resellers (or the manufacturer directly)
2. There are items from 3rd party resellers, who bought at a discount (end of season, black friday, etc)
3. There are items, which are authentic, but defective. (returns, misprints, typos, etc). These are problematic, since they could not be marked such, but sold as new.
4. There are counterfeit items.
I think category 3 is the worst for the brand. You'd get a defective item which should not have been sold, and will blame the brand when it fails early, or when it looks a bit off.
And I think category 2 is bad for keeping the "premium" prices. An item that is out of season, and was supposed to be off the shelves will be competing with the new offerings. They are both real, and authentic. So why would people pay $120, instead of getting the $60 one?
Anyway, there is a lot of concern for the manufacturer, so for many brands, Amazon just restricts the sale. (new release Disney items for example).
Bitcoin is dual purpose depending on how you look at it.
Bitcoin as a value, is a currency (or an asset in the eyes of IRS).
Bitcoin network is a payment processor. It only works with the Bitcoin currency though.
Initially the Bitcoin as a payment network was more valuable (at least that was my understanding). This is because people would be able to do cheap cross border payments with very low latency. (WU could take a few days, whereas Bitcoin was initially 15 minutes or so). However it is no longer cheap, nor low latency.
Bitcoin as a currency was less valuable (maybe less than a dollar), since people would be expected to "go in and out" during their transaction (at least that was how I would have used it). I could order something from abroad, let's say China, buy some bitcoin to facilitate the payment, and then they could have cashed out on their end. The value, if stable, would be just another measuring stick.
It no longer seems to be the case. The price was first determined by mining. Since there was non-trivial energy costs, and expensive initial investments, miners would not have accepted anything less than what would we profitable for them. (For some hard-ish numbers: a bitcoin mining machine costs more than $1000, and mines about 1 bitcoin in less than a year, this uses about 1.5KW power not including cooling costs. The cost would be ~$400 if you could get 1kWh at 3c). Hence bitcoin currently cannot go lower than $1400 or mining, hence transaction validation would collapse (the actual numbers are rising every day, I might be a bit stale).
Then people came and saw prices soaring. The herd mentality would then be "this is getting more expensive, so I should buy it", no it is the worst time to buy. Buy there is the "fear of losing out". Nevertheless people will probably wake up to a very very very very very very bitter crash. I don't think there is sufficient interest (worth about $300 Billion) in buying all the "invested" bitcoins in the world. Someone will be holding the bag. I hope I will not be that someone.
That is bitter, but that seems to be the recurring truth in asset bubbles.
I don't find the current Bitcoin valuation rooted in reality. Yes there is a real tangible value in Bitcoin as it can be used to purchase online items from retailers like Newegg, but that is getting more and more difficult. As seen in the Steam example, the success of Bitcoin as an investment instrument is damaging Bitcoin as a payment method. The current transaction times and rates are crazy high, and the dream of buying lattes with is no longer seems viable.
I still have a tiny amount of Bitcoin and a few other crypto coins, but don't plan to buy any more. The price just does not make sense.
No device would be perfect. We have gone thru 4-5 different devices at our home, and Samsung Galaxy Gear S2 was the best one for me so far. (The older version, without LTE support).
If you want fitness tracking and some connection to your phone it gives great value. It lets me know when I have sit too much (part of the daily job), and nudges me to take a walk, or do stretches. It will alert me if my hearth rate goes up all of a sudden (first time I put on the device was after a heavy physical activity, and the device not knowing about it warned me of my hr). It will keep track of my sleep habit. And of course it will let me know when there is a phone call, or a text message.
The good thing is I don't need all fancy features like making phone calls on my watch, or using it as a media player, I already have my phone for that.