First off, electric cars use their brake pads less, not more. Regenerative brakes do most of the work, and the brakes last 2-3x longer than a regular gasoline car. Tire do last a little less long, but most of those are big particles, and I have never heard of tire dust being considered a major health risk.
Which cell companies don't have arbitration clauses? We have large segments of the business world who have all made similar requirements. You can't simply go down the road, as they are all doing it.
Increasingly arbitration is written into all sorts of contracts. Oral surgeon for wisdom teeth demanded it. Cell phone plans demand it. And so on. As a lowly individual you generally can do nothing when all the viable vendors ask you to opt out of the court system as a condition of doing business.
I don't think it should be allowed in such lopsided situations as a major corporation and a lowly individual.
Analog phones had higher peak power (TDMA vs. CDMA anyway), but even digital modulation looks very analog after all the filtering done to stay inside the frequency mask specs.
My taxes are my responsibility. I pay them. My employer should pay theirs.
When one class of tax payers get a free ride, the rest of us who don't have a fleet of lawyers and politicians on speed dial end up picking up the slack.
Oregon got it a little more right. Property taxes are throttled to 3% per year (should have been a little higher) to prevent wild swings in property taxes, but they are throttled to the original house price (or 1995 valuation, whichever is more recent). It keeps things a little more sane.
Here in Oregon we recently saw Intel flex there muscle to get special tax breaks for a major fab expansion. Nike is surrounded by the city of Beaverton, but uses threats to leave to prevent annexation that would make them pay the same property taxes that all their neighbors do.
Major employers can use blackmail to get major concessions. Hell, Boeing got concessions a few years back up in Washington and moved much of the operation anyway.
Basically once a business gets big enough it can throw its weight around and get into a tax exempt club. It is anti-competitive, but it works, and is legal. Employees are used as a bargaining chip. Tax exempt us or all our employees will vanish and stop paying taxes. Such behavior is despicable and should be illegal under the equal protection clause, but what do I know.
Well maybe if we prioritized our citizens over overseas military adventures and more toy boards for the admiralty to play with we would.
In short, our political system has largely been captured. The military industrial complex has huge sway, as do the top 0.1 percent who largely fund our elections. These powerful entities have undue influence to make sure their taxes are low (or negative), while getting their geopolitical will imposed (Joe Sixpack never asked for the TPP or any of the complex taxation loopholes).
So we should not blame the government, but look to the puppet masters who mostly determine who ends up on the ballot, and who twist the arms of the ones who want to stay there. Until big money is out of politics our governance will continue to be mostly broken.
News has been broken for a long time. I can't tune into any of 24 hour networks without wanting to throw something at the TV due to the utter stupidity being displayed by the teleprompter monkeys. Evening local news is filled with "Is your cat going to kill you? After the break..." I'd rather get my news online where I can choose to skip past the inane crap.
The point is that you used to have manufacturing towns where the main employer was a factory, and people did most of the work. Many even got a good middle class living out of it. Now you have just a few people watching and maintaining the machines that replaced the vast hordes. A while back on a How It's Made they showed a Peter Pan Peanut Butter factory that churned out 50,000 lbs of peanut butter a day using only 8 employees. Arguably the "old" way had a lot of repetitive mundane jobs that are better off done by a machine no matter how you slice it.
So yes, you still have plumbers, and probably always will. But you still only need one plumber for every few hundred houses. So you can't rely on the profession of plumbing to absorb blue collar employees cast off by automation.
The real problem seems to be that cost savings (numerous types, including automation) by businesses have squeezed the money out of salaries to the point that the large number of the jobs people get no longer pay a living wage. I feel the real crisis is that without enough good paying jobs we will have a scenario where the rich factory owners (who are all but tax exempt) will be collecting money without a sufficient conduit to recycle it back through the economy. We are perilously close to this deflationary spiral in my observations.
These companies have really trained me well in skipping and ignoring ads. Nowadays any ad I can't get rid of is like fingernails on a chalkboard. I don't have cable, and paid the extra to get the ad free/reduced Hulu. Usually by time we start watching a DVD/Bluray my finger is a bit sore from bashing the controller to get past all the crap.
Funny thing is that I actually enjoy movies more. I go to the theater about as often as I ever did (every couple months), but unlike a few years ago I get to go to a fair number of movies I have never seen the trailer for. I got really sick of having the best scenes ruined, but that has become pretty rare recently. I managed to see the latest Star Wars without spoilers (and with a burger and beer). I usually hit up Rotten Tomatoes for a short list of non-crap movies to choose from and call it good.
Basically the ads reached the tipping point of obnoxiousness that I spend effort and money to block them out as best I can. I spend extra effort to shield my kid, since I still recall how much advertising manipulated me as a kid. 5 second pre-ads are the last desperate flailings of a desperate marketing department.
A Tahoe is a truck converted to have extra seats to bloat profits.
Most SUV's are only aspirationally off-road worthy. For most folks buying them it is about sitting higher on the road, feeling safer by being above average in vehicle size, and maybe being all wheel drive in case there is a snow flurry on the way to pick up the kids from their after school "My kid is a special little butterfly" class.
$200k is rounding error to someone like Ford. Just getting one idea that improved sales of just one of their vehicles by a percent would create profits that dwarf that.
Tear downs are very valuable. When I worked in the cellular power amplifier business a few years ago I found the tear downs of our competitors extremely useful, but not for the reasons you would initially suspect.
Our management was convinced we were state of the art, and the reason for losing out was due to bad engineering. Tear downs showed that our main competitors had already been shipping products with design rules that were 1.5-2x better than our rules (component size, component spacing, bondwire rules, etc). We got to bludgeon the dolts standing in the way of progress with these measurements and finally make forward progress. Sadly we were having to use something designed about 2 years previously to get our management to put roughly comparable targets onto the technology road map, targeting availability in 2 more years...
So often just knowing where your capabilities are strong or weak can be very valuable.
Let me think this through. If I am the family member of a murder victim, what would it say about me if I felt better and happier that the perpetrator was being badly treated on a daily basis?
Should be that each individual's subscription money goes proportionally to the authors they read. One page farmer could only cause as much damage as the money he is putting in (minus Amazon profits, of course). Seems like a simple page limit or similar could nip this in the bud.
I chose a pay-as-you-go data plan from Ting as a middle ground option. I almost never use data on my phone, but I can enable it when there is a need and pay for what I use. We average $35 a month for 2 phones for everything, and my wife uses a modest amount of data every month (still cheaper than a divorce attorney). I find this to be a good compromise for not having two sizeable internet data bills every month.
The whole Mac side of their business seems to be getting very little attention, which is rather sad. The current offerings were overpriced and used less than stellar hardware when they were first shipped, and mostly that was a looong time ago. Beautiful cases, but mobile grade guts with integrated graphics (or massively marked up GPU's).
My wife has 2 macs, and I would kind of like to have one on my desk too (grew up on macs BITD), but every time I take a look at the offerings I see a bunch of machines at twice the price for half the machine.
And you can still get fired before your last day and miss out on severance. Without decent worker protections it is usually better to keep your head down and take whatever crumbs they feel like handing you on the way out.
Skills you own. Specific company knowledge belongs to the company. So long as you are still drawing a pay check the company has rights to that specific knowledge. Once you leave the company still owns that intellectual property, but you have no obligation to help them any more. Most states are At-Will, so you have every right to simply quit at any time. You don't have the right to leave behind booby traps, malicious scripts, or similar destructive schemes. However if the company has a system that is a badly documented house of cards, you have every right to walk away and let nature take its course.
Also keep in mind that the world is a pretty small place. Word gets around. I expect that if these folks make it hard to get rid of them, they will find themselves black balled.
How did that work out for Terry Childs? Admittedly he did a more extreme thing than that, but the sentiment is roughly the same.
I applaud the sentiment these folks have, but I expect they will barely slow down the wood chipper as they pass through. They are a lot more expendable than they realize, and it will barely cause a hiccup in operations.
Consequences for his actions? You douse a bunch of kids with chemicals designed to inflict pain and your community doesn't rush to hug and support you? Let me cry a river...
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Who knew that stuff was so deadly toxic? Really?
First off, electric cars use their brake pads less, not more. Regenerative brakes do most of the work, and the brakes last 2-3x longer than a regular gasoline car. Tire do last a little less long, but most of those are big particles, and I have never heard of tire dust being considered a major health risk.
Sounds like a hatchet job...
Which cell companies don't have arbitration clauses? We have large segments of the business world who have all made similar requirements. You can't simply go down the road, as they are all doing it.
Increasingly arbitration is written into all sorts of contracts. Oral surgeon for wisdom teeth demanded it. Cell phone plans demand it. And so on. As a lowly individual you generally can do nothing when all the viable vendors ask you to opt out of the court system as a condition of doing business.
I don't think it should be allowed in such lopsided situations as a major corporation and a lowly individual.
Hell, I think most EULA's should be nullified.
Analog phones had higher peak power (TDMA vs. CDMA anyway), but even digital modulation looks very analog after all the filtering done to stay inside the frequency mask specs.
Public funding of campaigns. Outlaw super-PAC's. Get the money out of politics.
Only then can we even properly engage with out politicians. For now our leaders are at the beck and call of those who fund them.
My taxes are my responsibility. I pay them. My employer should pay theirs.
When one class of tax payers get a free ride, the rest of us who don't have a fleet of lawyers and politicians on speed dial end up picking up the slack.
Oregon got it a little more right. Property taxes are throttled to 3% per year (should have been a little higher) to prevent wild swings in property taxes, but they are throttled to the original house price (or 1995 valuation, whichever is more recent). It keeps things a little more sane.
Same happens all over.
Here in Oregon we recently saw Intel flex there muscle to get special tax breaks for a major fab expansion. Nike is surrounded by the city of Beaverton, but uses threats to leave to prevent annexation that would make them pay the same property taxes that all their neighbors do.
Major employers can use blackmail to get major concessions. Hell, Boeing got concessions a few years back up in Washington and moved much of the operation anyway.
Basically once a business gets big enough it can throw its weight around and get into a tax exempt club. It is anti-competitive, but it works, and is legal. Employees are used as a bargaining chip. Tax exempt us or all our employees will vanish and stop paying taxes. Such behavior is despicable and should be illegal under the equal protection clause, but what do I know.
Well maybe if we prioritized our citizens over overseas military adventures and more toy boards for the admiralty to play with we would.
In short, our political system has largely been captured. The military industrial complex has huge sway, as do the top 0.1 percent who largely fund our elections. These powerful entities have undue influence to make sure their taxes are low (or negative), while getting their geopolitical will imposed (Joe Sixpack never asked for the TPP or any of the complex taxation loopholes).
So we should not blame the government, but look to the puppet masters who mostly determine who ends up on the ballot, and who twist the arms of the ones who want to stay there. Until big money is out of politics our governance will continue to be mostly broken.
News has been broken for a long time. I can't tune into any of 24 hour networks without wanting to throw something at the TV due to the utter stupidity being displayed by the teleprompter monkeys. Evening local news is filled with "Is your cat going to kill you? After the break..." I'd rather get my news online where I can choose to skip past the inane crap.
The point is that you used to have manufacturing towns where the main employer was a factory, and people did most of the work. Many even got a good middle class living out of it. Now you have just a few people watching and maintaining the machines that replaced the vast hordes. A while back on a How It's Made they showed a Peter Pan Peanut Butter factory that churned out 50,000 lbs of peanut butter a day using only 8 employees. Arguably the "old" way had a lot of repetitive mundane jobs that are better off done by a machine no matter how you slice it.
So yes, you still have plumbers, and probably always will. But you still only need one plumber for every few hundred houses. So you can't rely on the profession of plumbing to absorb blue collar employees cast off by automation.
The real problem seems to be that cost savings (numerous types, including automation) by businesses have squeezed the money out of salaries to the point that the large number of the jobs people get no longer pay a living wage. I feel the real crisis is that without enough good paying jobs we will have a scenario where the rich factory owners (who are all but tax exempt) will be collecting money without a sufficient conduit to recycle it back through the economy. We are perilously close to this deflationary spiral in my observations.
I really can't take an OS seriously that is named Yakkety Yak. You lost me right there. What next Leprous Lemur?
These companies have really trained me well in skipping and ignoring ads. Nowadays any ad I can't get rid of is like fingernails on a chalkboard. I don't have cable, and paid the extra to get the ad free/reduced Hulu. Usually by time we start watching a DVD/Bluray my finger is a bit sore from bashing the controller to get past all the crap.
Funny thing is that I actually enjoy movies more. I go to the theater about as often as I ever did (every couple months), but unlike a few years ago I get to go to a fair number of movies I have never seen the trailer for. I got really sick of having the best scenes ruined, but that has become pretty rare recently. I managed to see the latest Star Wars without spoilers (and with a burger and beer). I usually hit up Rotten Tomatoes for a short list of non-crap movies to choose from and call it good.
Basically the ads reached the tipping point of obnoxiousness that I spend effort and money to block them out as best I can. I spend extra effort to shield my kid, since I still recall how much advertising manipulated me as a kid. 5 second pre-ads are the last desperate flailings of a desperate marketing department.
A Tahoe is a truck converted to have extra seats to bloat profits.
Most SUV's are only aspirationally off-road worthy. For most folks buying them it is about sitting higher on the road, feeling safer by being above average in vehicle size, and maybe being all wheel drive in case there is a snow flurry on the way to pick up the kids from their after school "My kid is a special little butterfly" class.
It means you got suckered in by marketing.
$200k is rounding error to someone like Ford. Just getting one idea that improved sales of just one of their vehicles by a percent would create profits that dwarf that.
Tear downs are very valuable. When I worked in the cellular power amplifier business a few years ago I found the tear downs of our competitors extremely useful, but not for the reasons you would initially suspect.
Our management was convinced we were state of the art, and the reason for losing out was due to bad engineering. Tear downs showed that our main competitors had already been shipping products with design rules that were 1.5-2x better than our rules (component size, component spacing, bondwire rules, etc). We got to bludgeon the dolts standing in the way of progress with these measurements and finally make forward progress. Sadly we were having to use something designed about 2 years previously to get our management to put roughly comparable targets onto the technology road map, targeting availability in 2 more years...
So often just knowing where your capabilities are strong or weak can be very valuable.
Let me think this through. If I am the family member of a murder victim, what would it say about me if I felt better and happier that the perpetrator was being badly treated on a daily basis?
Should be that each individual's subscription money goes proportionally to the authors they read. One page farmer could only cause as much damage as the money he is putting in (minus Amazon profits, of course). Seems like a simple page limit or similar could nip this in the bud.
Yet another example of why we can't have nice things.
I chose a pay-as-you-go data plan from Ting as a middle ground option. I almost never use data on my phone, but I can enable it when there is a need and pay for what I use. We average $35 a month for 2 phones for everything, and my wife uses a modest amount of data every month (still cheaper than a divorce attorney). I find this to be a good compromise for not having two sizeable internet data bills every month.
The whole Mac side of their business seems to be getting very little attention, which is rather sad. The current offerings were overpriced and used less than stellar hardware when they were first shipped, and mostly that was a looong time ago. Beautiful cases, but mobile grade guts with integrated graphics (or massively marked up GPU's).
My wife has 2 macs, and I would kind of like to have one on my desk too (grew up on macs BITD), but every time I take a look at the offerings I see a bunch of machines at twice the price for half the machine.
And you can still get fired before your last day and miss out on severance. Without decent worker protections it is usually better to keep your head down and take whatever crumbs they feel like handing you on the way out.
Skills you own. Specific company knowledge belongs to the company. So long as you are still drawing a pay check the company has rights to that specific knowledge. Once you leave the company still owns that intellectual property, but you have no obligation to help them any more. Most states are At-Will, so you have every right to simply quit at any time. You don't have the right to leave behind booby traps, malicious scripts, or similar destructive schemes. However if the company has a system that is a badly documented house of cards, you have every right to walk away and let nature take its course.
Also keep in mind that the world is a pretty small place. Word gets around. I expect that if these folks make it hard to get rid of them, they will find themselves black balled.
How did that work out for Terry Childs? Admittedly he did a more extreme thing than that, but the sentiment is roughly the same.
I applaud the sentiment these folks have, but I expect they will barely slow down the wood chipper as they pass through. They are a lot more expendable than they realize, and it will barely cause a hiccup in operations.
Consequences for his actions? You douse a bunch of kids with chemicals designed to inflict pain and your community doesn't rush to hug and support you? Let me cry a river...