The foxes long ago took over the hen house. Big corporations and the rich pays headline grabbing fines (Big Round Number!!!), but these are usually easily paid from the company slush fund. No individuals go to prison for this crap anymore.
Part of the trouble is the Holder doctrine, which tries not to punish shareholders for the bad acts of a few executives (who happen to be shielded from liability themselves as well) by not imposing fines or punishments that would materially harm a company. I will be glad when Eric Holder is gone from the political scene.
My suspicion is that it is mostly too late. Our political and economic system has entered a death spiral and we will be another has-been empire similar to the British, Roman, Greek, etc. It will take many decades, but decline looks pretty inevitable now that political outrage is easily classified as a terrorist act, secret prisons are a defacto standard, and so much more.
Old fashioned breading took darn near a 100 years to make a substantial change, while putting frog genes into your bananas takes just a few years, and just a few years to ram it through the captured regulators.
Old fashioned breading would also be more likely to increase the concentration of several genes that were already in the mix that yield the desired benefit (more yield, better drought resistance, or whatever), while GM gives you just one very specific modification that has never been seen before.
I am not expecting too many overnight boogey man effects, but I am worried that we will have some low level carcinogen accidentally get incorporated in our GMO wheat supply, and voila we have half the world's population getting stomach cancer decades later. Heck, it is hard to tell exactly why we have such an obesity epedemic, and it may be related to crop choices (not even necessarily GMO related mods) that have snuck through regulators who have an attention span shorter than the time span for the potential health effects. The more our food supply gets controlled by just a few companies, the more I worry we will have a fragile and/or dangerous food system in future decades.
Holding a conference on a public universities campus puts their name on it, giving it the appearance of tacit approval. It is pretty obvious that someone intended to poke the university in the eye with a sharp stick, and they rightly deserve to get booted for using deception to get in the door.
Silencing a dissenting view would be trying to get them banned from the town. They are still welcome to rent conference space from any number of hotels, or even have their conference in a Church. Nobody would criticize a church for refusing to rent their space for a party to honor Darwin on his birthday, now would they?
The differences between our two parties on many important issues around privacy, rule of law, and freedom of speech are mostly negligable. Both parties are pretty pathetic, if not defacto evil.
84 average, when new, at 70 degrees, and don't drive over 55 or the range drops quickly. On cold winter days chop a good 20-30% off that range. Expect 20-30% further degradation after 3-5 years of normal usage. There are a fair number of 3-4 year old Leafs that are under 66% capacity and getting replacement batteries (mostly under warranty), and those Leafs are mostly 2011's and 2012's that only started life with a 73 mile EPA range. It is a great little car with real limitations that should be soberly considered.
I expect that any car labeled a 150 mile car will be more reasonably a 100 mile car after a few years of aging and in non-southern winters. A buyer should count that degradation in if they plan on keeping the car for a decade or two. Thankfully battery prices are coming down, so a battery replacement after 5-10 years will be less daunting of an expense than originally feared.
Fiber is no panacea. It is still controlled by terrible ISP's that throttle reflexively and go cheap on the back haul. Frontier has made comments about offering much faster speeds over existing fiber connections, but only after Google started making serious noise about bringing in their own fiber option. The higher speeds were not available for purchase, so fiber gets us 20 Mb/s. It is not slow as such, but the speed offerings haven't changed in years, and to discussed 100 Mb/s is still just a press release to quell the masses. 20 Mb/s over fiber is just pretty lame as their best foot forward.
How about use it to fund public defenders? Those guys are always getting a raw deal (as are their clients), and it would create a bit of a stabilizing feedback loop. More fines means you need more defense lawyers, a win-win. Or have we given up on having a fair legal system?
There are established laws/standards for how long a yellow should be given the speed limit of the road. Municipalities have been caught violating their own laws/standards to increase revenue. A yellow light needs to be long enough to include a normal reaction time, and still leave a safe stopping distance. The best option for safety is to abide by established standards and law for yellow light times. Yellow lights should be predictable, not too short and not too long, or you stand to cause accidents at intersections that do not obey the norms.
The real issue here is that yellow lights have become a tool to tweak revenue for cash strapped towns, cities, and the companies they contract with. I can see it being a very easy trap to get caught in when you are facing closing schools and delaying pot hole repairs, but it should be off limits. The rules of the road should be optimized for safety and efficiency, not plugging budget holes.
Cars with 2G connections back tot eh mother ship are going to go dark soon as those system go off the air. It is hard to see a lot of manufacturers keeping servers alive for the whole 20 years car life for a lot of these features. Now GM is sticking wifi and 4G into their rigs. I'm a luddite for sure, but I just want a good reliable and fun car. Beyond the basic instrument cluster I really want any additions to be thought of on a couple decade scale.
To jazz things up for me, cars should come with: 1) A spare key FOB (i.e. 3 total, minimum) 2) A decent radio that I can dumb down (if i don't have an XM subscription, it should disappear from the station list, and let me hide AM as well please). 3) A modular GPS display that can be easily swapped out with other industry standard display/GPS/infotainment options. The proprietary crap that costs a couple hundred bucks to update the maps on is just BS, as is the ~2k price tag if it breaks. 4) An analog speed readout, I hate digital. 5) Buttons and controls I can manipulate easily without have to look down at them. Smooth front buttons on the radio look nice, but suck to use on the road. Dials for volume, fan speed, vent mode, etc are better than up/down switches.
Why just the poverty line as a cutoff? I'd all be all giving EVERYONE a basic income, say 10k per person in the house, 6k per minor, then tax the hell out of income above a LUXURY income level, say a 50% tax for every dollar of income above 100k per year, zero deductions. Maybe even tie that percentage to the budget so that the rich pay through the nose if their politicians start some stupid war (yes, they own them, they should pay for all the crap their guys do to us).
I think that sounds more fair than what I commonly see labeled as a "Fair Tax", which is almost always a tax cut for the rich in sheep's clothes.
How about we look for the gene's that cause one to be an uncooperative jerk? I'd be more likely to have a kid if I had some assurance they wouldn't inherit the rather prevalent trait of being anti-social jerks on my father's side of things (and his father). It seems to be getting attenuated through the generations, but I honestly am in the camp of wanting my kid to take after my wife and not me.
If you want to money for use of your patents, go sell patent licenses. If you want a job, be clear that you are there to work and your patented work is off limits (I am assuming you personally hold the patents). When we interview patent holders I grill them on the patent since it is clear piece of representative work I have access to, but I have never considered that their patents come along for the ride (usually they are owned by some other company).
When it comes to proprietary IP that is not patented, I steer a wide berth to avoid any chance of making it look like they need to share their protected knowledge to pass the interview. If it is on their resume I generally ask for enough description to understand the gyst of what they are working on and will ask industry standard design questions, but I do my best to stay far away from anything that makes them squirm.
Yeah... When the mob colludes it falls under RICO statutes and people go to jail, when CEO's collude the shareholders get to pay a small sum to settle the whole thing. I guess I am getting tired of being beat up by slaps from their invisible hand.
It seems like there is plenty of documented collusion that could be used to indict some of these scumbags. Too many offenses are being handled by writing paltry checks out of the company coffers. It is hard to see that future CEO's and HR departments will walk away from this with anything but an emboldened attitude towards screwing over workers.
Workers are paying taxes, so it is OK that their employer is not? WTF?
Corporations have more say in the running of the government than average citizen (even when incorporated in the Caymen Islands), so they should be paying a similar tax burden. Heck, the 35% tax rate is only on PROFITS. I get to deduct a lot less from my income before taxes than a corporation, so I say WTF again.
Our society need tax revenue, and we all need to fairly contribute. These super-national companies have been rigging the game to get special deal, loopholes, and exemptions. The little guys end up holding the bag, and somehow it is all OK because they have a lot of employees that pay taxes? How about I argue that my wife pays a lot of taxes so it is OK that I stop paying them?
No single technology will work. On the west coast a combination of hydro, wind and solar has a real chance. Other regions are less lucky.
Where solar really helps is to produce power during peak power loads. Night time is when there is a lot of spare hydro, wind, and coal capacity. When AC is running in summer is when we have the highest peak demand. If solar provides just 10-20% during those peak hours it can replace the need for a lot of fossil plants.
We also need a more overbuilt grid to allow power to be more readily pushed from region to region to allow Mojave sun to power Portland dank.
Show me a good example of where we have fully disposed of ANY spent nuclear fuel. It is stashed all over the place, there are failed attempts to bury it, and there are a lot of wild claims about non-existent plants that will burn it down to short lived isotopes.
Clean Nuclear is more vaporware than Solar and Clean Coal combined.
The example of Prineville in TFA is a good one. Here in Oregon we have a lot of base load provided by hydroelectric. We have had squabbles between the Hydro guys and the Wind guys at night in winter when the Hydro guys need to keep the turbines spinning to keep the dam levels safe, and the wind guys have to stop feeding into the grid and that hurts their bottom line.
Summer during the daytime is when Oregon fires up more of the of the coal and natural gas plants, so solar fits in well to cover these peaks times and seasons when the rain isn't falling, the snow has stopped melting, and the AC is running.
Other regions are not nearly as lucky as Oregon to have good wind and hydro options, but lets not disqualify a technology just because it isn't a perfect fit everywhere.
"Use distinct passwords, at least for the most critical uses (Work, Banking, Apple, Facebook, Google, Paypal, Amazon) and never use those somewhere else."
By far, this is the weakest link for many. I can handle maybe 4-5 passwords at a time, and quickly I find the need to have a unique one for work, a couple strong ones for my couple banks, and then just one more "burner" password for all the rest. It is impractical to expect folks to remember 10+ decent passwords. We need something newer and better to replace the whole password system. Everything else quickly turns into band-aid on the current broken system.
This. Far better than having us change our passwords often would be to display a short logfile at my first morning login of all recent login attempts (24 hours mid-week, 72 hours on Monday morning.). If I saw anything odd i could nip it in the bud. The 60-90 day routine just causes bad practices.
Compound frequency that with an obnoxious policy for maximum length, random characters, and so on and I'll tend to either keep hint on a sticky (say FB1 for FuBar1), or just cycle through a trailing unique number (FuBar2 for the next one, for example). Stupid policies have lead to stupid behavior, and frankly it is getting hard to feel bad about it.
What gets me is that most companies have RFID cards in or with their badges, why not stick a reader on every machine? Almost ANY password that required you to swipe your badge before entering it would be vastly better than almost any password on its own.
The problem has gotten bad enough that it sure feels like something is going to give soon and we might soon enter a post password world.
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The foxes long ago took over the hen house. Big corporations and the rich pays headline grabbing fines (Big Round Number!!!), but these are usually easily paid from the company slush fund. No individuals go to prison for this crap anymore.
Part of the trouble is the Holder doctrine, which tries not to punish shareholders for the bad acts of a few executives (who happen to be shielded from liability themselves as well) by not imposing fines or punishments that would materially harm a company. I will be glad when Eric Holder is gone from the political scene.
My suspicion is that it is mostly too late. Our political and economic system has entered a death spiral and we will be another has-been empire similar to the British, Roman, Greek, etc. It will take many decades, but decline looks pretty inevitable now that political outrage is easily classified as a terrorist act, secret prisons are a defacto standard, and so much more.
Old fashioned breading took darn near a 100 years to make a substantial change, while putting frog genes into your bananas takes just a few years, and just a few years to ram it through the captured regulators.
Old fashioned breading would also be more likely to increase the concentration of several genes that were already in the mix that yield the desired benefit (more yield, better drought resistance, or whatever), while GM gives you just one very specific modification that has never been seen before.
I am not expecting too many overnight boogey man effects, but I am worried that we will have some low level carcinogen accidentally get incorporated in our GMO wheat supply, and voila we have half the world's population getting stomach cancer decades later. Heck, it is hard to tell exactly why we have such an obesity epedemic, and it may be related to crop choices (not even necessarily GMO related mods) that have snuck through regulators who have an attention span shorter than the time span for the potential health effects. The more our food supply gets controlled by just a few companies, the more I worry we will have a fragile and/or dangerous food system in future decades.
All your keys are belong to us.
Fixed that for you.
Holding a conference on a public universities campus puts their name on it, giving it the appearance of tacit approval. It is pretty obvious that someone intended to poke the university in the eye with a sharp stick, and they rightly deserve to get booted for using deception to get in the door.
Silencing a dissenting view would be trying to get them banned from the town. They are still welcome to rent conference space from any number of hotels, or even have their conference in a Church. Nobody would criticize a church for refusing to rent their space for a party to honor Darwin on his birthday, now would they?
A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money...
The differences between our two parties on many important issues around privacy, rule of law, and freedom of speech are mostly negligable. Both parties are pretty pathetic, if not defacto evil.
84 average, when new, at 70 degrees, and don't drive over 55 or the range drops quickly. On cold winter days chop a good 20-30% off that range. Expect 20-30% further degradation after 3-5 years of normal usage. There are a fair number of 3-4 year old Leafs that are under 66% capacity and getting replacement batteries (mostly under warranty), and those Leafs are mostly 2011's and 2012's that only started life with a 73 mile EPA range. It is a great little car with real limitations that should be soberly considered.
I expect that any car labeled a 150 mile car will be more reasonably a 100 mile car after a few years of aging and in non-southern winters. A buyer should count that degradation in if they plan on keeping the car for a decade or two. Thankfully battery prices are coming down, so a battery replacement after 5-10 years will be less daunting of an expense than originally feared.
Fiber is no panacea. It is still controlled by terrible ISP's that throttle reflexively and go cheap on the back haul. Frontier has made comments about offering much faster speeds over existing fiber connections, but only after Google started making serious noise about bringing in their own fiber option. The higher speeds were not available for purchase, so fiber gets us 20 Mb/s. It is not slow as such, but the speed offerings haven't changed in years, and to discussed 100 Mb/s is still just a press release to quell the masses. 20 Mb/s over fiber is just pretty lame as their best foot forward.
How about use it to fund public defenders? Those guys are always getting a raw deal (as are their clients), and it would create a bit of a stabilizing feedback loop. More fines means you need more defense lawyers, a win-win. Or have we given up on having a fair legal system?
How much are they saving on jails and courts by not prosecuting pot users?
There are established laws/standards for how long a yellow should be given the speed limit of the road. Municipalities have been caught violating their own laws/standards to increase revenue. A yellow light needs to be long enough to include a normal reaction time, and still leave a safe stopping distance. The best option for safety is to abide by established standards and law for yellow light times. Yellow lights should be predictable, not too short and not too long, or you stand to cause accidents at intersections that do not obey the norms.
The real issue here is that yellow lights have become a tool to tweak revenue for cash strapped towns, cities, and the companies they contract with. I can see it being a very easy trap to get caught in when you are facing closing schools and delaying pot hole repairs, but it should be off limits. The rules of the road should be optimized for safety and efficiency, not plugging budget holes.
What fantasy land are you living in?!
Cars with 2G connections back tot eh mother ship are going to go dark soon as those system go off the air. It is hard to see a lot of manufacturers keeping servers alive for the whole 20 years car life for a lot of these features. Now GM is sticking wifi and 4G into their rigs. I'm a luddite for sure, but I just want a good reliable and fun car. Beyond the basic instrument cluster I really want any additions to be thought of on a couple decade scale.
To jazz things up for me, cars should come with:
1) A spare key FOB (i.e. 3 total, minimum)
2) A decent radio that I can dumb down (if i don't have an XM subscription, it should disappear from the station list, and let me hide AM as well please).
3) A modular GPS display that can be easily swapped out with other industry standard display/GPS/infotainment options. The proprietary crap that costs a couple hundred bucks to update the maps on is just BS, as is the ~2k price tag if it breaks.
4) An analog speed readout, I hate digital.
5) Buttons and controls I can manipulate easily without have to look down at them. Smooth front buttons on the radio look nice, but suck to use on the road. Dials for volume, fan speed, vent mode, etc are better than up/down switches.
rant
rant
rant...
Why just the poverty line as a cutoff? I'd all be all giving EVERYONE a basic income, say 10k per person in the house, 6k per minor, then tax the hell out of income above a LUXURY income level, say a 50% tax for every dollar of income above 100k per year, zero deductions. Maybe even tie that percentage to the budget so that the rich pay through the nose if their politicians start some stupid war (yes, they own them, they should pay for all the crap their guys do to us).
I think that sounds more fair than what I commonly see labeled as a "Fair Tax", which is almost always a tax cut for the rich in sheep's clothes.
How about we look for the gene's that cause one to be an uncooperative jerk? I'd be more likely to have a kid if I had some assurance they wouldn't inherit the rather prevalent trait of being anti-social jerks on my father's side of things (and his father). It seems to be getting attenuated through the generations, but I honestly am in the camp of wanting my kid to take after my wife and not me.
If you want to money for use of your patents, go sell patent licenses. If you want a job, be clear that you are there to work and your patented work is off limits (I am assuming you personally hold the patents). When we interview patent holders I grill them on the patent since it is clear piece of representative work I have access to, but I have never considered that their patents come along for the ride (usually they are owned by some other company).
When it comes to proprietary IP that is not patented, I steer a wide berth to avoid any chance of making it look like they need to share their protected knowledge to pass the interview. If it is on their resume I generally ask for enough description to understand the gyst of what they are working on and will ask industry standard design questions, but I do my best to stay far away from anything that makes them squirm.
Yeah... When the mob colludes it falls under RICO statutes and people go to jail, when CEO's collude the shareholders get to pay a small sum to settle the whole thing. I guess I am getting tired of being beat up by slaps from their invisible hand.
It seems like there is plenty of documented collusion that could be used to indict some of these scumbags. Too many offenses are being handled by writing paltry checks out of the company coffers. It is hard to see that future CEO's and HR departments will walk away from this with anything but an emboldened attitude towards screwing over workers.
Workers are paying taxes, so it is OK that their employer is not? WTF?
Corporations have more say in the running of the government than average citizen (even when incorporated in the Caymen Islands), so they should be paying a similar tax burden. Heck, the 35% tax rate is only on PROFITS. I get to deduct a lot less from my income before taxes than a corporation, so I say WTF again.
Our society need tax revenue, and we all need to fairly contribute. These super-national companies have been rigging the game to get special deal, loopholes, and exemptions. The little guys end up holding the bag, and somehow it is all OK because they have a lot of employees that pay taxes? How about I argue that my wife pays a lot of taxes so it is OK that I stop paying them?
Add some EV plugs and it is win-win-win
No single technology will work. On the west coast a combination of hydro, wind and solar has a real chance. Other regions are less lucky.
Where solar really helps is to produce power during peak power loads. Night time is when there is a lot of spare hydro, wind, and coal capacity. When AC is running in summer is when we have the highest peak demand. If solar provides just 10-20% during those peak hours it can replace the need for a lot of fossil plants.
We also need a more overbuilt grid to allow power to be more readily pushed from region to region to allow Mojave sun to power Portland dank.
Show me a good example of where we have fully disposed of ANY spent nuclear fuel. It is stashed all over the place, there are failed attempts to bury it, and there are a lot of wild claims about non-existent plants that will burn it down to short lived isotopes.
Clean Nuclear is more vaporware than Solar and Clean Coal combined.
The example of Prineville in TFA is a good one. Here in Oregon we have a lot of base load provided by hydroelectric. We have had squabbles between the Hydro guys and the Wind guys at night in winter when the Hydro guys need to keep the turbines spinning to keep the dam levels safe, and the wind guys have to stop feeding into the grid and that hurts their bottom line.
Summer during the daytime is when Oregon fires up more of the of the coal and natural gas plants, so solar fits in well to cover these peaks times and seasons when the rain isn't falling, the snow has stopped melting, and the AC is running.
Other regions are not nearly as lucky as Oregon to have good wind and hydro options, but lets not disqualify a technology just because it isn't a perfect fit everywhere.
"Use distinct passwords, at least for the most critical uses (Work, Banking, Apple, Facebook, Google, Paypal, Amazon) and never use those somewhere else."
By far, this is the weakest link for many. I can handle maybe 4-5 passwords at a time, and quickly I find the need to have a unique one for work, a couple strong ones for my couple banks, and then just one more "burner" password for all the rest. It is impractical to expect folks to remember 10+ decent passwords. We need something newer and better to replace the whole password system. Everything else quickly turns into band-aid on the current broken system.
This. Far better than having us change our passwords often would be to display a short logfile at my first morning login of all recent login attempts (24 hours mid-week, 72 hours on Monday morning.). If I saw anything odd i could nip it in the bud. The 60-90 day routine just causes bad practices.
Compound frequency that with an obnoxious policy for maximum length, random characters, and so on and I'll tend to either keep hint on a sticky (say FB1 for FuBar1), or just cycle through a trailing unique number (FuBar2 for the next one, for example). Stupid policies have lead to stupid behavior, and frankly it is getting hard to feel bad about it.
What gets me is that most companies have RFID cards in or with their badges, why not stick a reader on every machine? Almost ANY password that required you to swipe your badge before entering it would be vastly better than almost any password on its own.
The problem has gotten bad enough that it sure feels like something is going to give soon and we might soon enter a post password world.