The key there is that Swamp Cooling is the AC of choice because it has traditionally been cheaper to install, operate, and maintain than heat pumps. As fresh water becomes more scarce it is conceivable that they would no longer be viewed as economically viable. Heat pumps work just fine in the desert just not as efficiently as they do elsewhere.
The other thing that could really help is to require new construction, and remodels, to implement much better insulation and design practices. I spent a few months once in a desert sitting in a steel box with large thick windows. There was a generator with an AC unit attached that ran from sun up to sun down, and managed to keep the inside of the box in the mid 80's. It would seem that a lot of people give more thought to how their home looks than how it performs.
Did he just talk around astronauts getting naughty on the space station. He specifically said the Russian cosmonauts work and eat on their side of the station during waking hours. Why bother being that explicit about the timing?
I recently purchased an anniversary gift online. I actually went to a local retailer to ask about what I wanted. I spent an hour at the store with a representative trying to get what I wanted. A week later I got a price estimate of $300. In the meantime I had looked on amazon and found what I wanted for as low as $20. The really low priced options struck me as being risky and since I didn't want the worry of having to do a return I went with a $100 option as kind of a middle ground hoping for good quality. So far so good, though I guess I'll find out for sure when she opens the box. I'm still a bit amazed though at the price difference between what I paid and what the store offered.
Are you serious? Where you are born on the socio-economic ladder in the USA is a huge indicator comparatively of where you'll end up. Yes, it is in theory always possible to bootstrap yourself out of the lowest depths of poverty into wealth. But the odds of successfully improving your lot in life are fundamentally tied to the resources available to you and how much time you have to work with those resources. Even people in the lower middle class have a head and shoulders advantage over someone born into poverty. Think of any RTS or survival game you've ever played with random elements, if you get a bad spawn or series of events it can hamstring you for the rest of the play session. Life can work precisely the same and you can't just start a new game. Once upon a time when there was unclaimed land and frontiers maybe you could go reinvent yourself and rapidly climb back up the ladder of success, but those days have been gone for a century or more now.
So far as child starvation goes I would guess that malnutrition is a more common issue. It isn't really something that we as a society can readily fix though. We already provide welfare money for groceries and such but that relies on parents spending that money wisely.
All well and good but categorically refusing to consider incurring debt to own a vehicle or home is bad advice. In some very specific markets this could be good advice but in most of the USA at least it is foolhardy.
Not owning a means of reliable transportation means you are likely limiting your ability to seek employment, or business opportunities, to a much smaller range. Renting in perpetuity means you are very likely paying more for your living space with nothing to show for it in the end. While renting allows you to escape the responsibility for paying a mortgage you are subject to eviction should the owner decide to stop paying it. There is a lot to be said for living within your means, not buying vehicles and properties with little added value but exponentially larger price tags.
I agree except that the historical average has been more like 7% rather than 10-12%. Though obviously in shorter periods the averages have been both higher and lower. One of the criticisms of Dave Ramsey is that he touts the 10-12% number as gospel and while the strategy is still correct people will expect to do a lot better than reality might dictate. While it might not seem like a major difference, over the long term it really adds up.
I think I've had a few devices over the years that had S/PDIF outputs but I never realized what that was and never bothered trying to use it. The only device that I think I own now that has optical ports at all is my soundbar. I have a cheapo TV and use a Roku stick, neither of which have optical outputs. So when I hooked up my soundbar system I actually had to use an RCA to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter in order to get things working.
Government clearances are the only ones I know of and are the subject of the article so they bear on the conversation clearly. I'm just saying that it is silly of any company that is merely looking for trustworthy employees to require the applicant to have a government clearance.
It's kind of like if I were starting a private armed guard company, but would only hire former cops and military veterans, because I knew they had firearms training. I would be foolishly limiting my prospective applicant pool which would lead to me likely having to pay a higher wage.
Yes, requiring a strict background check means a smaller pool of people than you would have otherwise. However requiring a government issued clearance is limiting the pool even further because now instead of considering people who could pass that check, you're only considering people that have already passed it.
Besides which the background check for a clearance really isn't all that strict. The whole point of it is to verify the applicants integrity and check for skeletons in the closet that could be used for blackmail.
The reason more companies haven't gone with a system like the Volts is complexity. One of the key advantages of an EV is that by eliminating the internal combustion engine you reduce the number of moving parts by a huge factor. The Volt is actually more complex than a standard ICE or EV, which means more points of failure and consequentially more systems to maintain. Additionally those systems don't come weight free so you end up reducing efficiencies again.
That isn't to say that such a system doesn't have it's uses, I think of it kind of like a swiss army pocket knife. Sure it's got some cool tools and gadgets but how useful are they really? If I have one loose screw to fix sure my pocket knife will probably do the job, but if you're talking about more than a couple screws I want a real screwdriver.
Small turbines are a really fun idea but are limited by physics sadly. The efficiency of a turbine is directly limited by the ratio of the size of the fan to the width of the gap between the tip of the fan blade and the wall of the chamber. The smaller you try to make the turbine the worse your efficiency is going to be. Jaguar made a concept car a few years back that used a couple small turbines to generate power for the electric motors and it was beautiful, but prohibitively expensive to the extreme. The cost of producing small turbines with close enough tolerances to be efficient is just not worth it at a consumer level.
What I was trying to get at is that unless a company has a requirement from the Government that employees have an official clearance awarded by the Government, they can simply contract someone like a Private Investigator to do the leg work. An Investigator should be able to gather everything HR would need in 40 hours or less for most people. Even at $100 an hour that ends up being pretty cheap by comparison instead of paying a premium salary for someone who already had a clearance.
The government already does that to an extent for people that it is hiring. If you look at job advertisements they'll say the candidate must be able to qualify for some level of clearance as opposed to already having it.
When it comes to contractors though, already having the clearance is a big deal because it is expensive and time consuming to get. That said I don't see any reason that a private enterprise couldn't provide the same kind of service for vetting people. At it's most basic level the Secret and Top Secret clearance isn't really all that much trouble to sort out. It amounts to checking for criminal history, credit history, verifying previous employment and housing history, and finally interviewing the subject of the background check and a few of their friends/coworkers. Those are all things anyone could do, not just some federal bureau. The reason it's expensive and time consuming to get is that you're waiting on some federal bureau to get through a large backlog of work.
There is a lot more that has to happen than just planting trees. Trees are typically just a temporary way to tie up carbon. Forests are essentially carbon sponges, they'll hold carbon but have a saturation limit and once sufficiently mature start releasing old carbon as they intake new carbon. We could go in and harvest trees specifically to lock them up somewhere to sequester their carbon, but we'd have to do this on a truly massive scale to make a dent in just our current carbon output. For the USA we output 16.4 Tons of carbon per capita per year.
The amount of money beyond which the rest is excess is always going to be arbitrary and vary wildly from person to person. Just a couple decades ago I would have viewed my current fiscal situation as allowing a life of luxury. Now I look at my wages and think about how much better off I'd be with a $10k more a year. Meanwhile I read an article once where a couple with an income of around $350k felt they were living pay check to pay check. Of course the things they talked about as being necessities strike me more as luxuries for royalty.
It is a rare individual indeed that has the capacity to stash away ever larger sums of money when their income increases rather than improving their quality of life. Many people might increase their savings but even those people probably find ways to spend a disproportionate amount rather than save.
That said I am firmly for progressive income taxes and stiff estate taxes. Our current system coddles and protects you the more wealth you have. I'd very much like to see how a tax system that scaled directly with your income bracket in hundreds if not thousands of steps with a top end of 90% or so would work out. We'd likely have to switch to the IRS figuring out our taxes instead of forcing everyone to file a return, but it appeals to me as having abrupt tax brackets feels janky.
I spent a couple years working nights and it was awesome! I would switch between two different schedules periodically so I either started at 5pm or 10pm. Regardless of which shift I was doing I'd get to bed around 7am and it was perfect. Going to sleep as the sun is rising has to be one of the more satisfying simple pleasures in life.
The only thing I didn't like was roommates hosting friends in the early afternoon ruining my sleep. If I could get away with going back to working nights without my wife scalping me I'd definitely do it.
From what I understand historical records for storms in the ways we measure them don't go back very far. It wasn't all that long ago that unless a storm made landfall nobody would know it existed at all. Well I suppose any ships caught in the storms would know, but they'd likely be more concerned with the immediate need to survive than measure wind speeds and atmospheric pressure. We can make guesses about how strong storms where when they made landfall based on the destruction they wrought but that is pretty iffy at best. A lot of the damage we see in our modern age from storms is a result of the flooding. And we have made the flooding a lot worse by eliminating wetland areas along with roofing and paving over everything in site. The prevalence of stick built houses filled with drywall and electrical wiring makes for larger losses when a structure is flooded.
I'm not really sold one way or the other so far as whether storms are getting stronger and more frequent. But even anecdotally it doesn't seem so. It's been almost a decade since the gulf states saw serious hurricane danger.
A huge part of luck is not having your life turned on it's head by some event outside of your control. The argument can be made that you should have been prepared for whatever it was but it is impossible to be prepared for everything. And practically speaking the more prepared you are for every conceivable eventuality the less resources you have to try and make improvements in your life at large. The fewer resources you have available, the less prepared you can be for anything, and the more likely you are to be rendered destitute by the slightest turn of bad luck.
One of our societal flaws seems to be that there will always be a sizable portion of the population living in poverty. People not giving in doesn't really change the numbers, it just changes who resides where on the socio-economic ladder, provided everyone doesn't do the same thing.
Luck has played a large part in my own success. I happened to be born white, male, and hetero. Which means I face very little to no unfair discrimination. Then at the right time of my life I turned out to be eligible for military service, at a time when there were some nice cushy positions available. That cushy position gave me all kinds of lucrative experience as well as some other perks namely a security clearance. Then, days before I started terminal leave someone contacted me out of the blue to essentially offer a job. No one else wanted that job so all I had to do was show up to an interview, hosted by people I had known for years, and not fall on my face. That job came with enough pay to put my earnings at 150% of the areas household median income. A few years later I upgraded to a different position with far better benefits and even more pay, now as 200% of the area's median household income. By the way that position was offered to three other people, who had also applied for it, before it got to me.
I can see how someone might say it was because I saw the opportunities that came my way and took advantage of them. But not seeing them would be the bigger challenge frankly. Those opportunities weren't presented on a silver platter exactly but I would have needed to be in a coma not to see them, and clinically insane not to take them. The one and only "exceptional" thing I did was score high on the ASVAB, and lets be honest, my score was only considered high because the bar is designed to be incredibly low. I've never spent any of my spare time developing some marketable skill or hobby, I spend that time with my family and or playing video games.
Grim Dawn failed to grip me when I tried it out a year or two back. I felt the same way about Path of Exiles though that was way back during its closed beta. I've played D3 on and off over the years and it has gotten a lot more fun since they nuked the RMAH. That said I don't play it constantly but come back for a month or so at the start of each season/ladder, before moving on to something else.
I seem to have a few games that I cycle between regularly. Namely 7DTD, Minecraft, Terraria, D3. But I'll occasionally squeeze in something else.
Tesla isn't turning profits consistently because they aren't sitting on their laurels. They actually make something like 20% profit on each Model S. They're in the red because they're spending money like crazy to increase their capacity. If Tesla is ever going to become a serious competitor to the major automakers it'll likely require staying in the red for a decade or more to come.
That table is leaving out more than half the data for motor vehicles or something screwy like that. Look at the fatality numbers for the category before it starts doing breakdowns and you'll see the sub categories account for less than half of the numbers. Along with that the lifetime odds of death from a motor vehicle related accident look to be 1:114. So far as DUI's go, you not drinking and driving only slightly improves your odds of not being a DUI fatality because drunk drivers frequently kill others and manage to survive like the cockroaches they are.
The rates from the table are 114 and 370 for motor vehicles and firearms respectively. That means motor vehicles are 3 times more likely to kill you than a firearm. And maybe you can reduce your chance of death from motor vehicles slightly by not being an idiot, but the same is true of firearms. In fact you can probably limit your exposure to firearms violence to a much greater degree than you can motor vehicles.
I wouldn't bet on it being all that rare. This definitely falls under white collar crime, which gets a lot less press coverage and consequentially less funding, than violent street crime. Just look at the numbers for bank robberies from the FBI. The last time I looked in a good year the FBI was only able to identify half of the suspects. That doesn't even equate to catching half of the suspects. Bank Robberies are unlikely to not be reported as the FBI is responsible for them, and so you can bet that the numbers are pretty accurate. Banks are aware of the danger of being robbed and so have lots of cameras and usually armed guards on the premise. Robbing a bank is usually viewed as being a high risk venture even by the criminals themselves. So you have a kind of crime where the odds of getting busted are relatively high, but still only a 50% chance of being identified. I think that says a lot for the odds of getting away with white collar crimes, and especially when the fact that a crime was committed might not ever be realized.
It would seem to be a self re-enforcing myth that people can't keep their mouths shut about crimes they've committed. In white collar crime it is highly likely that a person or organization wouldn't even realize they had been victimized. So law enforcement can only make guesses as to how much of it there is and the low hanging fruit that is easiest to catch is going to be the criminals that couldn't keep their mouth shut.
This is similar to the low homicide rate, and insanely high closure rate for homicides in Japan. You could choose to believe that Japan just has much less lethal crime and that the police are magically more effective. Or you could notice that if a case doesn't appear to be open and shut, it won't be ruled a homicide. And on top of that attempted homicides are counted as homicides for reporting purposes while robbery homicides aren't.
Eff that! I'm retiring by 62 if not sooner, barring some catastrophe that gives me some insurmountable debt. As soon as I can possibly afford to quit work and scrape by on retirement savings I'm doing it. If I have to build a shack down by the river out of cardboard boxes I'm doing it.
The plan is to sell the house. Buy a small bit of land somewhere with good internet access. Build a small bunker of a house that meets my needs and not much more. Maintain a small garden, and spend the rest of my days doing whatever the hell I want.
It really depends on how extensive Disney allows their library to be. When you consider everything that falls under the umbrella of Disney these days and how long they've been producing content, they could be very competitive. Then you also have to consider the hordes of rabid fans. If there is any company that stands a real chance of competing with Netflix it'd be Disney. I still expect them to abandon it in a few years when they get sick of trying to manage it, but in the meantime my kids will probably campaign for it to be a permanent subscription until it goes under. I figure the only way I don't end up paying for it is if they insist on keeping with their artificial scarcity vault scheme, and have a higher price than Netflix.
The more you automate all of this though the less likely you are to have such problems. The robot fork lifts won't try to overfill a staging area as they'd just stop once it is filled. Or maybe you do program them to automatically extend the staging area, at which point they'd know where the boundaries of that area are, while stacking pallets neatly within it.
Technically I think they are modular to some degree. They just aren't designed with the intent of end users ever messing with it. There is also the problem that the individual cells that make up the battery aren't the hard part when it comes to making the battery pack work. The electronics that manage your pack and the various cooling systems are probably the hurdles in making customer friendly modular battery packs.
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The key there is that Swamp Cooling is the AC of choice because it has traditionally been cheaper to install, operate, and maintain than heat pumps. As fresh water becomes more scarce it is conceivable that they would no longer be viewed as economically viable. Heat pumps work just fine in the desert just not as efficiently as they do elsewhere.
The other thing that could really help is to require new construction, and remodels, to implement much better insulation and design practices. I spent a few months once in a desert sitting in a steel box with large thick windows. There was a generator with an AC unit attached that ran from sun up to sun down, and managed to keep the inside of the box in the mid 80's. It would seem that a lot of people give more thought to how their home looks than how it performs.
Did he just talk around astronauts getting naughty on the space station. He specifically said the Russian cosmonauts work and eat on their side of the station during waking hours. Why bother being that explicit about the timing?
I recently purchased an anniversary gift online. I actually went to a local retailer to ask about what I wanted. I spent an hour at the store with a representative trying to get what I wanted. A week later I got a price estimate of $300. In the meantime I had looked on amazon and found what I wanted for as low as $20. The really low priced options struck me as being risky and since I didn't want the worry of having to do a return I went with a $100 option as kind of a middle ground hoping for good quality. So far so good, though I guess I'll find out for sure when she opens the box. I'm still a bit amazed though at the price difference between what I paid and what the store offered.
Are you serious? Where you are born on the socio-economic ladder in the USA is a huge indicator comparatively of where you'll end up. Yes, it is in theory always possible to bootstrap yourself out of the lowest depths of poverty into wealth. But the odds of successfully improving your lot in life are fundamentally tied to the resources available to you and how much time you have to work with those resources. Even people in the lower middle class have a head and shoulders advantage over someone born into poverty. Think of any RTS or survival game you've ever played with random elements, if you get a bad spawn or series of events it can hamstring you for the rest of the play session. Life can work precisely the same and you can't just start a new game. Once upon a time when there was unclaimed land and frontiers maybe you could go reinvent yourself and rapidly climb back up the ladder of success, but those days have been gone for a century or more now.
So far as child starvation goes I would guess that malnutrition is a more common issue. It isn't really something that we as a society can readily fix though. We already provide welfare money for groceries and such but that relies on parents spending that money wisely.
All well and good but categorically refusing to consider incurring debt to own a vehicle or home is bad advice. In some very specific markets this could be good advice but in most of the USA at least it is foolhardy.
Not owning a means of reliable transportation means you are likely limiting your ability to seek employment, or business opportunities, to a much smaller range. Renting in perpetuity means you are very likely paying more for your living space with nothing to show for it in the end. While renting allows you to escape the responsibility for paying a mortgage you are subject to eviction should the owner decide to stop paying it. There is a lot to be said for living within your means, not buying vehicles and properties with little added value but exponentially larger price tags.
I agree except that the historical average has been more like 7% rather than 10-12%. Though obviously in shorter periods the averages have been both higher and lower. One of the criticisms of Dave Ramsey is that he touts the 10-12% number as gospel and while the strategy is still correct people will expect to do a lot better than reality might dictate. While it might not seem like a major difference, over the long term it really adds up.
I think I've had a few devices over the years that had S/PDIF outputs but I never realized what that was and never bothered trying to use it. The only device that I think I own now that has optical ports at all is my soundbar. I have a cheapo TV and use a Roku stick, neither of which have optical outputs. So when I hooked up my soundbar system I actually had to use an RCA to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter in order to get things working.
Government clearances are the only ones I know of and are the subject of the article so they bear on the conversation clearly. I'm just saying that it is silly of any company that is merely looking for trustworthy employees to require the applicant to have a government clearance.
It's kind of like if I were starting a private armed guard company, but would only hire former cops and military veterans, because I knew they had firearms training. I would be foolishly limiting my prospective applicant pool which would lead to me likely having to pay a higher wage.
Yes, requiring a strict background check means a smaller pool of people than you would have otherwise. However requiring a government issued clearance is limiting the pool even further because now instead of considering people who could pass that check, you're only considering people that have already passed it.
Besides which the background check for a clearance really isn't all that strict. The whole point of it is to verify the applicants integrity and check for skeletons in the closet that could be used for blackmail.
The reason more companies haven't gone with a system like the Volts is complexity. One of the key advantages of an EV is that by eliminating the internal combustion engine you reduce the number of moving parts by a huge factor. The Volt is actually more complex than a standard ICE or EV, which means more points of failure and consequentially more systems to maintain. Additionally those systems don't come weight free so you end up reducing efficiencies again.
That isn't to say that such a system doesn't have it's uses, I think of it kind of like a swiss army pocket knife. Sure it's got some cool tools and gadgets but how useful are they really? If I have one loose screw to fix sure my pocket knife will probably do the job, but if you're talking about more than a couple screws I want a real screwdriver.
Small turbines are a really fun idea but are limited by physics sadly. The efficiency of a turbine is directly limited by the ratio of the size of the fan to the width of the gap between the tip of the fan blade and the wall of the chamber. The smaller you try to make the turbine the worse your efficiency is going to be. Jaguar made a concept car a few years back that used a couple small turbines to generate power for the electric motors and it was beautiful, but prohibitively expensive to the extreme. The cost of producing small turbines with close enough tolerances to be efficient is just not worth it at a consumer level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What I was trying to get at is that unless a company has a requirement from the Government that employees have an official clearance awarded by the Government, they can simply contract someone like a Private Investigator to do the leg work. An Investigator should be able to gather everything HR would need in 40 hours or less for most people. Even at $100 an hour that ends up being pretty cheap by comparison instead of paying a premium salary for someone who already had a clearance.
The government already does that to an extent for people that it is hiring. If you look at job advertisements they'll say the candidate must be able to qualify for some level of clearance as opposed to already having it.
When it comes to contractors though, already having the clearance is a big deal because it is expensive and time consuming to get. That said I don't see any reason that a private enterprise couldn't provide the same kind of service for vetting people. At it's most basic level the Secret and Top Secret clearance isn't really all that much trouble to sort out. It amounts to checking for criminal history, credit history, verifying previous employment and housing history, and finally interviewing the subject of the background check and a few of their friends/coworkers. Those are all things anyone could do, not just some federal bureau. The reason it's expensive and time consuming to get is that you're waiting on some federal bureau to get through a large backlog of work.
There is a lot more that has to happen than just planting trees. Trees are typically just a temporary way to tie up carbon. Forests are essentially carbon sponges, they'll hold carbon but have a saturation limit and once sufficiently mature start releasing old carbon as they intake new carbon. We could go in and harvest trees specifically to lock them up somewhere to sequester their carbon, but we'd have to do this on a truly massive scale to make a dent in just our current carbon output. For the USA we output 16.4 Tons of carbon per capita per year.
The amount of money beyond which the rest is excess is always going to be arbitrary and vary wildly from person to person. Just a couple decades ago I would have viewed my current fiscal situation as allowing a life of luxury. Now I look at my wages and think about how much better off I'd be with a $10k more a year. Meanwhile I read an article once where a couple with an income of around $350k felt they were living pay check to pay check. Of course the things they talked about as being necessities strike me more as luxuries for royalty.
It is a rare individual indeed that has the capacity to stash away ever larger sums of money when their income increases rather than improving their quality of life. Many people might increase their savings but even those people probably find ways to spend a disproportionate amount rather than save.
That said I am firmly for progressive income taxes and stiff estate taxes. Our current system coddles and protects you the more wealth you have. I'd very much like to see how a tax system that scaled directly with your income bracket in hundreds if not thousands of steps with a top end of 90% or so would work out. We'd likely have to switch to the IRS figuring out our taxes instead of forcing everyone to file a return, but it appeals to me as having abrupt tax brackets feels janky.
I spent a couple years working nights and it was awesome! I would switch between two different schedules periodically so I either started at 5pm or 10pm. Regardless of which shift I was doing I'd get to bed around 7am and it was perfect. Going to sleep as the sun is rising has to be one of the more satisfying simple pleasures in life.
The only thing I didn't like was roommates hosting friends in the early afternoon ruining my sleep. If I could get away with going back to working nights without my wife scalping me I'd definitely do it.
nVidia has started this crap as well. Last time I wanted to upgrade my gfx card drivers it insisted on having an account.
From what I understand historical records for storms in the ways we measure them don't go back very far. It wasn't all that long ago that unless a storm made landfall nobody would know it existed at all. Well I suppose any ships caught in the storms would know, but they'd likely be more concerned with the immediate need to survive than measure wind speeds and atmospheric pressure. We can make guesses about how strong storms where when they made landfall based on the destruction they wrought but that is pretty iffy at best. A lot of the damage we see in our modern age from storms is a result of the flooding. And we have made the flooding a lot worse by eliminating wetland areas along with roofing and paving over everything in site. The prevalence of stick built houses filled with drywall and electrical wiring makes for larger losses when a structure is flooded.
I'm not really sold one way or the other so far as whether storms are getting stronger and more frequent. But even anecdotally it doesn't seem so. It's been almost a decade since the gulf states saw serious hurricane danger.
A huge part of luck is not having your life turned on it's head by some event outside of your control. The argument can be made that you should have been prepared for whatever it was but it is impossible to be prepared for everything. And practically speaking the more prepared you are for every conceivable eventuality the less resources you have to try and make improvements in your life at large. The fewer resources you have available, the less prepared you can be for anything, and the more likely you are to be rendered destitute by the slightest turn of bad luck.
One of our societal flaws seems to be that there will always be a sizable portion of the population living in poverty. People not giving in doesn't really change the numbers, it just changes who resides where on the socio-economic ladder, provided everyone doesn't do the same thing.
Luck has played a large part in my own success. I happened to be born white, male, and hetero. Which means I face very little to no unfair discrimination. Then at the right time of my life I turned out to be eligible for military service, at a time when there were some nice cushy positions available. That cushy position gave me all kinds of lucrative experience as well as some other perks namely a security clearance. Then, days before I started terminal leave someone contacted me out of the blue to essentially offer a job. No one else wanted that job so all I had to do was show up to an interview, hosted by people I had known for years, and not fall on my face. That job came with enough pay to put my earnings at 150% of the areas household median income. A few years later I upgraded to a different position with far better benefits and even more pay, now as 200% of the area's median household income. By the way that position was offered to three other people, who had also applied for it, before it got to me.
I can see how someone might say it was because I saw the opportunities that came my way and took advantage of them. But not seeing them would be the bigger challenge frankly. Those opportunities weren't presented on a silver platter exactly but I would have needed to be in a coma not to see them, and clinically insane not to take them. The one and only "exceptional" thing I did was score high on the ASVAB, and lets be honest, my score was only considered high because the bar is designed to be incredibly low. I've never spent any of my spare time developing some marketable skill or hobby, I spend that time with my family and or playing video games.
Grim Dawn failed to grip me when I tried it out a year or two back. I felt the same way about Path of Exiles though that was way back during its closed beta. I've played D3 on and off over the years and it has gotten a lot more fun since they nuked the RMAH. That said I don't play it constantly but come back for a month or so at the start of each season/ladder, before moving on to something else.
I seem to have a few games that I cycle between regularly. Namely 7DTD, Minecraft, Terraria, D3. But I'll occasionally squeeze in something else.
Tesla isn't turning profits consistently because they aren't sitting on their laurels. They actually make something like 20% profit on each Model S. They're in the red because they're spending money like crazy to increase their capacity. If Tesla is ever going to become a serious competitor to the major automakers it'll likely require staying in the red for a decade or more to come.
That table is leaving out more than half the data for motor vehicles or something screwy like that. Look at the fatality numbers for the category before it starts doing breakdowns and you'll see the sub categories account for less than half of the numbers. Along with that the lifetime odds of death from a motor vehicle related accident look to be 1:114. So far as DUI's go, you not drinking and driving only slightly improves your odds of not being a DUI fatality because drunk drivers frequently kill others and manage to survive like the cockroaches they are.
The rates from the table are 114 and 370 for motor vehicles and firearms respectively. That means motor vehicles are 3 times more likely to kill you than a firearm. And maybe you can reduce your chance of death from motor vehicles slightly by not being an idiot, but the same is true of firearms. In fact you can probably limit your exposure to firearms violence to a much greater degree than you can motor vehicles.
I wouldn't bet on it being all that rare. This definitely falls under white collar crime, which gets a lot less press coverage and consequentially less funding, than violent street crime. Just look at the numbers for bank robberies from the FBI. The last time I looked in a good year the FBI was only able to identify half of the suspects. That doesn't even equate to catching half of the suspects. Bank Robberies are unlikely to not be reported as the FBI is responsible for them, and so you can bet that the numbers are pretty accurate. Banks are aware of the danger of being robbed and so have lots of cameras and usually armed guards on the premise. Robbing a bank is usually viewed as being a high risk venture even by the criminals themselves. So you have a kind of crime where the odds of getting busted are relatively high, but still only a 50% chance of being identified. I think that says a lot for the odds of getting away with white collar crimes, and especially when the fact that a crime was committed might not ever be realized.
It would seem to be a self re-enforcing myth that people can't keep their mouths shut about crimes they've committed. In white collar crime it is highly likely that a person or organization wouldn't even realize they had been victimized. So law enforcement can only make guesses as to how much of it there is and the low hanging fruit that is easiest to catch is going to be the criminals that couldn't keep their mouth shut.
This is similar to the low homicide rate, and insanely high closure rate for homicides in Japan. You could choose to believe that Japan just has much less lethal crime and that the police are magically more effective. Or you could notice that if a case doesn't appear to be open and shut, it won't be ruled a homicide. And on top of that attempted homicides are counted as homicides for reporting purposes while robbery homicides aren't.
Eff that! I'm retiring by 62 if not sooner, barring some catastrophe that gives me some insurmountable debt. As soon as I can possibly afford to quit work and scrape by on retirement savings I'm doing it. If I have to build a shack down by the river out of cardboard boxes I'm doing it.
The plan is to sell the house. Buy a small bit of land somewhere with good internet access. Build a small bunker of a house that meets my needs and not much more. Maintain a small garden, and spend the rest of my days doing whatever the hell I want.
It really depends on how extensive Disney allows their library to be. When you consider everything that falls under the umbrella of Disney these days and how long they've been producing content, they could be very competitive. Then you also have to consider the hordes of rabid fans. If there is any company that stands a real chance of competing with Netflix it'd be Disney. I still expect them to abandon it in a few years when they get sick of trying to manage it, but in the meantime my kids will probably campaign for it to be a permanent subscription until it goes under. I figure the only way I don't end up paying for it is if they insist on keeping with their artificial scarcity vault scheme, and have a higher price than Netflix.
The more you automate all of this though the less likely you are to have such problems. The robot fork lifts won't try to overfill a staging area as they'd just stop once it is filled. Or maybe you do program them to automatically extend the staging area, at which point they'd know where the boundaries of that area are, while stacking pallets neatly within it.
Technically I think they are modular to some degree. They just aren't designed with the intent of end users ever messing with it. There is also the problem that the individual cells that make up the battery aren't the hard part when it comes to making the battery pack work. The electronics that manage your pack and the various cooling systems are probably the hurdles in making customer friendly modular battery packs.