The fact that it comes out of the businesses profits is exactly why some businesses don't use that form of payment. It could be that the owner is a penny pinching Scrouge who just wants every cent of profit possible, or it could be that they run a very narrow profit margin and that 3% makes it untenable. If I'm not mistaken there is also a monthly fee for having a credit card terminal so if using a credit terminal doesn't increase their revenue enough to cover the new expense I could see skipping it. If the business is already essentially already selling at capacity there might be no incentive to start taking cards as it would just represent a direct decline in profit margins. I've frequented a few lunch places that were cash only and always at full serving capacity, accepting cards would just hurt them.
All that said there is a cost to business of accepting cash, so I can also understand businesses not wanting to accept it if they prefer credit terminals.
Of course the counter argument is that we shouldn't have to put the lives of our soldiers on the line to defend ourselves from aggressors.
I'm for limiting AI and automation in warfare but I'm afraid it'll be unrealistic to maintain that as time goes on. Eventually some nation state will embrace using AI controlled weapons wholesale, and at that point any nation that wants to be able to compete with them will have no choice but to embrace the same changes.
Personally I'd like to see our politicians forced into participating in any armed engagements we enter into as a nation. Make the congress critters deploy with the armed forces as non-combatant support troops. And make the president deploy as well to whatever is the most hotly contested fire base of the time. Make them, the politicians, put their own skin on the line and witness the depredations of war. I guarantee we would see an end to the endless parade of armed conflicts we've been engaging in for most of the last century.
It doesn't really strike me as particularly ugly. That said it looks incredibly inefficient. I guess if it can actually generate more power than it needs even with such idiotic design choices that is a good thing. I wonder what could be accomplished with an efficient design.
One of the common complaints though is that the FDA seems to fail at its job disturbingly often. Just look at how many drugs end up being recalled because they do more harm than good. With vaccines this is exacerbated by the fact that you can't go after the company in civil court if it hurt your child. There is a special legal system setup specifically to protect the producers of the vaccines. To make things more complicated doctors are pushed to administer vaccines on a short schedule with multiple shots per visit. In the event a child does react negatively to a vaccine trying to figure out which one caused the problem is complicated by the scheduling. All that said I'm for mandatory vaccination, but I can understand why people have concerns about it.
SimFood was actually called Sim Farm, it was released in 1993. It taught me that the best profit results were to be had by filling up square miles with storage silos, then filling them with strawberries. Once the market for strawberries spiked you sold the entire stockpile all in one go and then had the funds to do absolutely whatever you wanted to the rest of the map.
Getting office supplies where I work is a PITA as well. I used to bring in my own pens but could never keep them as people were continually snatching them off my desk. Now I just keep a few mechanical pencils, nobody wants a pencil for whatever reason.
The floods which likely form the basis for the worldwide flood myths are probably Outburst Floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in particular from the end of the last ice age. Some of the floods that we know about covered some areas of land that were otherwise dry in hundreds of meters of water. Sure this isn't exactly the same as the Noah flood myth where even the mountains were covered, but exaggeration in a story passed down from more than 10,000 years ago is hardly surprising.
We drove 110 miles each way to buy from CarMax. The City we live in has a dealership for most every brand except the luxury outliers like Ferrari and such, but didn't have a CarMax at the time. We already knew what makes and models of vehicle we were looking for and so started checking inventories. We found CarMax online and their system for looking for a vehicle was much better than the hodge podge all the other brands and dealers had. We found a vehicle that matched what we wanted, but it was located on the other side of the country. CarMax charged us $500 to bring it to their nearest dealership, where we went to test drive it and make sure it was what we wanted then purchased it. We probably spent less than an hour at the dealership. The cost, especially with the delivery fee, was probably a little higher than we might have paid otherwise but we got precisely the vehicle we were looking for without a lot of hassle. I plan for my next car purchase to be a Tesla, otherwise I would be going back for sure.
There is also the ongoing controversy over absentee ballot fraud in NC. Some ex-con was paid for his super duper skills at turning out votes via absentee ballots. Turns out he had people illegally collecting ballots, illegally filling in votes in races which hadn't been marked yet on the ballots, witnessing the ballots illegally, and then sealing the ballots and mailing them in from different post offices to deliberately conceal the illegal activities. Only one race so far has been announced as needing a redo, however more may follow.
I don't remember ever running into a show stopping bug ever as a kid playing computer games. The first game I remember ever patching was MOO2 and even then it was mostly balance changes and some minor bug fixes that I hadn't even noticed. I can't remember the last time I played a major release game that worked so flawlessly out of the gate.
Relying on your vehicle to supply enough heat for you to survive in a vehicle is idiotic. You should always dress for the weather, and should be wearing that clothing in the vehicle. If you get stuck for whatever reason you need to be able to survive. ICEV aren't anymore immune to getting stuck in inclement weather than EV's. Taking off a hat or gloves isn't a huge deal because they can be replaced in seconds, but you should absolutely be wearing your coat. If you're involved in an accident you don't want to risk exposure to the elements getting a coat on when you could already be disoriented from an impact. Even having grown up in a state with pretty mild winters I experienced weather that would impair your mental and physical faculties within seconds of exposure without proper clothing on. You should always be dressed for the weather, doing anything else is taking a gamble. You'll likely win that gamble most of the time but when you don't you're in for a world of suck, if not death.
What kind of plastic though? 3d Printers that the public has access to usually use PLA stuff that is rather weak, essentially the same stuff as milk jugs. I've seen polymer components that while looking and feeling like plastic are considerably tougher.
I think it should be fairly obvious that the usage in the summary is meant to be derogatory. Just like the word Brother has multiple meanings in common use. Is its use sexist in that context, probably, but I wouldn't put it on the same level as calling a woman a hoe.
Last I knew the Chickenpox vaccine did not prevent shingles. The vaccine is just a tamer strain of the chickenpox, and so can still be reactivated later in life. Half of Shingles cases are people over 60, which still leaves the other half being people that are younger. The Shingles vaccine is only about 50% effective as a prevention, though it does seem to reduce the severity of the rashes when it does occur.
Last I knew text messages were actually sent through in the regular pings that your phone and the surrounding cell towers exchange. Those packets always had some empty space in them and your text messages were packed into that space, which is why the character limit was always so small. There was a lot of grumbling around here back then that the cell phone companies were charging a premium for making use of that bit of bandwidth that was just going to waste anyways.
I agree that actually implanting the complex hardware into the body seems foolish. Having the computer implanted makes upgrading, and patching it monumentally harder. Why not just install a dumb neural interface that provides for an external port or something. Then the chip or computer could be a very small wearable device that can be upgraded, patched, repaired, or even replaced without any more inconvenience to the user than unplugging it.
Some survey showed that 39% of the population supports a border wall. If the Government decided to issue Wall Bonds, and every adult that wanted the wall bought $75 worth of them Trump would have his money.
Estimated Population: 328 Million Adults are about 60% of that: 196.8 Million Wall Supporters 39%: 76.752 Million $75 per supporter: $5,756,400,000
Personally I'm opposed to the idea of a border wall as it'll just be wasted money. If we want border security there are much more effective ways to do it like drones and aerostats for monitoring then dispatching response teams as needed. Whether or not we really need better border security is still not something I'm convinced of, but spending money on a static wall in the middle of nowhere is a nonstarter for me.
The problem is that in most jurisdictions the fines are really only punitive to the poor and normally there aren't any points added to your license either. In at least one country I've heard of traffic fines are proportional to the offenders income, which has resulted in some hilariously large fines. I'd be all for a system like that in the USA and for far more things than just traffic infractions.
Are you kidding? I really can't tell if this is meant as sarcasm or not, 10/10 troll right there!
These things print money like you wouldn't believe. Almost two decades ago when these things were in their nascent stages a system would have cost $75k to $85k and maybe $5k a month to maintain. I would be surprised if the costs weren't down to around $20k by now and the maintenance costs have to be cheaper unless the system is being regularly vandalized. Anyways there are a number of red light cameras near my home and I see them go off probably 50% of the time I'm at those intersections. Even if we go with the most expensive numbers from 18 years ago, $145k for the first year of ownership and operation. A system would only need to issue 10 $40 tickets each day to turn a profit. I guarantee that any of these speed or red light systems are going to issue at least that many tickets each day just from idiot drivers that aren't paying close attention let alone people deliberately speeding or running lights. Higher fines just make the situation that much more juicy.
They made national news a few years back when the city snow plows weren't clearing the right turn lanes at stop lights because that was the only place for the snow to go. The drivers just adapted as they should and made their right turns from the right most lane that wasn't blocked. The red light cameras started generating tickets like crazy because so far as they were programmed those were illegal turns. The City agreed that the tickets were issued erroneously but refused to do anything to correct the situation insisting that anyone who felt they were wronged should go to court to get the ticket thrown out. That is basically a huge "Fuck You" to anyone that got a ticket as it means either just paying the wrongly issued fine or taking time off work to go and try fighting it. What really takes the cake though is that according to the city laws authorizing the cameras every single ticket was supposed to be validated by a human police officer before being mailed out, so even that basic sanity check wasn't being done.
I'm not enough of a science nerd to know off the top of my head, and I'm way to lazy to look it up. That said I know roughly how the process works to evaporate the water out of the whey, and it strikes me as something that doesn't have to be very energy intensive. They use towers where they have a constant slow flow of dry warm/hot air coming in the bottom of the tower and exiting at the top. The whey is sprayed as a fine mist down into the tower from the top. The tiny droplets of whey maximize the surface area and allow the water to evaporate so that at the bottom of the tower you collect just powder.
The heat for the air could be recycled waste heat from other processes. The air may or may not need to be dehumidified depending on how much heat you can get cheaply and the natural climate.
Given industrial production of cheese products reducing the volume of waste material is critical. Historically whey was just dumped into our public water ways when there was too much of it to use in other ways. That led to algae blooms that poisoned those water ways. Even though reducing the whey into powder takes more energy and money, it reduces the volume of waste by a very large factor and results in another product that can be used and sold. What's not to like about that? Environmentalists get less pollution. Capitalists get more product to sell out of the same raw materials. Consumers get more variety of products possibly at better prices and a cleaner environment. The only group I can see with a real gripe is cheese snobs who are just angry that such a thing exists.
All that stuff is made from the whey instead of the curds. Cheese curds are what is made into traditional cheeses. The whey has historically been a waste product. At some point someone realized they could evaporate the water out and use the resulting whey powder to make more products to sell. So while some of us don't really like the cheese products they are good in the sense that they reduce the amount of waste that needs to be disposed of.
A lot of American Cheese Products, such as cheese wizz and those orange slices aren't made from cheese curds. Instead they are made from the whey, there are special powdering towers used to remove the water resulting in a whey powder that is used to make all that crap. It's actually kind of a genius solution to reduce waste from traditional cheese making, and produce more profit in the mean time. That said I don't like it much either.
It should be noted though that a better hourly rate doesn't necessarily mean better earnings overall. Probably the largest perk of an office job over many trades is that the work is consistent. I know that in the last 16 years I have only had one year where I had any weeks where I was paid for less than 40 hours of work. Not that office jobs are immune to work shortages. A friend of mine quit his steady old bank job to work as a contractor with a higher pay rate, only to find out his new job disappeared after six months.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that it comes out of the businesses profits is exactly why some businesses don't use that form of payment. It could be that the owner is a penny pinching Scrouge who just wants every cent of profit possible, or it could be that they run a very narrow profit margin and that 3% makes it untenable. If I'm not mistaken there is also a monthly fee for having a credit card terminal so if using a credit terminal doesn't increase their revenue enough to cover the new expense I could see skipping it. If the business is already essentially already selling at capacity there might be no incentive to start taking cards as it would just represent a direct decline in profit margins. I've frequented a few lunch places that were cash only and always at full serving capacity, accepting cards would just hurt them.
All that said there is a cost to business of accepting cash, so I can also understand businesses not wanting to accept it if they prefer credit terminals.
Of course the counter argument is that we shouldn't have to put the lives of our soldiers on the line to defend ourselves from aggressors.
I'm for limiting AI and automation in warfare but I'm afraid it'll be unrealistic to maintain that as time goes on. Eventually some nation state will embrace using AI controlled weapons wholesale, and at that point any nation that wants to be able to compete with them will have no choice but to embrace the same changes.
Personally I'd like to see our politicians forced into participating in any armed engagements we enter into as a nation. Make the congress critters deploy with the armed forces as non-combatant support troops. And make the president deploy as well to whatever is the most hotly contested fire base of the time. Make them, the politicians, put their own skin on the line and witness the depredations of war. I guarantee we would see an end to the endless parade of armed conflicts we've been engaging in for most of the last century.
It doesn't really strike me as particularly ugly. That said it looks incredibly inefficient. I guess if it can actually generate more power than it needs even with such idiotic design choices that is a good thing. I wonder what could be accomplished with an efficient design.
One of the common complaints though is that the FDA seems to fail at its job disturbingly often. Just look at how many drugs end up being recalled because they do more harm than good. With vaccines this is exacerbated by the fact that you can't go after the company in civil court if it hurt your child. There is a special legal system setup specifically to protect the producers of the vaccines. To make things more complicated doctors are pushed to administer vaccines on a short schedule with multiple shots per visit. In the event a child does react negatively to a vaccine trying to figure out which one caused the problem is complicated by the scheduling. All that said I'm for mandatory vaccination, but I can understand why people have concerns about it.
SimFood was actually called Sim Farm, it was released in 1993. It taught me that the best profit results were to be had by filling up square miles with storage silos, then filling them with strawberries. Once the market for strawberries spiked you sold the entire stockpile all in one go and then had the funds to do absolutely whatever you wanted to the rest of the map.
Getting office supplies where I work is a PITA as well. I used to bring in my own pens but could never keep them as people were continually snatching them off my desk. Now I just keep a few mechanical pencils, nobody wants a pencil for whatever reason.
And it fits with the planned objective of starting Tesla to begin with. That is making electric vehicles sexy enough for the mainstream.
The floods which likely form the basis for the worldwide flood myths are probably Outburst Floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in particular from the end of the last ice age. Some of the floods that we know about covered some areas of land that were otherwise dry in hundreds of meters of water. Sure this isn't exactly the same as the Noah flood myth where even the mountains were covered, but exaggeration in a story passed down from more than 10,000 years ago is hardly surprising.
We drove 110 miles each way to buy from CarMax. The City we live in has a dealership for most every brand except the luxury outliers like Ferrari and such, but didn't have a CarMax at the time. We already knew what makes and models of vehicle we were looking for and so started checking inventories. We found CarMax online and their system for looking for a vehicle was much better than the hodge podge all the other brands and dealers had. We found a vehicle that matched what we wanted, but it was located on the other side of the country. CarMax charged us $500 to bring it to their nearest dealership, where we went to test drive it and make sure it was what we wanted then purchased it. We probably spent less than an hour at the dealership. The cost, especially with the delivery fee, was probably a little higher than we might have paid otherwise but we got precisely the vehicle we were looking for without a lot of hassle. I plan for my next car purchase to be a Tesla, otherwise I would be going back for sure.
There is also the ongoing controversy over absentee ballot fraud in NC. Some ex-con was paid for his super duper skills at turning out votes via absentee ballots. Turns out he had people illegally collecting ballots, illegally filling in votes in races which hadn't been marked yet on the ballots, witnessing the ballots illegally, and then sealing the ballots and mailing them in from different post offices to deliberately conceal the illegal activities. Only one race so far has been announced as needing a redo, however more may follow.
I don't remember ever running into a show stopping bug ever as a kid playing computer games. The first game I remember ever patching was MOO2 and even then it was mostly balance changes and some minor bug fixes that I hadn't even noticed. I can't remember the last time I played a major release game that worked so flawlessly out of the gate.
Relying on your vehicle to supply enough heat for you to survive in a vehicle is idiotic. You should always dress for the weather, and should be wearing that clothing in the vehicle. If you get stuck for whatever reason you need to be able to survive. ICEV aren't anymore immune to getting stuck in inclement weather than EV's. Taking off a hat or gloves isn't a huge deal because they can be replaced in seconds, but you should absolutely be wearing your coat. If you're involved in an accident you don't want to risk exposure to the elements getting a coat on when you could already be disoriented from an impact. Even having grown up in a state with pretty mild winters I experienced weather that would impair your mental and physical faculties within seconds of exposure without proper clothing on. You should always be dressed for the weather, doing anything else is taking a gamble. You'll likely win that gamble most of the time but when you don't you're in for a world of suck, if not death.
What kind of plastic though? 3d Printers that the public has access to usually use PLA stuff that is rather weak, essentially the same stuff as milk jugs. I've seen polymer components that while looking and feeling like plastic are considerably tougher.
I think it should be fairly obvious that the usage in the summary is meant to be derogatory. Just like the word Brother has multiple meanings in common use. Is its use sexist in that context, probably, but I wouldn't put it on the same level as calling a woman a hoe.
Last I knew the Chickenpox vaccine did not prevent shingles. The vaccine is just a tamer strain of the chickenpox, and so can still be reactivated later in life. Half of Shingles cases are people over 60, which still leaves the other half being people that are younger. The Shingles vaccine is only about 50% effective as a prevention, though it does seem to reduce the severity of the rashes when it does occur.
Last I knew text messages were actually sent through in the regular pings that your phone and the surrounding cell towers exchange. Those packets always had some empty space in them and your text messages were packed into that space, which is why the character limit was always so small. There was a lot of grumbling around here back then that the cell phone companies were charging a premium for making use of that bit of bandwidth that was just going to waste anyways.
I agree that actually implanting the complex hardware into the body seems foolish. Having the computer implanted makes upgrading, and patching it monumentally harder. Why not just install a dumb neural interface that provides for an external port or something. Then the chip or computer could be a very small wearable device that can be upgraded, patched, repaired, or even replaced without any more inconvenience to the user than unplugging it.
Some survey showed that 39% of the population supports a border wall. If the Government decided to issue Wall Bonds, and every adult that wanted the wall bought $75 worth of them Trump would have his money.
Estimated Population: 328 Million
Adults are about 60% of that: 196.8 Million
Wall Supporters 39%: 76.752 Million
$75 per supporter: $5,756,400,000
Personally I'm opposed to the idea of a border wall as it'll just be wasted money. If we want border security there are much more effective ways to do it like drones and aerostats for monitoring then dispatching response teams as needed. Whether or not we really need better border security is still not something I'm convinced of, but spending money on a static wall in the middle of nowhere is a nonstarter for me.
The problem is that in most jurisdictions the fines are really only punitive to the poor and normally there aren't any points added to your license either. In at least one country I've heard of traffic fines are proportional to the offenders income, which has resulted in some hilariously large fines. I'd be all for a system like that in the USA and for far more things than just traffic infractions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...
Are you kidding? I really can't tell if this is meant as sarcasm or not, 10/10 troll right there!
These things print money like you wouldn't believe. Almost two decades ago when these things were in their nascent stages a system would have cost $75k to $85k and maybe $5k a month to maintain. I would be surprised if the costs weren't down to around $20k by now and the maintenance costs have to be cheaper unless the system is being regularly vandalized. Anyways there are a number of red light cameras near my home and I see them go off probably 50% of the time I'm at those intersections. Even if we go with the most expensive numbers from 18 years ago, $145k for the first year of ownership and operation. A system would only need to issue 10 $40 tickets each day to turn a profit. I guarantee that any of these speed or red light systems are going to issue at least that many tickets each day just from idiot drivers that aren't paying close attention let alone people deliberately speeding or running lights. Higher fines just make the situation that much more juicy.
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehic...
https://www.digitaltrends.com/...
Shit, that's only the half of it.
They made national news a few years back when the city snow plows weren't clearing the right turn lanes at stop lights because that was the only place for the snow to go. The drivers just adapted as they should and made their right turns from the right most lane that wasn't blocked. The red light cameras started generating tickets like crazy because so far as they were programmed those were illegal turns. The City agreed that the tickets were issued erroneously but refused to do anything to correct the situation insisting that anyone who felt they were wronged should go to court to get the ticket thrown out. That is basically a huge "Fuck You" to anyone that got a ticket as it means either just paying the wrongly issued fine or taking time off work to go and try fighting it. What really takes the cake though is that according to the city laws authorizing the cameras every single ticket was supposed to be validated by a human police officer before being mailed out, so even that basic sanity check wasn't being done.
I'm not enough of a science nerd to know off the top of my head, and I'm way to lazy to look it up. That said I know roughly how the process works to evaporate the water out of the whey, and it strikes me as something that doesn't have to be very energy intensive. They use towers where they have a constant slow flow of dry warm/hot air coming in the bottom of the tower and exiting at the top. The whey is sprayed as a fine mist down into the tower from the top. The tiny droplets of whey maximize the surface area and allow the water to evaporate so that at the bottom of the tower you collect just powder.
The heat for the air could be recycled waste heat from other processes. The air may or may not need to be dehumidified depending on how much heat you can get cheaply and the natural climate.
Given industrial production of cheese products reducing the volume of waste material is critical. Historically whey was just dumped into our public water ways when there was too much of it to use in other ways. That led to algae blooms that poisoned those water ways. Even though reducing the whey into powder takes more energy and money, it reduces the volume of waste by a very large factor and results in another product that can be used and sold. What's not to like about that? Environmentalists get less pollution. Capitalists get more product to sell out of the same raw materials. Consumers get more variety of products possibly at better prices and a cleaner environment. The only group I can see with a real gripe is cheese snobs who are just angry that such a thing exists.
All that stuff is made from the whey instead of the curds. Cheese curds are what is made into traditional cheeses. The whey has historically been a waste product. At some point someone realized they could evaporate the water out and use the resulting whey powder to make more products to sell. So while some of us don't really like the cheese products they are good in the sense that they reduce the amount of waste that needs to be disposed of.
A lot of American Cheese Products, such as cheese wizz and those orange slices aren't made from cheese curds. Instead they are made from the whey, there are special powdering towers used to remove the water resulting in a whey powder that is used to make all that crap. It's actually kind of a genius solution to reduce waste from traditional cheese making, and produce more profit in the mean time. That said I don't like it much either.
It should be noted though that a better hourly rate doesn't necessarily mean better earnings overall. Probably the largest perk of an office job over many trades is that the work is consistent. I know that in the last 16 years I have only had one year where I had any weeks where I was paid for less than 40 hours of work. Not that office jobs are immune to work shortages. A friend of mine quit his steady old bank job to work as a contractor with a higher pay rate, only to find out his new job disappeared after six months.