Is Amazon video missing on AppleTV because Apple wouldn't allow them on it, or because Amazon chose not to be on it?
Did it boil down to Apple maybe allowing them as long as Amazon kicked back 5% of on-demand revenue? For prime videos, were they asking for a percentage there, too? Is there some upfront cost to be on Apple TV + percentages?
I can only see Apple's demands for money as being part of the equation, although I don't know how it works for Netflix -- does Netflix pay Apple just for presence? Some fee for new subscribers bought through Apple TV?
Was it just a case of Apple wanting to exclude Amazon because of competition over rental/purchases?
Will the new Apple TV support Amazon Video?
FWIW, I don't think Amazon is anti-competitive. I don't like it, because I think when video services fracture with too many exclusives, the studios win, cable wins, and consumers lose -- a person is pretty easy back to $50/month for a patchwork of streaming services to get what they want, back to a cable model of subsidizing shit you don't care about.
Mitlon Friedman, a very conservative economist, backed the negative income tax.
I haven't seen a spreadsheet version of specific amounts or tax rates, but the idea is that people with zero market income would get a minimum income. Every dollar they make gets taxed a certain rate which reduces their guaranteed income. So if your basic income was $20,000 and you earned $10,000, you'd be taxed some amount on that $10,000, an effective reduction in the basic income.
I think the tax and benefit reduction scheme is key and I haven't seen an exact table explaining the math. But I think the system is designed to make even low wage jobs profitable (ie, you end up ahead of the basic income even with a small market income) until you make so much money that your tax bill is greater than your basic income payment.
I think as policy part of its claimed economic advantage has to do with eliminating many other social benefit programs, like food stamps, housing vouchers, etc and delivering the same benefit more efficiently and allowing people to make more efficient resource allocations.
If income inequality is a serious problem, I think a negative income tax makes sense. For one, it raises the wage floor a lot, forcing employers to pay more for labor. Higher labor rates would seem to force businesses to cut executive compensation or profitability to meet labor costs. It would probably have some stimulative effect on the economy, since it would be putting more money into the consumer economy (but it I could see where it might be slightly inflationary, too). Since by design it's not meant to be punative, even low wage jobs have an incentive because you will gain an income higher than the basic income for any work.
It's hard to know the bureacucratic efficiencies that would be gained, but I suspect they would be major. I don't know if the concept implies an end to the social security system, but you could see where it would be redundant or could be reduced. It also lets people spend the money in the way that helps them the best, at market eficiency, versus less efficient means (ie, you can rent whatever apartment makes sense to you, versus having to live in a project or qualifying section 8 housing). The lack of complex access and screening mechanisms would mean fewer people stuck in a system and more able to focus their energy on obtaining better jobs or fearing losing their benefits.
I think it would require moderately higher taxes on very high income people and corporations. I don't think this is necessarly bad and you could argue that part of the economy's inequality problem is corporations and very high income individuals sitting on cash because they don't have investment alternatives (think Apples billions in cash) -- as long as that money is held in short-term deposits and short term securities, it's not doing produtive work in the economy. Taxed and returned to the economy, it produces economic activity.
About the only other idea I've found compelling for reducing inequality is a tax incentive to companies that reduce salary ratios between the highest paid and othe employees. Whatever the loss in tax revenue shold be offset by increased tax revenue from better paid employees and increased sales taxes as the money is spent.
All those things strike me as problem transference, not problem solving.
Rather than fix the WAN problems (lack of capacity, bad architecture, etc), even if the original "problem" goes away, we've just adopted a *different* set of problems (complex architecture, lack of transparency, etc).
The same is true for whatever personnel issues are associated with IT personnel and hardware/cloud. No real problem was solved, it was just transferred elsewhere.
I just get tired of non-system updates which require a reboot.
I just built a new workstation system based on Server 2012R2 (to get the server-level features) and one thing I put off was installing Acrobat Reader. It finally became just too annoying to use Chrome as a PDF reader, so I broke down and installed it -- from Adobe's web site. And sure enough, two days later, it's blinking at me on the taskbar to fucking reboot due to some update.
For a system which runs off SSDs isn't that time consuming individually, but is a nuisance because I've got other stuff that uses my workstation resources, so it's less about the reboot time and the annoying coordination with other resources.
My sense is that the science part of NASA isn't inspirational to the general population. It produces the occasional interesting pictures in the paper, but two days later we're back to stories about the Kardashians or whoever the latest transgender phenomenon is.
And this isn't to say that the science side isn't valuable, but it only really enthuses scientists. The Apollo missions transfixed the public for days. Even the first shuttle launch was a big deal, I can remember them setting up TVs in classrooms for the launch -- I saw it in *choir* class. The impression I got of the Apollo missions is that EVERYONE stopped what they were doing for the Apollo events, like the apocryphal image of a dozen people standing on the sidewalk outside a TV store.
It may be that the rational argument is to spend the money (and less of it) on probes and science missions, which is the argument that scientists would make because they get value out of it. And maybe that's some of the problem, a science-oriented NASA mission means more varied science missions which means more centers of power for science groups. A funding shift would lead to fewer science missions unrelated to manned space travel missions, so scientists argue against it because ultimately their ox is being gored.
And this may be a lousy argument in terms of science, but I think there's something culturally unifying and inspirational about manned space travel. It seems to show us a future of *hope* -- space isn't bogged down with ideological, historical and religious conflict. Mullahs, ISIS, right-wing evangelicals and ideologues don't have much to say about space or many ways to use it as a divisive issue -- in fact, I'd argue that it many ways it scares them because even if life isn't found on Mars, just the idea that a God-created humanity on Earth isn't really the center of the universe is intimidating to them.
I don't know what that distribution network looks like, but if a branch line feeding some section of town got broken and cut off, I feel skeptical that they could just cap it temporarily knowing that gas would continue to flow to that segment because...spanning tree for natural gas.
I mean maybe in cold weather climates they have that ability, even if it requires guys in hard hats to go to some valve someplace and turn some knobs, but something tells me it doesn't work that way.
We all know for sure that fault tolerance in electricity is roll your own -- UPS and/or generator power.
The one I worry about the most is water. What if there was some kind of *major* fuckup in some big pipe between the water plant and the rest of the system, like the kind of thing that would take a few days to fix. That's a long time for a major urban center to go without water.
Self-signed works fine if you can actually verify the certificates by some other method, which is generally OK for smaller, more tightly integrated groups but is hard to scale to the general public or complete strangers.
It would also help if product makers would make it somewhat easier to manage them. Most people reasonably intelligent and competent in the world of IT don't know how to manage self-signed certs, even down to what they would need to do to make the browser errors go away.
Of course, if OS vendors or application vendors made it easier, we'd probably just end up with a giant mess of untrustworthy self-signed certificates floating around, with every home PC bloated with bogus certificates designed to rip them off.
What I don't understand is what does it take to become a public CA? Who approves them? Who audits their procedures? Sometimes it just feels like you can be one as long as your sales pitch is good enough to get your root CAs installed by default in browsers and operating systems.
What is true, though, is they sometimes don't understand the appeal of the new stuff, nor why anyone would consider using it.
This. Growth in the technology industry is heavily dependent on selling the same thing to the same people frequently. The "old dudes" start to see new versions quite often for what they are -- meaningless churn, designed to get support contracts renewed, all the required new licensing models enforced, and the vendors' quarterly results up.
Thus, the new versions are laden with all the new buzzwords, lots of bugs, some breakage from previous versions and all you end up with is the pain of implementing teh shiny to basically do what you did before.
The riders will come from the lakes area and SW suburbs. The unwillingness to tunnel has everything to do with cost. Even with the relatively cheap route on an old railroad bed that they've chosen, it is an extremely expensive project and they've had to eliminate stops and take other cost cutting measures just to make it happen. As great as it would be, there is no way the taxpayers are going to pay for a subway.
The riders will come from the lakes area? That demographic isn't going to be riding mass transit, and the people who would use it are nearly a mile away from it, following a circuitous route around Isles. The reality is that it's not an urban mass transit system, it's a suburban commuter route.
And that reality is why I find the notion of ripping through the Kenilworth corridor across the channel between Isles and Cedar so infuriating. We got Minneapolis ripped up for freeways in the 1960s, so we could improve suburban access, now we're doing it again, with little benefit to Minneapolis citizens and the major benefit to suburban commuters, downtown corporations and sports teams.
LRT ends up being expensive because trains are expensive, and Metro Transit LRT wants to be both a Metra/MetroNorth style commuter railroad in addition to styling itself an urban transit platform. IMHO this has led to over-arching design decisions that have made the system more expensive than necessary due to rolling stock more similar to heavy rail than to a streetcar, trying to obtain economies of scale across the entire system. It's a one size fits all solution.
I agree with you that our road network is ultimately unsupportable, but I also think that a lot of that blame lies with the Met Council which has only been too happy to extend roads and sewers into distant exurban areas for decades, creating the sprawl.
In WWII, America celebrated the worker, because it needed workers. Today, America shits on the worker, and outsources his job as rapidly as possible. Was America really pro-worker during the war, or was it just talking a lot of shit to get the ignorant rubes on board? Obviously, the latter.
It's easy to think of the Nazis using the rhetoric of socialism as merely window dressing for a totalitarian dictatorship because that's how it looks in the wake of WW II.
But fascism was an actual emerging ideology before Nazism that sought to accomplish at least some of the goals we ascribe to socialism. American capitalism never sought to do any of that, so it's much easier to write off American WWII pro-worker propaganda as just that, propaganda.
Since Nazi ideology was at least influenced by fascist ideology, it's harder to say that it was always and only window dressing and that elements of socialism weren't an actual part of Nazi ideology. And the complicating factor, of course, is that everything but militarism and antisemitism went out the window in '38, so there was little to no history of a Nazi economic policy that wasn't entangled with Hitler's war ambitions.
Wait, you mean the NSDAP, or National Socialist German Worker's Party isn't a socialist party afterall?
I think that despite that the Nazis are remembered more for a police state than a worker's paradise, I think there was some kind of pro-worker aspect to Nazi ideology, even if it was more along the lines of inventing the mythology the aryan volk. There was stuff like the Volkswagen and other various pro-labor kinds of symbolism.
It wasn't leftist in terms of following a Marxist-Leninist economics as much it was being supportive of pure German people, who by numbers were labor. I think at least early on, some part of it was genuine but it was ultimately corrupted by authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and war.
My sense is that fascist ideology's focus on ethnicity and nationalism often makes it something of a confounding philosophy when viewed through the usual political economy spectrum spanning Communism to Capitalism. Fascism's populist bent I think is both suspicious of the wealthy for corrupting the purity of the people and hostile to communism's exclusive focus on wealth distribution I think this leads to weird outcomes, like policies that have a socialist rhetroic while not necessarily being redistributive.
It would have been kind of interesting to see how fascist economics would have worked in Germany and Italy if both countries had settled "merely" for discriminatory racial policies and left out the military conflict, expansionism and extermination policies. Would they mostly have become totalitarian capitalist states (like Korea in the 1970s) or would they have become like some kind of right-wing Sweden?
I've lived in the city of Minneapolis my entire life and have always hated the bus system, even for downtown commuting. Slow, slow, slow. You can't get anywhere in a timely fashion, even within the city limits, unless you count "getting anywhere" as being something akin to riding from north of Lake Street to downtown.
I worked at the U of MN and the ride to my job was over 45 minutes, and this was in the 1980s when there was a lot less traffic. I was tolerable when I lived Uptown in the 1990s, but then again, I was riding from 24th street to 9th street and there were still times where it was agonizingly slow and forget about it on the weekends when buses ran every 30+ minutes. You could easily have an hour ride to go 20 blocks if your schedule didn't mesh with the bus schedule. When I moved to Kenny neighborhood, the EXPRESS bus took over 45 minutes to get downtown. I was literally spending 90 minutes a day on a commute that was no more than 45 minutes both ways by car.
Downtown's parking reality is probably a byproduct of the fact that the powers that be have designated it as a central hub for everything -- sports, business, government -- our mass transit just doesn't cut it to move that volume of people in and out, you HAVE to accommodate cars and a lot of them if you want to have people actually go see the Twins or Vikings.
SW LRT is a joke. Running the line down Kenilworth serves whom? The people that live near it aren't its target audience and the people who WOULD ride it are on the other side of Lake of the Isles. It should have been planned as a subway line down Hennepin and then out Excelsior on the surface. Reusing the existing rail corridor sounds like it makes sense on paper but mostly means it will be distant from many riders and feels mostly like a sop to suburban politicians so it can end up being a suburban commuter amenity, not an urban transportation system.
And I don't think cost has much to do with the unwillingness to tunnel, I think transit officials are scared to death that if they build an urban subway it will become a crime-infested mess which will detract from the suburban support they need to build it.
What I don't understand about all this bad debt is that most of it seems self-inflicted by the lender.
If they don't do adequate credit checks and issue credit to people who can't repay the loans, aren't they kind of likely to end up with bad debt?
I'm sure their argument is "But we wouldn't sell as many widgets if we didn't offer easy credit". Which is logic I don't undertstand -- how do you make money on widgets if you give them away and don't get repaid?
It almost seems like there's some kind of accounting magic about bad debt that pays for itself, like the tax writeoffs plus the sale of bad debt to collections somehow is enough to make up for it.
If they were more selective, you'd think it'd mostly be a problem that solves itself (but medical will always be a problem until we get universal care).
IMHO, we'd end up with a system more like what you see on the east coast with "train station suburbs" -- mini-cities with a downtown built around the train station and housing more or less leafing off from there.
I'm thinking of the kinds of things you see when you ride the Metro North Railroad out of NYC. They've kind of sprawled, in automobile dependent ways since the first ones were built, but the idea is appealing in its pre-automobile incarnation.
I don't know how many of the stops past NYC sprung up before car ownership became really widespread, or how many were actually built around the notion of people living in a "suburb" and commuting into NYC. I'd wager that most of them were kind organic towns that sprung up for other reasons and it just made sense to build the rail system through them, and most people didn't actually commute into NYC for jobs, the train system was just a way to move travelers and goods out of NYC.
But there are a couple you'd swear were purpose built for suburban living and commuting with the train an integral part of the design, although it's hard to tell how much of that is reformatting.
My wife and I have used a gimmick where we go into the dealership together and I do all the talking with the salesdroid and she only acts minimally interested in the process, like the car is for me and she's just along for the experience.
Once we've sorted out what we want to buy and have some kind of researched invoice price, we switch roles. I quit saying anything at all and she starts negotiating with the salesdroid.
It really fucks with their head and they don't negotiate well. My wife is kind of an ass-kicker in negotiations to begin with and this gives her a huge psychological advantage. One guy kept trying to talk to me and she got pissed at him and yelled at him for not talking with the person she was actually negotiating with.
There is a dealer in Minneapolis that sells nothing but used cars, and most of them are like 1-2 years old with very low miles. My wife bought an Acura MDX that was 1 year old with like 14,000 miles on it and it looked brand new inside and out. We drove the same model and trim new and couldn't see any differences (there was no model year changes).
And the savings were great, much more than any discount we could have gotten off a new car.
The car still has an extensive manufacturer warranty, serviceable by any dealer.
I bought my Volvo S80 V8 used from a dealer, a one owner lease return. I paid HALF the sticker price (sticker found inside the car) with 20K miles on it and it was totally mint.
The other nice thing is avoiding troublesome new cars.
It seems to be an article of faith among urban planners that the way to deal with cars is just to get rid of them, as if you can wave your hands and simply undo 60-odd years of growth and sprawl enabled by cars.
For sure cars have drawbacks, but so many of the planning decisions which seem to be anti-car seem to be somewhat ideologically driven rather than recognizing that arbitrarily making cars more difficult (less parking, narrower roads built with "traffic calming" features, etc) really is a kind of net negative when the larger geography and established infrastructure can't possibly be adapted on a timescale to accommodate it.
We had hundreds of miles of streetcar in 1950, but rebuilding it with light rail has taken over a decade and there's only two lines built. It's cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.7 billion dollars to build those two lines. I think the projected cost of the Southwest line is something on the order of 1.5 billion dollars and has a crazy route that will maul some of the city's parks and somehow manages not to serve the Hennepin Avenue corridor, despite it being one the most ideal places to build rail service to support existing high density residence.
The bus system is a joke, only practical for suburban commuters -- any kind of urban trip you could make in 20 minutes in a car is an hour odyssey not including time spent waiting for the bus.
I'm pretty sure I've read or seen one of those "Crazy shit in prison" stories where they show the kinds of paper mache they can make with just paper and water.. Like tightly rolled newspaper rolled and progressively built up until it becomes hard enough to sharped into a point and made into a shank, sometimes with some kind of random bit of metal embedded into the tip.
The ingenuity of prisoners is often quite amazing. You'd almost think that for "The Martian" they would have used JPL for the space technology, and some lifers in prison for the "what can he make with plastic sheeting, duct tape and empty food bags".
Actually, an excise tax on sugar makes a ton of sense.
As someone who has done a LCHF diet (and lost a lot of weight with it), it's astonishing how many foods you wouldn't assume have sugar in them in fact have sugar in them. Their makers add sugar because it's a cheap way to jack up flavor or replace fat (which would have provided flavor).
Making sugar more expensive at the producer/wholesale level would make these products more expensive and food producers would have to find another way to get the benefits they're looking for and possibly even remove it completely.
The challenges would be making sure that it didn't JUST target basic sugar from beets or cane, but encompassed the whole range of sugar-like sweeteners, from HFCS to some of the refined fruit juices used for their fructose content.
The other challenge would be the scores of agricultural lobbies, from the powerful sugar grower's lobby to the various fruit production lobbies who sell their crops for use as sweeteners or juice. The orange growers already have an exemption from alcohol excise taxes -- their low-value juice gets turned into a cheap alcohol called "blend" which is used in low cost liquor (part of the reason its low cost is that grain alcohol has a higher excise tax).
My basic claim is that what Comcast is selling is nothing more than a DOCSIS speed setting on the modem, and not access to actual network throughput.
In any urban cable network there's some shared segment encompassing some range of dwellings that usually connects to a node where it gains access to some branch segment and that handles uplink for a larger geographic area and then to whatever the metro area data center is. I count 3 hops on my connection before it leaves my metro region.
My sense is that these uplinks are all prone to massive oversubscription, especially at the neighborhood aggregation point and that when Comcast sells you the speed upgrade, there's no assessment of whether their metro network can even deliver such speeds, even out of your closest uplink node. They have, in fact, every incentive to allow internet congestion within their network.
In my mind, this "best effort" service delivery for fixed pricing kind of sucks. I'd rather see the pricing associated with 95% peak delivered throughput or at least discounts when the 95% delivered falls below the priced speed.
A final anecdote on how poor their metro network can perform:
I have a client with a large and very old campus. They have facilities spread over this campus that they want connectivity to the main building. With Comcast as the ISP, we should see throughput comparable to the subscribed speeds -- afterall, we never leave their network, but do have different uplink nodes which are separated by fewer than 2 miles. But they can't even deliver this, despite the hardware being capable of it when installed locally.
(Yes, the client would be far better served running their own fiber, but it's costly and they don't want to rip up the landscaping in the process).
Which makes you wonder why they're not. I would think following the money coupled with aggressive sanctions to providers (ISPs, hosting companies, banks, credit processors, etc) and heavy publicity against them would get them someplace.
My guess is the intelligence agencies are worried about getting caught up in such an investigation or at least having methods and "back doors" closed down.
Like where you pay a premium for a higher speed tier and the net result is your local modem's speed is upgraded, but it's basically worthless because of congestion from your node all the way up to the interchange is congested and oversubscribed?
I see this all the time -- customer buys into some ridiculous Comcast business class speed tier of 100/50 or whatever and never sees the throughput. Sure, all the internet speed tests (which I am sure are gamed) show the speed but real-world tests from a local data center with real connectivity can't come close, yet local testing with a laptop connected to a firewall outside port shows the on-premise hardware has no problems either.
I get that not every location in the world can keep up with 100Mbit local connectivity -- some don't have the throughput, some are managed to cap individual streams, etc, but Comcast, et al seem to get away with selling fantasy connection speeds that amount to little more than cable modem configs.
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Is Amazon video missing on AppleTV because Apple wouldn't allow them on it, or because Amazon chose not to be on it?
Did it boil down to Apple maybe allowing them as long as Amazon kicked back 5% of on-demand revenue? For prime videos, were they asking for a percentage there, too? Is there some upfront cost to be on Apple TV + percentages?
I can only see Apple's demands for money as being part of the equation, although I don't know how it works for Netflix -- does Netflix pay Apple just for presence? Some fee for new subscribers bought through Apple TV?
Was it just a case of Apple wanting to exclude Amazon because of competition over rental/purchases?
Will the new Apple TV support Amazon Video?
FWIW, I don't think Amazon is anti-competitive. I don't like it, because I think when video services fracture with too many exclusives, the studios win, cable wins, and consumers lose -- a person is pretty easy back to $50/month for a patchwork of streaming services to get what they want, back to a cable model of subsidizing shit you don't care about.
Mitlon Friedman, a very conservative economist, backed the negative income tax.
I haven't seen a spreadsheet version of specific amounts or tax rates, but the idea is that people with zero market income would get a minimum income. Every dollar they make gets taxed a certain rate which reduces their guaranteed income. So if your basic income was $20,000 and you earned $10,000, you'd be taxed some amount on that $10,000, an effective reduction in the basic income.
I think the tax and benefit reduction scheme is key and I haven't seen an exact table explaining the math. But I think the system is designed to make even low wage jobs profitable (ie, you end up ahead of the basic income even with a small market income) until you make so much money that your tax bill is greater than your basic income payment.
I think as policy part of its claimed economic advantage has to do with eliminating many other social benefit programs, like food stamps, housing vouchers, etc and delivering the same benefit more efficiently and allowing people to make more efficient resource allocations.
If income inequality is a serious problem, I think a negative income tax makes sense. For one, it raises the wage floor a lot, forcing employers to pay more for labor. Higher labor rates would seem to force businesses to cut executive compensation or profitability to meet labor costs. It would probably have some stimulative effect on the economy, since it would be putting more money into the consumer economy (but it I could see where it might be slightly inflationary, too). Since by design it's not meant to be punative, even low wage jobs have an incentive because you will gain an income higher than the basic income for any work.
It's hard to know the bureacucratic efficiencies that would be gained, but I suspect they would be major. I don't know if the concept implies an end to the social security system, but you could see where it would be redundant or could be reduced. It also lets people spend the money in the way that helps them the best, at market eficiency, versus less efficient means (ie, you can rent whatever apartment makes sense to you, versus having to live in a project or qualifying section 8 housing). The lack of complex access and screening mechanisms would mean fewer people stuck in a system and more able to focus their energy on obtaining better jobs or fearing losing their benefits.
I think it would require moderately higher taxes on very high income people and corporations. I don't think this is necessarly bad and you could argue that part of the economy's inequality problem is corporations and very high income individuals sitting on cash because they don't have investment alternatives (think Apples billions in cash) -- as long as that money is held in short-term deposits and short term securities, it's not doing produtive work in the economy. Taxed and returned to the economy, it produces economic activity.
About the only other idea I've found compelling for reducing inequality is a tax incentive to companies that reduce salary ratios between the highest paid and othe employees. Whatever the loss in tax revenue shold be offset by increased tax revenue from better paid employees and increased sales taxes as the money is spent.
All those things strike me as problem transference, not problem solving.
Rather than fix the WAN problems (lack of capacity, bad architecture, etc), even if the original "problem" goes away, we've just adopted a *different* set of problems (complex architecture, lack of transparency, etc).
The same is true for whatever personnel issues are associated with IT personnel and hardware/cloud. No real problem was solved, it was just transferred elsewhere.
I wanted to avoid all the malware associated with FoxIt.
Or has that changed since the last time I looked at it?
I just get tired of non-system updates which require a reboot.
I just built a new workstation system based on Server 2012R2 (to get the server-level features) and one thing I put off was installing Acrobat Reader. It finally became just too annoying to use Chrome as a PDF reader, so I broke down and installed it -- from Adobe's web site. And sure enough, two days later, it's blinking at me on the taskbar to fucking reboot due to some update.
For a system which runs off SSDs isn't that time consuming individually, but is a nuisance because I've got other stuff that uses my workstation resources, so it's less about the reboot time and the annoying coordination with other resources.
My sense is that the science part of NASA isn't inspirational to the general population. It produces the occasional interesting pictures in the paper, but two days later we're back to stories about the Kardashians or whoever the latest transgender phenomenon is.
And this isn't to say that the science side isn't valuable, but it only really enthuses scientists. The Apollo missions transfixed the public for days. Even the first shuttle launch was a big deal, I can remember them setting up TVs in classrooms for the launch -- I saw it in *choir* class. The impression I got of the Apollo missions is that EVERYONE stopped what they were doing for the Apollo events, like the apocryphal image of a dozen people standing on the sidewalk outside a TV store.
It may be that the rational argument is to spend the money (and less of it) on probes and science missions, which is the argument that scientists would make because they get value out of it. And maybe that's some of the problem, a science-oriented NASA mission means more varied science missions which means more centers of power for science groups. A funding shift would lead to fewer science missions unrelated to manned space travel missions, so scientists argue against it because ultimately their ox is being gored.
And this may be a lousy argument in terms of science, but I think there's something culturally unifying and inspirational about manned space travel. It seems to show us a future of *hope* -- space isn't bogged down with ideological, historical and religious conflict. Mullahs, ISIS, right-wing evangelicals and ideologues don't have much to say about space or many ways to use it as a divisive issue -- in fact, I'd argue that it many ways it scares them because even if life isn't found on Mars, just the idea that a God-created humanity on Earth isn't really the center of the universe is intimidating to them.
Who has redundant natural gas at their house?
I don't know what that distribution network looks like, but if a branch line feeding some section of town got broken and cut off, I feel skeptical that they could just cap it temporarily knowing that gas would continue to flow to that segment because...spanning tree for natural gas.
I mean maybe in cold weather climates they have that ability, even if it requires guys in hard hats to go to some valve someplace and turn some knobs, but something tells me it doesn't work that way.
We all know for sure that fault tolerance in electricity is roll your own -- UPS and/or generator power.
The one I worry about the most is water. What if there was some kind of *major* fuckup in some big pipe between the water plant and the rest of the system, like the kind of thing that would take a few days to fix. That's a long time for a major urban center to go without water.
Self-signed works fine if you can actually verify the certificates by some other method, which is generally OK for smaller, more tightly integrated groups but is hard to scale to the general public or complete strangers.
It would also help if product makers would make it somewhat easier to manage them. Most people reasonably intelligent and competent in the world of IT don't know how to manage self-signed certs, even down to what they would need to do to make the browser errors go away.
Of course, if OS vendors or application vendors made it easier, we'd probably just end up with a giant mess of untrustworthy self-signed certificates floating around, with every home PC bloated with bogus certificates designed to rip them off.
What I don't understand is what does it take to become a public CA? Who approves them? Who audits their procedures? Sometimes it just feels like you can be one as long as your sales pitch is good enough to get your root CAs installed by default in browsers and operating systems.
What is true, though, is they sometimes don't understand the appeal of the new stuff, nor why anyone would consider using it.
This. Growth in the technology industry is heavily dependent on selling the same thing to the same people frequently. The "old dudes" start to see new versions quite often for what they are -- meaningless churn, designed to get support contracts renewed, all the required new licensing models enforced, and the vendors' quarterly results up.
Thus, the new versions are laden with all the new buzzwords, lots of bugs, some breakage from previous versions and all you end up with is the pain of implementing teh shiny to basically do what you did before.
The riders will come from the lakes area and SW suburbs. The unwillingness to tunnel has everything to do with cost. Even with the relatively cheap route on an old railroad bed that they've chosen, it is an extremely expensive project and they've had to eliminate stops and take other cost cutting measures just to make it happen. As great as it would be, there is no way the taxpayers are going to pay for a subway.
The riders will come from the lakes area? That demographic isn't going to be riding mass transit, and the people who would use it are nearly a mile away from it, following a circuitous route around Isles. The reality is that it's not an urban mass transit system, it's a suburban commuter route.
And that reality is why I find the notion of ripping through the Kenilworth corridor across the channel between Isles and Cedar so infuriating. We got Minneapolis ripped up for freeways in the 1960s, so we could improve suburban access, now we're doing it again, with little benefit to Minneapolis citizens and the major benefit to suburban commuters, downtown corporations and sports teams.
LRT ends up being expensive because trains are expensive, and Metro Transit LRT wants to be both a Metra/MetroNorth style commuter railroad in addition to styling itself an urban transit platform. IMHO this has led to over-arching design decisions that have made the system more expensive than necessary due to rolling stock more similar to heavy rail than to a streetcar, trying to obtain economies of scale across the entire system. It's a one size fits all solution.
I agree with you that our road network is ultimately unsupportable, but I also think that a lot of that blame lies with the Met Council which has only been too happy to extend roads and sewers into distant exurban areas for decades, creating the sprawl.
In WWII, America celebrated the worker, because it needed workers. Today, America shits on the worker, and outsources his job as rapidly as possible. Was America really pro-worker during the war, or was it just talking a lot of shit to get the ignorant rubes on board? Obviously, the latter.
It's easy to think of the Nazis using the rhetoric of socialism as merely window dressing for a totalitarian dictatorship because that's how it looks in the wake of WW II.
But fascism was an actual emerging ideology before Nazism that sought to accomplish at least some of the goals we ascribe to socialism. American capitalism never sought to do any of that, so it's much easier to write off American WWII pro-worker propaganda as just that, propaganda.
Since Nazi ideology was at least influenced by fascist ideology, it's harder to say that it was always and only window dressing and that elements of socialism weren't an actual part of Nazi ideology. And the complicating factor, of course, is that everything but militarism and antisemitism went out the window in '38, so there was little to no history of a Nazi economic policy that wasn't entangled with Hitler's war ambitions.
Wait, you mean the NSDAP, or National Socialist German Worker's Party isn't a socialist party afterall?
I think that despite that the Nazis are remembered more for a police state than a worker's paradise, I think there was some kind of pro-worker aspect to Nazi ideology, even if it was more along the lines of inventing the mythology the aryan volk. There was stuff like the Volkswagen and other various pro-labor kinds of symbolism.
It wasn't leftist in terms of following a Marxist-Leninist economics as much it was being supportive of pure German people, who by numbers were labor. I think at least early on, some part of it was genuine but it was ultimately corrupted by authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and war.
My sense is that fascist ideology's focus on ethnicity and nationalism often makes it something of a confounding philosophy when viewed through the usual political economy spectrum spanning Communism to Capitalism. Fascism's populist bent I think is both suspicious of the wealthy for corrupting the purity of the people and hostile to communism's exclusive focus on wealth distribution I think this leads to weird outcomes, like policies that have a socialist rhetroic while not necessarily being redistributive.
It would have been kind of interesting to see how fascist economics would have worked in Germany and Italy if both countries had settled "merely" for discriminatory racial policies and left out the military conflict, expansionism and extermination policies. Would they mostly have become totalitarian capitalist states (like Korea in the 1970s) or would they have become like some kind of right-wing Sweden?
I've lived in the city of Minneapolis my entire life and have always hated the bus system, even for downtown commuting. Slow, slow, slow. You can't get anywhere in a timely fashion, even within the city limits, unless you count "getting anywhere" as being something akin to riding from north of Lake Street to downtown.
I worked at the U of MN and the ride to my job was over 45 minutes, and this was in the 1980s when there was a lot less traffic. I was tolerable when I lived Uptown in the 1990s, but then again, I was riding from 24th street to 9th street and there were still times where it was agonizingly slow and forget about it on the weekends when buses ran every 30+ minutes. You could easily have an hour ride to go 20 blocks if your schedule didn't mesh with the bus schedule. When I moved to Kenny neighborhood, the EXPRESS bus took over 45 minutes to get downtown. I was literally spending 90 minutes a day on a commute that was no more than 45 minutes both ways by car.
Downtown's parking reality is probably a byproduct of the fact that the powers that be have designated it as a central hub for everything -- sports, business, government -- our mass transit just doesn't cut it to move that volume of people in and out, you HAVE to accommodate cars and a lot of them if you want to have people actually go see the Twins or Vikings.
SW LRT is a joke. Running the line down Kenilworth serves whom? The people that live near it aren't its target audience and the people who WOULD ride it are on the other side of Lake of the Isles. It should have been planned as a subway line down Hennepin and then out Excelsior on the surface. Reusing the existing rail corridor sounds like it makes sense on paper but mostly means it will be distant from many riders and feels mostly like a sop to suburban politicians so it can end up being a suburban commuter amenity, not an urban transportation system.
And I don't think cost has much to do with the unwillingness to tunnel, I think transit officials are scared to death that if they build an urban subway it will become a crime-infested mess which will detract from the suburban support they need to build it.
What I don't understand about all this bad debt is that most of it seems self-inflicted by the lender.
If they don't do adequate credit checks and issue credit to people who can't repay the loans, aren't they kind of likely to end up with bad debt?
I'm sure their argument is "But we wouldn't sell as many widgets if we didn't offer easy credit". Which is logic I don't undertstand -- how do you make money on widgets if you give them away and don't get repaid?
It almost seems like there's some kind of accounting magic about bad debt that pays for itself, like the tax writeoffs plus the sale of bad debt to collections somehow is enough to make up for it.
If they were more selective, you'd think it'd mostly be a problem that solves itself (but medical will always be a problem until we get universal care).
IMHO, we'd end up with a system more like what you see on the east coast with "train station suburbs" -- mini-cities with a downtown built around the train station and housing more or less leafing off from there.
I'm thinking of the kinds of things you see when you ride the Metro North Railroad out of NYC. They've kind of sprawled, in automobile dependent ways since the first ones were built, but the idea is appealing in its pre-automobile incarnation.
I don't know how many of the stops past NYC sprung up before car ownership became really widespread, or how many were actually built around the notion of people living in a "suburb" and commuting into NYC. I'd wager that most of them were kind organic towns that sprung up for other reasons and it just made sense to build the rail system through them, and most people didn't actually commute into NYC for jobs, the train system was just a way to move travelers and goods out of NYC.
But there are a couple you'd swear were purpose built for suburban living and commuting with the train an integral part of the design, although it's hard to tell how much of that is reformatting.
My wife and I have used a gimmick where we go into the dealership together and I do all the talking with the salesdroid and she only acts minimally interested in the process, like the car is for me and she's just along for the experience.
Once we've sorted out what we want to buy and have some kind of researched invoice price, we switch roles. I quit saying anything at all and she starts negotiating with the salesdroid.
It really fucks with their head and they don't negotiate well. My wife is kind of an ass-kicker in negotiations to begin with and this gives her a huge psychological advantage. One guy kept trying to talk to me and she got pissed at him and yelled at him for not talking with the person she was actually negotiating with.
There is a dealer in Minneapolis that sells nothing but used cars, and most of them are like 1-2 years old with very low miles. My wife bought an Acura MDX that was 1 year old with like 14,000 miles on it and it looked brand new inside and out. We drove the same model and trim new and couldn't see any differences (there was no model year changes).
And the savings were great, much more than any discount we could have gotten off a new car.
The car still has an extensive manufacturer warranty, serviceable by any dealer.
I bought my Volvo S80 V8 used from a dealer, a one owner lease return. I paid HALF the sticker price (sticker found inside the car) with 20K miles on it and it was totally mint.
The other nice thing is avoiding troublesome new cars.
It seems to be an article of faith among urban planners that the way to deal with cars is just to get rid of them, as if you can wave your hands and simply undo 60-odd years of growth and sprawl enabled by cars.
For sure cars have drawbacks, but so many of the planning decisions which seem to be anti-car seem to be somewhat ideologically driven rather than recognizing that arbitrarily making cars more difficult (less parking, narrower roads built with "traffic calming" features, etc) really is a kind of net negative when the larger geography and established infrastructure can't possibly be adapted on a timescale to accommodate it.
We had hundreds of miles of streetcar in 1950, but rebuilding it with light rail has taken over a decade and there's only two lines built. It's cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.7 billion dollars to build those two lines. I think the projected cost of the Southwest line is something on the order of 1.5 billion dollars and has a crazy route that will maul some of the city's parks and somehow manages not to serve the Hennepin Avenue corridor, despite it being one the most ideal places to build rail service to support existing high density residence.
The bus system is a joke, only practical for suburban commuters -- any kind of urban trip you could make in 20 minutes in a car is an hour odyssey not including time spent waiting for the bus.
Installing deliberate "baffles" to slow down traffic flow.
Around here, they call that "traffic calming", a funny little euphemism given that seems to translate into "road rage" when traffic backs up.
I'm pretty sure I've read or seen one of those "Crazy shit in prison" stories where they show the kinds of paper mache they can make with just paper and water.. Like tightly rolled newspaper rolled and progressively built up until it becomes hard enough to sharped into a point and made into a shank, sometimes with some kind of random bit of metal embedded into the tip.
The ingenuity of prisoners is often quite amazing. You'd almost think that for "The Martian" they would have used JPL for the space technology, and some lifers in prison for the "what can he make with plastic sheeting, duct tape and empty food bags".
Actually, an excise tax on sugar makes a ton of sense.
As someone who has done a LCHF diet (and lost a lot of weight with it), it's astonishing how many foods you wouldn't assume have sugar in them in fact have sugar in them. Their makers add sugar because it's a cheap way to jack up flavor or replace fat (which would have provided flavor).
Making sugar more expensive at the producer/wholesale level would make these products more expensive and food producers would have to find another way to get the benefits they're looking for and possibly even remove it completely.
The challenges would be making sure that it didn't JUST target basic sugar from beets or cane, but encompassed the whole range of sugar-like sweeteners, from HFCS to some of the refined fruit juices used for their fructose content.
The other challenge would be the scores of agricultural lobbies, from the powerful sugar grower's lobby to the various fruit production lobbies who sell their crops for use as sweeteners or juice. The orange growers already have an exemption from alcohol excise taxes -- their low-value juice gets turned into a cheap alcohol called "blend" which is used in low cost liquor (part of the reason its low cost is that grain alcohol has a higher excise tax).
The risks of dihydrogen monoxide are pretty well publicized.
http://www.dhmo.org/
My basic claim is that what Comcast is selling is nothing more than a DOCSIS speed setting on the modem, and not access to actual network throughput.
In any urban cable network there's some shared segment encompassing some range of dwellings that usually connects to a node where it gains access to some branch segment and that handles uplink for a larger geographic area and then to whatever the metro area data center is. I count 3 hops on my connection before it leaves my metro region.
My sense is that these uplinks are all prone to massive oversubscription, especially at the neighborhood aggregation point and that when Comcast sells you the speed upgrade, there's no assessment of whether their metro network can even deliver such speeds, even out of your closest uplink node. They have, in fact, every incentive to allow internet congestion within their network.
In my mind, this "best effort" service delivery for fixed pricing kind of sucks. I'd rather see the pricing associated with 95% peak delivered throughput or at least discounts when the 95% delivered falls below the priced speed.
A final anecdote on how poor their metro network can perform:
I have a client with a large and very old campus. They have facilities spread over this campus that they want connectivity to the main building. With Comcast as the ISP, we should see throughput comparable to the subscribed speeds -- afterall, we never leave their network, but do have different uplink nodes which are separated by fewer than 2 miles. But they can't even deliver this, despite the hardware being capable of it when installed locally.
(Yes, the client would be far better served running their own fiber, but it's costly and they don't want to rip up the landscaping in the process).
Which makes you wonder why they're not. I would think following the money coupled with aggressive sanctions to providers (ISPs, hosting companies, banks, credit processors, etc) and heavy publicity against them would get them someplace.
My guess is the intelligence agencies are worried about getting caught up in such an investigation or at least having methods and "back doors" closed down.
Like where you pay a premium for a higher speed tier and the net result is your local modem's speed is upgraded, but it's basically worthless because of congestion from your node all the way up to the interchange is congested and oversubscribed?
I see this all the time -- customer buys into some ridiculous Comcast business class speed tier of 100/50 or whatever and never sees the throughput. Sure, all the internet speed tests (which I am sure are gamed) show the speed but real-world tests from a local data center with real connectivity can't come close, yet local testing with a laptop connected to a firewall outside port shows the on-premise hardware has no problems either.
I get that not every location in the world can keep up with 100Mbit local connectivity -- some don't have the throughput, some are managed to cap individual streams, etc, but Comcast, et al seem to get away with selling fantasy connection speeds that amount to little more than cable modem configs.