And the simplicity... well they did just come out with the SCv2000 which is all wizard-driven and about as dead simple to set up as the EQL. I predict we'll see that same level of simplicity making its way into the higher tier products pretty soon.
That would sure be nice. I like the statistics and most of the features of EM, but their I/O configuration is lunacy, up to and including the required license for virtual ports. All of that feels like a networking configuration system that was solved (and better) elsewhere. I'd like to think they don't make it horrifically complicated just to drive reseller/support revenue and that there's something deep inside that makes it worthwhile, but I find it hard to believe.
The auto tiering if configured correctly can certainly make for an interesting performance story. Put SLC at the top where you want fast writes and allow it to trickle down to MLC and/or TLC... just like 15K->10K->7K. There's a question mark over whether current controllers can really take advantage of the potential performance in this kind of setup, but we're seeing controller performance increasing over generations anyway.
IMHO, new flash technologies like Intel/Micron 3D-Xpoint will moot the need to tier between older generation flash technologies. I also suspect that for all but a few workloads MLC is just so much faster that it won't matter at the customer side. Any performance increase is probably offset by the need for heavier weight controllers needed to manage tiering and data page management.
And as you suggest, interconnects would remain a limiting factor -- how many 24 drive MLC shelves until you saturate even a SAS-12 bus?
Even in networking... they've shit-canned the atrocious Powerconnect line of switches (that some people loved) and replaced with a whole new line of switching from low end to high.
I think the N series is pretty good. I don't see much uptake of Force10 since N series came out and the price/performance/features of the 10 gig N series are pretty good. I'd love for someone to give me a couple of the 10 gig models...
Dell own Equallogic (low-to-mid) and Compellent (mid-to-high).
They already can't quite figure out how to merge the two systems and have been selling both. The inside story is that EQL will go away, but they never seem to go away and Compellent can't quite come up with a product as simple and cheap as EQL. The SC4020, rather than being an EQL with SAS expansion ends up being burdened by Compellent's over-complicated interface system and fiber-channel focused mindset, in addition to being more expensive than EQL (install by a CML certified technician is required, $$$). EQL setup is trivial, I can get one on line in less than an hour.
I think there's also an open question about the mid-long range future of Compellent's primary sales pitch, its automatic tiering of data between different disk speeds (like SSD, 15k and 7.2k) when the future of data storage looks increasingly like it will be all flash, at least for most of the market volume.
What does all that tiering overhead mean in a world dominated by flash? Maybe it makes sense for the absolute largest installs where petabytes are in play, but most of the Compellent installs I've seen have been a shelf of tier 1 and maybe 2 shelves of tier 3. And they're increasingly 10G iSCSI focused, passing on FC.
I can't figure out how they'd blend in EMC to this mix.
What they're probably after is controlling interest in VMware. This would give them a complete vertical play for virtualization, being able to supply compute, networking, storage and hypervisor. They would probably also be in a position to further a lot of network and storage virtualization with control over both sides of the equation, hardware an software.
I do wonder if there's a possible anti-trust question here. I also wonder how Microsoft would feel about it as well.
If policy is an attempted experiment and governments always fail to conduct properly controlled experiments, doesn't that end up meaning that it actually is difficult to run controlled experiments in economics? Calling it a problem of will is about as much hand-waving as Keynes' animal spirits.
Generally speaking, I can see where you might be able to run very simple controlled experiments, like taking a hot dog cart to different corners in a city and see how geography affects hot dog sales. But even then you have more variables than just geography in play as changing the geography changes the customer base, the weather may vary, the competition for your type of product may vary and so on. You could go crazy just trying to control those simple variances.
An enlightened perspective, and I think you're right.
I see too many managers just deciding it's an authoritarian chain: you do what I say because I said it.
This will never be fixed until managers are paid and treated the same as the people they are managing. As long as they are compensated and treated as figures of elevated status, they will tend to act in authoritarian ways.
My sense is that distributed power production won't work until you get a quantum leap in battery storage so the generators can use their own excess capacity. I'd cover my roof in solar tomorrow if I could have 100 kWh of battery in the basement to cover evenings and peak utilization.
I don't think the idea of a random, unstructured network of spare residential solar over capacity is really what makes for a manageable grid. Maybe the existing grid could be redesigned to support a lots of local feeds in a manageable way, but it would be extremely expensive and I don't know that it's worth the cost, especially if its only to justify the individual generators personal solar economic choices.
I don't agree with the monopoly obligation agreement at all. The concession made by utility monopolies is rate regulation -- they get to charge enough to meet reasonable costs and a fair profit margin. Stable, minimal markup pricing is the concession. By forcing the utilities to buy power they don't need under their current generation and management structure (and at high rates), you're basically forcing them to charge more to everyone else so that they can buy power they don't need from people who have invested in solar.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree that utilities or other rate payers have a moral or any other obligation to subsidize the choice of putting up solar panels. Put up panels if you want, but your economic calculations should just include the power you don't buy from the grid, not the power you make the other rate payers buy from you. If that turns out to be a less winning economic decision, too bad. "Because solar" or similar isn't good enough.
Think of it this way -- if I shop at one grocery store and buy food and then discover I have too much, I can't go to a different grocery store and make them buy back my excess food or give me a discount on the additional food I buy.
I just don't get the righteous indignation. Why should the utility be required to buy your excess production at all? I get that in some kind of ideal world, it makes sense to pump excess residential generation into the grid but I don't know if that's much more than wishful thinking right now -- there's no coordination or management of reverse feeds, for the utility its a nuisance and could be a real headache in the future.
At some point I wonder if this is really about being pissed off that the economics of a solar installation is dependent on excess power being sold back and their actual numbers aren't adding up.
I guess my thought is, too bad. If you want solar, you should pay for solar. Asking other people (the other ratepayers) to subsidize your solar installation is kind of BS and no amount of moralizing about your petty 10kw backfeed keeping them from spooling up a gas turbine will make it otherwise.
I'm also inclined to give Sanger's eugenics a sort-of-pass.
I think you don't have to swing a dead cat very far to find contemporary medical ethicists exploring some of the same issues Sanger was pretty gung-ho about. Like should a couple discover they both carry a gene which will result in a high probability of a child with birth defects have children? Such a child would likely impose a significant dollar costs, and since most people can't afford to self-fund such care, they will just be shifting those costs onto everyone else.
The racialism and forced sterilization stuff seems distasteful (especially now), but there's a certain dark charitibility to her outlook when you consider the poverty, slums and misery of the poor of her historical era. All of the war on poverty money spent still hasn't cured poverty and the social costs of basically unchecked poverty seem to only perpetuate it.
If you did implement some kind of eugenics, would we have "solved" the problem of poverty, or at least reduced the scale of poverty to the point where it was manageable as a social and economic cost and allowed social welfare spending to actually produce the results its supposed to? Or would it have been a serious problem in terms of shrinking populations and reduced economic growth?
Could you implement a eugenic program in a way that wasn't coercively Orwellian? Could you model social welfare costs of poverty and offer some kind of net-positive cash benefit to people willing to be sterilized?
What I find appalling about the anti-PP rhetoric is that it's really post-natal eugenics, given the insistence on having babies and the typically concomitant lack of funding for social welfare.
Of course, a prerequisite for using TiVo is a more-than-passing interest in browsing and watching TV.
Which really means "cable TV" -- I can't see spending $300 for a new Tivo + $150 a year for a no-content-included Tivo subscription without the giant cable plan content feed to go with it. There's not enough on the broadcast channels to make it worthwhile with an antenna or my bare-minimum cable plan.
And for that kind of money with Amazon Instant, Netflix and Apple content already on my TVs I can buy a lot of seasons of shows that aren't on Prime or Netflix.
Any one of a zillion boxes will stream content from the major streaming providers and so much of cable's content is available online already.
I've owned Tivos since series 2, but have cut out cable to the "basic" package of local channels only, mostly to appease my wife and son (who has pretty much moved on to Netflix anyway).
I have 3 Series 3 boxes right now, but when they go I can't see a reason for replacing them. I already have other boxes which do Netflix/Amazon/Hulu.
If the credit-worthiness data does not correlate well with ability to repay,
None of this changes the desire of the lenders to charge more profitable interest rates nor the desire of credit reporting agencies to have their scoring seen as more profitable. Since lenders are inherently risk-averse and profit-oriented, they have an incentive to lend at the interest rate that represents the highest possible risk and highest possible profit.
There's almost no way for a credit reporter to lose by reporting clients as worse risks than they really are. If a lender has a loan go bad and they see that the borrower was assigned the worst of three possible credit scores, they can't blame the credit reporting agency who reported it. If a loan was repaid correctly, the credit reporting agency was ALSO right AND the lender made more money.
None of this should be surprising. The credit reporting services are in business to please their customers, the credit issuers. People who apply for credit are part of the product.
I would even go so far as to argue that the credit reporting agencies have an incentive to make your credit report as bad as possible, since the worse the report, the higher the interest rate you get charged for borrowing money. And the good news for creditors is that it doesn't force them to be more competitive, since they're all competing against the same view of your creditworthiness. Erring on the side of reduced creditworthiness lets creditors charge a higher interest rate for a risk that isn't elevated.
My conspiracy minded side says this is why erroneous credit data is hard to remove and why credit reporters want to use non-financial correlates (like driving records) as part of your credit score -- something you can't ever get removed yet makes your credit report look marginally worse, thus making you a more profitable creditor via higher interest rates.
The companies cheat anyway, so the number on the product is meaningless (ranked first merely for topicality)
People buy a [thing] for its inherent qualities. A TV is chosen for its picture quality, size, features and price first. Energy consumption? The only person I've ever known to choose a TV based on energy consumption was a guy with a boat who wanted to keep his house battery consumption down.
Maybe if all products were essentially equal, energy consumption would matter. You could argue that fridges are basically the same, but when we bought ours size was the most important quality (biggest that would fit the opening) followed by the interior arrangement.
And does the energy consumption vary that much? Maybe the cheapest possible fridge uses a lot more energy, but once you narrow the field and eliminate the tails of the curve they seem awfully close.
I have ATM cards (ATM-only, not Visa check cards) and have NOT FOR RETAIL PURCHASE written in the signing box. It saved me once when I handed the card to a clerk for a purchase by mistake, although I think I would have had to enter my pin number on the terminal since it was not a Visa check card, ATM only.
I think I've also done something similar on a credit card -- written CHECK PHOTO ID where the signature is supposed to go. I think I only showed my photo ID once.
We already see international business sanctions -- the embargo of specific goods or services, banking access, oil sales, etc. You can make arguments for and against their effectiveness or even usefulness, but they are still pursued for reasons both publicity-related and practical.
Will we ever see "internet sanctions" where nations have their Internet access to the US limited or blocked?
I took the opposite message from the TFSummary, although maybe that's my reading and not the author questioning the tactic.
It will happen, because management believes these are the more valuable employees and will pay them more and will devalue other employees and pay them less -- probably sneaking in an overall net pay cut while they're at it, since they can pay the devalued employees less than they increase the pay of valued employees.
My assumption is that this would ultimately backfire because they would end up developing less talent overall, discouraging workers they should encourage and ultimately overburdening workers they overvalue. Not to mention the relentless gaming of any measurement system by all parties that erodes whatever value it might have.
A couple of people who were on their way out anyway will be offered off-the-books compensation and a promise of no consequences to be tainted by this.
A couple of people they want to get rid of outright will get pinned with the most serious charges, but to protect the organization they will be allowed to resign quietly without any prosecution.
In the end, it will be the same as no wrongdoing being found but with a little "accountability theater" to keep critics quiet.
This is mostly what I end up doing about the second half of the summer.
We go out to the lake and I apply SPF 55 when we first get there and about the first half of the summer I reapply after about 4 hours. By the end of the summer I still do the initial application but seldom reapply without any issues.
With me, I probably mitigate this by wearing a loose-fitting "fishing shirt" that has some kind of super high SPF number (it's advertised for its sun safety) and a broad billed hat. I figure the sun exposure I don't get at all is the best protection.
But I usually spend about half the time at the lake swimming or floating in the water with my shoulders and bald head exposed, although occasionally with a hat.
I think we grew up closer to the "let your kids burn" side of the coin. We would go to the beach at a local lake almost daily when we were between about the ages of 5 and 12 and I think my mom would put whatever passed for "suntan lotion" in the 1970s on us, once, when first got there and never reapply.
I don't ever remember getting sunburned but I do remember getting a really dark tan.
The problem is we really don't have any growth in industrial employment and a lot of the automation is replacing work in the service sector. The 19th century saw gains in both industrial employment and service employment. We've cut one of those categories and automation aims to cut the other.
So where do they go?
I suppose one answer might be an increase in nominal agricultural employment through urban, grow-local subsistence agriculture.
Do they have any engineering expertise that proves this is even possible?
Maybe the last 100 years of internal combustion engine evolution? Detroit whined it was impossible until the Japanese and Europeans started selling cars with improved mileage.
My guess is that there is a shitload of engineering consulting on setting pollution and fuel consumption targets with ranges known to be obtainable with well understood technologies. I kind of doubt they are throwing darts on a dartboard.
Well, yes. It's affordability too, but try to imagine how soured on space the general public would get to see people slowly dying in an under-resourced "base" on Mars.
I think you greatly underestimate the public's appetite for risk. We've been willing to watch our sons and daughters die by the thousands to take villages and hilltops only to give them back a week, a month or a year later with zero long-term achievement and right now politicians running for President are advocating to ramp that up.
I can't imagine that the public would be turned off by deaths associated with a Mars mission failure. What are we talking about -- 5 people? 10 people? 100 people? And it wouldn't be for some shit patch of dirt it would be to explore space and expand human horizons. That would inspire people, not intimidate them or discourage them.
Exploration has always been risky. People willingly entertain the risk of dying climbing, sailing, diving, parachuting, flying small planes, racing motorcycles, cars and so on. Because somebody might die is a lousy reason not to explore.
But right now, the web is badly broken. Most of these new users Mr. Zuckerberg wants to get online have no clue about the dangers, both cultural and technical. There are efforts by various foundations (eg: Mozilla) to educate new users, but they are hilariously mismatched to the big internet giants who want to siphon of people's privacy for $$$. On top of that you have the Snowden revelations
I work with many rural communities in India, and often the question of providing internet access comes up. Unlike before, where I would say an unqualified yes, I do not support providing internet unless there is a deep discussion held with the stakeholders. What is (pleasantly) surprising though is that usually the elders in a Village are quite concerned and want to discuss these issues.
As much as the technology community and a lot of political voices (all over the spectrum) are supportive of the disruptive political nature of the Internet, in the West we mostly do disruptive change with only a token level of on-the-ground chaos and violence. I think we greatly discount the ability to process disruptive change in countries with longstanding traditional cultures and marginally functional political processes. Population growth alone has pushed a lot of people into African cities with a lot of negative externalities in terms of poverty and disgruntled idle bodies able and willing to join whatever revolutionary movement comes down the pike.
It doesn't surprise me that village elders would have questions. Partly due to just general wisdom, partly due to caution and partly due to concern over their status and position.
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And the simplicity... well they did just come out with the SCv2000 which is all wizard-driven and about as dead simple to set up as the EQL. I predict we'll see that same level of simplicity making its way into the higher tier products pretty soon.
That would sure be nice. I like the statistics and most of the features of EM, but their I/O configuration is lunacy, up to and including the required license for virtual ports. All of that feels like a networking configuration system that was solved (and better) elsewhere. I'd like to think they don't make it horrifically complicated just to drive reseller/support revenue and that there's something deep inside that makes it worthwhile, but I find it hard to believe.
The auto tiering if configured correctly can certainly make for an interesting performance story. Put SLC at the top where you want fast writes and allow it to trickle down to MLC and/or TLC... just like 15K->10K->7K. There's a question mark over whether current controllers can really take advantage of the potential performance in this kind of setup, but we're seeing controller performance increasing over generations anyway.
IMHO, new flash technologies like Intel/Micron 3D-Xpoint will moot the need to tier between older generation flash technologies. I also suspect that for all but a few workloads MLC is just so much faster that it won't matter at the customer side. Any performance increase is probably offset by the need for heavier weight controllers needed to manage tiering and data page management.
And as you suggest, interconnects would remain a limiting factor -- how many 24 drive MLC shelves until you saturate even a SAS-12 bus?
Even in networking... they've shit-canned the atrocious Powerconnect line of switches (that some people loved) and replaced with a whole new line of switching from low end to high.
I think the N series is pretty good. I don't see much uptake of Force10 since N series came out and the price/performance/features of the 10 gig N series are pretty good. I'd love for someone to give me a couple of the 10 gig models...
Dell own Equallogic (low-to-mid) and Compellent (mid-to-high).
They already can't quite figure out how to merge the two systems and have been selling both. The inside story is that EQL will go away, but they never seem to go away and Compellent can't quite come up with a product as simple and cheap as EQL. The SC4020, rather than being an EQL with SAS expansion ends up being burdened by Compellent's over-complicated interface system and fiber-channel focused mindset, in addition to being more expensive than EQL (install by a CML certified technician is required, $$$). EQL setup is trivial, I can get one on line in less than an hour.
I think there's also an open question about the mid-long range future of Compellent's primary sales pitch, its automatic tiering of data between different disk speeds (like SSD, 15k and 7.2k) when the future of data storage looks increasingly like it will be all flash, at least for most of the market volume.
What does all that tiering overhead mean in a world dominated by flash? Maybe it makes sense for the absolute largest installs where petabytes are in play, but most of the Compellent installs I've seen have been a shelf of tier 1 and maybe 2 shelves of tier 3. And they're increasingly 10G iSCSI focused, passing on FC.
I can't figure out how they'd blend in EMC to this mix.
What they're probably after is controlling interest in VMware. This would give them a complete vertical play for virtualization, being able to supply compute, networking, storage and hypervisor. They would probably also be in a position to further a lot of network and storage virtualization with control over both sides of the equation, hardware an software.
I do wonder if there's a possible anti-trust question here. I also wonder how Microsoft would feel about it as well.
Didn't you just contradict yourself?
If policy is an attempted experiment and governments always fail to conduct properly controlled experiments, doesn't that end up meaning that it actually is difficult to run controlled experiments in economics? Calling it a problem of will is about as much hand-waving as Keynes' animal spirits.
Generally speaking, I can see where you might be able to run very simple controlled experiments, like taking a hot dog cart to different corners in a city and see how geography affects hot dog sales. But even then you have more variables than just geography in play as changing the geography changes the customer base, the weather may vary, the competition for your type of product may vary and so on. You could go crazy just trying to control those simple variances.
An enlightened perspective, and I think you're right.
I see too many managers just deciding it's an authoritarian chain: you do what I say because I said it.
This will never be fixed until managers are paid and treated the same as the people they are managing. As long as they are compensated and treated as figures of elevated status, they will tend to act in authoritarian ways.
My sense is that distributed power production won't work until you get a quantum leap in battery storage so the generators can use their own excess capacity. I'd cover my roof in solar tomorrow if I could have 100 kWh of battery in the basement to cover evenings and peak utilization.
I don't think the idea of a random, unstructured network of spare residential solar over capacity is really what makes for a manageable grid. Maybe the existing grid could be redesigned to support a lots of local feeds in a manageable way, but it would be extremely expensive and I don't know that it's worth the cost, especially if its only to justify the individual generators personal solar economic choices.
I don't agree with the monopoly obligation agreement at all. The concession made by utility monopolies is rate regulation -- they get to charge enough to meet reasonable costs and a fair profit margin. Stable, minimal markup pricing is the concession. By forcing the utilities to buy power they don't need under their current generation and management structure (and at high rates), you're basically forcing them to charge more to everyone else so that they can buy power they don't need from people who have invested in solar.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree that utilities or other rate payers have a moral or any other obligation to subsidize the choice of putting up solar panels. Put up panels if you want, but your economic calculations should just include the power you don't buy from the grid, not the power you make the other rate payers buy from you. If that turns out to be a less winning economic decision, too bad. "Because solar" or similar isn't good enough.
Think of it this way -- if I shop at one grocery store and buy food and then discover I have too much, I can't go to a different grocery store and make them buy back my excess food or give me a discount on the additional food I buy.
I just don't get the righteous indignation. Why should the utility be required to buy your excess production at all? I get that in some kind of ideal world, it makes sense to pump excess residential generation into the grid but I don't know if that's much more than wishful thinking right now -- there's no coordination or management of reverse feeds, for the utility its a nuisance and could be a real headache in the future.
At some point I wonder if this is really about being pissed off that the economics of a solar installation is dependent on excess power being sold back and their actual numbers aren't adding up.
I guess my thought is, too bad. If you want solar, you should pay for solar. Asking other people (the other ratepayers) to subsidize your solar installation is kind of BS and no amount of moralizing about your petty 10kw backfeed keeping them from spooling up a gas turbine will make it otherwise.
I'm also inclined to give Sanger's eugenics a sort-of-pass.
I think you don't have to swing a dead cat very far to find contemporary medical ethicists exploring some of the same issues Sanger was pretty gung-ho about. Like should a couple discover they both carry a gene which will result in a high probability of a child with birth defects have children? Such a child would likely impose a significant dollar costs, and since most people can't afford to self-fund such care, they will just be shifting those costs onto everyone else.
The racialism and forced sterilization stuff seems distasteful (especially now), but there's a certain dark charitibility to her outlook when you consider the poverty, slums and misery of the poor of her historical era. All of the war on poverty money spent still hasn't cured poverty and the social costs of basically unchecked poverty seem to only perpetuate it.
If you did implement some kind of eugenics, would we have "solved" the problem of poverty, or at least reduced the scale of poverty to the point where it was manageable as a social and economic cost and allowed social welfare spending to actually produce the results its supposed to? Or would it have been a serious problem in terms of shrinking populations and reduced economic growth?
Could you implement a eugenic program in a way that wasn't coercively Orwellian? Could you model social welfare costs of poverty and offer some kind of net-positive cash benefit to people willing to be sterilized?
What I find appalling about the anti-PP rhetoric is that it's really post-natal eugenics, given the insistence on having babies and the typically concomitant lack of funding for social welfare.
Of course, a prerequisite for using TiVo is a more-than-passing interest in browsing and watching TV.
Which really means "cable TV" -- I can't see spending $300 for a new Tivo + $150 a year for a no-content-included Tivo subscription without the giant cable plan content feed to go with it. There's not enough on the broadcast channels to make it worthwhile with an antenna or my bare-minimum cable plan.
And for that kind of money with Amazon Instant, Netflix and Apple content already on my TVs I can buy a lot of seasons of shows that aren't on Prime or Netflix.
Any one of a zillion boxes will stream content from the major streaming providers and so much of cable's content is available online already.
I've owned Tivos since series 2, but have cut out cable to the "basic" package of local channels only, mostly to appease my wife and son (who has pretty much moved on to Netflix anyway).
I have 3 Series 3 boxes right now, but when they go I can't see a reason for replacing them. I already have other boxes which do Netflix/Amazon/Hulu.
I thought all contractors trained on the client's dime.
We sure as hell don't train on our employer's dime.
If the credit-worthiness data does not correlate well with ability to repay,
None of this changes the desire of the lenders to charge more profitable interest rates nor the desire of credit reporting agencies to have their scoring seen as more profitable. Since lenders are inherently risk-averse and profit-oriented, they have an incentive to lend at the interest rate that represents the highest possible risk and highest possible profit.
There's almost no way for a credit reporter to lose by reporting clients as worse risks than they really are. If a lender has a loan go bad and they see that the borrower was assigned the worst of three possible credit scores, they can't blame the credit reporting agency who reported it. If a loan was repaid correctly, the credit reporting agency was ALSO right AND the lender made more money.
None of this should be surprising. The credit reporting services are in business to please their customers, the credit issuers. People who apply for credit are part of the product.
I would even go so far as to argue that the credit reporting agencies have an incentive to make your credit report as bad as possible, since the worse the report, the higher the interest rate you get charged for borrowing money. And the good news for creditors is that it doesn't force them to be more competitive, since they're all competing against the same view of your creditworthiness. Erring on the side of reduced creditworthiness lets creditors charge a higher interest rate for a risk that isn't elevated.
My conspiracy minded side says this is why erroneous credit data is hard to remove and why credit reporters want to use non-financial correlates (like driving records) as part of your credit score -- something you can't ever get removed yet makes your credit report look marginally worse, thus making you a more profitable creditor via higher interest rates.
The companies cheat anyway, so the number on the product is meaningless (ranked first merely for topicality)
People buy a [thing] for its inherent qualities. A TV is chosen for its picture quality, size, features and price first. Energy consumption? The only person I've ever known to choose a TV based on energy consumption was a guy with a boat who wanted to keep his house battery consumption down.
Maybe if all products were essentially equal, energy consumption would matter. You could argue that fridges are basically the same, but when we bought ours size was the most important quality (biggest that would fit the opening) followed by the interior arrangement.
And does the energy consumption vary that much? Maybe the cheapest possible fridge uses a lot more energy, but once you narrow the field and eliminate the tails of the curve they seem awfully close.
I have ATM cards (ATM-only, not Visa check cards) and have NOT FOR RETAIL PURCHASE written in the signing box. It saved me once when I handed the card to a clerk for a purchase by mistake, although I think I would have had to enter my pin number on the terminal since it was not a Visa check card, ATM only.
I think I've also done something similar on a credit card -- written CHECK PHOTO ID where the signature is supposed to go. I think I only showed my photo ID once.
We already see international business sanctions -- the embargo of specific goods or services, banking access, oil sales, etc. You can make arguments for and against their effectiveness or even usefulness, but they are still pursued for reasons both publicity-related and practical.
Will we ever see "internet sanctions" where nations have their Internet access to the US limited or blocked?
I took the opposite message from the TFSummary, although maybe that's my reading and not the author questioning the tactic.
It will happen, because management believes these are the more valuable employees and will pay them more and will devalue other employees and pay them less -- probably sneaking in an overall net pay cut while they're at it, since they can pay the devalued employees less than they increase the pay of valued employees.
My assumption is that this would ultimately backfire because they would end up developing less talent overall, discouraging workers they should encourage and ultimately overburdening workers they overvalue. Not to mention the relentless gaming of any measurement system by all parties that erodes whatever value it might have.
Token wrongdoing will be found.
A couple of people who were on their way out anyway will be offered off-the-books compensation and a promise of no consequences to be tainted by this.
A couple of people they want to get rid of outright will get pinned with the most serious charges, but to protect the organization they will be allowed to resign quietly without any prosecution.
In the end, it will be the same as no wrongdoing being found but with a little "accountability theater" to keep critics quiet.
This is mostly what I end up doing about the second half of the summer.
We go out to the lake and I apply SPF 55 when we first get there and about the first half of the summer I reapply after about 4 hours. By the end of the summer I still do the initial application but seldom reapply without any issues.
With me, I probably mitigate this by wearing a loose-fitting "fishing shirt" that has some kind of super high SPF number (it's advertised for its sun safety) and a broad billed hat. I figure the sun exposure I don't get at all is the best protection.
But I usually spend about half the time at the lake swimming or floating in the water with my shoulders and bald head exposed, although occasionally with a hat.
I think we grew up closer to the "let your kids burn" side of the coin. We would go to the beach at a local lake almost daily when we were between about the ages of 5 and 12 and I think my mom would put whatever passed for "suntan lotion" in the 1970s on us, once, when first got there and never reapply.
I don't ever remember getting sunburned but I do remember getting a really dark tan.
The problem is we really don't have any growth in industrial employment and a lot of the automation is replacing work in the service sector. The 19th century saw gains in both industrial employment and service employment. We've cut one of those categories and automation aims to cut the other.
So where do they go?
I suppose one answer might be an increase in nominal agricultural employment through urban, grow-local subsistence agriculture.
Do they have any engineering expertise that proves this is even possible?
Maybe the last 100 years of internal combustion engine evolution? Detroit whined it was impossible until the Japanese and Europeans started selling cars with improved mileage.
My guess is that there is a shitload of engineering consulting on setting pollution and fuel consumption targets with ranges known to be obtainable with well understood technologies. I kind of doubt they are throwing darts on a dartboard.
You could always use a vaporizer. In theory it's everything you love about nicotine without the stink or the smoke.
Well, yes. It's affordability too, but try to imagine how soured on space the general public would get to see people slowly dying in an under-resourced "base" on Mars.
I think you greatly underestimate the public's appetite for risk. We've been willing to watch our sons and daughters die by the thousands to take villages and hilltops only to give them back a week, a month or a year later with zero long-term achievement and right now politicians running for President are advocating to ramp that up.
I can't imagine that the public would be turned off by deaths associated with a Mars mission failure. What are we talking about -- 5 people? 10 people? 100 people? And it wouldn't be for some shit patch of dirt it would be to explore space and expand human horizons. That would inspire people, not intimidate them or discourage them.
Exploration has always been risky. People willingly entertain the risk of dying climbing, sailing, diving, parachuting, flying small planes, racing motorcycles, cars and so on. Because somebody might die is a lousy reason not to explore.
But right now, the web is badly broken. Most of these new users Mr. Zuckerberg wants to get online have no clue about the dangers, both cultural and technical. There are efforts by various foundations (eg: Mozilla) to educate new users, but they are hilariously mismatched to the big internet giants who want to siphon of people's privacy for $$$. On top of that you have the Snowden revelations
I work with many rural communities in India, and often the question of providing internet access comes up. Unlike before, where I would say an unqualified yes, I do not support providing internet unless there is a deep discussion held with the stakeholders. What is (pleasantly) surprising though is that usually the elders in a Village are quite concerned and want to discuss these issues.
As much as the technology community and a lot of political voices (all over the spectrum) are supportive of the disruptive political nature of the Internet, in the West we mostly do disruptive change with only a token level of on-the-ground chaos and violence. I think we greatly discount the ability to process disruptive change in countries with longstanding traditional cultures and marginally functional political processes. Population growth alone has pushed a lot of people into African cities with a lot of negative externalities in terms of poverty and disgruntled idle bodies able and willing to join whatever revolutionary movement comes down the pike.
It doesn't surprise me that village elders would have questions. Partly due to just general wisdom, partly due to caution and partly due to concern over their status and position.