By measuring myself, I found it takes about 20-30 minutes to become fully focused and ease into maximum productivity, which could last for hours if not interrupted.
Yes, a thousand times this. Nobody understands the penalty of the context switch.
I work as an IT consultant/contractor and some of the people who are what I call "desk-biased" don't seem to understand the context switch penalty. On more than one occasion they've kind of griped about why task X wasn't done. "You left the client at 3:30, you got home by 4, why wasn't it done by 4:30?"
Even though the task itself takes about 30 minutes (if everything goes right), It's not like you can just walk in the door, sit down, and just start step 1 of task X. There's both the practical side -- setup laptop, get signed into the right VPN, bring up the right system, start the task" but a mental shift required to just get started on the task, some of which might be substantively identifiable (ie, look up documentation, etc) but some of it seems purely psychological and hard to put into words. And then there's pure distractions of coming home, dealing with the dog, the phone call that happened, the text message, the urgent email, and so on.
I find as I get older my prime window of focus is when I first get up. Maybe it's the caffeine, but I think it's a certain distraction-free clarity I only get in any quantity in the morning. Once the day gets going, it's hard to get the time necessary to get re-focused enough to be as productive.
The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick, not enough carrot (and the bullshit perks like a closer parking spot or free cafeteria tokens don't count).
American business has reaped huge productivity gains from its white collar workforces through computers, networking and telecommunications, both intrinsic gains (more output from the same effort) and structural gains (getting productivity where it would otherwise wouldn't have, like laptops in planes/hotels/homes, smartphone messaging, etc). And workers really haven't seen any income improvement from these productivity gains. You might make some side arguments that remote work enables leisure time that might otherwise be spent at a desk, but I think the reality is that pure leisure time has been degraded by electronic tethers.
In addition, business has reaped gains by other forms of wage suppression like offshoring and outsourcing to H1Bs, which probably has had a productivity increase by simply ratcheting up the fear factor and making employees less demanding of wage increases.
I'm pretty sure that global economic realities will allow employers to continue this trend, but I think they will facing rapid diminishing returns on their efforts. I can whip my dog and get some control over him, but ultimately he will stop doing anything useful. I'm much better off positively reinforcing the behaviors I want.
All of this reminds me of an apocryphal saying I was told was attributed to Soviet era workers. "They can never pay me less than I can work."
Where in fact, while we didn't do German engineering, we could make some kickass killing machinery ourselves, and we had the resources to do it for a long time. So it would be a tit for tat war, with Americans and British countering German innovation. For them to win, the "what if game has to allow them unlimited people and resources, and for the USA to not have developed the A-Bomb.
Excluding the high tech stuff like jets and ballistic missiles, it'd be interesting to know how something like standardizing on the Sturmgewehr in 1940 would have influenced the outcome.
The Americans didn't see the value in the modern assault rifle until they faced it in Viet Nam and even then getting the M-16 right took years under combat circumstances that were far more favorable for development than WW II. The Thompson was too complicated to mass produce enough of, the Grease Gun lacked the accuracy and range even though it was a more producible. The Sten wasn't much better and probably worse ballistically. The M2 may have been somewhat competitive, but the.30 carbine still lacks the range and punch of the 7.62 Kurz.
The resources argument probably would have still held out, but the Germans were a uniquely effective infantry force and wide adoption of a vastly superior infantry weapon (which was essentially copied by every army in the world) might have bought the Germans a lot of time, though perhaps not enough to avoid getting nuked.
I would think it would make more sense to invest time and energy into making existing filtration systems that can be mass produced and use simple materials would be more beneficial than one, when used correctly, loses half its value over time (the book part).
And am I the only one who feels like we are taking pages from the playbook of the Axis in WWII and making the same dumb moves?
And just to have the nation that defeated you take all your research and develop your ideas into practical implementations!
The Germans larger problem wasn't their innovation, but when most of their ideas came to fruition they were so out of resources and so pressured by Allied bombing that they couldn't further refine them. You can play what-if all day, but what if the Germans had five more years of time to refine many of their (then) far-out ideas?
We could have been fighting an army with accurate and effective ballistic missiles, jet fighters, an infantry armed with select-fire assault rifles and already highly effective (and probably further refined) man-portable squad automatic weapon (the MG-42).
I think he's been a public personallity for so long that he's had a hard time not shaping his message as a political persona. Some of that I think is his appeal, but he needs to strike a fine line between being himself and becoming a caricature of himself.
I think his real weakness will be lack of any real policy depth. I'm pretty sure he has ideas and believes that every problem is just another business opportuntiy where a deal can be struck that profits everybody. I don't know, though, that public policy is necessarily a topic that can treated as just a bunch of one-off deals but instead requires a little more depth.
I suppose it's possible he could surround himself with the right policy experts (all Presidents ultimately do) but then who's policy is it?
I think he's too practical minded. Trump has the financial resources to turn every business dispute he has into the legal equivalent of WW III, but he hasn't, because he knows he can't win them all, even when the odds are strongly in his favor, and doing so would ultimately be extremely costly.
To the contrary, I think he might actually be better than most at diplomacy -- he knows how to negotiate and strike deals, even or especially with people who are hard to deal with. I'd be really surprised at some point if he didn't have to deal with the mafia in NYC during the course of building his real estate empire. If you've outlasted John Gotti, how hard can Putin be to deal with?
I've read that in more than one place. I own a Volvo, and I don't know how much of that car Volvo actually *makes*. The engine is from Yamaha, the glass Saint-Gobain, the transmission is from Aisin (which I think is owned by Toyota), the AWD systems from Haldex, and on and on and on.
Cars may be designed by their marques and depending on a bunch of factors those companies may actually make some of the parts that go into them, but so many automotive systems are from the giant international automotive systems parts bins and mostly just integrated with the manufacturer car design.
Where a lot of these car makers do excel is the coordination of all these parts and system makers and then final assembly of the product.
It's hard to see Apple wanting to get into the car assembly business and as far as I know there really isn't a Foxconn of final assembly you can have build your car design. It's very labor intensive, the UAW is still something of a force to be dealt with, and it's a business Apple has zero experience with.
Frankly, I see the "Apple car" as a way to come up with CarPlay on steroids -- a test platform to figure out how they can come up with some kind of next generation interface and management system that they can sell to carmakers. I would seriously doubt they have the slightest interest in actually getting into the vehicle assembly business.
My (probably too charitable) assumption is that Trump is just a highly pragmatic businessman who sees stuff like paying off politicians as an undesirable but unavoidable part of the existing system. He made a statement like that at the debate regarding bankruptcies where he said he was just using the system as it existed.
It's just the rules of the game as it exists. You can play by them and achieve your goals, or you can take a moral stance and achieve your goals, but suboptimally (higher costs, longer delays, etc) or not at all. Your competition will likely play by those rules and if you don't, you're at a competitive disadvantage.
If (and this is a big if) Trump sincerely believes the system is broken (despite playing by its rules), he is kind of uniquely qualified to fix it because he knows how to fix it on the buying side. Politicians never seem to want to eliminate money-for-influence because they are on the benefits side, but somebody like Trump could (all very theoretically) fix it by making government provide the results without making greasing politicians a requirement.
All this being said, I'm not a fan of Trump for the most part. But there's this kind of weird angle you can look at him and find his track record of business success somewhat impressive and his somewhat chaotic pragmatism appealing.
I hope this continues to be a point of discussion in this election, rather than what names Trump called certain women.
This is where Trump's personality is doing him in.
If he was just a little less of an asshole, his intimate knowledge of money in politics from a *buyer's* perspective and ability to name names, amounts and "policy outcomes" might be a huge advantage.
Not that he mentioned it -- you could see many candidates look visibly nervous when he mentioned he had given donations to most of the candidates on the stage.
What he SHOULD have done was produced cancelled checks (or certified facsimiles) from his suit coat, held them out in his hand, and said "I've donated money to most of these guys at one point, and here are the cancelled checks to prove it" and then run through them rattling off amounts, dates and names.
That would have been AMAZING. It's one thing to have Bernie Sanders or the anti-money left complain about money in politics, it'd be completely different to have a guy who's actually written the checks produce them spontaneously in public in front of the douchebags who take the money.
And I grant Trump enough credit as a pragmatic businessman who knows there are times you gotta write a check (or stuff a brown paper bag) if you want to get past some of these guys and get something done. Yes, it's awful, but not doing it is probably a significant business liability (especially if you operate in NYC).
Now, the bummer postscript is I think somebody fact-checked Trump's claim and he'd only actually given money to a couple of them and it was kind of squishy how it was given -- a lot of these guys route their bribes through their favorite charities or something to skirt laws, hide bribes or obfuscate the process somehow.
But still, seeing the guy that wrote the checks on stage bitching about how everybody has their hand out in front of the egg-suckers who have their hands out would have been truly wonderful.
Maybe that's the unintended consequence of a write once, run anywhere language -- they were supposed to transcend the operating system. They never made a Java operating system because of that concept, and Sun really wanted to sell Solaris, too.
because there was always a clock wherever I was, either on my computer, laptop, cell phone, car dashboard, departure gate, whatever
Some of these are networked synced, but "dashboard...whatever", for many wall-clock values of "whatever", aren't synced with anything other than the time source of whoever pushed the buttons when they were set. AC wall clocks drift with slight variations in AC frequency.
Does that "this will go to the press if I don't check in" failsafe actually work in real life, or only in detective fiction?
Who provides this kind of service? My first guess would be an attorney, but that might require some explaining and some examining of information and the attorney might be unwilling to play along if they thought they would get some blowback from it.
I like having a watch to be on a consistent time. I find the various clocks (other than computer clocks) to be not on a consistent time, being off 5 minutes in both directions overall.
And only parts of Southwest Minneapolis. My neighborhood doesn't have it, but I think part of that may be cursed geography. We were the LAST neighborhood to get DSL in the city.
However, CenturyStink is going to be offering it soon. They had utility subcontractors stringing fiber along the poles in our neighborhood a few months ago.
My hope is that it will prod USI to get our neighborhood covered as well, and that CL will sell internet access only, and not require phone service, TV, and other valu-add bullshit.
There are ways to tweak it that might help, like some kind of decreasing capital gains tax index tied to how long securities are held. Create a financial disincentive for short-term trading and an incentive for buy-and-hold. The unintended side effect might be less market liquidity.
I also wonder if there shouldn't be some mandate to pay of dividends. Stocks that don't pay dividends seem to only derive value from price increases in the stock, creating all kinds of perverse incentives.
It might even effect compensation imbalance, since cash that would otherwise pay a dividend can be pumped into executive compensation.
To be honest with you, I trust the NSA MORE than a trust any local cop or prosecutor.
Maybe that's misplaced, but I have the gut feeling that the NSA has bigger fish to fry than me. World leaders to spy on, Islamists to locate, global events to manipulate. Whatever shenanigans I might get up, so long as they don't rate on any national security stage, the NSA doesn't care about. Sure, there's a vanishingly small percentage chance that my phone might have been within 100' of some douchebag and I might get hauled off to Guantanamo Bay, but it's hard to lose sleep about.
The local prosecutor? He loves all prosecutions. Think I might have a gram of pot in my house? Some old gun my dad dumped on me before he lit off to Florida with his 3rd wife? He's looking to get-reelected. Maybe move up to state AG. Maybe get himself a Federal slot.
The local cop? Maybe I wasn't respectful enough at my traffic stop. Maybe he thinks I'm hiding something. Maybe he's taking the sargeant's exam soon and wants another felony bust to make sure it's a sure thing.
I think local law enforcement types are the ones that I really worry about because they're the ones for whom the small time shit really matters and making more small time shit is how they get ahead and they want to get ahead.
They wanted hardware manufacturer adoption and carrier adoption without the dealmaking Apple did with AT&T to get them to allow a device they couldn't modify with carrier crapware.
I wonder if they know regret making that Faustian bargain given the noise level about carrier skins, lack of updates, etc.
Interesting, but with a 42' boat it seems to be slightly past the point where the size and weight of the vessel makes sense for electric power.
I'm also surprised at the engineering decision to make the battery only 60kw -- that's low end Model S capacity, but given the included 1000 hp worth of diesel maybe it makes sense.
It would be interesting to know if they also looked at pure diesel-electric hybrid propulsion (eg, Volt-style) where the engine(s) are only responsible for electric power generation. They may have gotten away with only a single, smaller diesel engine but would have needed larger electric motors. The weight trade from losing an engine might buy more battery, although ultimately speed will be sacrificed. It's tough to beat 1100 diesel horsepower.
What's also interesting is they aren't changing hull design. Planing hulls are great if you want to go fast, but they're super inefficient if you can't apply enough power to reach the planing speed. A hybrid boat would probably greatly benefit from a hull design oriented towards the available power.
Too much network bandwidth? Too much storage capacity? Too much CPU?
Usually the drill seems to involve a lot of begging and pleading for money from management. The intermediate levels get dinged if they have to go back to the well, but they don't seem to get dinged if budgeted money ends up buying unused capacity.
I don't doubt there are places which do heavy audits and ask hard questions about why you have a SAN with a bunch of free space or why your 10 gig NICs are running at sub-gigabit utilization and cause all manner of pain and suffering for excess capacity already budgeted and bought.
But usually it doesn't seem to happen that way. Management barely supplies enough resources to meet their running demands and line management buys as much excess capacity as they can beg, borrow or steal because they know they will be punished for buying too little.
There's some indication that your body actually reacts to the taste of sweetness... although I only half-believe that myself, it's still interesting to think about at minimum.
It's made the rounds the past year or so and I find it interesting but I want a much better hypothesis for how it works than "because taste".
If you consume large amounts of sweets over a long period of time, I can see some kind of Pavlovian-type response where your body produces an insulin response to sweets, since you've been actually providing sugars when the body tastes sweets,
But what happens if you taste sweet but stop providing the sugar to go along with it? I think there's some biochemistry involved in actually producing an insulin response, I'm suspicious it's not a biochemical process that can necessarily be stimulated on its own merely by taste.
I also suspect that criticism of sugar-free drinks as being insulin-stimulating is just a new iteration of the debunked scare theories involving saccharin and aspartame, all of which I think are variations on puritanical thinking that wants to make something enjoyable (a sweet-tasting drink) "bad for you" and push the notion that the only road to redemption is through forgoing pleasure (ie, just drinking plain water).
I think so much of our worldview has been dominated by centuries of Christian theology that theories that postulate negative consequences for pleasurable behaviors and that only denial of pleasure results in "redemption" that culturally we tend to gravitate to explanations that reflect this thinking.
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By measuring myself, I found it takes about 20-30 minutes to become fully focused and ease into maximum productivity, which could last for hours if not interrupted.
Yes, a thousand times this. Nobody understands the penalty of the context switch.
I work as an IT consultant/contractor and some of the people who are what I call "desk-biased" don't seem to understand the context switch penalty. On more than one occasion they've kind of griped about why task X wasn't done. "You left the client at 3:30, you got home by 4, why wasn't it done by 4:30?"
Even though the task itself takes about 30 minutes (if everything goes right), It's not like you can just walk in the door, sit down, and just start step 1 of task X. There's both the practical side -- setup laptop, get signed into the right VPN, bring up the right system, start the task" but a mental shift required to just get started on the task, some of which might be substantively identifiable (ie, look up documentation, etc) but some of it seems purely psychological and hard to put into words. And then there's pure distractions of coming home, dealing with the dog, the phone call that happened, the text message, the urgent email, and so on.
I find as I get older my prime window of focus is when I first get up. Maybe it's the caffeine, but I think it's a certain distraction-free clarity I only get in any quantity in the morning. Once the day gets going, it's hard to get the time necessary to get re-focused enough to be as productive.
The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick, not enough carrot (and the bullshit perks like a closer parking spot or free cafeteria tokens don't count).
American business has reaped huge productivity gains from its white collar workforces through computers, networking and telecommunications, both intrinsic gains (more output from the same effort) and structural gains (getting productivity where it would otherwise wouldn't have, like laptops in planes/hotels/homes, smartphone messaging, etc). And workers really haven't seen any income improvement from these productivity gains. You might make some side arguments that remote work enables leisure time that might otherwise be spent at a desk, but I think the reality is that pure leisure time has been degraded by electronic tethers.
In addition, business has reaped gains by other forms of wage suppression like offshoring and outsourcing to H1Bs, which probably has had a productivity increase by simply ratcheting up the fear factor and making employees less demanding of wage increases.
I'm pretty sure that global economic realities will allow employers to continue this trend, but I think they will facing rapid diminishing returns on their efforts. I can whip my dog and get some control over him, but ultimately he will stop doing anything useful. I'm much better off positively reinforcing the behaviors I want.
All of this reminds me of an apocryphal saying I was told was attributed to Soviet era workers. "They can never pay me less than I can work."
I wonder how many Zimbabweans wish they still lived Ian Smith's Rhodesia.
Where in fact, while we didn't do German engineering, we could make some kickass killing machinery ourselves, and we had the resources to do it for a long time. So it would be a tit for tat war, with Americans and British countering German innovation. For them to win, the "what if game has to allow them unlimited people and resources, and for the USA to not have developed the A-Bomb.
Excluding the high tech stuff like jets and ballistic missiles, it'd be interesting to know how something like standardizing on the Sturmgewehr in 1940 would have influenced the outcome.
The Americans didn't see the value in the modern assault rifle until they faced it in Viet Nam and even then getting the M-16 right took years under combat circumstances that were far more favorable for development than WW II. The Thompson was too complicated to mass produce enough of, the Grease Gun lacked the accuracy and range even though it was a more producible. The Sten wasn't much better and probably worse ballistically. The M2 may have been somewhat competitive, but the .30 carbine still lacks the range and punch of the 7.62 Kurz.
The resources argument probably would have still held out, but the Germans were a uniquely effective infantry force and wide adoption of a vastly superior infantry weapon (which was essentially copied by every army in the world) might have bought the Germans a lot of time, though perhaps not enough to avoid getting nuked.
....proves successful.
Isn't that a more accurate description?
I would think it would make more sense to invest time and energy into making existing filtration systems that can be mass produced and use simple materials would be more beneficial than one, when used correctly, loses half its value over time (the book part).
And am I the only one who feels like we are taking pages from the playbook of the Axis in WWII and making the same dumb moves?
And just to have the nation that defeated you take all your research and develop your ideas into practical implementations!
The Germans larger problem wasn't their innovation, but when most of their ideas came to fruition they were so out of resources and so pressured by Allied bombing that they couldn't further refine them. You can play what-if all day, but what if the Germans had five more years of time to refine many of their (then) far-out ideas?
We could have been fighting an army with accurate and effective ballistic missiles, jet fighters, an infantry armed with select-fire assault rifles and already highly effective (and probably further refined) man-portable squad automatic weapon (the MG-42).
I think he's been a public personallity for so long that he's had a hard time not shaping his message as a political persona. Some of that I think is his appeal, but he needs to strike a fine line between being himself and becoming a caricature of himself.
I think his real weakness will be lack of any real policy depth. I'm pretty sure he has ideas and believes that every problem is just another business opportuntiy where a deal can be struck that profits everybody. I don't know, though, that public policy is necessarily a topic that can treated as just a bunch of one-off deals but instead requires a little more depth.
I suppose it's possible he could surround himself with the right policy experts (all Presidents ultimately do) but then who's policy is it?
I think he's too practical minded. Trump has the financial resources to turn every business dispute he has into the legal equivalent of WW III, but he hasn't, because he knows he can't win them all, even when the odds are strongly in his favor, and doing so would ultimately be extremely costly.
To the contrary, I think he might actually be better than most at diplomacy -- he knows how to negotiate and strike deals, even or especially with people who are hard to deal with. I'd be really surprised at some point if he didn't have to deal with the mafia in NYC during the course of building his real estate empire. If you've outlasted John Gotti, how hard can Putin be to deal with?
I've read that in more than one place. I own a Volvo, and I don't know how much of that car Volvo actually *makes*. The engine is from Yamaha, the glass Saint-Gobain, the transmission is from Aisin (which I think is owned by Toyota), the AWD systems from Haldex, and on and on and on.
Cars may be designed by their marques and depending on a bunch of factors those companies may actually make some of the parts that go into them, but so many automotive systems are from the giant international automotive systems parts bins and mostly just integrated with the manufacturer car design.
Where a lot of these car makers do excel is the coordination of all these parts and system makers and then final assembly of the product.
It's hard to see Apple wanting to get into the car assembly business and as far as I know there really isn't a Foxconn of final assembly you can have build your car design. It's very labor intensive, the UAW is still something of a force to be dealt with, and it's a business Apple has zero experience with.
Frankly, I see the "Apple car" as a way to come up with CarPlay on steroids -- a test platform to figure out how they can come up with some kind of next generation interface and management system that they can sell to carmakers. I would seriously doubt they have the slightest interest in actually getting into the vehicle assembly business.
My (probably too charitable) assumption is that Trump is just a highly pragmatic businessman who sees stuff like paying off politicians as an undesirable but unavoidable part of the existing system. He made a statement like that at the debate regarding bankruptcies where he said he was just using the system as it existed.
It's just the rules of the game as it exists. You can play by them and achieve your goals, or you can take a moral stance and achieve your goals, but suboptimally (higher costs, longer delays, etc) or not at all. Your competition will likely play by those rules and if you don't, you're at a competitive disadvantage.
If (and this is a big if) Trump sincerely believes the system is broken (despite playing by its rules), he is kind of uniquely qualified to fix it because he knows how to fix it on the buying side. Politicians never seem to want to eliminate money-for-influence because they are on the benefits side, but somebody like Trump could (all very theoretically) fix it by making government provide the results without making greasing politicians a requirement.
All this being said, I'm not a fan of Trump for the most part. But there's this kind of weird angle you can look at him and find his track record of business success somewhat impressive and his somewhat chaotic pragmatism appealing.
I hope this continues to be a point of discussion in this election, rather than what names Trump called certain women.
This is where Trump's personality is doing him in.
If he was just a little less of an asshole, his intimate knowledge of money in politics from a *buyer's* perspective and ability to name names, amounts and "policy outcomes" might be a huge advantage.
This was a huge strategic misstep by Trump.
Not that he mentioned it -- you could see many candidates look visibly nervous when he mentioned he had given donations to most of the candidates on the stage.
What he SHOULD have done was produced cancelled checks (or certified facsimiles) from his suit coat, held them out in his hand, and said "I've donated money to most of these guys at one point, and here are the cancelled checks to prove it" and then run through them rattling off amounts, dates and names.
That would have been AMAZING. It's one thing to have Bernie Sanders or the anti-money left complain about money in politics, it'd be completely different to have a guy who's actually written the checks produce them spontaneously in public in front of the douchebags who take the money.
And I grant Trump enough credit as a pragmatic businessman who knows there are times you gotta write a check (or stuff a brown paper bag) if you want to get past some of these guys and get something done. Yes, it's awful, but not doing it is probably a significant business liability (especially if you operate in NYC).
Now, the bummer postscript is I think somebody fact-checked Trump's claim and he'd only actually given money to a couple of them and it was kind of squishy how it was given -- a lot of these guys route their bribes through their favorite charities or something to skirt laws, hide bribes or obfuscate the process somehow.
But still, seeing the guy that wrote the checks on stage bitching about how everybody has their hand out in front of the egg-suckers who have their hands out would have been truly wonderful.
...about a guy frustrated with bureaucracy, restrictions, etc on obtaining AIDS drugs who basically becomes his own AIDS drug dispensary.
Maybe that's the unintended consequence of a write once, run anywhere language -- they were supposed to transcend the operating system. They never made a Java operating system because of that concept, and Sun really wanted to sell Solaris, too.
because there was always a clock wherever I was, either on my computer, laptop, cell phone, car dashboard, departure gate, whatever
Some of these are networked synced, but "dashboard...whatever", for many wall-clock values of "whatever", aren't synced with anything other than the time source of whoever pushed the buttons when they were set. AC wall clocks drift with slight variations in AC frequency.
Does that "this will go to the press if I don't check in" failsafe actually work in real life, or only in detective fiction?
Who provides this kind of service? My first guess would be an attorney, but that might require some explaining and some examining of information and the attorney might be unwilling to play along if they thought they would get some blowback from it.
I like having a watch to be on a consistent time. I find the various clocks (other than computer clocks) to be not on a consistent time, being off 5 minutes in both directions overall.
And only parts of Southwest Minneapolis. My neighborhood doesn't have it, but I think part of that may be cursed geography. We were the LAST neighborhood to get DSL in the city.
However, CenturyStink is going to be offering it soon. They had utility subcontractors stringing fiber along the poles in our neighborhood a few months ago.
My hope is that it will prod USI to get our neighborhood covered as well, and that CL will sell internet access only, and not require phone service, TV, and other valu-add bullshit.
"No Stress Mondays"
So if I send them a picture of me with a bong, binge-watching TV on Monday they'll give me a discount??
There are ways to tweak it that might help, like some kind of decreasing capital gains tax index tied to how long securities are held. Create a financial disincentive for short-term trading and an incentive for buy-and-hold. The unintended side effect might be less market liquidity.
I also wonder if there shouldn't be some mandate to pay of dividends. Stocks that don't pay dividends seem to only derive value from price increases in the stock, creating all kinds of perverse incentives.
It might even effect compensation imbalance, since cash that would otherwise pay a dividend can be pumped into executive compensation.
To be honest with you, I trust the NSA MORE than a trust any local cop or prosecutor.
Maybe that's misplaced, but I have the gut feeling that the NSA has bigger fish to fry than me. World leaders to spy on, Islamists to locate, global events to manipulate. Whatever shenanigans I might get up, so long as they don't rate on any national security stage, the NSA doesn't care about. Sure, there's a vanishingly small percentage chance that my phone might have been within 100' of some douchebag and I might get hauled off to Guantanamo Bay, but it's hard to lose sleep about.
The local prosecutor? He loves all prosecutions. Think I might have a gram of pot in my house? Some old gun my dad dumped on me before he lit off to Florida with his 3rd wife? He's looking to get-reelected. Maybe move up to state AG. Maybe get himself a Federal slot.
The local cop? Maybe I wasn't respectful enough at my traffic stop. Maybe he thinks I'm hiding something. Maybe he's taking the sargeant's exam soon and wants another felony bust to make sure it's a sure thing.
I think local law enforcement types are the ones that I really worry about because they're the ones for whom the small time shit really matters and making more small time shit is how they get ahead and they want to get ahead.
They wanted hardware manufacturer adoption and carrier adoption without the dealmaking Apple did with AT&T to get them to allow a device they couldn't modify with carrier crapware.
I wonder if they know regret making that Faustian bargain given the noise level about carrier skins, lack of updates, etc.
Interesting, but with a 42' boat it seems to be slightly past the point where the size and weight of the vessel makes sense for electric power.
I'm also surprised at the engineering decision to make the battery only 60kw -- that's low end Model S capacity, but given the included 1000 hp worth of diesel maybe it makes sense.
It would be interesting to know if they also looked at pure diesel-electric hybrid propulsion (eg, Volt-style) where the engine(s) are only responsible for electric power generation. They may have gotten away with only a single, smaller diesel engine but would have needed larger electric motors. The weight trade from losing an engine might buy more battery, although ultimately speed will be sacrificed. It's tough to beat 1100 diesel horsepower.
What's also interesting is they aren't changing hull design. Planing hulls are great if you want to go fast, but they're super inefficient if you can't apply enough power to reach the planing speed. A hybrid boat would probably greatly benefit from a hull design oriented towards the available power.
Too much network bandwidth? Too much storage capacity? Too much CPU?
Usually the drill seems to involve a lot of begging and pleading for money from management. The intermediate levels get dinged if they have to go back to the well, but they don't seem to get dinged if budgeted money ends up buying unused capacity.
I don't doubt there are places which do heavy audits and ask hard questions about why you have a SAN with a bunch of free space or why your 10 gig NICs are running at sub-gigabit utilization and cause all manner of pain and suffering for excess capacity already budgeted and bought.
But usually it doesn't seem to happen that way. Management barely supplies enough resources to meet their running demands and line management buys as much excess capacity as they can beg, borrow or steal because they know they will be punished for buying too little.
There's some indication that your body actually reacts to the taste of sweetness... although I only half-believe that myself, it's still interesting to think about at minimum.
It's made the rounds the past year or so and I find it interesting but I want a much better hypothesis for how it works than "because taste".
If you consume large amounts of sweets over a long period of time, I can see some kind of Pavlovian-type response where your body produces an insulin response to sweets, since you've been actually providing sugars when the body tastes sweets,
But what happens if you taste sweet but stop providing the sugar to go along with it? I think there's some biochemistry involved in actually producing an insulin response, I'm suspicious it's not a biochemical process that can necessarily be stimulated on its own merely by taste.
I also suspect that criticism of sugar-free drinks as being insulin-stimulating is just a new iteration of the debunked scare theories involving saccharin and aspartame, all of which I think are variations on puritanical thinking that wants to make something enjoyable (a sweet-tasting drink) "bad for you" and push the notion that the only road to redemption is through forgoing pleasure (ie, just drinking plain water).
I think so much of our worldview has been dominated by centuries of Christian theology that theories that postulate negative consequences for pleasurable behaviors and that only denial of pleasure results in "redemption" that culturally we tend to gravitate to explanations that reflect this thinking.