Xi Jinping has been rolling on an anti-corruption campaign.
Is there any chance that while this may have some kind of economic benefits for China that it might be some kind of backdoor move against corruption or have some kind of anti-corruption benefit at least equal to its economic benefits?
IIRC, the rail industry has been tied to corruption in the past and merging two big players is a convenient and public way to sideline bad apples without some of that unpleasant scrutiny the Chinese don't like.
My guess was they accuse Google of promoting piracy by not downranking pirated content and get them to agree to license the patent as a payoff, not caring if they actually implement it.
There's always the backdoor idea that if Google someow did tweak pagerank to downrank pirated content they accuse Google of patent violation..
It's not really much of a comparison between single payer health systems and the US system.
I was against ACA because it wasn't single payer. All ACA did was cast into stone a really broken health payment system in which for-profit entities will quickly learn and exploit loopholes for maximum profit and the mandate side of ACA will have us all paying more for it.
I've heard several economists say that what really skews our health system is the lack of direct payment. Since we don't pay for anything we don't know what it costs and it makes it easier to over consume health care because we're one or more steps removed from what things cost.
I totally agree with your criticisms of what really seems like fraudulent billing with in/out of network doctors and drive-by doctoring (I read those NY Times articles, too). It really seems like a deliberately dishonest way to screw patients, especially when it involves surgeries where you had no control over the "assisting" doctor or emergency rooms where, well, it's an emergency.
It's like buying stock and selling it only to be told by your broker that they had to use another clearinghouse to sell your stock and there will be an additional brokerage fee they didn't tell you about.
I'm afraid that these and other unsavory practices will become more common, not less, with ACA and insurance providers squeeze health care costs and doctors look for more ways to rake in fees.
Sadly, I think the "market solution" probably involves having the majority of people pay more out of pocket and either refuse to buy or not be able to buy medical services to force medicine to produce a lower-cost product. As long as they can get paid at current pricing levels they won't charge less.
Like his corporate rivals within Apple? Like his business rivals outside of Apple? Anyone in a position to use it against him?
I guess I don't see the point of the announcement unless it was something unknown except to his closest friends.
It would also seem less like grandstanding if it came along with a $100 million endowment to some charity meant to overcome sexual orientation bullying or something.
I think some of the technology issues involving size, etc. will eventually get fixed. The price may actually end up being less if the value proposition includes using modules in multiple devices, desktops, etc.
The software issue is two-pronged -- one, hardware advances so rapidly right now that I mostly give OEMs a break for bad support of older devices (maybe more nods to Apple, less to Android).
The biggest obstacle for both software and an Ara-like system with modularity is the economics of monolithic device release cycle. OEMs know they can count on a huge amount of sales as entire devices get bought every year.
It's hard to see Apple or Samsung giving up those economics for the economics of incrementalism or even bothering to support incremental component upgrades.
There's all kinds of reasons this won't work, but I'm glad someone disagrees and is spending time developing it anyway because it seems like a cool concept and the idea of a modular phone/phablet/tablet/laptop/desktop system is appealing.
I think a lot of components are rapidly approaching the point where they're good enough for most people -- how many more ppi is Joe Sixpack going to want once a phone is over 300 ppi?
AT&T issues press release defending action as within the definition of "unlimited" they found in the dictionary in that one empty cubicle the temp was using last week.
Settlement agreed upon with the FTC to include your choice of $2.99 worth of AT&T credit on your account or a check for $1.19 if you send 3 years of back statements, including the envelope, to Dewey, Cheatam & Howe who will be overseeing the settlement process.
WMH I liked but WoH introduced too much metaphysical crap -- the religious group and its telekinetic leader and the strange, godlike woman at its core were too much. I wanted to read about the post-technological world, not a quasi-fantasy world populated by near-magical peoples.
I didn't know there was a book 3 out, I'll have to look into it.
I also think he had too many excuses/gimmicks for arbitrarily eliminating some kinds of technology. I would have thought that there would be more "at home" electricity through the adaptation of car batteries and car alternators adapted to work as generators. I read another post-oil type book where these were common.
His paved roads were all reduced to rubble in a really short time. I would assume that without car traffic roads would last a long time -- my residential street is asphalt with a gravel/tar sealcoat and it hasn't been rebuilt in the 15 years I've lived there and shows almost no wear. My uncle owned a farm on a trunk highway in Kansas. In the 1950s they moved the road a mile away and the old trunk highway became a county road. Traffic is low but the road never deteriorated in any meaningful way over 50-some years.
I think a lot of your assumptions come with assumptions.
For example, refrigeration is electric heavy and we have a ton of coal to keep existing coal plants running, but do those steam turbines ever need replacement and where will the replacement turbines come from?
Existing refrigerators will wear out, where will you get refrigerant? Motors? The high-tech polymers used in seals and insulation? Maybe a very clever chemist and mechanical engineer could cobble together a kind of Road Warrior-style ammonia refrigerator from spare parts if they could figure out how to synthesize ammonia in quantity.
The book isn't that great, but "A World Made By Hand" by James Howard Kunstler paints a compelling idea of what a post-technological world might look like. Pretty much everything is grown and made locally. A key subgroup runs the old landfill like a mine, painstakingly digging and sorting its content for trade -- they even disassemble houses down to the nails for materials. One group takes over an old school and digs up the asphalt parking lot and melts it to harvest the tars to fix the roof.
Everybody farms at some scale, either large-ish with animal and big human labor or with large vegetable gardens at homes. Refrigeration means ice boxes and ice houses, harvesting winter ice ala 1800s. Everybody grows a small patch of poppies which the doctor uses to make laudanum, the only anesthesia for any kind of serious medical situation.
"Trade" involves small-scale river traffic of agricultural goods and is a serious gamble as one of the narratives involves the boats and their cargo being basically pirated. Another narrative device is the lack of wheat bread, a rust infection keeps any serious wheat crop from being raised, leaving them eating corn or flaxseed bread. Metals are in short supply in a narrative gimmick based on the last major war recycling anything available, so there's almost no junked cars for scrap metal.
The book itself is so-so, but the ideas involved in a world basically only missing fossil fuels is pretty interesting.
I just read a book about Watergate and it mostly makes you think Nixon was a rank amateur. Bungled, dirt-digging expeditions that were mostly designed to dig up embassing, low-rent scandals, conducted by second-tier political operatives outside of Nixon's actual control or direction.
It seems like just an evolution of the usual political chicanery employed up to this day.
The rest of the Nixon mystique just seems like hysteria. You can't tell me every administration since hasn't had a poitical enemies list or attempted to obfuscate their scandals and errors and suppress leaks. Nixon just happened to be caught in the tide of poltical and social upheavel of his time. It's winner's history.
Today's political skullduggery seems much scarier given the technology and powers the government has it didn't then, from the Patriot Act, National Security Letters to civil forfeiture.
I would have thought that they would have had at least a couple since the Reston introduction in 1989 if not prior to that based on intelligence related to Soviet biowarfare research. Or during some of the concern about smallpox over the last 15 years.
With a credit card, the risk is entirely the bank's, not yours. Bad transaction, fraud, theft? Dispute the charge with your credit card company. They're out the loss, not you. Debit card? You're out the loss and it may be difficult to recoup the money, although I suspect better banks (did I really just type that?) have more generous reimbursement policies these days, but still the risk is on you first.
The APR on a credit card is meaningless if you pay the balance every month. It's like getting the free use of someone else's money at their risk. I also suspect that if there was something wrong with a major transaction, having Visa/MC/Amex/Some Bank going to bat for their money on your behalf means more than a bad transaction where you're already out the cash from a debit.
Frequent use and regular zeroing of your balance also makes you a better credit risk. Nothing says "financial stability" like someone running a couple grand a month through their credit card and paying it off. Having access to credit and using it without being a fuckup gets you lower APRs on car loans, mortgages and probably greases the skids on other kinds of credit-ish background checks where someone is wondering if you live within or beyond your means. I think it kind of sucks in principal, but with credit checks being part of hiring decisions it might make the difference between getting hired and not getting hired.
Not having a credit card may also make you look like a bad risk.
Plus, there's all the various places where a credit card is nearly required, like renting a car or some hotel stays. And HAVING credit when you don't need it beats NEEDING credit when it may be hard to come by, like when you're unemployed.
Maybe this explains why the rich have complex financial arrangements. I'm sure a lot of it is about avoiding taxes and the chore of investing (and spending) lots of money, but maybe some of it is about insulating your wealth from these kinds of things.
I know these people weren't rich and a couple were probably only sort of middle class (like the restaurant owner) and they may be chosen because of their limited resources to fight back. And a lot of rich people are high salaried or compensated in non-cash ways.
But it's like the quote about robbing banks because that's where the money is -- the IRS must be fairly interested in sort of wealthy people, too, since a $50k legal tab is expensive after the government has taken all your cash.
I remember reading somewhere (maybe even here) about a really successful IRS agent who had a technique where he would see fancy cars and run the plates and try to figure out if the owner of the car had the tax data to support owning that kind of car.
I think being an IRS agent comes with some significant moral hazards.
There was a time when their readership was white-shoe, blue-blood Ivy Leaguers who didn't have much appetite for low-rent right wing politics.
Now their readership are low-rent capitalists from the hinterlands who think that cheap greed plays and ideology go hand-in-hand, so that's what they give them.
They seem to have moved to the description "less lethal" when talking about weapons of this class, especially projectile weapons like pepper spray pellet guns and the "rubber" bullets used in extreme riot control circumstances.
I think most individual server filesystem monitoring for free space is kind of a waste of time anymore or at least low prioirty.
SANs and virtualized storage and modern operating systems can extend filesystems easily. Thin provisioning means you can allocate surpluses to filesystems without actually consuming real disk until you use it. Size your filesystem with surpluses and you won't run out.
Now you only have to monitor your SAN's actual consumption, and hopefully you bought enough SAN to cover your growth until you can buy another one.
I listened to an economics podcast that discussed the role of automation in the economy.
The Google car came up and the MIT professor who was being interviewed said that contrary to what a lot of people think, the Google car is highly dependent on very detailed annotated maps and can't just detect stuff like traffic controls (lights, signals, etc).
I can see a driverless cars happening in urban areas if "self-drive" features start getting built into roads, like RFID chips embedded in lane stripes, traffic controls that have RF signalling. Even then you would probably need car-car signalling.
But at some point it seems like they aren't driverless cars as much as they are trackless trains or some kind of personalized mass transit. Decide you want a ride someplace, request a car and it follows GPS + signalling to your house from its parking place and then delivers you to a destination. Uber without the driver.
Can we first then agree one what exactly constitutes a troll?
Of course not. Defining it would undermine the censorship power of people who want to ban/control/censor "trolls". A vague definition that includes anything from "classic" trolling -- inflammatory opinions about a topic designed to elicit responses ("If Macs didn't suck so much...") to whatever existing harassing, threatening or fraudulent behavior has been re-labeled trolling allows maximum latitude for those given the authority to censor it.
I think "the new trolling" is a complicated concept, driven by the large number of people who weren't users of longtime Internet social forums (web-based message boards, USENET) but have come online in the age of Facebook and have sort of everyday expectations of civil social engagement which are less common. They may see what passed for heated debate in years past (EMACS! vi!) as pretty hostile.
Another driving force seems to be really extreme people who seem kind of publicity-driven who really seem to embrace what amounts not to trolling but to harassment and defamation, either just for spite and publicity or with some kind of weak self-righteous justification.
This seems to be the way its actually being adopted if you start to consider the collision detection, adaptive cruise control and lane detection systems in some cars.
There was an article hear about a luxury car that has the ability to let you take your hands off the wheel for a certain amount of time under "cruise control" conditions and it will actually drive itself for a brief period. I think the article was about some "hack" that let you evade the built-in time limit for taking your hands off the wheel, meaning that the self-driving component was manufacturer-limited to avoid being used as a self-driving car.
I'd guess that self-driving cars will get adopted more this way than suddenly buying a car that can drive itself everywhere perfectly.
I've bought clothes from LL Bean for over 25 years. On more than one occasion over that time I've noticed new pants bought in the same size and style as I've been wearing suddenly getting a little roomier.
I'm not sure if the sizing changes were the result of changes in fashion or adaptation to a clientele with more girth. If you look at magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of mens clothing was much slimmer fitting and perhaps a looser fit became the fashion standard. But it could also be that people were simply buying larger sizes to accommodate weight gain and vendors adapted their sizing in ways that made them looser fitting without specifically altering the specific dimensions of waist size or leg length.
It could be just changes in contract manufacturers, but I think that kind of variation would be too small to notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Xi Jinping has been rolling on an anti-corruption campaign.
Is there any chance that while this may have some kind of economic benefits for China that it might be some kind of backdoor move against corruption or have some kind of anti-corruption benefit at least equal to its economic benefits?
IIRC, the rail industry has been tied to corruption in the past and merging two big players is a convenient and public way to sideline bad apples without some of that unpleasant scrutiny the Chinese don't like.
My guess was they accuse Google of promoting piracy by not downranking pirated content and get them to agree to license the patent as a payoff, not caring if they actually implement it.
There's always the backdoor idea that if Google someow did tweak pagerank to downrank pirated content they accuse Google of patent violation..
That was my first thought. Use only one, inconvenient digit held at a strange angle as your unlock code.
Maybe they should have a self-destruct fingerprint that causes a wipe.
It's not really much of a comparison between single payer health systems and the US system.
I was against ACA because it wasn't single payer. All ACA did was cast into stone a really broken health payment system in which for-profit entities will quickly learn and exploit loopholes for maximum profit and the mandate side of ACA will have us all paying more for it.
I've heard several economists say that what really skews our health system is the lack of direct payment. Since we don't pay for anything we don't know what it costs and it makes it easier to over consume health care because we're one or more steps removed from what things cost.
I totally agree with your criticisms of what really seems like fraudulent billing with in/out of network doctors and drive-by doctoring (I read those NY Times articles, too). It really seems like a deliberately dishonest way to screw patients, especially when it involves surgeries where you had no control over the "assisting" doctor or emergency rooms where, well, it's an emergency.
It's like buying stock and selling it only to be told by your broker that they had to use another clearinghouse to sell your stock and there will be an additional brokerage fee they didn't tell you about.
I'm afraid that these and other unsavory practices will become more common, not less, with ACA and insurance providers squeeze health care costs and doctors look for more ways to rake in fees.
Sadly, I think the "market solution" probably involves having the majority of people pay more out of pocket and either refuse to buy or not be able to buy medical services to force medicine to produce a lower-cost product. As long as they can get paid at current pricing levels they won't charge less.
Like his corporate rivals within Apple? Like his business rivals outside of Apple? Anyone in a position to use it against him?
I guess I don't see the point of the announcement unless it was something unknown except to his closest friends.
It would also seem less like grandstanding if it came along with a $100 million endowment to some charity meant to overcome sexual orientation bullying or something.
Go new school -- Strontium-90! And then it won't need charging.
I think some of the technology issues involving size, etc. will eventually get fixed. The price may actually end up being less if the value proposition includes using modules in multiple devices, desktops, etc.
The software issue is two-pronged -- one, hardware advances so rapidly right now that I mostly give OEMs a break for bad support of older devices (maybe more nods to Apple, less to Android).
The biggest obstacle for both software and an Ara-like system with modularity is the economics of monolithic device release cycle. OEMs know they can count on a huge amount of sales as entire devices get bought every year.
It's hard to see Apple or Samsung giving up those economics for the economics of incrementalism or even bothering to support incremental component upgrades.
There's all kinds of reasons this won't work, but I'm glad someone disagrees and is spending time developing it anyway because it seems like a cool concept and the idea of a modular phone/phablet/tablet/laptop/desktop system is appealing.
I think a lot of components are rapidly approaching the point where they're good enough for most people -- how many more ppi is Joe Sixpack going to want once a phone is over 300 ppi?
AT&T issues press release defending action as within the definition of "unlimited" they found in the dictionary in that one empty cubicle the temp was using last week.
Settlement agreed upon with the FTC to include your choice of $2.99 worth of AT&T credit on your account or a check for $1.19 if you send 3 years of back statements, including the envelope, to Dewey, Cheatam & Howe who will be overseeing the settlement process.
WMH I liked but WoH introduced too much metaphysical crap -- the religious group and its telekinetic leader and the strange, godlike woman at its core were too much. I wanted to read about the post-technological world, not a quasi-fantasy world populated by near-magical peoples.
I didn't know there was a book 3 out, I'll have to look into it.
I also think he had too many excuses/gimmicks for arbitrarily eliminating some kinds of technology. I would have thought that there would be more "at home" electricity through the adaptation of car batteries and car alternators adapted to work as generators. I read another post-oil type book where these were common.
His paved roads were all reduced to rubble in a really short time. I would assume that without car traffic roads would last a long time -- my residential street is asphalt with a gravel/tar sealcoat and it hasn't been rebuilt in the 15 years I've lived there and shows almost no wear. My uncle owned a farm on a trunk highway in Kansas. In the 1950s they moved the road a mile away and the old trunk highway became a county road. Traffic is low but the road never deteriorated in any meaningful way over 50-some years.
I think a lot of your assumptions come with assumptions.
For example, refrigeration is electric heavy and we have a ton of coal to keep existing coal plants running, but do those steam turbines ever need replacement and where will the replacement turbines come from?
Existing refrigerators will wear out, where will you get refrigerant? Motors? The high-tech polymers used in seals and insulation? Maybe a very clever chemist and mechanical engineer could cobble together a kind of Road Warrior-style ammonia refrigerator from spare parts if they could figure out how to synthesize ammonia in quantity.
The book isn't that great, but "A World Made By Hand" by James Howard Kunstler paints a compelling idea of what a post-technological world might look like. Pretty much everything is grown and made locally. A key subgroup runs the old landfill like a mine, painstakingly digging and sorting its content for trade -- they even disassemble houses down to the nails for materials. One group takes over an old school and digs up the asphalt parking lot and melts it to harvest the tars to fix the roof.
Everybody farms at some scale, either large-ish with animal and big human labor or with large vegetable gardens at homes. Refrigeration means ice boxes and ice houses, harvesting winter ice ala 1800s. Everybody grows a small patch of poppies which the doctor uses to make laudanum, the only anesthesia for any kind of serious medical situation.
"Trade" involves small-scale river traffic of agricultural goods and is a serious gamble as one of the narratives involves the boats and their cargo being basically pirated. Another narrative device is the lack of wheat bread, a rust infection keeps any serious wheat crop from being raised, leaving them eating corn or flaxseed bread. Metals are in short supply in a narrative gimmick based on the last major war recycling anything available, so there's almost no junked cars for scrap metal.
The book itself is so-so, but the ideas involved in a world basically only missing fossil fuels is pretty interesting.
I just read a book about Watergate and it mostly makes you think Nixon was a rank amateur. Bungled, dirt-digging expeditions that were mostly designed to dig up embassing, low-rent scandals, conducted by second-tier political operatives outside of Nixon's actual control or direction.
It seems like just an evolution of the usual political chicanery employed up to this day.
The rest of the Nixon mystique just seems like hysteria. You can't tell me every administration since hasn't had a poitical enemies list or attempted to obfuscate their scandals and errors and suppress leaks. Nixon just happened to be caught in the tide of poltical and social upheavel of his time. It's winner's history.
Today's political skullduggery seems much scarier given the technology and powers the government has it didn't then, from the Patriot Act, National Security Letters to civil forfeiture.
Really?
I would have thought that they would have had at least a couple since the Reston introduction in 1989 if not prior to that based on intelligence related to Soviet biowarfare research. Or during some of the concern about smallpox over the last 15 years.
With a credit card, the risk is entirely the bank's, not yours. Bad transaction, fraud, theft? Dispute the charge with your credit card company. They're out the loss, not you. Debit card? You're out the loss and it may be difficult to recoup the money, although I suspect better banks (did I really just type that?) have more generous reimbursement policies these days, but still the risk is on you first.
The APR on a credit card is meaningless if you pay the balance every month. It's like getting the free use of someone else's money at their risk. I also suspect that if there was something wrong with a major transaction, having Visa/MC/Amex/Some Bank going to bat for their money on your behalf means more than a bad transaction where you're already out the cash from a debit.
Frequent use and regular zeroing of your balance also makes you a better credit risk. Nothing says "financial stability" like someone running a couple grand a month through their credit card and paying it off. Having access to credit and using it without being a fuckup gets you lower APRs on car loans, mortgages and probably greases the skids on other kinds of credit-ish background checks where someone is wondering if you live within or beyond your means. I think it kind of sucks in principal, but with credit checks being part of hiring decisions it might make the difference between getting hired and not getting hired.
Not having a credit card may also make you look like a bad risk.
Plus, there's all the various places where a credit card is nearly required, like renting a car or some hotel stays. And HAVING credit when you don't need it beats NEEDING credit when it may be hard to come by, like when you're unemployed.
Maybe this explains why the rich have complex financial arrangements. I'm sure a lot of it is about avoiding taxes and the chore of investing (and spending) lots of money, but maybe some of it is about insulating your wealth from these kinds of things.
I know these people weren't rich and a couple were probably only sort of middle class (like the restaurant owner) and they may be chosen because of their limited resources to fight back. And a lot of rich people are high salaried or compensated in non-cash ways.
But it's like the quote about robbing banks because that's where the money is -- the IRS must be fairly interested in sort of wealthy people, too, since a $50k legal tab is expensive after the government has taken all your cash.
I remember reading somewhere (maybe even here) about a really successful IRS agent who had a technique where he would see fancy cars and run the plates and try to figure out if the owner of the car had the tax data to support owning that kind of car.
I think being an IRS agent comes with some significant moral hazards.
We had slavery in the US once, it was "legal". That doesn't make it "right".
As it turns out, "most people" didn't like competing against slave labor in the labor market or against giant slave-staffed plantations for farmland.
It's cute that you think that slavery ended because the populace and the government felt high-minded and righteous about it.
There was a time when their readership was white-shoe, blue-blood Ivy Leaguers who didn't have much appetite for low-rent right wing politics.
Now their readership are low-rent capitalists from the hinterlands who think that cheap greed plays and ideology go hand-in-hand, so that's what they give them.
They seem to have moved to the description "less lethal" when talking about weapons of this class, especially projectile weapons like pepper spray pellet guns and the "rubber" bullets used in extreme riot control circumstances.
I think most individual server filesystem monitoring for free space is kind of a waste of time anymore or at least low prioirty.
SANs and virtualized storage and modern operating systems can extend filesystems easily. Thin provisioning means you can allocate surpluses to filesystems without actually consuming real disk until you use it. Size your filesystem with surpluses and you won't run out.
Now you only have to monitor your SAN's actual consumption, and hopefully you bought enough SAN to cover your growth until you can buy another one.
I listened to an economics podcast that discussed the role of automation in the economy.
The Google car came up and the MIT professor who was being interviewed said that contrary to what a lot of people think, the Google car is highly dependent on very detailed annotated maps and can't just detect stuff like traffic controls (lights, signals, etc).
I can see a driverless cars happening in urban areas if "self-drive" features start getting built into roads, like RFID chips embedded in lane stripes, traffic controls that have RF signalling. Even then you would probably need car-car signalling.
But at some point it seems like they aren't driverless cars as much as they are trackless trains or some kind of personalized mass transit. Decide you want a ride someplace, request a car and it follows GPS + signalling to your house from its parking place and then delivers you to a destination. Uber without the driver.
Can we first then agree one what exactly constitutes a troll?
Of course not. Defining it would undermine the censorship power of people who want to ban/control/censor "trolls". A vague definition that includes anything from "classic" trolling -- inflammatory opinions about a topic designed to elicit responses ("If Macs didn't suck so much...") to whatever existing harassing, threatening or fraudulent behavior has been re-labeled trolling allows maximum latitude for those given the authority to censor it.
I think "the new trolling" is a complicated concept, driven by the large number of people who weren't users of longtime Internet social forums (web-based message boards, USENET) but have come online in the age of Facebook and have sort of everyday expectations of civil social engagement which are less common. They may see what passed for heated debate in years past (EMACS! vi!) as pretty hostile.
Another driving force seems to be really extreme people who seem kind of publicity-driven who really seem to embrace what amounts not to trolling but to harassment and defamation, either just for spite and publicity or with some kind of weak self-righteous justification.
This seems to be the way its actually being adopted if you start to consider the collision detection, adaptive cruise control and lane detection systems in some cars.
There was an article hear about a luxury car that has the ability to let you take your hands off the wheel for a certain amount of time under "cruise control" conditions and it will actually drive itself for a brief period. I think the article was about some "hack" that let you evade the built-in time limit for taking your hands off the wheel, meaning that the self-driving component was manufacturer-limited to avoid being used as a self-driving car.
I'd guess that self-driving cars will get adopted more this way than suddenly buying a car that can drive itself everywhere perfectly.
I've bought clothes from LL Bean for over 25 years. On more than one occasion over that time I've noticed new pants bought in the same size and style as I've been wearing suddenly getting a little roomier.
I'm not sure if the sizing changes were the result of changes in fashion or adaptation to a clientele with more girth. If you look at magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of mens clothing was much slimmer fitting and perhaps a looser fit became the fashion standard. But it could also be that people were simply buying larger sizes to accommodate weight gain and vendors adapted their sizing in ways that made them looser fitting without specifically altering the specific dimensions of waist size or leg length.
It could be just changes in contract manufacturers, but I think that kind of variation would be too small to notice.