My only guess (outside of pure rent-seeking monopoly behavior) would be just scale -- 250M people versus 20 million people, 9 million km^2 vs. 238,000 km^2, and the US only has about 1/3 of the population density.
But what was the telecommunications infrastructure like before Ceausescu was deposed? I would guess that individual phone lines were something of a luxury, especially outside core urban areas. Was there even a cable television infrastructure before the 1990s?
Of course, I'm not justifying what feels like underinvestment in US infrastructure, but somehow it seems more likely you'd end up today with something much more modern in a place like Romania which likely had a pretty old and small telecomms buildout until the 1990s.
In most cases, US high speed internet is an "extension" (or bastardization, if you will) of older, pre-existing infrastructure. DSL is built out on top of POTS, and pretty much everything else that isn't fiber to the home is built out on the cable television infrastructure.
My guess is that most of the communications infrastructure, especially Internet connectivity, dates from the mid-1990s at the earliest. It was purpose built, brand-new using modern technologies rather than adapting the crap infrastructure already present in many US cities that dates from the 1980s at latest.
Or even something simpler, like some kind of coup de grace, maybe a 12 gauge slug to the back of the head? Maybe by making executions much more visceral we'll be less inclined to make them clean and clinical and stop thinking about them as clean and clinical.
As bloody as such an execution would be, perhaps it should be so and the judge, prosecuting attorney and lead low enforcement investigators could be mandated to be in attendance and watching. It's one thing to plant evidence, withhold exculpatory information from the defense, commit gross prosecutorial misconduct and run quadrennial judicial elections on your persona as a "hangin' judge" when the convicted is executed somewhere else in a manner more consistent with outpatient surgery than an actual execution.
But when you know ahead of time that if the death penalty goes through you're going to see a human being have a good chunk of the head taken off in front of you, maybe you might not sleep so well knowing it happened because you broke the rules.
Given the kinds and amount of data they want to move to end users, either directly via video or audio streaming/downloads or indirectly from their cloud infrastructure, having an "Amazon Device" only seems to be part of the equation.
With the future of net neutrality seriously in doubt and rent-seekers like Comcast holding their customer base hostage it seems like it would make sense for them to try to get into that market, too.
Google is approaching this, albeit teasingly and slowly to probably not scare regulators as much as anything else.
I'm not sure the 100% idea would ever happen, but I know the notion of varying capital gains taxes based on the duration they have been held has been discussed a lot as means to discourage risky, short-term bet-making, market churn and encourage investment.
C'mon, cell service cuts out all the time. Calls drop, phones misbehave, bluetooth hiccups, batteries die, there's a 1001 ways a cell phone can stop working as expected during a call, especially in motion on the highway.
Saying he's responsible because someone decided to prioritize communicating over driving or navigation and had an accident is ridiculous. What's next, blaming ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile/Sprint for "causing" accidents because they lack perfect coverage? Maybe blaming Apple or Google or Samsung for the same reason?
YOU are responsible for your car while driving, if your gadget fucks up and you feel the need to futz with it, pull over.
he pointed out just how many different businesses had contracts with all these little agencies and offices.
So when we set it up in the usual means of centralized efficiency it costs less because they are fewer vendors and more money goes to a smaller group of people.
Then we complain about the problems of income distribution and wonder how we can use government to redistribute income.
Maybe this is just a kind of organic income redistribution. Maybe people, when given a choice, will choose a certain level of level of inefficiency to achieve some level of fairness over some measurement of efficiency that seems less fair.
And who knows, maybe its more economically beneficial overall to do it this way versus a government driven scheme to redistribute income directly.
From what I've read, high carb diets, specifically those high in sugar, suppress the leptin response, keeping you feeling hungry, eating more carbs that get turned to body fat instead of being consumed.
Reducing/eliminating carbs helps with the leptin response by causing you to not be hungry and less interested in food.
My experience was that it worked exactly like this,
I have a half-dozen or more digital timers for AC power control from 3-4 different brands -- Intermatic, "GE" (which I'm sure is the brand label, not the manufacturer) and whatever brand(s) Home Depot sells and ALL of these devices wander time-wise and need to be periodically adjusted. They are smart enough to adjust for DST automatically, although one of the older ones has the wrong DST dates programmed in (I think most only adjust for DST because they are the "astro time" models that have mapping for dusk/dawn).
The generic iPod dock on my desk with a clock is 9 minutes off, and my car clock is a couple of minutes off; both need adjustment for DST manually.
My old Timex watch needed adjustment for DST and also drifted, although less than the Tag.
Anyway, considering that most digital/electronic devices without NTP sync integrated drift and/or need periodic adjustment, I don't consider the 15 seconds it takes to adjust the Tag to be a serious functionality flaw considering how durable it's been (I've owned it for nearly 7 years).
For my 40th birthday, my wife gave me a Tag Heuer chronograph (day, date, with stopwatch indicators for seconds, minutes and hours). I had been a long-time wearer of a digital watch, in fact I still wore the same Timex digital watch I bought at at Target in 1986 when I got this watch.
I'm not sure what "don't function all that well" means. About the only timekeeping weaknesses this watch has is that it is prone to run a little slow, needing to be moved ahead a minute or so every month, the date needs to be set when leaving a month with less than 31 days and of course DST adjustments.
Beyond that, it's a great timepiece. It's self-winding, so it never needs batteries. Waterproof to 300 meters. The sapphire crystal is totally clear and free of scratches. The stopwatch is handy for cooking or whatever simple timing needs I have.
Now, serious watch people tell me this really isn't a "serious" watch from a jewelry perspective, but it was $2300 when I got it and I don't think I'd want a more "serious" watch than this for the kind of money those sorts of watches go for.
Sensors on any municipal vehicle that covers a lot of geography would be great -- cop cars, garbage trucks, busses. Busses and garbage trucks would be especially useful because you'd get regular coverage -- equip enough busses and you might have near real-time info on many streets.
They should consider some kind of ultrasonic or laser surface scanning over just vibration sensors (which would need a lot vehicle-specific calibration). Surface scanning would give them actual road surface measurements and maybe allow for better long-term road maintenance data -- durability of initial road surfaces, durability of patches and fixes, trends over time and so on.
Maybe they could even have a drone car with more detailed sensors for higher resolution info that just drove the streets endlessly.
They have more money, more political access, are better educated and have access to more resources.
Even if Boston dispatched street repair based on complaints, wouldn't they end up fixing roads in wealthier areas before poor areas simply because the more money people have the more likely they are to own cars and drive more? And are more likely to call and complain, and so on?
Maybe I've just seen too many movies, but wasn't taking in boarders common at one point in the not-that-distant past? Maybe the adult male of a middle class household living in a larger house died and the family consolidated their use of rooms and let out rooms and maybe provided a meal, known now as "room and board"? Perhaps if there wasn't much left of the family it was nearly all a boarding house?
This is a dangerous precedent for the US to set, as their only possible responses to foreign country's requests for similar information would be either "sure, here it is" or "sorry, we have a bigger army. Don't mess with us." Land of the Free much?
This is exactly what multinationals do. They love to have some weird, three-room office in an industrial park near the airport in someplace like Ireland that they can use as their tax headquarters to shelter a bunch of income from American taxes, but then keep their business headquarters in the US so they can run to the State Department every time they have an issue with a non-US government.
This is a big reason why these tax dodges suck -- they get to dodge taxes but use the government to do their bidding. You want to be an Irish company? Great, see how little weight the Irish Ministry for Foreign Affairs can throw around.
I think it's just extremely broad and could mean anything and I think the courts have generally sided with the Feds when they decided to invoke the commerce clause.
Brace yourself, the upgrade I'm tempted to make is to a Microsoft Surface Pro 2. It gives me iPad portability with actual PC functionality yet can still be a "tablet" if I want it to be.
My wife inherited my iPad 1 when I got the 3 and I was always of the opinion that it was underpowered even when new, mainly lacking RAM. She complains a lot about apps crashing and glacial page load times when viewing non-mobile sites and it was like that when I had it, although perhaps slightly less so on and older iOS release.
Right now I can't see replacing my 3. Performance is good and 64GB storage is about my personal use sweet spot.
I just wish they would allow pairing a Bluetooth mouse. I have an RDP app that's great but the lack of a mouse when connected to a non-touch centric GUI is pretty frustrating. I don't generally care about most intentional Apple restrictions but this one seems weirdly arbitrary. I'm sure they could just ignore mouse input for stock iOS apps and the home screens and require apps to acquire mouse input via a separate API to keep apps as pure touch-gesture input. I can only presume the reason for not supporting mice is they don't want the touch UI contaminated by mouse based GUIs.
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While I'm sure there is a lot of room for abuse, I kind of applaud this action.
I think far too long the government has let banks and payment processors off the hook when it comes to enabling fraud.
A lot of fraud wouldn't exist in our modern world if it didn't have access to financial services. In some ways its the air supply of fraud.
Total spending on 2012 elections according to the FEC was 7 billion dollars.
There's roughly 231 million Americans over 18 according to the census, $10 from each of them would only get you about 2.3 billion.
Let's assume you could get $10 from everyone who voted for President in 2012, it would get you about 1.2 billion dollars.
That might be enough to elect enough candidates to create a spoiler bloc in congress capable of forcing an agenda.
My only guess (outside of pure rent-seeking monopoly behavior) would be just scale -- 250M people versus 20 million people, 9 million km^2 vs. 238,000 km^2, and the US only has about 1/3 of the population density.
We're all about the here-and-now cashflow.
What gets me what I want right now for the lowest apparent monthly nut.
But what was the telecommunications infrastructure like before Ceausescu was deposed? I would guess that individual phone lines were something of a luxury, especially outside core urban areas. Was there even a cable television infrastructure before the 1990s?
Of course, I'm not justifying what feels like underinvestment in US infrastructure, but somehow it seems more likely you'd end up today with something much more modern in a place like Romania which likely had a pretty old and small telecomms buildout until the 1990s.
Newer infrastructure?
In most cases, US high speed internet is an "extension" (or bastardization, if you will) of older, pre-existing infrastructure. DSL is built out on top of POTS, and pretty much everything else that isn't fiber to the home is built out on the cable television infrastructure.
My guess is that most of the communications infrastructure, especially Internet connectivity, dates from the mid-1990s at the earliest. It was purpose built, brand-new using modern technologies rather than adapting the crap infrastructure already present in many US cities that dates from the 1980s at latest.
Or even something simpler, like some kind of coup de grace, maybe a 12 gauge slug to the back of the head? Maybe by making executions much more visceral we'll be less inclined to make them clean and clinical and stop thinking about them as clean and clinical.
As bloody as such an execution would be, perhaps it should be so and the judge, prosecuting attorney and lead low enforcement investigators could be mandated to be in attendance and watching. It's one thing to plant evidence, withhold exculpatory information from the defense, commit gross prosecutorial misconduct and run quadrennial judicial elections on your persona as a "hangin' judge" when the convicted is executed somewhere else in a manner more consistent with outpatient surgery than an actual execution.
But when you know ahead of time that if the death penalty goes through you're going to see a human being have a good chunk of the head taken off in front of you, maybe you might not sleep so well knowing it happened because you broke the rules.
Given the kinds and amount of data they want to move to end users, either directly via video or audio streaming/downloads or indirectly from their cloud infrastructure, having an "Amazon Device" only seems to be part of the equation.
With the future of net neutrality seriously in doubt and rent-seekers like Comcast holding their customer base hostage it seems like it would make sense for them to try to get into that market, too.
Google is approaching this, albeit teasingly and slowly to probably not scare regulators as much as anything else.
I think this is a sound idea.
I'm not sure the 100% idea would ever happen, but I know the notion of varying capital gains taxes based on the duration they have been held has been discussed a lot as means to discourage risky, short-term bet-making, market churn and encourage investment.
C'mon, cell service cuts out all the time. Calls drop, phones misbehave, bluetooth hiccups, batteries die, there's a 1001 ways a cell phone can stop working as expected during a call, especially in motion on the highway.
Saying he's responsible because someone decided to prioritize communicating over driving or navigation and had an accident is ridiculous. What's next, blaming ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile/Sprint for "causing" accidents because they lack perfect coverage? Maybe blaming Apple or Google or Samsung for the same reason?
YOU are responsible for your car while driving, if your gadget fucks up and you feel the need to futz with it, pull over.
he pointed out just how many different businesses had contracts with all these little agencies and offices.
So when we set it up in the usual means of centralized efficiency it costs less because they are fewer vendors and more money goes to a smaller group of people.
Then we complain about the problems of income distribution and wonder how we can use government to redistribute income.
Maybe this is just a kind of organic income redistribution. Maybe people, when given a choice, will choose a certain level of level of inefficiency to achieve some level of fairness over some measurement of efficiency that seems less fair.
And who knows, maybe its more economically beneficial overall to do it this way versus a government driven scheme to redistribute income directly.
From what I've read, high carb diets, specifically those high in sugar, suppress the leptin response, keeping you feeling hungry, eating more carbs that get turned to body fat instead of being consumed.
Reducing/eliminating carbs helps with the leptin response by causing you to not be hungry and less interested in food.
My experience was that it worked exactly like this,
But did lead poisoning lead to beta?
That had crossed my mind -- it hasn't seen service at all since I've owned it, I don't know what the recommended service/cleaning for it is.
I wouldn't.
I have a half-dozen or more digital timers for AC power control from 3-4 different brands -- Intermatic, "GE" (which I'm sure is the brand label, not the manufacturer) and whatever brand(s) Home Depot sells and ALL of these devices wander time-wise and need to be periodically adjusted. They are smart enough to adjust for DST automatically, although one of the older ones has the wrong DST dates programmed in (I think most only adjust for DST because they are the "astro time" models that have mapping for dusk/dawn).
The generic iPod dock on my desk with a clock is 9 minutes off, and my car clock is a couple of minutes off; both need adjustment for DST manually.
My old Timex watch needed adjustment for DST and also drifted, although less than the Tag.
Anyway, considering that most digital/electronic devices without NTP sync integrated drift and/or need periodic adjustment, I don't consider the 15 seconds it takes to adjust the Tag to be a serious functionality flaw considering how durable it's been (I've owned it for nearly 7 years).
For my 40th birthday, my wife gave me a Tag Heuer chronograph (day, date, with stopwatch indicators for seconds, minutes and hours). I had been a long-time wearer of a digital watch, in fact I still wore the same Timex digital watch I bought at at Target in 1986 when I got this watch.
I'm not sure what "don't function all that well" means. About the only timekeeping weaknesses this watch has is that it is prone to run a little slow, needing to be moved ahead a minute or so every month, the date needs to be set when leaving a month with less than 31 days and of course DST adjustments.
Beyond that, it's a great timepiece. It's self-winding, so it never needs batteries. Waterproof to 300 meters. The sapphire crystal is totally clear and free of scratches. The stopwatch is handy for cooking or whatever simple timing needs I have.
Now, serious watch people tell me this really isn't a "serious" watch from a jewelry perspective, but it was $2300 when I got it and I don't think I'd want a more "serious" watch than this for the kind of money those sorts of watches go for.
Sensors on any municipal vehicle that covers a lot of geography would be great -- cop cars, garbage trucks, busses. Busses and garbage trucks would be especially useful because you'd get regular coverage -- equip enough busses and you might have near real-time info on many streets.
They should consider some kind of ultrasonic or laser surface scanning over just vibration sensors (which would need a lot vehicle-specific calibration). Surface scanning would give them actual road surface measurements and maybe allow for better long-term road maintenance data -- durability of initial road surfaces, durability of patches and fixes, trends over time and so on.
Maybe they could even have a drone car with more detailed sensors for higher resolution info that just drove the streets endlessly.
They have more money, more political access, are better educated and have access to more resources.
Even if Boston dispatched street repair based on complaints, wouldn't they end up fixing roads in wealthier areas before poor areas simply because the more money people have the more likely they are to own cars and drive more? And are more likely to call and complain, and so on?
Maybe I've just seen too many movies, but wasn't taking in boarders common at one point in the not-that-distant past? Maybe the adult male of a middle class household living in a larger house died and the family consolidated their use of rooms and let out rooms and maybe provided a meal, known now as "room and board"? Perhaps if there wasn't much left of the family it was nearly all a boarding house?
This is a dangerous precedent for the US to set, as their only possible responses to foreign country's requests for similar information would be either "sure, here it is" or "sorry, we have a bigger army. Don't mess with us." Land of the Free much?
This is exactly what multinationals do. They love to have some weird, three-room office in an industrial park near the airport in someplace like Ireland that they can use as their tax headquarters to shelter a bunch of income from American taxes, but then keep their business headquarters in the US so they can run to the State Department every time they have an issue with a non-US government.
This is a big reason why these tax dodges suck -- they get to dodge taxes but use the government to do their bidding. You want to be an Irish company? Great, see how little weight the Irish Ministry for Foreign Affairs can throw around.
My sense is that all the online petitions that really meant anything basically got the same reply -- "Uh, no."
Why bother even linking to them and perpetuating the fantasy they represent anything meaningful to the Obama administration?
I think it's just extremely broad and could mean anything and I think the courts have generally sided with the Feds when they decided to invoke the commerce clause.
They're not even in the same league. The Surface Pro 2 has higher res display, more storage, better CPU, more RAM.
Brace yourself, the upgrade I'm tempted to make is to a Microsoft Surface Pro 2. It gives me iPad portability with actual PC functionality yet can still be a "tablet" if I want it to be.
My wife inherited my iPad 1 when I got the 3 and I was always of the opinion that it was underpowered even when new, mainly lacking RAM. She complains a lot about apps crashing and glacial page load times when viewing non-mobile sites and it was like that when I had it, although perhaps slightly less so on and older iOS release.
Right now I can't see replacing my 3. Performance is good and 64GB storage is about my personal use sweet spot.
I just wish they would allow pairing a Bluetooth mouse. I have an RDP app that's great but the lack of a mouse when connected to a non-touch centric GUI is pretty frustrating. I don't generally care about most intentional Apple restrictions but this one seems weirdly arbitrary. I'm sure they could just ignore mouse input for stock iOS apps and the home screens and require apps to acquire mouse input via a separate API to keep apps as pure touch-gesture input. I can only presume the reason for not supporting mice is they don't want the touch UI contaminated by mouse based GUIs.