You're still missing the point. Calories are not interchangeable -- eating "too many" calories isn't the cause of obesity. Go read "Why we get fat" by Gary Taubes for a better documented explanation.
The larger problem is that the food "they" call good for you isn't necessarily good for you. Most of these people are still operating under the failed low-fat diet paradigm and will count the availability of rice, pasta and breads as "good for you" food that is available.
It also doesn't take into account the cost of fresh meats and the impact this has on low income food budgets and how they will supplement with refined carbohydrates like pasta and rice.
Nor does it take into account the unhealthy nature of supposedly healthy food which has been pumped up with high fructose corn syrup.
With popcorn, it's partly a physiological response.
Popcorn is pure carbohydrate -- when you hit your digestive system with a large quantity of a simple carbohydrate, you produce an insulin response which signals your fat cells to absorb and create more fat (neolipogenesis).
This has the effect of causing you to be still hungry, since your body is locking up this energy in your fat cells not making it available for energy. So you eat more, because your body is calling for more fuel because what you ate didn't provide it.
Further, there's not enough fat in most movie popcorn to initiate satiety signals to get you to stop eating.
Some people don't get lung cancer from smoking cigarettes, but most people do. Saying that cigarettes aren't harmful isn't the right conclusion. And the plural of anecdote is not data.
Reducing the size of big gulps is primarily misguided because it only involves soda, NOT the high sugar and HFCS load food producers put in our food.
Overeating is actually symptom of obesity driven metabolic syndrome, not the cause. It's exacerbated by fructose consumption from refined sugar and especially high fructose corn syrup. Fructose interferes with the leptin response that should make us stop eating -- we never get full, so we keep eating.
Combined with the insulin response from sugar, which causes our fat cells to absorb fat and produce more of it (neolipogenesis), eating high sugar diets literally starves the body of energy (locking it in fat instead of making it available for fuel) and further increases appetite.
High levels of sugars in the diet are a long-term poison and the primary driver of obesity and the cluster of diseases associated with metabolic syndrome (type II diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, elevated triglycerides, heart disease, even Alzheimer's). Those of you needing a refresher on the biochemistry should watch this video of Dr. Robert Lustig -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Other references include the excellent work of Gary Taubes on the misguided and scientifically unproven war on dietary fat and the subsequent advocacy of low-fat diets.
It's great to see sugar targeted aggressively, but I don't agree with Bloomberg's ban for a number of reasons. It's anti-choice and it lets juice off the hook, which due to its fructose content is actually worse than something sweetened with sugar (which is glucose/fructose in equal proportions). It's also not nearly broad enough due to the widespread loading of processed food with high fructose corn syrup and sugar.
What needs to be done more generally is not just attacking soda per se, but raising the wholesale price of sugar and corn syrup to about 5 times their current level, either via an excise tax or in combination with elimination of any agricultural subsidies on corn and sugar beet production. This will make it much more expensive for food producers to add in sugars to their products and will hopefully reduce the overall glycemic load on our food supply. Less sugar consumed means less obesity.
That a large cup of non-diet soda contains a large quantity of sugar/HFCS is not up for debate, this is an established fact.
That sugars produce an insulin response is not up for debate and has been scientifically established for nearly 100 years. That insulin is the primary hormonal driver of fat accumulation has been scientifically established since the 1960s.
We know this and have known this for for nearly 50 years. It's less open to debate than evolution, and that's a closed subject.
Banning is probably the wrong approach from an economics perspective, and the details are poor, too -- allowing juice? That's like saying smoking menthols is better than smoking non-menthols. Metabolically there is zero difference, and in many ways juice is much worse due to the fructose content.
You're right, I've been around long enough to have used a Blackberry when it wasn't even a phone. It was revolutionary at the time, but it's clearly outived its usefulness or sense of innovation (which was always more about having portable email than the quality of the email).
I don't quite understand why people consider it so great for email. I suppose the physical keyboard might be faster for typing, although even I'm amazed at how good I and others are on an on-screen keyboard. The interface seems less convenient than an iPhone, which I find useful but not terribly feature-rich.
But let's face it, the Blackberry is a joke for *any* application as user interface compared to IOS or Android. The marketplace knows it and the company knows it, or they wouldn't be desperate with BB 10.
But yet if you actually used a Blackberry, as a smartphone (and not an App machine)...
So a Blackberry is a "smartphone" if you use it as a phone and presumably as an email device, but any other use isn't "smartphone" but is instead an "app machine", which presumably means stupid shit like Angry Birds and not useful apps, like a SSH client or a mapping client or something else.
It sounds like the problem Blackberry has is that it's not a very smart phone.
I think one reason the polity has become more polarized is that each 'side' in the debate demands new laws of increasing scope that are seen as punitive and diminishing of the rights of the 'other side'.
As a simple example, the 'left' demands free health care paid for through higher taxes and greater controls. Their opposite, the 'right' sees this as a great power grab and a huge taxation cost.
It works the other way -- the 'right' demands tax cuts which they will pay for via cuts of entitlement programs. Their opposite sees this as a free ride for the rich and an attack on the poor.
No side appears to be advancing any kind of incrementalism in policies -- its huge scope and reach, all couched in absolute terms, and in many cases seems less designed to provide a benefit to the advocate than a restriction or a punishment on one's opponents.
Once this gets started, it just seems to be an ugly spiral, with each side using whatever advantage they have for increased leverage.
My guess is that they are targeting the low-end of the market that has a high-end feature phone now but can't afford a traditional smartphone. The kind with a texting keyboard, weak camera and limited internet access via carrier apps.
My guess is the idea is to provide a phone optimized for Facebook and picture taking but with low end enough specs that it can be sold very cheaply.
My guess is that there are a lot of people at this end of the market who use Facebook on PCs and who see a smartphone's primary purpose as being for Facebook or social media and who would take hardware more comparable to a real smartphone even if most of what it did well was Facebook.
Done well, Facebook could create an ecosystem of Facebook apps exclusive to this platform and along with their data mining sell the phones at cost and actually make money on the larger project.
Done poorly, it's a train wreck. Either way, I don't see any kind of Facebook phone taking Apple or Android's place.
Some of the greatest rock and roll records ever recorded were done in non-studio environments, in live venues or very low end studios where carpeting on the walls was what mattered. Exile on Main Street was recorded in the basement of a 19th century French Estate.
And what percentage of the listening public would even notice when so many are happy with 128k MP3s played back on cheap Skullcandy headphones?
I'm sure there are some kinds of music (acoustic, jazz, classical) that attract the kinds of people who claim they can hear the difference between 3/0 and 4/0 speaker wire or who made the tubes in their amplifiers. For them, the studio location may matter.
But for most forms of popular music, the music is either totally electronic and thus doesn't care what physical space it was created in, or it's likely to be the kind of music that might actually sound better in a more raw setting.
All-in-all, with decent microphones and basic engineering, a band of today in a garage can probably make a basic recording that's as good or better than what many studios could produce in the 1960s.
My guess is, though, that meaningful improvement in bandwidth and coverage is probably slim to none with an addition of only a 180 towers. If there are 100 major American cities in terms of size, you're talking about adding less than two towers per city and an improvement in performance for maybe less than a couple of densely populated square miles.
In areas like NYC you're probably talking about a cell site cost of over a million dollars for an improvement area measurable in terms of single-digit square blocks if not square yards in the densest parts of midtown.
FWIW, I was in NYC last April. Coverage in the Times Square area was awful -- at night I couldn't get the NY Times page to load 25% of the time on an iPhone 4S. Upper west side (West End Ave & 80th) was usable, as were areas in Brooklyn & Queens. I kind of wonder if it's not AT&T but instead limitations on GSM in dense areas that makes it economically non-viable to support more than N phones in a small area.
Overall, I've been happy with AT&T in the Twin Cities. The 4GB data limit I never come close to (leaving plenty of data for tethering) and I have good call and data quality pretty much everywhere.
Let's assume that the $137 million in compensation is actually fungible monies and not stock compensation, use of airplanes, etc.
Let's further assume that you are able to convince the executive team that they are willing to accept only $50 million combined, freeing up $87 million dollars in cash.
Does anyone with any experience in enterprise carrier equipment and networks know how far that would go?
A cursory search shows a cell site costing $200,000, but that seems like it would only cover the cost of physical construction (tower base, tower, antennas, equipment housing, power feed) and not the networking equipment used to run it, the network links for backhual, and back end configuration and installation costs (which are kind of covered as fixed operational costs, but have some opportunity value). Nor does it cover the administrative costs of acquiring a site, local government lobbying, legal costs, etc. A fat round figure that seems better is $500,000.
Let's say there's other unaccounted costs and our $87 million will buy us 160 new cell towers. What does that buy in terms of actual network coverage or additional bandwidth? My guess is it would be splitting an existing cell footprint in half to increase available bandwidth within an area already covered.
There's only one main issue, and that's the basic human right of free expression, unfettered by state or religion sponsored oppression.
The examples you cite aren't even remotely related and none actually justify morally or practically suppression of free speech.
Criminalizing Holocaust Denial, whatever it's achieved or claimed sociological benefits in Germany, is a political restraint on free speech probably no longer justifiable in Germany, even by it's supporters' standards. Now it's merely a technique to suppress far right political movements, even though most far right parties have become more PR savvy and dropped the Hitlerian rhetoric and focused on more regional and contemporary issues.
Incitement to murder *is* probably a justifiable restraint of speech, but only in the same category as yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, and only so long as the incitement is literal, specific and likely to actually result in a homicide. The risk is that it will get used against people advocating for radical political change, despite the fact that even though revolutions may cause deaths, advocating for revolution isn't advocating for killing.
Religiously-derived bans on freedom of speech can't even claim some practical value as Incitement and Denial -- the only thing being "protected" is the public status of a religious figure -- they are the pure suppressions of freedom of speech. If anything, they stoke the passions which often result in violence. They're not even particularly logical -- if you follow Islam, how or why would you be swayed or even in a position to participate in anti-Islamic speech?
A ban like this is entirely ridiculous and even more so for a country like Pakistan. Pakistan needs to do everything it can to promote itself as a regional center in Asia. Religious or politically motivated suppression of human rights will only isolate them, reducing their political, economic and social standing.
This is the problem with the calories in/calories out model.
Eating an additional 20 calories a day will make a 55 year old 57 pounds overweight.
How on earth are you supposed to balance your energy output against your energy input down to 20 calories a day? That's maybe a half a slice of bread. A bite of meat. Across the 40 million calories you would have consumed over that lifetime?
I'll bet that food was far more abundant 100+ years ago than you think, at least for the majority of people who lived in rural settings. They were either involved directly in food production as a vocation (farming) or were involved in some kind of part time small scale subsistence agriculture -- keeping a cow for milk, raising chickens or some other fowl, sheep or goats for milk, meat or wool, and pigs for meat and their ability to eat organic garbage.
My dad lived on a farm in the 1930s during the depression and he said they always had pork and chicken, raised, slaughtered and smoked on site. Beef was more seasonal as they only raised a small number of beef cattle primarily to be sold and they had to eat what beef they got as they got it since there wasn't preservation capacity (freezers; smoking worked less well for beef). All manner of vegetables were available as was commercially procured grains.
For city dwelling poor people, food quantity was probably an issue, but an economic one, not a supply issue. There wasn't a lot of urban poverty concentration until there was larger scale grain agriculture capable of supply cheap, high-volume processed grains capable of supporting a large population not engaged in any form of agriculture, subsistence or otherwise.
Almost all of my profile data is fake, much of it obviously ludicrous (my college is right, my degree in "Bible Sexuality" not so much, my occupation in the "Salt Mines" is factually incorrect but metaphorically true...). The only profile picture I've ever had that was actually a photograph of me was when I was 6 years old (40-odd years ago). There are no photos tagged of me.
I don't really understand how they will plan to make money off this.
You're right, our version of "honor killing" is much worse here. We kill the young woman involved and a couple of puppies and a pony, too, for good measure. Can't let those Persians out-honor-killing us.
...but in the US the content of the Turner Diaries would be protected as political speech even without the 'story' format.
You can even dress up as a Nazi and walk down the street espousing fascist propaganda and it is protected speech. To the extent that you don't get your head split open by the crowd that forms.
The only place I can think of where MS has become successful where it initially had no market presence has been the Xbox gaming console, and even there MS leveraged their experience with desktop PC technology and in some ways co-opt existing developers who developed for the PC platform, as well as subsidizing the platform for years before they began to make any money.
In every other case MS has been merely building on existing platforms while failing to create any new areas of market dominance -- Windows OS, Exchange, SQL, MS Office.
Phones? WinMo had some traction when ActiveSync became established, then was in some ways abandoned, leaving the market to BlackBerry and ultimately Apple and Android. Windows Phone doesn't look like it will be more than a niche player. Bing? Fail. Zune? Fail. Etc.Etc.
I wonder if the real reason for this is actually the success of their core products -- anyone who's actually talented, especially at the management level, wants the easy money of the core products and also resists any innovative products in other areas that might threaten them.
I sometimes wonder if MS might have actually been more successful if HAD been broken up by the DOJ and forced to actually innovate vs. just collecting rent from their monopoly positions.
The airport commission is where empires are built. If MAC isn't remodeling something or building something or buying a dozen new squad cars for the airport police (look! you can see them all parked together, like they don't need that many...), they're making sweetheart deals with the one remaining major carrier.
The funny thing is, since the NWA/Delta merger, Delta can't ship assets out of MSP fast enough (maintenance, ground operations, etc). Why MAC thinks we need a brass-plated airport when in 10 years the only direct flight you can get out of MSP is to another carrier's hub city is beyond me, but they have built a multi-terminal airport that's just ridiculously large and unsuited to the future role of air travel in MSP or the future of air travel in a era of expensive fuel.
I think a better argument is that while the spectrum for SMS data is essentially free, the infrastructure of SMS messaging within a carrier is non-free.
AFAICT from reading criminal news reporting, one of the first things the police do is subpoena a persons text messages, which the carriers seem to store, at least for a while. I have to assume that this includes MMS messages, too.
If you stop and think about the requirements for merely for logging the last 10 text or MMS messages of every subscriber, that's a lot of data that not only has to be routed around their network, but stored in some manageable way and probably subject to all the usual backup and storage requirements, too, and I'd guess it goes beyond 10.
Slashdot Mirror
You're still missing the point. Calories are not interchangeable -- eating "too many" calories isn't the cause of obesity. Go read "Why we get fat" by Gary Taubes for a better documented explanation.
False advertising. Exercise won't make you lean, but eliminating simple carbs like sugar and HFCS will.
The larger problem is that the food "they" call good for you isn't necessarily good for you. Most of these people are still operating under the failed low-fat diet paradigm and will count the availability of rice, pasta and breads as "good for you" food that is available.
It also doesn't take into account the cost of fresh meats and the impact this has on low income food budgets and how they will supplement with refined carbohydrates like pasta and rice.
Nor does it take into account the unhealthy nature of supposedly healthy food which has been pumped up with high fructose corn syrup.
With popcorn, it's partly a physiological response.
Popcorn is pure carbohydrate -- when you hit your digestive system with a large quantity of a simple carbohydrate, you produce an insulin response which signals your fat cells to absorb and create more fat (neolipogenesis).
This has the effect of causing you to be still hungry, since your body is locking up this energy in your fat cells not making it available for energy. So you eat more, because your body is calling for more fuel because what you ate didn't provide it.
Further, there's not enough fat in most movie popcorn to initiate satiety signals to get you to stop eating.
Some people don't get lung cancer from smoking cigarettes, but most people do. Saying that cigarettes aren't harmful isn't the right conclusion. And the plural of anecdote is not data.
Reducing the size of big gulps is primarily misguided because it only involves soda, NOT the high sugar and HFCS load food producers put in our food.
Overeating is actually symptom of obesity driven metabolic syndrome, not the cause. It's exacerbated by fructose consumption from refined sugar and especially high fructose corn syrup. Fructose interferes with the leptin response that should make us stop eating -- we never get full, so we keep eating.
Combined with the insulin response from sugar, which causes our fat cells to absorb fat and produce more of it (neolipogenesis), eating high sugar diets literally starves the body of energy (locking it in fat instead of making it available for fuel) and further increases appetite.
High levels of sugars in the diet are a long-term poison and the primary driver of obesity and the cluster of diseases associated with metabolic syndrome (type II diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, elevated triglycerides, heart disease, even Alzheimer's). Those of you needing a refresher on the biochemistry should watch this video of Dr. Robert Lustig -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Other references include the excellent work of Gary Taubes on the misguided and scientifically unproven war on dietary fat and the subsequent advocacy of low-fat diets.
It's great to see sugar targeted aggressively, but I don't agree with Bloomberg's ban for a number of reasons. It's anti-choice and it lets juice off the hook, which due to its fructose content is actually worse than something sweetened with sugar (which is glucose/fructose in equal proportions). It's also not nearly broad enough due to the widespread loading of processed food with high fructose corn syrup and sugar.
What needs to be done more generally is not just attacking soda per se, but raising the wholesale price of sugar and corn syrup to about 5 times their current level, either via an excise tax or in combination with elimination of any agricultural subsidies on corn and sugar beet production. This will make it much more expensive for food producers to add in sugars to their products and will hopefully reduce the overall glycemic load on our food supply. Less sugar consumed means less obesity.
That a large cup of non-diet soda contains a large quantity of sugar/HFCS is not up for debate, this is an established fact.
That sugars produce an insulin response is not up for debate and has been scientifically established for nearly 100 years. That insulin is the primary hormonal driver of fat accumulation has been scientifically established since the 1960s.
We know this and have known this for for nearly 50 years. It's less open to debate than evolution, and that's a closed subject.
Banning is probably the wrong approach from an economics perspective, and the details are poor, too -- allowing juice? That's like saying smoking menthols is better than smoking non-menthols. Metabolically there is zero difference, and in many ways juice is much worse due to the fructose content.
You're right, I've been around long enough to have used a Blackberry when it wasn't even a phone. It was revolutionary at the time, but it's clearly outived its usefulness or sense of innovation (which was always more about having portable email than the quality of the email).
I don't quite understand why people consider it so great for email. I suppose the physical keyboard might be faster for typing, although even I'm amazed at how good I and others are on an on-screen keyboard. The interface seems less convenient than an iPhone, which I find useful but not terribly feature-rich.
But let's face it, the Blackberry is a joke for *any* application as user interface compared to IOS or Android. The marketplace knows it and the company knows it, or they wouldn't be desperate with BB 10.
Stick a fork in it, it's done.
....does this mean?
But yet if you actually used a Blackberry, as a smartphone (and not an App machine) ...
So a Blackberry is a "smartphone" if you use it as a phone and presumably as an email device, but any other use isn't "smartphone" but is instead an "app machine", which presumably means stupid shit like Angry Birds and not useful apps, like a SSH client or a mapping client or something else.
It sounds like the problem Blackberry has is that it's not a very smart phone.
I think one reason the polity has become more polarized is that each 'side' in the debate demands new laws of increasing scope that are seen as punitive and diminishing of the rights of the 'other side'.
As a simple example, the 'left' demands free health care paid for through higher taxes and greater controls. Their opposite, the 'right' sees this as a great power grab and a huge taxation cost.
It works the other way -- the 'right' demands tax cuts which they will pay for via cuts of entitlement programs. Their opposite sees this as a free ride for the rich and an attack on the poor.
No side appears to be advancing any kind of incrementalism in policies -- its huge scope and reach, all couched in absolute terms, and in many cases seems less designed to provide a benefit to the advocate than a restriction or a punishment on one's opponents.
Once this gets started, it just seems to be an ugly spiral, with each side using whatever advantage they have for increased leverage.
My guess is that they are targeting the low-end of the market that has a high-end feature phone now but can't afford a traditional smartphone. The kind with a texting keyboard, weak camera and limited internet access via carrier apps.
My guess is the idea is to provide a phone optimized for Facebook and picture taking but with low end enough specs that it can be sold very cheaply.
My guess is that there are a lot of people at this end of the market who use Facebook on PCs and who see a smartphone's primary purpose as being for Facebook or social media and who would take hardware more comparable to a real smartphone even if most of what it did well was Facebook.
Done well, Facebook could create an ecosystem of Facebook apps exclusive to this platform and along with their data mining sell the phones at cost and actually make money on the larger project.
Done poorly, it's a train wreck. Either way, I don't see any kind of Facebook phone taking Apple or Android's place.
Some of the greatest rock and roll records ever recorded were done in non-studio environments, in live venues or very low end studios where carpeting on the walls was what mattered. Exile on Main Street was recorded in the basement of a 19th century French Estate.
And what percentage of the listening public would even notice when so many are happy with 128k MP3s played back on cheap Skullcandy headphones?
I'm sure there are some kinds of music (acoustic, jazz, classical) that attract the kinds of people who claim they can hear the difference between 3/0 and 4/0 speaker wire or who made the tubes in their amplifiers. For them, the studio location may matter.
But for most forms of popular music, the music is either totally electronic and thus doesn't care what physical space it was created in, or it's likely to be the kind of music that might actually sound better in a more raw setting.
All-in-all, with decent microphones and basic engineering, a band of today in a garage can probably make a basic recording that's as good or better than what many studios could produce in the 1960s.
No disagreement about CEO compensation.
My guess is, though, that meaningful improvement in bandwidth and coverage is probably slim to none with an addition of only a 180 towers. If there are 100 major American cities in terms of size, you're talking about adding less than two towers per city and an improvement in performance for maybe less than a couple of densely populated square miles.
In areas like NYC you're probably talking about a cell site cost of over a million dollars for an improvement area measurable in terms of single-digit square blocks if not square yards in the densest parts of midtown.
FWIW, I was in NYC last April. Coverage in the Times Square area was awful -- at night I couldn't get the NY Times page to load 25% of the time on an iPhone 4S. Upper west side (West End Ave & 80th) was usable, as were areas in Brooklyn & Queens. I kind of wonder if it's not AT&T but instead limitations on GSM in dense areas that makes it economically non-viable to support more than N phones in a small area.
Overall, I've been happy with AT&T in the Twin Cities. The 4GB data limit I never come close to (leaving plenty of data for tethering) and I have good call and data quality pretty much everywhere.
Let's assume that the $137 million in compensation is actually fungible monies and not stock compensation, use of airplanes, etc.
Let's further assume that you are able to convince the executive team that they are willing to accept only $50 million combined, freeing up $87 million dollars in cash.
Does anyone with any experience in enterprise carrier equipment and networks know how far that would go?
A cursory search shows a cell site costing $200,000, but that seems like it would only cover the cost of physical construction (tower base, tower, antennas, equipment housing, power feed) and not the networking equipment used to run it, the network links for backhual, and back end configuration and installation costs (which are kind of covered as fixed operational costs, but have some opportunity value). Nor does it cover the administrative costs of acquiring a site, local government lobbying, legal costs, etc. A fat round figure that seems better is $500,000.
Let's say there's other unaccounted costs and our $87 million will buy us 160 new cell towers. What does that buy in terms of actual network coverage or additional bandwidth? My guess is it would be splitting an existing cell footprint in half to increase available bandwidth within an area already covered.
It's a great idea, though.
There's only one main issue, and that's the basic human right of free expression, unfettered by state or religion sponsored oppression.
The examples you cite aren't even remotely related and none actually justify morally or practically suppression of free speech.
Criminalizing Holocaust Denial, whatever it's achieved or claimed sociological benefits in Germany, is a political restraint on free speech probably no longer justifiable in Germany, even by it's supporters' standards. Now it's merely a technique to suppress far right political movements, even though most far right parties have become more PR savvy and dropped the Hitlerian rhetoric and focused on more regional and contemporary issues.
Incitement to murder *is* probably a justifiable restraint of speech, but only in the same category as yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, and only so long as the incitement is literal, specific and likely to actually result in a homicide. The risk is that it will get used against people advocating for radical political change, despite the fact that even though revolutions may cause deaths, advocating for revolution isn't advocating for killing.
Religiously-derived bans on freedom of speech can't even claim some practical value as Incitement and Denial -- the only thing being "protected" is the public status of a religious figure -- they are the pure suppressions of freedom of speech. If anything, they stoke the passions which often result in violence. They're not even particularly logical -- if you follow Islam, how or why would you be swayed or even in a position to participate in anti-Islamic speech?
A ban like this is entirely ridiculous and even more so for a country like Pakistan. Pakistan needs to do everything it can to promote itself as a regional center in Asia. Religious or politically motivated suppression of human rights will only isolate them, reducing their political, economic and social standing.
There's research linking sugar consumption to dopamine, making it actually similar to cocaine in its brain effect.
This is the problem with the calories in/calories out model.
Eating an additional 20 calories a day will make a 55 year old 57 pounds overweight.
How on earth are you supposed to balance your energy output against your energy input down to 20 calories a day? That's maybe a half a slice of bread. A bite of meat. Across the 40 million calories you would have consumed over that lifetime?
I'll bet that food was far more abundant 100+ years ago than you think, at least for the majority of people who lived in rural settings. They were either involved directly in food production as a vocation (farming) or were involved in some kind of part time small scale subsistence agriculture -- keeping a cow for milk, raising chickens or some other fowl, sheep or goats for milk, meat or wool, and pigs for meat and their ability to eat organic garbage.
My dad lived on a farm in the 1930s during the depression and he said they always had pork and chicken, raised, slaughtered and smoked on site. Beef was more seasonal as they only raised a small number of beef cattle primarily to be sold and they had to eat what beef they got as they got it since there wasn't preservation capacity (freezers; smoking worked less well for beef). All manner of vegetables were available as was commercially procured grains.
For city dwelling poor people, food quantity was probably an issue, but an economic one, not a supply issue. There wasn't a lot of urban poverty concentration until there was larger scale grain agriculture capable of supply cheap, high-volume processed grains capable of supporting a large population not engaged in any form of agriculture, subsistence or otherwise.
Almost all of my profile data is fake, much of it obviously ludicrous (my college is right, my degree in "Bible Sexuality" not so much, my occupation in the "Salt Mines" is factually incorrect but metaphorically true...). The only profile picture I've ever had that was actually a photograph of me was when I was 6 years old (40-odd years ago). There are no photos tagged of me.
I don't really understand how they will plan to make money off this.
You're right, our version of "honor killing" is much worse here. We kill the young woman involved and a couple of puppies and a pony, too, for good measure. Can't let those Persians out-honor-killing us.
...but in the US the content of the Turner Diaries would be protected as political speech even without the 'story' format.
You can even dress up as a Nazi and walk down the street espousing fascist propaganda and it is protected speech. To the extent that you don't get your head split open by the crowd that forms.
Me too. I remember one example/sample involving the Pantheon.
The only place I can think of where MS has become successful where it initially had no market presence has been the Xbox gaming console, and even there MS leveraged their experience with desktop PC technology and in some ways co-opt existing developers who developed for the PC platform, as well as subsidizing the platform for years before they began to make any money.
In every other case MS has been merely building on existing platforms while failing to create any new areas of market dominance -- Windows OS, Exchange, SQL, MS Office.
Phones? WinMo had some traction when ActiveSync became established, then was in some ways abandoned, leaving the market to BlackBerry and ultimately Apple and Android. Windows Phone doesn't look like it will be more than a niche player. Bing? Fail. Zune? Fail. Etc.Etc.
I wonder if the real reason for this is actually the success of their core products -- anyone who's actually talented, especially at the management level, wants the easy money of the core products and also resists any innovative products in other areas that might threaten them.
I sometimes wonder if MS might have actually been more successful if HAD been broken up by the DOJ and forced to actually innovate vs. just collecting rent from their monopoly positions.
The airport commission is where empires are built. If MAC isn't remodeling something or building something or buying a dozen new squad cars for the airport police (look! you can see them all parked together, like they don't need that many...), they're making sweetheart deals with the one remaining major carrier.
The funny thing is, since the NWA/Delta merger, Delta can't ship assets out of MSP fast enough (maintenance, ground operations, etc). Why MAC thinks we need a brass-plated airport when in 10 years the only direct flight you can get out of MSP is to another carrier's hub city is beyond me, but they have built a multi-terminal airport that's just ridiculously large and unsuited to the future role of air travel in MSP or the future of air travel in a era of expensive fuel.
I think a better argument is that while the spectrum for SMS data is essentially free, the infrastructure of SMS messaging within a carrier is non-free.
AFAICT from reading criminal news reporting, one of the first things the police do is subpoena a persons text messages, which the carriers seem to store, at least for a while. I have to assume that this includes MMS messages, too.
If you stop and think about the requirements for merely for logging the last 10 text or MMS messages of every subscriber, that's a lot of data that not only has to be routed around their network, but stored in some manageable way and probably subject to all the usual backup and storage requirements, too, and I'd guess it goes beyond 10.