...to make managers in profit centers accountable for the costs that go into their profits?
Once you get out of the realm of real businesses and into the funny money realm of large corporation "profit centers" so many of the costs associated with running a real business get lost -- rents, furniture, HR costs (payroll and benefit admin overhead), utilities, and of course, IT costs.
A lot of these profit center managers are prone to treat $Profit = $income - ($payroll + $direct_expenditures) and ignore the other costs, no matter how wastefully they're incurred.
Their attitude is so we ran 200k color copies, big deal. So we've got a file & email servers with 2-3 TB of crap, MP3s, etc. So we all stream TV, audio/video and still want to download a gigabyte in 10 minutes. We insist on expensive laptops, Adobe Creative Suite on every computer, ponies, balloons, etc.
What's funny is when you work with REAL small businesses that have to pay for everything it's amazing the corners they'll cut and the sacrifices they'll make for IT (old, slow PCs, bad software, slow networks, bad/no backups, etc). It goes too far with them sometimes, but in those worlds they "get" it.
I think chargebacks are another way to keep these managers honest and in some ways, not skew upper managements view of how profitable or not the business actually is.
The downside of unlimited storage is it wreaks havoc with backups, replication and other intensive tasks that have to move that storage around.
I've worked in more than a couple of places with an "all you can eat" philosophy and you end up with a data monster that's expensive and complicated to backup, replicate and work with.
And usually they grew to a size (a place I work with right now has one just crossing the 2 TB threshold) where they become impossible to deal with -- departments can't/won't shrink them because the pile of crap is so large they'd need a couple of FTEs just to go through it all.
Chargebacks make perfect sense -- business units treat IT resources like they were free and use them EXTREMELY inefficiently (scanning thousands of images at 1200 dpi to use in on-screen PowerPoints as one example). It's perfectly reasonable to allocate those costs to business units so management can really get an idea if a business unit is profitable.
I agree completely that the Founding Fathers were highly intelligent and unbelievable prescient. Have you researched these quotes to make sure they're accurate and historically verifiable?
I keep running into quotes attributed them that seem uncannily accurate to today's situation; they're widely repeated but when you look into them, there's no authority on the speaker who can back the quotes up. It's like (or exactly like) someone is making up the quotes and attributing them to Founding Fathers when in fact they are just Tea Party mantras.
And it's not that the sentiment is something I disagree with, its just that it's dishonest.
Or at least the whole truth, quite often you find that to replicate your 8 TB volume really requires you to buy a SAN with 16 TB capacity on one end and 16 TB on the other with the "unused" space for replication overhead or whatever fancy SAN tricks you want play.
So while you wanted 16 TB of capacity, you actually buy 32+ much of what appears to be uncommitted.
While I'm sure the police enjoy that little definition of "always on duty" and all the conveniences that come with the powers of being an "on duty" police officer 24 hours a day, the reality is that they are not really on duty 24 hours a day.
For one, almost all police agencies are unionized and operate under a collective bargaining agreement, and I'm certain that collective bargaining agreement sets aside time for being "off duty" where they are not functioning as active police officers.
Secondly, there's the actual reality of being out of uniform and not performing job tasks for which you are not compensated (most police officers are also hourly wage employees). Of course they do not lose their peace officer certification or their employment status, but they are not actually performing policing duties.
That was a great movie, but difficult to keep track of the time travel.
I don't think they ended up with specific paradoxes, but I seem to recall a lot of attempts to fix things by going further and further back; perhaps not explicit paradoxes, but a lot of manipulation of the past to try to impact the future.
Most of them are probably pissed because that dream of running a freelance business out of your cool house in a hip urban neighborhood and being able to write off all your Macintosh crap as a business expense is over.
I've had an iPhone for too long now to clearly remember, but my last Verizon phone had a ton of bloatware.
It seemed like it was designed to generate revenue in three ways:
1) Subscription fees for Verizon services 2) Purchase fees for Verizon products (ringtones, etc) 3) Service fees for network services you don't have a good/any plan for (eg, data).
Does anyone know what kind of revenue the carriers actually make from this? Is it substantial, or are they merely doing it thinking that if they do, they'll be the next Apple or control the "market"?
While it would be great to see the government doing the right thing for the right reasons, when did THAT last happen?
Personally, I don't have an issue with it, and it's hardly a new meme in the legalization fight. It's always been a plank in the legalization platform that legalization could/would/should be taxed for revenue purposes, just as liquor and cigarettes are now.
I think most smart government officials realize that there's a window of time between the local legalization of marijuana and the eventual Federal legalization of marijuana where the locals get to collect ALL the taxes -- production, wholesale, retail, licensing fees at all levels, you name it.
Once it's legalized at the Federal level, the Feds will swoop in and excise tax the shit out of it, leaving only morsels & local regulation licensing fees left for local government. They can only tax it so much before it becomes sensible to grow your own or people shift back to the black market.
Next up should be a re-thinking of the laws regarding pain medication, such as opiates and synthetics.
Amen. I get terrible "migraines" (doctor's word, not mine -- I just say headaches) and about 20% of the time a timely Midrin will help, but if that fails or I'm not timely, the only thing that helps is opiates.
My doctor gives me *40* Percocets every six months, along with a bullshit lecture on how habit-forming they are, etc etc etc. It's hardly adequate -- I fall short by about 1-2 months and refuse to go back for fear of being labeled and cut off forever or have him force shit like daily tricyclic antidepressants on me.
At my last visit I complained mildly that while effective, the peak duration of pain relief was fairly short, forcing me to take more pills -- was there something with a longer, sustained release? "No, that'd be just more narcotics, and we'll stay where we're at." Meanwhile, a 3 day headache is like 1/4 of my SIX MONTH supply.
I'm pretty sure I could take 40 Percocets in a MONTH and never develop an addiction, but they'd rather have you suffer than "risk" addiction.
I think governments get that trying to stop it is a colossal waste in an era of shrinking revenue and resources and that legalizing it enables a revenue source that has thus been untapped.
I don't think the Feds will necessarily roll over, but the smart states will realize that if they get on top of it before it becomes Federalized they can collect pretty much all the taxes on it -- production, wholesale, retail, plus licensing fees to growers, wholesalers and retailers; smart regulations will ensure only in-state product is sold by anyone at any level.
How many choices did you have in a rather competitive market (at the time) like cars?
Domestically? At least five: Hudson (which became AMC), Studebaker, General Motors (which we'll count as one, despite the fact that in the 1950s there was a lot more distinction between division products), Ford and Chrysler.
And then there were niche players, like Checker whose vehicles were primarily for the livery market but went on to sell normal end-user vehicles.
What do we have now? Three, sort of -- GM has closed its Olds and Pontiac divisions, making for fewer choices, although realistically the marquees of GM have had little distinction since the 1970s, Chrysler is owned by Fiat, and Ford isn't what it used to be.
Import-wise we have more choices now, but to be fair to 1950s markets, Europe and Japan were in recovery and the vehicles produced at that time were more attuned to local market conditions (less expensive, smaller, etc) than American consumer demand (larger, more powerful, etc).
And maybe even personalized fares make sense from the perspective of what *I* want a "personalized" fare to be versus the evil, how-much-can-we-take-him-for idea of personalized fares.
For example, I have a gazillion frequent flyer miles; when searching for flights, I want to find the cheapest coach seat I can upgrade to first class via miles. I'd love a flight search that gave me that data as my "personalized fare" (ie, cost + miles). It's a total PITA to do that now on the airlines web site.
I keep wondering why if, as they say, broadband is so vital to economic growth that the only way to get it is to subsidize it.
If it provides a business advantage, someone will be selling it, and low and behold, they do. But it costs money to provide high speed networking -- networks cost money and the sellers don't see the business advantage to investing more money in networks than they can recoup. You can always get bandwidth if that's what you want, but it will cost you. That's how the market functions.
Sure, in some places it "sucks" (3Mbps, bad DNS, no NNTP, etc) but even there I think we need some perspective about how far the technology has come -- within the constraints of a market economy and without a ton of government involvement.
28.8 Kbps Internet was a miracle in 1995. 1.5 Mbps internet access was pretty high end 10 or so years ago. You paid big bucks for a T1 or were lucky to spend $75-100 for a 1.5 DSL line. I did at home when it finally became available. Just a few months ago, I switched ISPs and got 12/2 Mbps with 5 IPs for $70 a month. Is it a global bargain? No, but it's not tax subsidized either, but its 10x bandwidth I had 10 years ago for the same money.
I get there's some sloppy, we're-a-utility profitmaking to broadband in some areas and choices are limited, but overall it seems OK to me. In the past ten years, for me, the cost has remained static in absolute terms (which actually declining in real terms) *and* the product has been increased by a factor of 10. What else do I buy that's anywhere near that good? Can I buy 10x food I used to for the same money as 10 years ago? Energy? Clothes?
What's the best actual fix for existing & new phones? Assuming there is a real problem with the antenna, but only when shorted with hand in "right position".
Idea #1: A new antenna design using coatings or some factory installed bumper/widget/plastic spacer installed with a modified antenna? This assumes a "4.1" phone design which would be sold instead of the current design.
Presumably this could be retrofitted onto existing inventories of iPhones and these could be swapped for existing iPhones in the field, which could be further refurbished and swapped, etc.
Idea #2: Fix phone through methods above. Sell new phones only based on this design. Existing users get free bumper or some kind of credit.
idea #3: Do nothing. Revise design for 2011 iPhone seasonal launch.
It was a major issue that kept me from buying an iPhone.
As it turned out, in MSP, I get overall BETTER reception with AT&T than I got with Verizon (Motorola Q black). I had a couple of client sites where there was almost no reception on Verizon and now I get a great signal with AT&T.
Dropped calls have been about the same overall, although I have noticed a slight (but totally perception-based, I don't keep score) uptick in dropped calls lately but that may just be an illusion. When you do 1200+ minutes a month on a cell phone, a handful of dropped calls isn't really an issue.
I do think Apple hardware designs occasionally need a second rev to get it right and I agree with you about the iPhone 4. I'm not due for a discounted upgrade anyway until next year (and I have a 32GB 3GS now) and I'd like to see whatever the antenna issue is fixed as well as see a 64GB storage option -- I was surprised they didn't do a 64GB model this year.
It'd be nuts to "free" dive in caves, without a rope or some other guide back. For these extreme dives you'd think they'd also work their way down with spare air tanks so they never had to worry about going all the way back up to the top, just back to the last air tank drop.
I also wonder if they couldn't engineer some kind of capsule that could be inflated in a larger chamber to serve as a base on longer dives, possibly with an air line from the surface, sort of a base camp.
Regardless, you gotta really not have even a hint of claustrophobia. I usually enjoy cave tours, mine tours and that sort of underground thing but the idea of diving in a cave makes me sick to my stomach nervous.
Tax avoidance through expense maximization and income minimization is one thing; there are rules and if you break them you get penalized, up to an including prison.
In this case, though, the rules (GAAP) are much more flexible and in some cases they can write their own rules (contract language, business procedures) and the punishment at worst might be a fraud conviction but generally the punishment is getting sued and that has a high barrier to success, let alone initiation.
It also helps that the "product" of much of Hollywood doesn't have the kind of supply-and-product chain that manufacturing or other industry has. It has a lot of soft costs and a lot of human costs that can silently and flexibly siphon money from successful projects (consulting fees, personal services (AKA "hookers and blow"), promotional costs, legal fees).
I think you're onto something. The storm drains around here are basically just a row of bars; you couldn't ever fall through one but the gaps are large enough that magnets, string and sticks were deployed for toy extraction as kids.
With manhole covers, I think they want the minimal amount of drainage into them since they are generally for access to either sanitary sewers (which can get inundated in heavy rainfall and overflow discharge where you don't want them to) or electrical/comm vaults which don't mix well with large amounts of water. Plus they are often welded down to keep people out or for event security.
One idea that occurred to me for manholes that could accommodate some water would be microperforation -- thousands of 1/16" holes drilled into the manhole would allow pressure to escape while making it less likely that tons of water would drain in as well as allow them to be welded down for security without making it possible to get into them or force objects into them.
The other idea (which is probably too complex) that occured to me would keying the covers so that it required a half-turn to secure them to the frame, but have the frame be such that it would allow the manhole cover to lift up a couple of inches to let pressure escape.
You could probably get the same effect by welding a T bracket to the bottom of the manhole cover and attaching another to the inside of the hole -- the cover could "pop off" but the cable would keep it from flying in the air. The cable could be easily removed from the bracket for maintenance.
They're often welded to the frame for theft prevention. IIRC when metals prices were peaking, there was a rash of manhole cover thefts in Detroit. Apparently it got bad enough that it became a substantial road hazard in some areas.
Admiral walks past clock shop, sets watch to grandfather clock, goes to naval base and fires cannon.
After the Admiral walks past the clock shop, the clockmaker shows up for work. He waits until the cannon is fired and then corrects the grandfather clock.
The admiral is setting his watch to the "corrected" time from yesterday.
The only thing that's off is that the correction that the grandfather clock gets would be fairly minor, as the assumption is the cannon is fired soon after he sets his watch.
But it could be that his pocket watch is REALLY inaccurate and the grandfather clock less so.
There was a local newspaper column about Comcast's switch to digital encoding for everything and the requirement that everyone have a cable box (shades of pre-cable ready TV again). As with all things local newspaper + technology, it was shockingly short of facts.
What I don't understand is why Comcast doesn't use in the clear ATSC digital encoding for their "analog to digital" conversion? I finally got a TV with an ATSC tuner and was surprised to see ATSC digital channels on the cable coming out of the wall without a box.
Of course I know the conspiracy angle is Comcast just wants to nickel and dime everyone as much as possible, but the ability to just connect a TV to cable without a box has been a strength of cable vs. satellite (along with a simpler wiring scheme). When the box becomes a requirement to get ANY TV, I think they lose a competitive advantage over satellite.
The article I read said they would be supplying 1-2 boxes for free to all subscribers. Given the relative stupidity of most people and the inherent added complexity this adds to cable, wouldn't it be more profitable in the long run to just encode via ATSC and not deal with all the nuisance of boxes and box support and box replacement, ad nauseum?
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...to make managers in profit centers accountable for the costs that go into their profits?
Once you get out of the realm of real businesses and into the funny money realm of large corporation "profit centers" so many of the costs associated with running a real business get lost -- rents, furniture, HR costs (payroll and benefit admin overhead), utilities, and of course, IT costs.
A lot of these profit center managers are prone to treat $Profit = $income - ($payroll + $direct_expenditures) and ignore the other costs, no matter how wastefully they're incurred.
Their attitude is so we ran 200k color copies, big deal. So we've got a file & email servers with 2-3 TB of crap, MP3s, etc. So we all stream TV, audio/video and still want to download a gigabyte in 10 minutes. We insist on expensive laptops, Adobe Creative Suite on every computer, ponies, balloons, etc.
What's funny is when you work with REAL small businesses that have to pay for everything it's amazing the corners they'll cut and the sacrifices they'll make for IT (old, slow PCs, bad software, slow networks, bad/no backups, etc). It goes too far with them sometimes, but in those worlds they "get" it.
I think chargebacks are another way to keep these managers honest and in some ways, not skew upper managements view of how profitable or not the business actually is.
The downside of unlimited storage is it wreaks havoc with backups, replication and other intensive tasks that have to move that storage around.
I've worked in more than a couple of places with an "all you can eat" philosophy and you end up with a data monster that's expensive and complicated to backup, replicate and work with.
And usually they grew to a size (a place I work with right now has one just crossing the 2 TB threshold) where they become impossible to deal with -- departments can't/won't shrink them because the pile of crap is so large they'd need a couple of FTEs just to go through it all.
Chargebacks make perfect sense -- business units treat IT resources like they were free and use them EXTREMELY inefficiently (scanning thousands of images at 1200 dpi to use in on-screen PowerPoints as one example). It's perfectly reasonable to allocate those costs to business units so management can really get an idea if a business unit is profitable.
You mean I can get out from under my Friday night obligation?
I agree completely that the Founding Fathers were highly intelligent and unbelievable prescient. Have you researched these quotes to make sure they're accurate and historically verifiable?
I keep running into quotes attributed them that seem uncannily accurate to today's situation; they're widely repeated but when you look into them, there's no authority on the speaker who can back the quotes up. It's like (or exactly like) someone is making up the quotes and attributing them to Founding Fathers when in fact they are just Tea Party mantras.
And it's not that the sentiment is something I disagree with, its just that it's dishonest.
Or at least the whole truth, quite often you find that to replicate your 8 TB volume really requires you to buy a SAN with 16 TB capacity on one end and 16 TB on the other with the "unused" space for replication overhead or whatever fancy SAN tricks you want play.
So while you wanted 16 TB of capacity, you actually buy 32+ much of what appears to be uncommitted.
Son, the job of the bureaucracy is to CREATE regulations, NOT follow them.
While I'm sure the police enjoy that little definition of "always on duty" and all the conveniences that come with the powers of being an "on duty" police officer 24 hours a day, the reality is that they are not really on duty 24 hours a day.
For one, almost all police agencies are unionized and operate under a collective bargaining agreement, and I'm certain that collective bargaining agreement sets aside time for being "off duty" where they are not functioning as active police officers.
Secondly, there's the actual reality of being out of uniform and not performing job tasks for which you are not compensated (most police officers are also hourly wage employees). Of course they do not lose their peace officer certification or their employment status, but they are not actually performing policing duties.
That was a great movie, but difficult to keep track of the time travel.
I don't think they ended up with specific paradoxes, but I seem to recall a lot of attempts to fix things by going further and further back; perhaps not explicit paradoxes, but a lot of manipulation of the past to try to impact the future.
The Communist Party has been doing well with the bread angle (at least compared to the 1970s), and now they're just fine-tuning the circuses.
Most of them are probably pissed because that dream of running a freelance business out of your cool house in a hip urban neighborhood and being able to write off all your Macintosh crap as a business expense is over.
I've had an iPhone for too long now to clearly remember, but my last Verizon phone had a ton of bloatware.
It seemed like it was designed to generate revenue in three ways:
1) Subscription fees for Verizon services
2) Purchase fees for Verizon products (ringtones, etc)
3) Service fees for network services you don't have a good/any plan for (eg, data).
Does anyone know what kind of revenue the carriers actually make from this? Is it substantial, or are they merely doing it thinking that if they do, they'll be the next Apple or control the "market"?
While it would be great to see the government doing the right thing for the right reasons, when did THAT last happen?
Personally, I don't have an issue with it, and it's hardly a new meme in the legalization fight. It's always been a plank in the legalization platform that legalization could/would/should be taxed for revenue purposes, just as liquor and cigarettes are now.
I think most smart government officials realize that there's a window of time between the local legalization of marijuana and the eventual Federal legalization of marijuana where the locals get to collect ALL the taxes -- production, wholesale, retail, licensing fees at all levels, you name it.
Once it's legalized at the Federal level, the Feds will swoop in and excise tax the shit out of it, leaving only morsels & local regulation licensing fees left for local government. They can only tax it so much before it becomes sensible to grow your own or people shift back to the black market.
Next up should be a re-thinking of the laws regarding pain medication, such as opiates and synthetics.
Amen. I get terrible "migraines" (doctor's word, not mine -- I just say headaches) and about 20% of the time a timely Midrin will help, but if that fails or I'm not timely, the only thing that helps is opiates.
My doctor gives me *40* Percocets every six months, along with a bullshit lecture on how habit-forming they are, etc etc etc. It's hardly adequate -- I fall short by about 1-2 months and refuse to go back for fear of being labeled and cut off forever or have him force shit like daily tricyclic antidepressants on me.
At my last visit I complained mildly that while effective, the peak duration of pain relief was fairly short, forcing me to take more pills -- was there something with a longer, sustained release? "No, that'd be just more narcotics, and we'll stay where we're at." Meanwhile, a 3 day headache is like 1/4 of my SIX MONTH supply.
I'm pretty sure I could take 40 Percocets in a MONTH and never develop an addiction, but they'd rather have you suffer than "risk" addiction.
I think governments get that trying to stop it is a colossal waste in an era of shrinking revenue and resources and that legalizing it enables a revenue source that has thus been untapped.
I don't think the Feds will necessarily roll over, but the smart states will realize that if they get on top of it before it becomes Federalized they can collect pretty much all the taxes on it -- production, wholesale, retail, plus licensing fees to growers, wholesalers and retailers; smart regulations will ensure only in-state product is sold by anyone at any level.
How many choices did you have in a rather competitive market (at the time) like cars?
Domestically? At least five: Hudson (which became AMC), Studebaker, General Motors (which we'll count as one, despite the fact that in the 1950s there was a lot more distinction between division products), Ford and Chrysler.
And then there were niche players, like Checker whose vehicles were primarily for the livery market but went on to sell normal end-user vehicles.
What do we have now? Three, sort of -- GM has closed its Olds and Pontiac divisions, making for fewer choices, although realistically the marquees of GM have had little distinction since the 1970s, Chrysler is owned by Fiat, and Ford isn't what it used to be.
Import-wise we have more choices now, but to be fair to 1950s markets, Europe and Japan were in recovery and the vehicles produced at that time were more attuned to local market conditions (less expensive, smaller, etc) than American consumer demand (larger, more powerful, etc).
And maybe even personalized fares make sense from the perspective of what *I* want a "personalized" fare to be versus the evil, how-much-can-we-take-him-for idea of personalized fares.
For example, I have a gazillion frequent flyer miles; when searching for flights, I want to find the cheapest coach seat I can upgrade to first class via miles. I'd love a flight search that gave me that data as my "personalized fare" (ie, cost + miles). It's a total PITA to do that now on the airlines web site.
I keep wondering why if, as they say, broadband is so vital to economic growth that the only way to get it is to subsidize it.
If it provides a business advantage, someone will be selling it, and low and behold, they do. But it costs money to provide high speed networking -- networks cost money and the sellers don't see the business advantage to investing more money in networks than they can recoup. You can always get bandwidth if that's what you want, but it will cost you. That's how the market functions.
Sure, in some places it "sucks" (3Mbps, bad DNS, no NNTP, etc) but even there I think we need some perspective about how far the technology has come -- within the constraints of a market economy and without a ton of government involvement.
28.8 Kbps Internet was a miracle in 1995. 1.5 Mbps internet access was pretty high end 10 or so years ago. You paid big bucks for a T1 or were lucky to spend $75-100 for a 1.5 DSL line. I did at home when it finally became available. Just a few months ago, I switched ISPs and got 12/2 Mbps with 5 IPs for $70 a month. Is it a global bargain? No, but it's not tax subsidized either, but its 10x bandwidth I had 10 years ago for the same money.
I get there's some sloppy, we're-a-utility profitmaking to broadband in some areas and choices are limited, but overall it seems OK to me. In the past ten years, for me, the cost has remained static in absolute terms (which actually declining in real terms) *and* the product has been increased by a factor of 10. What else do I buy that's anywhere near that good? Can I buy 10x food I used to for the same money as 10 years ago? Energy? Clothes?
How does government involvement improve on this?
What's the best actual fix for existing & new phones? Assuming there is a real problem with the antenna, but only when shorted with hand in "right position".
Idea #1: A new antenna design using coatings or some factory installed bumper/widget/plastic spacer installed with a modified antenna? This assumes a "4.1" phone design which would be sold instead of the current design.
Presumably this could be retrofitted onto existing inventories of iPhones and these could be swapped for existing iPhones in the field, which could be further refurbished and swapped, etc.
Idea #2: Fix phone through methods above. Sell new phones only based on this design. Existing users get free bumper or some kind of credit.
idea #3: Do nothing. Revise design for 2011 iPhone seasonal launch.
It was a major issue that kept me from buying an iPhone.
As it turned out, in MSP, I get overall BETTER reception with AT&T than I got with Verizon (Motorola Q black). I had a couple of client sites where there was almost no reception on Verizon and now I get a great signal with AT&T.
Dropped calls have been about the same overall, although I have noticed a slight (but totally perception-based, I don't keep score) uptick in dropped calls lately but that may just be an illusion. When you do 1200+ minutes a month on a cell phone, a handful of dropped calls isn't really an issue.
I do think Apple hardware designs occasionally need a second rev to get it right and I agree with you about the iPhone 4. I'm not due for a discounted upgrade anyway until next year (and I have a 32GB 3GS now) and I'd like to see whatever the antenna issue is fixed as well as see a 64GB storage option -- I was surprised they didn't do a 64GB model this year.
It'd be nuts to "free" dive in caves, without a rope or some other guide back. For these extreme dives you'd think they'd also work their way down with spare air tanks so they never had to worry about going all the way back up to the top, just back to the last air tank drop.
I also wonder if they couldn't engineer some kind of capsule that could be inflated in a larger chamber to serve as a base on longer dives, possibly with an air line from the surface, sort of a base camp.
Regardless, you gotta really not have even a hint of claustrophobia. I usually enjoy cave tours, mine tours and that sort of underground thing but the idea of diving in a cave makes me sick to my stomach nervous.
Tax avoidance through expense maximization and income minimization is one thing; there are rules and if you break them you get penalized, up to an including prison.
In this case, though, the rules (GAAP) are much more flexible and in some cases they can write their own rules (contract language, business procedures) and the punishment at worst might be a fraud conviction but generally the punishment is getting sued and that has a high barrier to success, let alone initiation.
It also helps that the "product" of much of Hollywood doesn't have the kind of supply-and-product chain that manufacturing or other industry has. It has a lot of soft costs and a lot of human costs that can silently and flexibly siphon money from successful projects (consulting fees, personal services (AKA "hookers and blow"), promotional costs, legal fees).
I think you're onto something. The storm drains around here are basically just a row of bars; you couldn't ever fall through one but the gaps are large enough that magnets, string and sticks were deployed for toy extraction as kids.
With manhole covers, I think they want the minimal amount of drainage into them since they are generally for access to either sanitary sewers (which can get inundated in heavy rainfall and overflow discharge where you don't want them to) or electrical/comm vaults which don't mix well with large amounts of water. Plus they are often welded down to keep people out or for event security.
One idea that occurred to me for manholes that could accommodate some water would be microperforation -- thousands of 1/16" holes drilled into the manhole would allow pressure to escape while making it less likely that tons of water would drain in as well as allow them to be welded down for security without making it possible to get into them or force objects into them.
The other idea (which is probably too complex) that occured to me would keying the covers so that it required a half-turn to secure them to the frame, but have the frame be such that it would allow the manhole cover to lift up a couple of inches to let pressure escape.
You could probably get the same effect by welding a T bracket to the bottom of the manhole cover and attaching another to the inside of the hole -- the cover could "pop off" but the cable would keep it from flying in the air. The cable could be easily removed from the bracket for maintenance.
They're often welded to the frame for theft prevention. IIRC when metals prices were peaking, there was a rash of manhole cover thefts in Detroit. Apparently it got bad enough that it became a substantial road hazard in some areas.
Admiral walks past clock shop, sets watch to grandfather clock, goes to naval base and fires cannon.
After the Admiral walks past the clock shop, the clockmaker shows up for work. He waits until the cannon is fired and then corrects the grandfather clock.
The admiral is setting his watch to the "corrected" time from yesterday.
The only thing that's off is that the correction that the grandfather clock gets would be fairly minor, as the assumption is the cannon is fired soon after he sets his watch.
But it could be that his pocket watch is REALLY inaccurate and the grandfather clock less so.
There was a local newspaper column about Comcast's switch to digital encoding for everything and the requirement that everyone have a cable box (shades of pre-cable ready TV again). As with all things local newspaper + technology, it was shockingly short of facts.
What I don't understand is why Comcast doesn't use in the clear ATSC digital encoding for their "analog to digital" conversion? I finally got a TV with an ATSC tuner and was surprised to see ATSC digital channels on the cable coming out of the wall without a box.
Of course I know the conspiracy angle is Comcast just wants to nickel and dime everyone as much as possible, but the ability to just connect a TV to cable without a box has been a strength of cable vs. satellite (along with a simpler wiring scheme). When the box becomes a requirement to get ANY TV, I think they lose a competitive advantage over satellite.
The article I read said they would be supplying 1-2 boxes for free to all subscribers. Given the relative stupidity of most people and the inherent added complexity this adds to cable, wouldn't it be more profitable in the long run to just encode via ATSC and not deal with all the nuisance of boxes and box support and box replacement, ad nauseum?