Do they even make TVs configurable without the remote, no matter how frustrating 4 buttons makes the menu navigation?
I have a Pioneer AV receiver and its remote quit. The remote has a zillion buttons and a bunch of functions can't be configured on the unit itself. A replacement identical remote has proved elusive, and the Harmony I bought seems only capable of controlling a subset of the features.
It's made me think that a preferred feature of many AV devices would be configuration on the unit itself or minimal, basic remote buttons required to do all configuration (arrows and enter, etc). It's also made me think the next time I buy a higher dollar AV item, I ought to source a replacement remote at the same time and keep it stored without batteries as a backup.
I think dedupe is probably a reasonable explanation. I usually see deduplication systems cut data consumption by 30-40% but in some cases it can go even higher than that.
The limit I would have expected him to run into was creating a data set that exceeded the storage system, hitting some size that required spanning storage buckets in a way it couldn't do.
I live in northern USA. No concrete slab foundations. Our houses all have basements for utilities and because the footings need to extend below the frost line as do our water and sewer lines. Basement has a poured slab, but the footings for sure are poured with most new houses built in my immediate neighborhood in the last 10 years having a poured concrete foundation walls that extend to about 2 feet above grade.
Typically above grade elevation they are stick framed with dimensional lumber, LVLs or engineered wood truss joists. Exterior structure is usually chipboard or plywood over the stick framing. That gets covered with Tyvek house wrap, and the exterior finish is either vinyl siding, cementboard siding often with 6 ft of cultured stone or brick fascia at ground level.
Exterior walls between 2x4s or 2x6s are filled with fiberglass batting for insulation. Attic spaces are usually unfinished with blown in or rolled fiberglass over the attic decking or top floor ceiling joists. Roof itself is uninsulated to allow it to remain cold and prevent snow melt and ice dams.
No house around here I've seen has ever used bricks for structure unless it was built in the 19th century. I think the "bricks" used for fascias are all synthetic masonry and not fired clay, either.
I don't think the economic arguments are necessarily wrong about the macro effects of change.
The problem lies in the clinical language of "dislocation and role changes" of labor, as if labor just gets a slip of paper that reassigns them to another job in a different place. This is a major gloss over the fact that these are real people, often at later stages of careers, who practically can't "just go get another job" doing something completely different.
It's compounded by the fact that the profits from these changes go to the owners of capital, while the burden of dealing with the unemployed worker with no career options goes to the state.
And the rate of change is accelerating to the point that neither labor nor government can adapt fast enough. Even the buggy whip industry had several decades to adapt, especially if you consider that as an industry the buggy whip industry wasn't even around that long; buggy whips existed for centuries, but were probably not organized on an industrial basis until the mid 19th century.
I'd hope they go pretty far to prevent that from happening.
1) Balls are cheap, so you keep a dozen sets of them, split into two pools, the use pool and the hold pool. A die is rolled to choose the set of balls used in the drawing. After the drawing, the die is rolled again and a hold pool box is put into the use pool and the recently used box of balls goes into the hold pool. This makes sure nobody knows which balls will get used and no way to keep a single set of balls in use consistently.
2) Balls are locked away and it takes 3 employees to work with them under video surveillance.
3) Frequent replacement of all ball sets.
4) Chain of custody for all balls from manufacturer to lottery.
This would make it really difficult to tamper with the balls or even know which balls would be used for any drawing or even how many times they might get used.
My guess is that while the combat systems on these ships are awesome and they're probably also capable of awesome electronic navigation, but some kind of "not the Navy Way" mindset causes them to do things the old fashioned way and not rely on modern navigation systems when they're not feeling vulnerable.
The combat radars are turned off and the information sections are probably lightly staffed at 3 AM in friendly waters. The rest of the crew is doing business as usual and navigating the old fashioned way *and* being really lazy about it, assuming that everyone else is doing their job so they can slack off. It's 3 AM, and we're just cruising.
You could literally spend $5000 on recreational marine displays, radar and AIS and totally avoid this accident. AIS in particular -- ships *broadcast* their position, heading and speed and it shows up on screen, allowing even recreational boaters to set collision prediction alarms. Even recreational radar can track targets and show predicted paths against the vessel's own path. Why isn't this being done on the bridge of Navy ships?
But it's been explained to me that the Navy doesn't like to do this way, they have the staff and bridge space to do manual plotting and there's some kind of belief that it's superior.
I work in IT technology and it changes, but to be honest, it often seems like it doesn't change.
I had a conversation with a co-worker about this, and while there are kind of shifts in hardware platforms over time (like internal to networked storage) and performance increases in components (CPUs, network speeds, storage speeds) the basic framework of client/server computing hasn't changed all that much -- clients connect to applications that run on servers and they all communicate over a network.
You might call virtualization the only major big innovation in the last 15 years in some ways, as its really the most unique thing to come out of IT that wasn't based on just an incremental improvement in CPUs or networking, as well as making "cloud" computing possible.
At the end of the day, so many changes seem just incremental and not really paradigm shifting. Slightly new command set, modified user interface, bump in some kind of performance, but not much more.
I think automating foundations is probably not very likely considering the amount and complexity of robotics involved relative to what's already being saved in the traditional poured concrete method.
Soil variability makes automated excavation a challenge, you really need a person doing the digging to deal with small-scale variations in soil conditions (dig more here, dig less there) or with unknown stuff under a re-purposed building site (abandoned utilities or foundations).
Existing poured foundations are already modular forms that get re-used, and once the concrete is poured it's almost no labor involved -- just let the concrete cure and then remove the forms.
An automated digging system would have to be very good at local soil variations of subterranean exceptions in small scales and would wind up being a lot of complex machinery for what amounts to a couple of guys and a backhoe.
I think where automatic concrete pouring makes more sense is post-foundation, where you would use a machine to 3D print walls using some kind of fast-setting concrete type material. But they seem to be really fast and efficient with wood framing, so its a question of extreme capital intensive automation versus small amounts of labor and well-known methods.
I think it's important to differentiate between bricks (dark, historically clay-fired) and concrete blocks.
I don't think bricks are used for structural features anymore, but concrete block still is used for foundations and sometimes walls. The challenge for concrete block, though, is even in large scale construction where you would use them they already face competition from poured concrete and precast concrete panels. I think both are structurally sounder and allow rapid assembly of large buildings. Most new warehouses or industrial buildings made from concrete are built this way.
I live in an older neighborhood that's seen a fair amount of teardown new construction and the basement foundations are almost universally made from form-based poured concrete from what I've seen. In the types of construction where concrete block is still used, the scale often seems small -- a limited set of block courses before switching to wood or steel framing.
I'm not sure how much robotics works in this market.
Some upgrades can be tolerable and seldom get especially worse. Storage systems have by and large gotten mostly better over the last 10 years. That being said, the desktop is an especially irksome upgrade that causes much grief from users and to IT staff. Microsoft server operating systems are a mixed bag, I'd call Server 2016 a real mixed bag, and Exchange has gotten worse from 2010 - 2013 -2016.
Don't forget the vendor treadmill that everybody is subject to.
Vendors by and large "solve" the problems associated with a given functional domain (say, desktop operating systems or hypervisors) but the problem they run into is that they need to keep issuing upgrades to keep support revenue and licensing bringing in growth.
So you wind up on these largely needless upgrade cycles which at best bring marginal functional improvements, a bunch of fringe features for a small percentage of the customer base, and at worst break stable functionality in the name of some new bullshit interface or management paradigm.
I would like to see long term data on the effectiveness of treasure hunt job posting employees. I'd be surprised if these kinds of applicants didn't have a bunch of quirks that made them really great at very narrow tasks, but awful at many others and possibly not very good at human skills.
I would say there's no bans on nuclear weapons, just anti-proliferation strategies that make it a requirement to make your own from scratch and a material strategy that prevents key industrial components from being obtainable by prohibited nations.
But really, any country with a sufficiently developed industrial base and focus can build a nuclear weapon and there's no way to stop them short of military intervention. That's how Britain, France, Israel, India and Pakistan wound up with them
There's an entire subculture of people that do that. My brother in law used to work in some kind of security department at Target and he worked on a team that specifically focused on people who had kind of figured out how to exploit the system this way. They were serious enough about it to use the security cameras to track people down to their vehicles.
I don't really know if this was actual fraud, like counterfeit coupons or just collections of really lucrative coupons in combination. The casino analogy would be did they learn to count cards or were they actively cheating in some way?
I get the general idea that subsidies are bad, but this was seems especially bad on so many levels. The scale of the subsidy to a single company, for one. I'm also fairly convinced there will be a major cultural mismatch between the company and the locals. I'm also thinking that the Wisconsin lacks the human capital to effectively run this plant and it will rely on a lot out of outside experts, with few higher end jobs being filled by locals.
As far as potentially successful subsidy schemes go, I think something more like a sovereign wealth fund might actually have the fewest drawbacks. It would be roughly about the same model as most private capital investment business with some kind of selection bias -- local firms, growth businesses, maximizing certain types of employment, and perhaps trying to pull off a larger strategic goal of fostering a synergistic business economy that generates network effects.
But it wouldn't provide the kickbacks to the individuals who voted for the bill.
Actually it would -- with the subsidies more widely dispersed, there would be more potential kickback sources and possibly more kickback recipients depending on how the subsidies were awarded.
It just becomes an auction for hosting the company and you wind up with states bidding the subsidy up to attract the company.
I think the only way it makes sense for a deal of this scale is if the subsidies are entirely derived from the success of the business, like a 3% payroll tax refund to the company. It costs the government something, but if the company doesn't deliver as many jobs or they don't pay as well as they said, it winds up being a lower subsidy.
The math is crazy. They could pay 13,000 people $15,384 per year for 15 years for $3 billion. Which I know doesn't make any sense, especially considering the $3 billion in cash isn't a pre-existing sum and probably represents some kind of long term payroll tax refund, which is why its tied to the employment and projected wage numbers.
You would think, though, that if they were willing to lay out that kind of money as an incentive it would be better in some kind of startup fund or small business capital expansion program. The same $3 billion could provide $1 million per year to 207 small businesses or startups for 15 years.
The latter seems like it would be more likely to create a stronger and more diverse economy, especially if the money helps grow established small businesses.
So what happens when a crime is motivated by a hatred of an unprotected class? Not a hate crime, just an ordinary crime?
I'm willing in principal to buy into the idea of a hate crime as a crime motivated by bias against some kind of identifiable group, but I have to balk at the "protected class" distinction because it seems to rather arbitrarily consider crimes motivated against "unprotected" classes as less serious.
I also question how you determine this bias motivation. Is it strictly limited to the circumstances of the crime committed, or does it involve the perpetrators speech or beliefs outside of the crime's commission? I think both methods are flawed.
As a thought exercise, imagine a person with a public affiliation with some hate group. They get into a fender bender in a parking lot with a member of someone that falls under the umbrella of a disliked group, a fight ensues and they beat that person up. At no time do they mention this person's group status in any way. Under a strict circumstance interpretation, it's not a hate crime because the crime itself isn't liked to an act of bias. But it could easily be the hate group's modus operandi -- fight the disliked group, but keep your mouth shut.
Now imagine a person with a private set of biases. They only express them in one-one interactions with close friends, they don't belong to any hate group. They get involved in a fight with a member of the group they dislike without showing a bias. and after some investigation (seized cell phone, etc) their private biases become known. Is this a hate crime? I'd worry here that any crime involving a so-called protected class would wind up as a fishing expedition to try to discover hidden biases.
I quit taking the express bus for driving for that reason -- my express bus route was taking 90 minutes a day, driving was around 40 minutes per day. I was literally getting 3 usable hours a week back driving.
I think the only fix for this express route was to shorten the pre-"express" part. It covered about 5 miles of city streets collecting passengers and this accounted for about 25 of its 45 minute one-way trip. If they could cut that down to 2 miles of streets, it would have been much more time competitive.
Call me crazy, but I don't think they would have to price old content for less than "new" content, or at least not any less than they charge for a 5 year old major studio movie which they already discount.
I have a hard time with the notion that there are a lot of stakeholders in older content. I think it's *new* content where everyone involved has a complex contract with percentages of a film or show in perpetuity, but in older films I think there were more people with just straight fees or payments and only the producer or studio actually had rights down the road.
And even if you had a film with stakeholders, many of them are dead and the rights such a mess that I bet even the people or entities that inherited them don't even really know. You might get sued for 1 of every 25 films you made a streaming deal, and you just build that into your licensing model. I mean, if it's borderline profitable to release them at all, how big can the risk actually be?
Paying people to attend a candidate's rally so that the media can report that the candidate attracted standing room only crowds? I think I've read this as a tactic as far back as the Kennedy/Nixon race in 1960, especially in states where Kennedy was weak. Joe Kennedy's money and mob connections got big crowds for JFK in places like West Virginia.
I know the conspiracy folks have been onto this for a while and regularly claim that many protests or big media events have been stage managed with hired crowds/extras, and that's above and beyond the "false flag" claims where they deny there was anything real about a specific event.
I still don't quite understand why old content owners are so reluctant to license content to Netflix, especially content that's pre-1975 or so.
Outside of really notable films (Academy Award winners, etc), those films and especially TV shows aren't making any money sitting on the shelf at all and few copies are probably being sold on DVD/BD even if they are available on disc. It literally makes more sense to license them to Netflix than to do nothing.
Even in the case where principals had lucrative deals that would allow them to hold up licensing to streaming/digital formats, a lot of those principals are dead and their inheritors probably aren't either going to object or will accept whatever extra is offered to them for a streaming deal. This would seem to get better as you go further back, not worse. Maybe in some cases it would be worth whatever risk to just run the risk of cutting someone out and pay them off if they object.
Even if $Studio has some kind of vague plans for their own streaming services, we haven't seen any of them do it or if they're still planning to, it's slightly more complicated than just slapping up a web site, meaning there's years before they're able to do it and they could license their content out for a couple of years without risking their own service.
I'm sometimes convinced that Netflix isn't even trying to license this content, they're trying to ween subscribers off other people's content so that in 5 years or whatever nobody (especially young people) will even know that Netflix actually had third party content. Or the other theory, that content owners simply don't want back catalog available because there's so much of it that's worthwhile that it would seriously degrade interest in their new content.
Problem 1 is that the action would have to be taken by the state where the CEO or whoever you're arresting has their home office. Minnesota can issue an arrest warrant for the head of Wells Fargo, but that doesn't mean they can guarantee some other state will actually execute the warrant for them, especially if its the their home office state.
Even if that wasn't an obstacle, about the second time you try that I'm sure there would be a Federal civil rights lawsuit filed naming specific state officials as defendants and seeking vast monetary damages and an injunction against State action.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they even make TVs configurable without the remote, no matter how frustrating 4 buttons makes the menu navigation?
I have a Pioneer AV receiver and its remote quit. The remote has a zillion buttons and a bunch of functions can't be configured on the unit itself. A replacement identical remote has proved elusive, and the Harmony I bought seems only capable of controlling a subset of the features.
It's made me think that a preferred feature of many AV devices would be configuration on the unit itself or minimal, basic remote buttons required to do all configuration (arrows and enter, etc). It's also made me think the next time I buy a higher dollar AV item, I ought to source a replacement remote at the same time and keep it stored without batteries as a backup.
I think dedupe is probably a reasonable explanation. I usually see deduplication systems cut data consumption by 30-40% but in some cases it can go even higher than that.
The limit I would have expected him to run into was creating a data set that exceeded the storage system, hitting some size that required spanning storage buckets in a way it couldn't do.
I live in northern USA. No concrete slab foundations. Our houses all have basements for utilities and because the footings need to extend below the frost line as do our water and sewer lines. Basement has a poured slab, but the footings for sure are poured with most new houses built in my immediate neighborhood in the last 10 years having a poured concrete foundation walls that extend to about 2 feet above grade.
Typically above grade elevation they are stick framed with dimensional lumber, LVLs or engineered wood truss joists. Exterior structure is usually chipboard or plywood over the stick framing. That gets covered with Tyvek house wrap, and the exterior finish is either vinyl siding, cementboard siding often with 6 ft of cultured stone or brick fascia at ground level.
Exterior walls between 2x4s or 2x6s are filled with fiberglass batting for insulation. Attic spaces are usually unfinished with blown in or rolled fiberglass over the attic decking or top floor ceiling joists. Roof itself is uninsulated to allow it to remain cold and prevent snow melt and ice dams.
No house around here I've seen has ever used bricks for structure unless it was built in the 19th century. I think the "bricks" used for fascias are all synthetic masonry and not fired clay, either.
I don't think the economic arguments are necessarily wrong about the macro effects of change.
The problem lies in the clinical language of "dislocation and role changes" of labor, as if labor just gets a slip of paper that reassigns them to another job in a different place. This is a major gloss over the fact that these are real people, often at later stages of careers, who practically can't "just go get another job" doing something completely different.
It's compounded by the fact that the profits from these changes go to the owners of capital, while the burden of dealing with the unemployed worker with no career options goes to the state.
And the rate of change is accelerating to the point that neither labor nor government can adapt fast enough. Even the buggy whip industry had several decades to adapt, especially if you consider that as an industry the buggy whip industry wasn't even around that long; buggy whips existed for centuries, but were probably not organized on an industrial basis until the mid 19th century.
I'd hope they go pretty far to prevent that from happening.
1) Balls are cheap, so you keep a dozen sets of them, split into two pools, the use pool and the hold pool. A die is rolled to choose the set of balls used in the drawing. After the drawing, the die is rolled again and a hold pool box is put into the use pool and the recently used box of balls goes into the hold pool. This makes sure nobody knows which balls will get used and no way to keep a single set of balls in use consistently.
2) Balls are locked away and it takes 3 employees to work with them under video surveillance.
3) Frequent replacement of all ball sets.
4) Chain of custody for all balls from manufacturer to lottery.
This would make it really difficult to tamper with the balls or even know which balls would be used for any drawing or even how many times they might get used.
My guess is that while the combat systems on these ships are awesome and they're probably also capable of awesome electronic navigation, but some kind of "not the Navy Way" mindset causes them to do things the old fashioned way and not rely on modern navigation systems when they're not feeling vulnerable.
The combat radars are turned off and the information sections are probably lightly staffed at 3 AM in friendly waters. The rest of the crew is doing business as usual and navigating the old fashioned way *and* being really lazy about it, assuming that everyone else is doing their job so they can slack off. It's 3 AM, and we're just cruising.
You could literally spend $5000 on recreational marine displays, radar and AIS and totally avoid this accident. AIS in particular -- ships *broadcast* their position, heading and speed and it shows up on screen, allowing even recreational boaters to set collision prediction alarms. Even recreational radar can track targets and show predicted paths against the vessel's own path. Why isn't this being done on the bridge of Navy ships?
But it's been explained to me that the Navy doesn't like to do this way, they have the staff and bridge space to do manual plotting and there's some kind of belief that it's superior.
I work in IT technology and it changes, but to be honest, it often seems like it doesn't change.
I had a conversation with a co-worker about this, and while there are kind of shifts in hardware platforms over time (like internal to networked storage) and performance increases in components (CPUs, network speeds, storage speeds) the basic framework of client/server computing hasn't changed all that much -- clients connect to applications that run on servers and they all communicate over a network.
You might call virtualization the only major big innovation in the last 15 years in some ways, as its really the most unique thing to come out of IT that wasn't based on just an incremental improvement in CPUs or networking, as well as making "cloud" computing possible.
At the end of the day, so many changes seem just incremental and not really paradigm shifting. Slightly new command set, modified user interface, bump in some kind of performance, but not much more.
I think automating foundations is probably not very likely considering the amount and complexity of robotics involved relative to what's already being saved in the traditional poured concrete method.
Soil variability makes automated excavation a challenge, you really need a person doing the digging to deal with small-scale variations in soil conditions (dig more here, dig less there) or with unknown stuff under a re-purposed building site (abandoned utilities or foundations).
Existing poured foundations are already modular forms that get re-used, and once the concrete is poured it's almost no labor involved -- just let the concrete cure and then remove the forms.
An automated digging system would have to be very good at local soil variations of subterranean exceptions in small scales and would wind up being a lot of complex machinery for what amounts to a couple of guys and a backhoe.
I think where automatic concrete pouring makes more sense is post-foundation, where you would use a machine to 3D print walls using some kind of fast-setting concrete type material. But they seem to be really fast and efficient with wood framing, so its a question of extreme capital intensive automation versus small amounts of labor and well-known methods.
I think it's important to differentiate between bricks (dark, historically clay-fired) and concrete blocks.
I don't think bricks are used for structural features anymore, but concrete block still is used for foundations and sometimes walls. The challenge for concrete block, though, is even in large scale construction where you would use them they already face competition from poured concrete and precast concrete panels. I think both are structurally sounder and allow rapid assembly of large buildings. Most new warehouses or industrial buildings made from concrete are built this way.
I live in an older neighborhood that's seen a fair amount of teardown new construction and the basement foundations are almost universally made from form-based poured concrete from what I've seen. In the types of construction where concrete block is still used, the scale often seems small -- a limited set of block courses before switching to wood or steel framing.
I'm not sure how much robotics works in this market.
Some upgrades can be tolerable and seldom get especially worse. Storage systems have by and large gotten mostly better over the last 10 years. That being said, the desktop is an especially irksome upgrade that causes much grief from users and to IT staff. Microsoft server operating systems are a mixed bag, I'd call Server 2016 a real mixed bag, and Exchange has gotten worse from 2010 - 2013 -2016.
Don't forget the vendor treadmill that everybody is subject to.
Vendors by and large "solve" the problems associated with a given functional domain (say, desktop operating systems or hypervisors) but the problem they run into is that they need to keep issuing upgrades to keep support revenue and licensing bringing in growth.
So you wind up on these largely needless upgrade cycles which at best bring marginal functional improvements, a bunch of fringe features for a small percentage of the customer base, and at worst break stable functionality in the name of some new bullshit interface or management paradigm.
I would like to see long term data on the effectiveness of treasure hunt job posting employees. I'd be surprised if these kinds of applicants didn't have a bunch of quirks that made them really great at very narrow tasks, but awful at many others and possibly not very good at human skills.
I would say there's no bans on nuclear weapons, just anti-proliferation strategies that make it a requirement to make your own from scratch and a material strategy that prevents key industrial components from being obtainable by prohibited nations.
But really, any country with a sufficiently developed industrial base and focus can build a nuclear weapon and there's no way to stop them short of military intervention. That's how Britain, France, Israel, India and Pakistan wound up with them
There's an entire subculture of people that do that. My brother in law used to work in some kind of security department at Target and he worked on a team that specifically focused on people who had kind of figured out how to exploit the system this way. They were serious enough about it to use the security cameras to track people down to their vehicles.
I don't really know if this was actual fraud, like counterfeit coupons or just collections of really lucrative coupons in combination. The casino analogy would be did they learn to count cards or were they actively cheating in some way?
I get the general idea that subsidies are bad, but this was seems especially bad on so many levels. The scale of the subsidy to a single company, for one. I'm also fairly convinced there will be a major cultural mismatch between the company and the locals. I'm also thinking that the Wisconsin lacks the human capital to effectively run this plant and it will rely on a lot out of outside experts, with few higher end jobs being filled by locals.
As far as potentially successful subsidy schemes go, I think something more like a sovereign wealth fund might actually have the fewest drawbacks. It would be roughly about the same model as most private capital investment business with some kind of selection bias -- local firms, growth businesses, maximizing certain types of employment, and perhaps trying to pull off a larger strategic goal of fostering a synergistic business economy that generates network effects.
But it wouldn't provide the kickbacks to the individuals who voted for the bill.
Actually it would -- with the subsidies more widely dispersed, there would be more potential kickback sources and possibly more kickback recipients depending on how the subsidies were awarded.
It just becomes an auction for hosting the company and you wind up with states bidding the subsidy up to attract the company.
I think the only way it makes sense for a deal of this scale is if the subsidies are entirely derived from the success of the business, like a 3% payroll tax refund to the company. It costs the government something, but if the company doesn't deliver as many jobs or they don't pay as well as they said, it winds up being a lower subsidy.
The math is crazy. They could pay 13,000 people $15,384 per year for 15 years for $3 billion. Which I know doesn't make any sense, especially considering the $3 billion in cash isn't a pre-existing sum and probably represents some kind of long term payroll tax refund, which is why its tied to the employment and projected wage numbers.
You would think, though, that if they were willing to lay out that kind of money as an incentive it would be better in some kind of startup fund or small business capital expansion program. The same $3 billion could provide $1 million per year to 207 small businesses or startups for 15 years.
The latter seems like it would be more likely to create a stronger and more diverse economy, especially if the money helps grow established small businesses.
So what happens when a crime is motivated by a hatred of an unprotected class? Not a hate crime, just an ordinary crime?
I'm willing in principal to buy into the idea of a hate crime as a crime motivated by bias against some kind of identifiable group, but I have to balk at the "protected class" distinction because it seems to rather arbitrarily consider crimes motivated against "unprotected" classes as less serious.
I also question how you determine this bias motivation. Is it strictly limited to the circumstances of the crime committed, or does it involve the perpetrators speech or beliefs outside of the crime's commission? I think both methods are flawed.
As a thought exercise, imagine a person with a public affiliation with some hate group. They get into a fender bender in a parking lot with a member of someone that falls under the umbrella of a disliked group, a fight ensues and they beat that person up. At no time do they mention this person's group status in any way. Under a strict circumstance interpretation, it's not a hate crime because the crime itself isn't liked to an act of bias. But it could easily be the hate group's modus operandi -- fight the disliked group, but keep your mouth shut.
Now imagine a person with a private set of biases. They only express them in one-one interactions with close friends, they don't belong to any hate group. They get involved in a fight with a member of the group they dislike without showing a bias. and after some investigation (seized cell phone, etc) their private biases become known. Is this a hate crime? I'd worry here that any crime involving a so-called protected class would wind up as a fishing expedition to try to discover hidden biases.
I quit taking the express bus for driving for that reason -- my express bus route was taking 90 minutes a day, driving was around 40 minutes per day. I was literally getting 3 usable hours a week back driving.
I think the only fix for this express route was to shorten the pre-"express" part. It covered about 5 miles of city streets collecting passengers and this accounted for about 25 of its 45 minute one-way trip. If they could cut that down to 2 miles of streets, it would have been much more time competitive.
Call me crazy, but I don't think they would have to price old content for less than "new" content, or at least not any less than they charge for a 5 year old major studio movie which they already discount.
I have a hard time with the notion that there are a lot of stakeholders in older content. I think it's *new* content where everyone involved has a complex contract with percentages of a film or show in perpetuity, but in older films I think there were more people with just straight fees or payments and only the producer or studio actually had rights down the road.
And even if you had a film with stakeholders, many of them are dead and the rights such a mess that I bet even the people or entities that inherited them don't even really know. You might get sued for 1 of every 25 films you made a streaming deal, and you just build that into your licensing model. I mean, if it's borderline profitable to release them at all, how big can the risk actually be?
Paying people to attend a candidate's rally so that the media can report that the candidate attracted standing room only crowds? I think I've read this as a tactic as far back as the Kennedy/Nixon race in 1960, especially in states where Kennedy was weak. Joe Kennedy's money and mob connections got big crowds for JFK in places like West Virginia.
I know the conspiracy folks have been onto this for a while and regularly claim that many protests or big media events have been stage managed with hired crowds/extras, and that's above and beyond the "false flag" claims where they deny there was anything real about a specific event.
I still don't quite understand why old content owners are so reluctant to license content to Netflix, especially content that's pre-1975 or so.
Outside of really notable films (Academy Award winners, etc), those films and especially TV shows aren't making any money sitting on the shelf at all and few copies are probably being sold on DVD/BD even if they are available on disc. It literally makes more sense to license them to Netflix than to do nothing.
Even in the case where principals had lucrative deals that would allow them to hold up licensing to streaming/digital formats, a lot of those principals are dead and their inheritors probably aren't either going to object or will accept whatever extra is offered to them for a streaming deal. This would seem to get better as you go further back, not worse. Maybe in some cases it would be worth whatever risk to just run the risk of cutting someone out and pay them off if they object.
Even if $Studio has some kind of vague plans for their own streaming services, we haven't seen any of them do it or if they're still planning to, it's slightly more complicated than just slapping up a web site, meaning there's years before they're able to do it and they could license their content out for a couple of years without risking their own service.
I'm sometimes convinced that Netflix isn't even trying to license this content, they're trying to ween subscribers off other people's content so that in 5 years or whatever nobody (especially young people) will even know that Netflix actually had third party content. Or the other theory, that content owners simply don't want back catalog available because there's so much of it that's worthwhile that it would seriously degrade interest in their new content.
I wonder if the researchers controlled for users who drank sugar sweetened vs. artificially sweetened energy drinks.
There are some serious people who claim that sugar has addictive properties on par with cocaine.
Problem 1 is that the action would have to be taken by the state where the CEO or whoever you're arresting has their home office. Minnesota can issue an arrest warrant for the head of Wells Fargo, but that doesn't mean they can guarantee some other state will actually execute the warrant for them, especially if its the their home office state.
Even if that wasn't an obstacle, about the second time you try that I'm sure there would be a Federal civil rights lawsuit filed naming specific state officials as defendants and seeking vast monetary damages and an injunction against State action.