walk down to the town square and let everyone know what I think.
You can't even do that anymore. The "town square" is now a private mall development and political speech is prohibited by their terms of service. And it doesn't even matter that public tax dollars helped fund the mall development.
I get the standard pedantic line that "freedom of speech" is freedom from government prohibition on speech, but I think the increasing privatization of speech "platforms", whether they be Internet oligopolies or the domination of public space by private corporations, is a real threat to the principal of free speech.
When the public arena for speech is functionally controlled by private entities, does the protection from government censorship really mean much? Can we say we even have "free speech"?
Is it a bubble, or just a sign that there's so little organic growth and so much cash on the sidelines that people are willing to invest in anything that might provide better returns that T-bills?
Did they just use whatever the "reference time" was for some existing highly accurate clock? Or did they do a bunch of astronomical measurements and then set the atomic clock based on some astronomical reference that defined some specific time?
I think people who show up to "counter-protest" these neo-Nazis are only feeding into the neo-Nazi narrative of left-wing oppression and (ultimately) violence.
All the counter protesters do is encourage press coverage, which in turn gives the Nazis the attention they crave, possibly even attracting the sympathies of people who would otherwise never consider any kind of White Nationalist agenda. I guarantee you there are now a bunch of armchair types who are sympathetic to the Nazis now.
The only other thing they do is stroke their own egos for "fighting back" and "taking a stand against Nazis". You're not changing the opinions of Nazis by counter-protesting, nor are you "stopping" any kind of fledgling Nazi movement.
Within the realm of consumer products, personal computers are already kind of unreliable even when they generally work to common standards of "reliability".
Having a common component fail regularly isn't good, even if something like a reboot fixes it. I had a laptop that would lose Bluetooth periodically, requiring a reboot to fix it. Of course when BT died, my mouse died, and it was almost never convenient to reboot.
For a lot of ordinary users, screwing around with driver updates is beyond their abilities. Even for people who know what they're doing, you can go down a hall of mirrors wonder if you should use the vendor driver (which appears to be nothing more than an older, slightly rebranded OEM driver) or whether you should use the newer, OEM hardware driver. I've done both and while I've gotten away with the OEM driver most of the time, I've also run into problems as well.
* WF is huge, which means they have vast legal resources. * Much of what they do is at the margins of legal * The people losing money don't have many resources and their losses are relatively small * Investigating and prosecuting them is a massive effort that strains the budgets of State AGs * Finding culpable individuals in the organization and proving fraudulent intent is really difficult
I was actually surprised that the "account scandal" got sorted out like it did (CEO resigned, clawbacks of executive bonuses, etc). It probably had something to do with the actions being closer to actual criminal fraud.
Unfortunately I think we have two problems. One, we're a huckster culture, where we generally allow for fraudulent behavior as "good salesmanship".
The other is an economy with marginal broad growth which forces large companies to pursue more and more dubious income to make up for the lack of growth in their sector's organic income. In theory, banks should be natural profit centers -- if the economy is growing, they basically make a percentage off that growth through loans and money handling. But they face an economy with marginal growth and increased growth expectations, so they have to grind out these increases on the margins of their business.
The funny thing is that by the end of the series, humans were becoming interstellar.
They had "the treatment" that gave humans lifespans of at least 300 years (and based on the trends in the book concerning Sach's memory treatment) it might stretch to double or triple that.
They had mastered fusion energy in a portable format, giving them the ability to put it in spacecraft.
And Jackie had joined a group traveling to a nearby star system in a hollowed out asteroid to a human-habitable planet.
If humans managed all that in some 300 years, you'd almost expect they would be broadly interstellar in the next 1000.
You could lay some of the blame at people's credulity and some kind of willful desire to believe alternative opinions because they're alternatives, but the bottom line is that the volume of manipulation and misinformation aimed at the public is relentless. Advertisements, sales and marketing, public relations, politicians -- the list of people with agendas and no regard for anything like the truth is endless.
And unfortunately this list includes traditional authority figures generally associated with agenda-neutral factual truth.
What the fuck ever happened to "universal rental", where the entire back catalogs of the studios were available for digital rental?
I mean, you still can't do that now and many of the movies have been available on DVD, so it's not like they haven't had them telecined to a digital format.
Is the black hole of back catalogs just to keep crotchety old men like me from watching old movies and force me to buy into newer content?
Is it *really* "licensing disputes" on 40-some year old movies because the soundtrack or some actor didn't have a clause for digital distribution? I mean, a movie made in 1970, many of the principals are probably *dead* by now. They're not cruising iTunes or Amazon and calling up Sidney Bloomenberg on the phone and bitching they're not getting a cut. Their ancestors are merely happy that a check still shows up once in a while.
My dad lived in a development in the foothills that abutted BLM land. They had large lots (20 acres minimum) and most lots extended down into the canyons. One guy decided he didn't want anyone in his canyon wash, so he drove pilings in and fenced it off with locked metal gate. Within his right, but his house was 100 feet or more above the wash and about a half-mile drive up the wash and back down the road to his house.
Within about two weeks, the pilings and gate he put up were *gone*. Someone with a powerful truck and/or winch had yanked them up and taken them away.
My dad said that around there, you just didn't block "public" access into BLM lands, and if you tried, they would knock the gates down. It was fruitless, one guy tried steel I-beams and found them cut off with an acetylene torch.
Then there is the question of exactly why a candidate who loses the popular vote is winning via the electoral college.
I think you have to dig deeper and start to look at geographical political divisions and ask if even a majority vote winds up being "fair" if deep divisions exist between rural areas and the West Coast/NE Corridor.
It starts to come down to some basic constitutional-level questions of governance structure, like the reasons why we have bicameral legislature -- to prevent populous states from dominating low-population states.
Where I live, the Democratic party has a total lock on municipal government. No elected official has been a Republican in 30+ years. The last Republican mayor's term ended in 1961. I think the last non-Democratic elected official was the city councilor for my ward in the early 1990s, and he was an "independent".
When one party controls the city government, you don't need to cheat at the ballot box to have corruption because the party already controls who can get elected. Even without criminal intent, you wind up with a narrow group of people who ultimately control an awful lot of resources without much oversight.
And it's not like the outcome would be any different had the party roles been reversed, it's the lack of active competition that's the problem.
I think the issue there is that a lot of freighters are older repurposed passenger planes. I still see DC-10s in FedEx livery. Which would mean that the automation avionics for the more complex tasks, like takeoff and landing, are probably unavailable.
I don't know for sure, but I'd also wager that freighters have cheaper pilots, further complicating the drive for automation in freight aviation.
A company like Google that employs tens of thousands of people has a lot of experience in dealing with people. Google was absolutely right to fire him for nothing else than for creating a huge disruption to the company because of his BS.
Kind of what it all boils down to. Google is an *organization* and organizations need stability and some unity to achieve a common purpose.
A loud and disruptive voice, even if it is making legitimate points, disrupts it.
Any amount paid to a buyer to discount a seller's products is in effect a subsidy to the seller, since they are able to sell their product for a higher price than if it didn't have the subsidy.
Who is actually getting $7500 in cash? Not the buyer, they are getting a tax rebate (paying less taxes). Tesla is the one taking in cash in this entire transaction, from buyer to seller.
You might argue that a Model S is so unique that wealthy early adopters really don't care about the subsidy, but we also have no idea what their sales would be like without it, either. Wealthy people may buy a Tesla just for the tax credit.
Is it worth it as a means of encouraging electric cars? I would say maybe, but personally I would have made the subsidy inversely proportional to the cost of the car to encourage affordable electric cars and to prevent it from becoming a tax break for the wealthy. I'm not sold on the idea that by making a luxury electric car we're somehow speeding electric car development.
I think you're optimistic. 40 cycles / 13,000 miles is 325 miles per charge, I don't think the P90 even does that.
My guess is very few people who own electric cars don't recharge overnight as a matter of habit and almost none of them wait until its under 25% charge to consider recharging.
I'd wager its more like 100 miles between charging sessions, which for 13k miles would be 130 charge cycles in a single year. Dead pack in 4 years.
It really matters whether your pack accepts fractional charges without substantial wear (ie, charging from 75% to 100% is only 1/4 of a cycle worth of wear or less) or whether any charge of more than 20-25% is basically the same as a full charge cycle. If fractional charging is free, then 400 cycles is fine. If it's not, then 400 charges is a problem unless swapping the pack is only $1000 or something.
400 cycles? That's maybe a year's use for a heavy car driver (which would include some trips where the car is rapid charged during the trip, thus more than 1 per day) or maybe 18 months for a light driver.
I would think for a car or any heavy use application you'd ideally prefer an order of magnitude more charge cycles but might settle for 3-5x more cycles depending on who the car is targeted at and what a new pack costs.
Of course 400 cycles may be a lot if topping off from 50%+ charge doesn't count, and the 400 number is only from 10% charge.
I'll take money now versus when I'm 65. It will make the lower long term rate of return mostly wash out when I'm investing more money on the front end.
Maybe it's meant to cover all your stored password data, notes, etc in aggregate.
Because there are people who will look at it as a kind of steganographic file system and try to store a bunch of non-password data in LastPass under the idea that it's more secure than most file sharing systems, an unconventional place to put it, and possibly provides greater legal protection that file sharing specifically (I don't know if this last bit is true, but I guess I'd see it harder for the cops to get a warrant for your LastPass account as opposed to your Dropbox account).
Well, he almost saved it -- he stole from rich people, but ultimately he made them a profit.
Really, if the securities issues was *all* he had done, I think he wouldn't ever have been charged with anything under a kind of "no harm, no foul" mindset. My guess is that the kind of thing he did probably happens all the time, especially in small funds run by inexperienced or aggressive fund managers. The ones that manage to cover it all get away with.
But no, he had to be a complete asshole, both as a human being and as a drug company manager.
Fruits and vegetables in the wild are seasonable at best and unobtainable outside their season, especially in winter months. While I'm sure they can eat them, I would imagine the preference is for animal flesh, especially for the essential fatty acids which only they can supply.
The willingness and ability to eat plant foods may be higher in tropical latitudes, but in seasonal latitudes the amount of wild vegetables and fruits would be extremely limited, especially vegetables. Even fruit trees aren't very widely distributed without human cultivation.
Cats are obligate carnivores, they have to eat meat because they need the ready nutrients only meat can provide.
Dogs have a higher tolerance for carbohydrates, but really, this is an accident of domestication. In any wild setting, all canine species would eat a diet almost entirely of meat because that's what's available. The occasional browsing of grasses and plants may have some digestive benefit for canines but almost no caloric value. Their caloric intake would be animal flesh.
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walk down to the town square and let everyone know what I think.
You can't even do that anymore. The "town square" is now a private mall development and political speech is prohibited by their terms of service. And it doesn't even matter that public tax dollars helped fund the mall development.
I get the standard pedantic line that "freedom of speech" is freedom from government prohibition on speech, but I think the increasing privatization of speech "platforms", whether they be Internet oligopolies or the domination of public space by private corporations, is a real threat to the principal of free speech.
When the public arena for speech is functionally controlled by private entities, does the protection from government censorship really mean much? Can we say we even have "free speech"?
Is it a bubble, or just a sign that there's so little organic growth and so much cash on the sidelines that people are willing to invest in anything that might provide better returns that T-bills?
Did they just use whatever the "reference time" was for some existing highly accurate clock? Or did they do a bunch of astronomical measurements and then set the atomic clock based on some astronomical reference that defined some specific time?
I think people who show up to "counter-protest" these neo-Nazis are only feeding into the neo-Nazi narrative of left-wing oppression and (ultimately) violence.
All the counter protesters do is encourage press coverage, which in turn gives the Nazis the attention they crave, possibly even attracting the sympathies of people who would otherwise never consider any kind of White Nationalist agenda. I guarantee you there are now a bunch of armchair types who are sympathetic to the Nazis now.
The only other thing they do is stroke their own egos for "fighting back" and "taking a stand against Nazis". You're not changing the opinions of Nazis by counter-protesting, nor are you "stopping" any kind of fledgling Nazi movement.
Within the realm of consumer products, personal computers are already kind of unreliable even when they generally work to common standards of "reliability".
Having a common component fail regularly isn't good, even if something like a reboot fixes it. I had a laptop that would lose Bluetooth periodically, requiring a reboot to fix it. Of course when BT died, my mouse died, and it was almost never convenient to reboot.
For a lot of ordinary users, screwing around with driver updates is beyond their abilities. Even for people who know what they're doing, you can go down a hall of mirrors wonder if you should use the vendor driver (which appears to be nothing more than an older, slightly rebranded OEM driver) or whether you should use the newer, OEM hardware driver. I've done both and while I've gotten away with the OEM driver most of the time, I've also run into problems as well.
Many reasons.
* WF is huge, which means they have vast legal resources.
* Much of what they do is at the margins of legal
* The people losing money don't have many resources and their losses are relatively small
* Investigating and prosecuting them is a massive effort that strains the budgets of State AGs
* Finding culpable individuals in the organization and proving fraudulent intent is really difficult
I was actually surprised that the "account scandal" got sorted out like it did (CEO resigned, clawbacks of executive bonuses, etc). It probably had something to do with the actions being closer to actual criminal fraud.
Unfortunately I think we have two problems. One, we're a huckster culture, where we generally allow for fraudulent behavior as "good salesmanship".
The other is an economy with marginal broad growth which forces large companies to pursue more and more dubious income to make up for the lack of growth in their sector's organic income. In theory, banks should be natural profit centers -- if the economy is growing, they basically make a percentage off that growth through loans and money handling. But they face an economy with marginal growth and increased growth expectations, so they have to grind out these increases on the margins of their business.
Even in Star Trek, crossing the entire galaxy is a big deal and other galaxies aren't even really possible.
The funny thing is that by the end of the series, humans were becoming interstellar.
They had "the treatment" that gave humans lifespans of at least 300 years (and based on the trends in the book concerning Sach's memory treatment) it might stretch to double or triple that.
They had mastered fusion energy in a portable format, giving them the ability to put it in spacecraft.
And Jackie had joined a group traveling to a nearby star system in a hollowed out asteroid to a human-habitable planet.
If humans managed all that in some 300 years, you'd almost expect they would be broadly interstellar in the next 1000.
This is exactly right.
You could lay some of the blame at people's credulity and some kind of willful desire to believe alternative opinions because they're alternatives, but the bottom line is that the volume of manipulation and misinformation aimed at the public is relentless. Advertisements, sales and marketing, public relations, politicians -- the list of people with agendas and no regard for anything like the truth is endless.
And unfortunately this list includes traditional authority figures generally associated with agenda-neutral factual truth.
What the fuck ever happened to "universal rental", where the entire back catalogs of the studios were available for digital rental?
I mean, you still can't do that now and many of the movies have been available on DVD, so it's not like they haven't had them telecined to a digital format.
Is the black hole of back catalogs just to keep crotchety old men like me from watching old movies and force me to buy into newer content?
Is it *really* "licensing disputes" on 40-some year old movies because the soundtrack or some actor didn't have a clause for digital distribution? I mean, a movie made in 1970, many of the principals are probably *dead* by now. They're not cruising iTunes or Amazon and calling up Sidney Bloomenberg on the phone and bitching they're not getting a cut. Their ancestors are merely happy that a check still shows up once in a while.
In Arizona, they would just rip the fence down.
My dad lived in a development in the foothills that abutted BLM land. They had large lots (20 acres minimum) and most lots extended down into the canyons. One guy decided he didn't want anyone in his canyon wash, so he drove pilings in and fenced it off with locked metal gate. Within his right, but his house was 100 feet or more above the wash and about a half-mile drive up the wash and back down the road to his house.
Within about two weeks, the pilings and gate he put up were *gone*. Someone with a powerful truck and/or winch had yanked them up and taken them away.
My dad said that around there, you just didn't block "public" access into BLM lands, and if you tried, they would knock the gates down. It was fruitless, one guy tried steel I-beams and found them cut off with an acetylene torch.
A teeming underclass only capable of reading and "writing" an ideogrammatic language whose verbalization is developed by an AI.
Then there is the question of exactly why a candidate who loses the popular vote is winning via the electoral college.
I think you have to dig deeper and start to look at geographical political divisions and ask if even a majority vote winds up being "fair" if deep divisions exist between rural areas and the West Coast/NE Corridor.
It starts to come down to some basic constitutional-level questions of governance structure, like the reasons why we have bicameral legislature -- to prevent populous states from dominating low-population states.
Where I live, the Democratic party has a total lock on municipal government. No elected official has been a Republican in 30+ years. The last Republican mayor's term ended in 1961. I think the last non-Democratic elected official was the city councilor for my ward in the early 1990s, and he was an "independent".
When one party controls the city government, you don't need to cheat at the ballot box to have corruption because the party already controls who can get elected. Even without criminal intent, you wind up with a narrow group of people who ultimately control an awful lot of resources without much oversight.
And it's not like the outcome would be any different had the party roles been reversed, it's the lack of active competition that's the problem.
I think the issue there is that a lot of freighters are older repurposed passenger planes. I still see DC-10s in FedEx livery. Which would mean that the automation avionics for the more complex tasks, like takeoff and landing, are probably unavailable.
I don't know for sure, but I'd also wager that freighters have cheaper pilots, further complicating the drive for automation in freight aviation.
A company like Google that employs tens of thousands of people has a lot of experience in dealing with people. Google was absolutely right to fire him for nothing else than for creating a huge disruption to the company because of his BS.
Kind of what it all boils down to. Google is an *organization* and organizations need stability and some unity to achieve a common purpose.
A loud and disruptive voice, even if it is making legitimate points, disrupts it.
Any amount paid to a buyer to discount a seller's products is in effect a subsidy to the seller, since they are able to sell their product for a higher price than if it didn't have the subsidy.
Who is actually getting $7500 in cash? Not the buyer, they are getting a tax rebate (paying less taxes). Tesla is the one taking in cash in this entire transaction, from buyer to seller.
You might argue that a Model S is so unique that wealthy early adopters really don't care about the subsidy, but we also have no idea what their sales would be like without it, either. Wealthy people may buy a Tesla just for the tax credit.
Is it worth it as a means of encouraging electric cars? I would say maybe, but personally I would have made the subsidy inversely proportional to the cost of the car to encourage affordable electric cars and to prevent it from becoming a tax break for the wealthy. I'm not sold on the idea that by making a luxury electric car we're somehow speeding electric car development.
I love Excel. I was never a math whiz but Excel lets me play with math in ways I couldn't on paper.
I think you're optimistic. 40 cycles / 13,000 miles is 325 miles per charge, I don't think the P90 even does that.
My guess is very few people who own electric cars don't recharge overnight as a matter of habit and almost none of them wait until its under 25% charge to consider recharging.
I'd wager its more like 100 miles between charging sessions, which for 13k miles would be 130 charge cycles in a single year. Dead pack in 4 years.
It really matters whether your pack accepts fractional charges without substantial wear (ie, charging from 75% to 100% is only 1/4 of a cycle worth of wear or less) or whether any charge of more than 20-25% is basically the same as a full charge cycle. If fractional charging is free, then 400 cycles is fine. If it's not, then 400 charges is a problem unless swapping the pack is only $1000 or something.
400 cycles? That's maybe a year's use for a heavy car driver (which would include some trips where the car is rapid charged during the trip, thus more than 1 per day) or maybe 18 months for a light driver.
I would think for a car or any heavy use application you'd ideally prefer an order of magnitude more charge cycles but might settle for 3-5x more cycles depending on who the car is targeted at and what a new pack costs.
Of course 400 cycles may be a lot if topping off from 50%+ charge doesn't count, and the 400 number is only from 10% charge.
I'll take money now versus when I'm 65. It will make the lower long term rate of return mostly wash out when I'm investing more money on the front end.
Maybe it's meant to cover all your stored password data, notes, etc in aggregate.
Because there are people who will look at it as a kind of steganographic file system and try to store a bunch of non-password data in LastPass under the idea that it's more secure than most file sharing systems, an unconventional place to put it, and possibly provides greater legal protection that file sharing specifically (I don't know if this last bit is true, but I guess I'd see it harder for the cops to get a warrant for your LastPass account as opposed to your Dropbox account).
Well, he almost saved it -- he stole from rich people, but ultimately he made them a profit.
Really, if the securities issues was *all* he had done, I think he wouldn't ever have been charged with anything under a kind of "no harm, no foul" mindset. My guess is that the kind of thing he did probably happens all the time, especially in small funds run by inexperienced or aggressive fund managers. The ones that manage to cover it all get away with.
But no, he had to be a complete asshole, both as a human being and as a drug company manager.
Fruits and vegetables in the wild are seasonable at best and unobtainable outside their season, especially in winter months. While I'm sure they can eat them, I would imagine the preference is for animal flesh, especially for the essential fatty acids which only they can supply.
The willingness and ability to eat plant foods may be higher in tropical latitudes, but in seasonal latitudes the amount of wild vegetables and fruits would be extremely limited, especially vegetables. Even fruit trees aren't very widely distributed without human cultivation.
Cats are obligate carnivores, they have to eat meat because they need the ready nutrients only meat can provide.
Dogs have a higher tolerance for carbohydrates, but really, this is an accident of domestication. In any wild setting, all canine species would eat a diet almost entirely of meat because that's what's available. The occasional browsing of grasses and plants may have some digestive benefit for canines but almost no caloric value. Their caloric intake would be animal flesh.