It's so funny to see the people lined up against UBI for individuals as some kind of socialist tyrany, but you never see the same kind of logic applied to walled gardens where OS/device makers skim profit off of everything that runs on "their" devices.
It's icky, monopolistic and seems only designed to extract rents, not add any value to the product or consumers. I used to be sort of receptive to the idea that it adds some element of security, but too many bad apps have passed through and its too often just used to reject apps that conflict with the maker's own cloud/services (even when they don't exist yet).
We're just in this relentless march towards total corporate monopolies where rent can be extracted multiple times and competition eliminated, guaranteeing profits, and nobody seems to care.
And this is like problem 6 on a long laundry list of death marches.
I think app store restrictions have always been primarily about protecting Apple's control and only incidentally about user security. I think Apple initially did have a vested interest in making the app store something less than a security train wreck, if only to get the platform off the ground and not scare away mass adoption.
But many of the restrictions were only coincidentally about security and quite often it seemed like it was just protecting their turf or ideas they had but weren't ready to introduce yet.
I expect they will get worse as iPhone revenue growth stalls and they turn to services to restore growth. There's not many services they can introduce that don't already have well-entrenched competition.
I applied for my passport at the municipal registrar office, and as far as I know, they're actually issued by the state department, not the post office.
You show a bunch of ID, they take your picture and send it off with your birth certificate to the state department who then does something mysterious and then issues the passport.
Strangely, when I applied for Global Entry I had to do it all over again, but starting with my passport. But sure enough, they took another photo, a set of finger prints, an interview with an armed ICE agent, and issued another ID card. And every time I've used global entry they don't even want the ID card, they just scan my passport.
At some point can't they just check the box and skip issuing new credentials?
Even if you try to fire all of them, you'll still be paying them with UBI. In reality, what will happen is a power grab at every level of government, and the same useless fucks will merely be moved to different government agencies.
Nah, you pass a law that says that anyone over 50 in a welfare agency job eliminated by UBI gets moved to retired status as if they had moved up one level in the pay scale and gets to collect their pension early. Anyone under 50 gets permanent preferential hiring treatment for similarly skilled jobs in other bureaucracies. Nobody new gets hired for a job in these agencies.
My guess is that it would take a decade or two to wind down these organizations (settle accounts, offload buildings, land, equipment, etc) and most of the people who work for them could do that winding down work.
You'd basically end up employing most of the employable people at dismantling the organizations, something which would have to happen anyway, so it'd be a net-zero cost. The really influential employees would be those over 50 retiring on a full pension, so they wouldn't really fight it much. The younger ones would wind up just finishing their careers in more or less guaranteed jobs.
The bonus would be that the longer it went on, the fewer people there would be working there and no expansionary spending on the organization.
Yeah, I did skip the asshole part. I actually told them if everything was the most important, I'd do the work by rank of the person handing out the work.
I've used that technique before. Mostly gently, and people understood immediately that they were outranked by Bob so he got his first.
But there were times where it was still true, but people didn't like the answer and I had to be really blunt. "If I don't do Bob's first, I get fired. If I don't do your job first, all that happens is you get mad. Do you understand why Bob is my priority and you aren't?"
The snarky one is to fuck interns and make more money.
The more charitable one is that a lot of "managers" have two roles. The first one is to herd a group of cats whose collective work is more than any one person can do (ie, management).
The second role is to actually *do* a fraction of the work. Either because *their* managers deem it too sensitive to be delegated to rank and file employees, even if it is what they do best, or because they don't have enough rank and file employees to do the work and their management expects the total work product to get finished no matter what.
I'm dealing with the latter right now -- I can't get fucking decisions made or shit above my pay grade done because my boss is too busy doing work that isn't managing. It sucks.
Some of it is supposed to be paid for by eliminating the enormous welfare bureaucracy associated with the alphabet soup of individual welfare programs, the means testing, the monitoring, etc.
Just because $1 in tax money goes into a welfare program does not mean that $1 in benefits was received by a recipient. Much of that $1 went into the budgets, salaries and operations involved in running that program.
With UBI you eliminate all of that. You get a check and the progressive tax code decides whether it's net positive for you when your total income (UBI + wages) goes above the income level of benefits eligibility.
In fact, I think it makes sense if a person gets $25,000 UBI, makes $5,000 working that they should somehow net out something more than $25,000 and less than $30,000. We want people to have an incentive to keep working, and not losing all benefits because of *any* work goes a long way to providing that incentive. A big problem with many current welfare programs is the complexity of means testing and the games people play to get benefits though they don't qualify or to kill work incentives so they continue to get benefits.
I mean, if it's not universal, than it's not a Universal Basic Income.
I could see doing it on a regional basis -- but you'd have to be kind of a hard-ass about it and be fairly committed to it.
Restrict it to only residents of the region at the time it started. Actually dismantle that region's regular welfare system, so you know exactly what cost savings you are gaining. I don't see either of those as being easy or palatable.
Which seems to be the major problem with a UBI -- you can model the shit out of it and say it makes sense, but until you do it -- and make it Universal -- you don't know.
And it still leaves a lot of uncomfortable questions -- what about immigrants? How long are they there until they're eligible? Diverse welfare payments are easier in that situation, because you can say "well, immigrants should get housing and job training, but not actual unemployment payments" or however you slice it.
FWIW, I think a negative income tax type of UBI makes sense, especially if it allows for marginal, low-wage employment without completely eliminating UBI payments (they should get zeroed out by taxes, but only once income rises above some level greater than UBI itself). I think providing people an incentive to work, even at low wage jobs (ie, more total income) makes sense, and would have a lot of positive impacts on working conditions. Low wage employers wouldn't be able to treat workers like slaves because homelessness and starvation wouldn't be the alternatives.
If somone complains about me not being available or that I haven't completed a task, I inform them that I have more tasks than time and I ask my boss to prioritize my assignments.
That's a nice theory, but the problem is that many managers will ding you on reviews for poor time management. I've known people who got fired for it, being told that part of what was expected out of them was the ability to judge conflicting workloads and prioritize them yourself.
I'm not saying that doing that -- even successfully -- doesn't result in complaints, or that people aren't legitimately given more work than they have the bandwidth to get done and that managers won't refuse to acknowledge this -- aka, manage poorly.
But these days, asking what your number 1 priority is almost always results in "they all are number 1" and nobody cares to fix this.
It's kind of the argument for a republic if not an aristocracy.
The masses are too ignorant, gullible and guided by base motivations to make serious decisions. In a Democratic Republic you at least have the will of the people as voiced in elections for Representatives, but that as a rule intelligent, serious people will actually be making the decisions.
It's what's kind of interesting at times in the British monarchy -- the crown doesn't run government but by virtue of its status, gives advice and guidance to the government and acts as a conscience. I think at this point -- historically, politically and perhaps geriatrically -- this idea has been exhausted.
Historically, though, you find that most institutions diluted the common man's voice. Rome certainly did with Senatorial asset requirements and differing electoral classes.
I don't think poor people are too poor to understand facts, but I think at times they are too uneducated *and* too provincial in their outlook. And the level of understanding required to make educated decisions on many topics has gotten pretty deep. I like to think of myself as well-read and well-educated, but when I think of what's involved in truly understanding economics, diplomacy, health, I think I know my limits but do other people, or are they merely indulging in the fallacy that they understand when they don't?
There's a context switch penalty for everyone, which is (another) reason why our multitasking focused world produces crap outcomes at slow paces.
It can work, sort of, if you do trivial tasks with little actual context change. But the more in-depth the actual tasks are and the more the actual context changes, the more time it takes to reconstruct the cognitive and structural environment the task requires.
It's obvious for some physical tasks -- if you fix widgets and you only have room for one widget on your work bench, obviously being asked to stop fixing one widget to work on another widget.
But even when the physical side appears trivial to the outsider, it often isn't really, and even if it is it still requires a cognitive reset.
What percentage of all mortgages are paid until maturity?
I would wager that almost none of them are, especially anymore. People move to a new city or new house in the same city, get divorced, die, go broke, whatever. There's a thousand and one reasons that mortgages are not paid for 30 years until maturity.
The lack of certainty over any one mortgage as a reliable producer of fixed income is already built into the interest rate as a risk as well as the larger business model. If mortgage lending was dependent on the majority of notes being paid at a stable basis until maturity, it would eliminate any liquidity in the housing market.
Plus, the interest payments on the debt are vastly higher than the principal for the first 10 years of the loan. The lender is front-loading their profit on the investment, so even if you go belly up after 5 years they have still made a profit *and* they still have the secured asset to sell (likely at a price over the initial selling price, barring a housing crash or other externalities).
I prepay principal with my mortgage, but the bank is still making a vast profit on my loan in spite of it. Despite making an extra principal payment per year, it only cuts the loan term to 23 years from 30. Most interest is paid on the front end of the mortgage, years 24-30 would be a fraction of the interest paid on years 1-23.
I'm also pretty sure that the vast majority of mortgages are held less than 30 years (people move, sell houses, etc) so banks *expect* that the mortgages will be paid off years ahead of their nominal loan term.
You failed to post the link to where the Orlando man not only had the foreclosure cancelled, he would up with a new mortgage and a lower mortgage payment.
Neither story fully explains what exactly his original loan terms were and what the "trial adjustment" was for. I've had two loans for 10 years with Wells Fargo and the forms literally let you specify how much additional principal you want to pay every month, so I call BS on the conspiracy against pre-payment. So many people want to do it they made a form to make it easy.
I think this guy had a shitty mortgage -- Haitian immigrant? Florida property? Bus driver? That's like an example taken from "The Big Short" of crappy lending practices. He probably had an awful, high-risk mortgage the bank wanted to repackage as lower risk -- thus the test adjustment program with (badly designed, perhaps) parameters which define "good payment" as basically paying what is due on time, and everything else is foreclusureville.
Given the sheer volume of shitty mortgages, it's not surprising that there are some outliers in the sea of bad mortgages who truly are good risks but who get caught in bad AIs as poor credit risks.
Banks are shitty much of the time, but there's something odd about the Orlando guy they're not telling us.
Blame the gradual erasure of search and seizure on the decades long drug war. That's what's caused the erosion of civil liberties, not Trump's one appointment (who hasn't really ruled on anything) or potential future nominee for the court.
People aren't getting raked over the coals for their private information just recently, it's been going on for decades as law enforcement, district attorneys and their political supporters have green lighted aggressive drug searches which have given the courts many opportunities to rule in favor of the police, like rain eroding a sand castle.
IMHO, our protections from search and seizure are all but gone. Civil forfeiture is still alive and well, for crying out loud. The NSA hoovers our data, local police use Stingrays, etc.
No Supreme Court appointments by any party are going to change any of this, they're mostly just reinforcing 50 years of progressively worse precedence.
Crap, even at $800, I'd buy one since I don't need a $700 laptop and $300 phone anymore.
Now you know why they won't do it. You and many, many people will stop buying Windows licenses. For a huge number of people, once the phone docks to KVM, they are completely done with buying real computers anymore. At best its a net-zero long-term business prospect for Microsoft, at worst its an awful burden because they have to keep supporting a PC-centric Windows for the remaining (1/3?) of the market that wants an actual PC.
You can also just hear the version 1 criticism if its not x86 compatible -- "Microsoft makes dockable phone, but doesn't run its own apps -- SAD!" and the major headwind it will take at adoption because of it.
I agree they should do it anyway, though, because it would be a great way to disrupt the entire PC market, too, but they need to convince the internal executives banking on existing unvested stock options this will benefit them.
The big problem with wind and solar is that they really aren't all that much use without abundant cheap electrical storage -- a point that seems to be completely lost on those who advocate them.
I am a bit surprised that so little of the money going toward "green" R&D isn't directed at storage. I don't think money would help (much), but I'm surprised we aren't trying anyway.
Based solely on the science of interpreting Slashdot comments, it strikes me that green energy advocates look at storage as a "solved" problem -- you just need to flood a reservoir for pumped hydro, and every place you get good insolation or wind has a spare million or so acre-feet of space with a suitable head drop and supply of water, or batteries, which Evon Musk has already figured out.
IMHO, there hasn't been much effort put into energy storage that's "universal" and can be built near anywhere green energy is generated other than batteries. Little interest in some of the gravitational storage techniques (such as giant weights suspended by a column of captured water) or a water->hydrogen->methane process. They're all seen as impractical (as if pumped hydro was practical) or too "inefficient", even when the energy is free and otherwise ungenerated or wasted.
There's also a ton of cheerleading for green energy, too, a glossing over the costs (ie, ignore subsidies) and ignoring the downsides like storage or cyclical unreliability (eg, clouds, windless days), basically anything that makes green energy seem less practical is ignored, which I think includes storage most of the time.
A grid scale (2 TW?) fusion plant is likely to be massively expensive, especially if it is the first one built. The planning process will take ages, and some group of geniuses will decide it makes sense to merge it into an existing fusion plant site ("because nuclear" or "economies of scale"), further complicating the process and jacking up costs.
I'm guessing the total tab would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion if you were lucky in today's dollars. So yes, despite being a "private company" there would be investors involved financing the whole thing. Unless your private company is one a handful of the existing large industrial concerns with the cash flow and know-how to build the entire thing themselves, there will be outside money and outside agendas involved.
If you think about it, even if a lab-scale version were to be net positive energy tomorrow, it would still be, what, 20-odd years to see a true grid-scale version?
5 years to fund and build a scaled-up model plant at some reasonable fraction of a grid scale plant, say, 100 megawatts, another 5 years of debugging and operation to convince anyone that a grid-scale version was workable, and then another 10 years to fund, site, build and operate the first grid-scale plant.
And even if it worked perfectly as intended and with frantic investment and building, another 10 years to get the next 5 plants built?
So 30-odd years for fusion to generate a fraction of the grid demand. I want fusion to work, but I think the reality is that even if it was a sorted out system today I question whether it will be a viable system in my lifetime.
I also wonder if the R&D dollars wouldn't be better spent on energy storage/battery systems and wind/solar.
With adequate system resources, running a VM shouldn't be that big of a problem. I use a couple of Windows desktops in VMs. I have 3 monitors and some of the time one of them is a full-screen RDP session to a Win 10 desktop and I think it's just fine in terms of responsiveness, etc. Even limited video playback works.
I think the key is RDP, though, because IMHO at least it's a pretty efficient remote display protocol. A lot of the VM virtual consoles just suck, although Windows on Hyper-V seems fairly close to RDP (and I suspect it is, too, under the hood). I think the virtual console windows provided by virtualization work pretty hard on the rendering side but that workload gets shifted with RDP is used because the client side does a lot of the rendering.
Of course none of this helps on the Mac side, although I'll admit to not really knowing because I haven't done anything with Macs in years. But AFAIK, Macs don't have a cross-platform remote desktop protocol quite as good as Windows native RDP.
They are flexing their muscles buy creating/buying their own exclusive content. The entire goal seems to be to have enough unique content to attract and maintain a decent audience, making third parties negotiate harder for content.
I think the culture of Hollywood (from mansions to coke to sports cars) is probably the root of all of it. Maybe Netflix should have tried to bootstrap a new center of film & TV production outside of Hollywood to re-invent the culture from the ground up, or at least have less of the traditional Hollywood mindset.
There will be a single payer system that will deliver to everyone. They'll call it something clever, like "United States Postal Service." They'll organize delivery areas and rationalize it so that only one delivery person needs visit every street every day. No congestion. Predictable delivery.
Seriously, this seems to have become a "problem" with the Amazon doing it's own deliveries. I see more generic white vans with Amazon logos than I do Fedex or UPS trucks.
What I don't get is why it wouldn't make more sense for Amazon to partner with USPS to handle last-mile delivery. They could pre-sort by zip and deliver in bulk to individual post offices once a day and let USPS deliver it.
I suppose Amazon is Uber-izing package delivery, and making it a race to the bottom job.
I wonder if a possible explanation is just sloppy coding by app programmers, cutting and pasting huge swaths of code, libraries, etc, that they don't understand to get one function.
Even the *programmer* doesn't know what ports they're cut-and-pasted code is opening.
Slashdot Mirror
It's so funny to see the people lined up against UBI for individuals as some kind of socialist tyrany, but you never see the same kind of logic applied to walled gardens where OS/device makers skim profit off of everything that runs on "their" devices.
It's icky, monopolistic and seems only designed to extract rents, not add any value to the product or consumers. I used to be sort of receptive to the idea that it adds some element of security, but too many bad apps have passed through and its too often just used to reject apps that conflict with the maker's own cloud/services (even when they don't exist yet).
We're just in this relentless march towards total corporate monopolies where rent can be extracted multiple times and competition eliminated, guaranteeing profits, and nobody seems to care.
And this is like problem 6 on a long laundry list of death marches.
I think app store restrictions have always been primarily about protecting Apple's control and only incidentally about user security. I think Apple initially did have a vested interest in making the app store something less than a security train wreck, if only to get the platform off the ground and not scare away mass adoption.
But many of the restrictions were only coincidentally about security and quite often it seemed like it was just protecting their turf or ideas they had but weren't ready to introduce yet.
I expect they will get worse as iPhone revenue growth stalls and they turn to services to restore growth. There's not many services they can introduce that don't already have well-entrenched competition.
I applied for my passport at the municipal registrar office, and as far as I know, they're actually issued by the state department, not the post office.
You show a bunch of ID, they take your picture and send it off with your birth certificate to the state department who then does something mysterious and then issues the passport.
Strangely, when I applied for Global Entry I had to do it all over again, but starting with my passport. But sure enough, they took another photo, a set of finger prints, an interview with an armed ICE agent, and issued another ID card. And every time I've used global entry they don't even want the ID card, they just scan my passport.
At some point can't they just check the box and skip issuing new credentials?
Even if you try to fire all of them, you'll still be paying them with UBI. In reality, what will happen is a power grab at every level of government, and the same useless fucks will merely be moved to different government agencies.
Nah, you pass a law that says that anyone over 50 in a welfare agency job eliminated by UBI gets moved to retired status as if they had moved up one level in the pay scale and gets to collect their pension early. Anyone under 50 gets permanent preferential hiring treatment for similarly skilled jobs in other bureaucracies. Nobody new gets hired for a job in these agencies.
My guess is that it would take a decade or two to wind down these organizations (settle accounts, offload buildings, land, equipment, etc) and most of the people who work for them could do that winding down work.
You'd basically end up employing most of the employable people at dismantling the organizations, something which would have to happen anyway, so it'd be a net-zero cost. The really influential employees would be those over 50 retiring on a full pension, so they wouldn't really fight it much. The younger ones would wind up just finishing their careers in more or less guaranteed jobs.
The bonus would be that the longer it went on, the fewer people there would be working there and no expansionary spending on the organization.
Yeah, I did skip the asshole part. I actually told them if everything was the most important, I'd do the work by rank of the person handing out the work.
I've used that technique before. Mostly gently, and people understood immediately that they were outranked by Bob so he got his first.
But there were times where it was still true, but people didn't like the answer and I had to be really blunt. "If I don't do Bob's first, I get fired. If I don't do your job first, all that happens is you get mad. Do you understand why Bob is my priority and you aren't?"
Well, I have two explanations.
The snarky one is to fuck interns and make more money.
The more charitable one is that a lot of "managers" have two roles. The first one is to herd a group of cats whose collective work is more than any one person can do (ie, management).
The second role is to actually *do* a fraction of the work. Either because *their* managers deem it too sensitive to be delegated to rank and file employees, even if it is what they do best, or because they don't have enough rank and file employees to do the work and their management expects the total work product to get finished no matter what.
I'm dealing with the latter right now -- I can't get fucking decisions made or shit above my pay grade done because my boss is too busy doing work that isn't managing. It sucks.
Some of it is supposed to be paid for by eliminating the enormous welfare bureaucracy associated with the alphabet soup of individual welfare programs, the means testing, the monitoring, etc.
Just because $1 in tax money goes into a welfare program does not mean that $1 in benefits was received by a recipient. Much of that $1 went into the budgets, salaries and operations involved in running that program.
With UBI you eliminate all of that. You get a check and the progressive tax code decides whether it's net positive for you when your total income (UBI + wages) goes above the income level of benefits eligibility.
In fact, I think it makes sense if a person gets $25,000 UBI, makes $5,000 working that they should somehow net out something more than $25,000 and less than $30,000. We want people to have an incentive to keep working, and not losing all benefits because of *any* work goes a long way to providing that incentive. A big problem with many current welfare programs is the complexity of means testing and the games people play to get benefits though they don't qualify or to kill work incentives so they continue to get benefits.
I mean, if it's not universal, than it's not a Universal Basic Income.
I could see doing it on a regional basis -- but you'd have to be kind of a hard-ass about it and be fairly committed to it.
Restrict it to only residents of the region at the time it started. Actually dismantle that region's regular welfare system, so you know exactly what cost savings you are gaining. I don't see either of those as being easy or palatable.
Which seems to be the major problem with a UBI -- you can model the shit out of it and say it makes sense, but until you do it -- and make it Universal -- you don't know.
And it still leaves a lot of uncomfortable questions -- what about immigrants? How long are they there until they're eligible? Diverse welfare payments are easier in that situation, because you can say "well, immigrants should get housing and job training, but not actual unemployment payments" or however you slice it.
FWIW, I think a negative income tax type of UBI makes sense, especially if it allows for marginal, low-wage employment without completely eliminating UBI payments (they should get zeroed out by taxes, but only once income rises above some level greater than UBI itself). I think providing people an incentive to work, even at low wage jobs (ie, more total income) makes sense, and would have a lot of positive impacts on working conditions. Low wage employers wouldn't be able to treat workers like slaves because homelessness and starvation wouldn't be the alternatives.
If somone complains about me not being available or that I haven't completed a task, I inform them that I have more tasks than time and I ask my boss to prioritize my assignments.
That's a nice theory, but the problem is that many managers will ding you on reviews for poor time management. I've known people who got fired for it, being told that part of what was expected out of them was the ability to judge conflicting workloads and prioritize them yourself.
I'm not saying that doing that -- even successfully -- doesn't result in complaints, or that people aren't legitimately given more work than they have the bandwidth to get done and that managers won't refuse to acknowledge this -- aka, manage poorly.
But these days, asking what your number 1 priority is almost always results in "they all are number 1" and nobody cares to fix this.
It's kind of the argument for a republic if not an aristocracy.
The masses are too ignorant, gullible and guided by base motivations to make serious decisions. In a Democratic Republic you at least have the will of the people as voiced in elections for Representatives, but that as a rule intelligent, serious people will actually be making the decisions.
It's what's kind of interesting at times in the British monarchy -- the crown doesn't run government but by virtue of its status, gives advice and guidance to the government and acts as a conscience. I think at this point -- historically, politically and perhaps geriatrically -- this idea has been exhausted.
Historically, though, you find that most institutions diluted the common man's voice. Rome certainly did with Senatorial asset requirements and differing electoral classes.
I don't think poor people are too poor to understand facts, but I think at times they are too uneducated *and* too provincial in their outlook. And the level of understanding required to make educated decisions on many topics has gotten pretty deep. I like to think of myself as well-read and well-educated, but when I think of what's involved in truly understanding economics, diplomacy, health, I think I know my limits but do other people, or are they merely indulging in the fallacy that they understand when they don't?
There's a context switch penalty for everyone, which is (another) reason why our multitasking focused world produces crap outcomes at slow paces.
It can work, sort of, if you do trivial tasks with little actual context change. But the more in-depth the actual tasks are and the more the actual context changes, the more time it takes to reconstruct the cognitive and structural environment the task requires.
It's obvious for some physical tasks -- if you fix widgets and you only have room for one widget on your work bench, obviously being asked to stop fixing one widget to work on another widget.
But even when the physical side appears trivial to the outsider, it often isn't really, and even if it is it still requires a cognitive reset.
My thought to, and of course that also makes for the link to OpenGL and 3D graphics, which IMHO was what SGI was often best known for.
What percentage of all mortgages are paid until maturity?
I would wager that almost none of them are, especially anymore. People move to a new city or new house in the same city, get divorced, die, go broke, whatever. There's a thousand and one reasons that mortgages are not paid for 30 years until maturity.
The lack of certainty over any one mortgage as a reliable producer of fixed income is already built into the interest rate as a risk as well as the larger business model. If mortgage lending was dependent on the majority of notes being paid at a stable basis until maturity, it would eliminate any liquidity in the housing market.
Plus, the interest payments on the debt are vastly higher than the principal for the first 10 years of the loan. The lender is front-loading their profit on the investment, so even if you go belly up after 5 years they have still made a profit *and* they still have the secured asset to sell (likely at a price over the initial selling price, barring a housing crash or other externalities).
I would think the hardware players would be almost easier to attack these days than approved desktop players.
I prepay principal with my mortgage, but the bank is still making a vast profit on my loan in spite of it. Despite making an extra principal payment per year, it only cuts the loan term to 23 years from 30. Most interest is paid on the front end of the mortgage, years 24-30 would be a fraction of the interest paid on years 1-23.
I'm also pretty sure that the vast majority of mortgages are held less than 30 years (people move, sell houses, etc) so banks *expect* that the mortgages will be paid off years ahead of their nominal loan term.
You failed to post the link to where the Orlando man not only had the foreclosure cancelled, he would up with a new mortgage and a lower mortgage payment.
Neither story fully explains what exactly his original loan terms were and what the "trial adjustment" was for. I've had two loans for 10 years with Wells Fargo and the forms literally let you specify how much additional principal you want to pay every month, so I call BS on the conspiracy against pre-payment. So many people want to do it they made a form to make it easy.
I think this guy had a shitty mortgage -- Haitian immigrant? Florida property? Bus driver? That's like an example taken from "The Big Short" of crappy lending practices. He probably had an awful, high-risk mortgage the bank wanted to repackage as lower risk -- thus the test adjustment program with (badly designed, perhaps) parameters which define "good payment" as basically paying what is due on time, and everything else is foreclusureville.
Given the sheer volume of shitty mortgages, it's not surprising that there are some outliers in the sea of bad mortgages who truly are good risks but who get caught in bad AIs as poor credit risks.
Banks are shitty much of the time, but there's something odd about the Orlando guy they're not telling us.
Blame the gradual erasure of search and seizure on the decades long drug war. That's what's caused the erosion of civil liberties, not Trump's one appointment (who hasn't really ruled on anything) or potential future nominee for the court.
People aren't getting raked over the coals for their private information just recently, it's been going on for decades as law enforcement, district attorneys and their political supporters have green lighted aggressive drug searches which have given the courts many opportunities to rule in favor of the police, like rain eroding a sand castle.
IMHO, our protections from search and seizure are all but gone. Civil forfeiture is still alive and well, for crying out loud. The NSA hoovers our data, local police use Stingrays, etc.
No Supreme Court appointments by any party are going to change any of this, they're mostly just reinforcing 50 years of progressively worse precedence.
Crap, even at $800, I'd buy one since I don't need a $700 laptop and $300 phone anymore.
Now you know why they won't do it. You and many, many people will stop buying Windows licenses. For a huge number of people, once the phone docks to KVM, they are completely done with buying real computers anymore. At best its a net-zero long-term business prospect for Microsoft, at worst its an awful burden because they have to keep supporting a PC-centric Windows for the remaining (1/3?) of the market that wants an actual PC.
You can also just hear the version 1 criticism if its not x86 compatible -- "Microsoft makes dockable phone, but doesn't run its own apps -- SAD!" and the major headwind it will take at adoption because of it.
I agree they should do it anyway, though, because it would be a great way to disrupt the entire PC market, too, but they need to convince the internal executives banking on existing unvested stock options this will benefit them.
The big problem with wind and solar is that they really aren't all that much use without abundant cheap electrical storage -- a point that seems to be completely lost on those who advocate them.
I am a bit surprised that so little of the money going toward "green" R&D isn't directed at storage. I don't think money would help (much), but I'm surprised we aren't trying anyway.
Based solely on the science of interpreting Slashdot comments, it strikes me that green energy advocates look at storage as a "solved" problem -- you just need to flood a reservoir for pumped hydro, and every place you get good insolation or wind has a spare million or so acre-feet of space with a suitable head drop and supply of water, or batteries, which Evon Musk has already figured out.
IMHO, there hasn't been much effort put into energy storage that's "universal" and can be built near anywhere green energy is generated other than batteries. Little interest in some of the gravitational storage techniques (such as giant weights suspended by a column of captured water) or a water->hydrogen->methane process. They're all seen as impractical (as if pumped hydro was practical) or too "inefficient", even when the energy is free and otherwise ungenerated or wasted.
There's also a ton of cheerleading for green energy, too, a glossing over the costs (ie, ignore subsidies) and ignoring the downsides like storage or cyclical unreliability (eg, clouds, windless days), basically anything that makes green energy seem less practical is ignored, which I think includes storage most of the time.
A grid scale (2 TW?) fusion plant is likely to be massively expensive, especially if it is the first one built. The planning process will take ages, and some group of geniuses will decide it makes sense to merge it into an existing fusion plant site ("because nuclear" or "economies of scale"), further complicating the process and jacking up costs.
I'm guessing the total tab would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion if you were lucky in today's dollars. So yes, despite being a "private company" there would be investors involved financing the whole thing. Unless your private company is one a handful of the existing large industrial concerns with the cash flow and know-how to build the entire thing themselves, there will be outside money and outside agendas involved.
If you think about it, even if a lab-scale version were to be net positive energy tomorrow, it would still be, what, 20-odd years to see a true grid-scale version?
5 years to fund and build a scaled-up model plant at some reasonable fraction of a grid scale plant, say, 100 megawatts, another 5 years of debugging and operation to convince anyone that a grid-scale version was workable, and then another 10 years to fund, site, build and operate the first grid-scale plant.
And even if it worked perfectly as intended and with frantic investment and building, another 10 years to get the next 5 plants built?
So 30-odd years for fusion to generate a fraction of the grid demand. I want fusion to work, but I think the reality is that even if it was a sorted out system today I question whether it will be a viable system in my lifetime.
I also wonder if the R&D dollars wouldn't be better spent on energy storage/battery systems and wind/solar.
With adequate system resources, running a VM shouldn't be that big of a problem. I use a couple of Windows desktops in VMs. I have 3 monitors and some of the time one of them is a full-screen RDP session to a Win 10 desktop and I think it's just fine in terms of responsiveness, etc. Even limited video playback works.
I think the key is RDP, though, because IMHO at least it's a pretty efficient remote display protocol. A lot of the VM virtual consoles just suck, although Windows on Hyper-V seems fairly close to RDP (and I suspect it is, too, under the hood). I think the virtual console windows provided by virtualization work pretty hard on the rendering side but that workload gets shifted with RDP is used because the client side does a lot of the rendering.
Of course none of this helps on the Mac side, although I'll admit to not really knowing because I haven't done anything with Macs in years. But AFAIK, Macs don't have a cross-platform remote desktop protocol quite as good as Windows native RDP.
They are flexing their muscles buy creating/buying their own exclusive content. The entire goal seems to be to have enough unique content to attract and maintain a decent audience, making third parties negotiate harder for content.
I think the culture of Hollywood (from mansions to coke to sports cars) is probably the root of all of it. Maybe Netflix should have tried to bootstrap a new center of film & TV production outside of Hollywood to re-invent the culture from the ground up, or at least have less of the traditional Hollywood mindset.
There will be a single payer system that will deliver to everyone. They'll call it something clever, like "United States Postal Service." They'll organize delivery areas and rationalize it so that only one delivery person needs visit every street every day. No congestion. Predictable delivery.
Seriously, this seems to have become a "problem" with the Amazon doing it's own deliveries. I see more generic white vans with Amazon logos than I do Fedex or UPS trucks.
What I don't get is why it wouldn't make more sense for Amazon to partner with USPS to handle last-mile delivery. They could pre-sort by zip and deliver in bulk to individual post offices once a day and let USPS deliver it.
I suppose Amazon is Uber-izing package delivery, and making it a race to the bottom job.
I wonder if a possible explanation is just sloppy coding by app programmers, cutting and pasting huge swaths of code, libraries, etc, that they don't understand to get one function.
Even the *programmer* doesn't know what ports they're cut-and-pasted code is opening.