How is it not a form of price fixing if Apple is trying to force non-Apple retailers to maintain the same price Apple stores are offering?
It's not even collusion ("hey, let's make extra profit") it's more like extortion ("sell at our dictated price, or else").
Apple can set the prices for its phones in its own stores, but other retailers should be free to set their own prices, even if they are apparently suicidal -- ie, selling below their own cost. If that makes Apple Store look overpriced, that's the Apple Store's problem and they need to correct that impression themselves -- better experience, better support, better accessory selection, etc.
The problem is you have this situation where the *appearance* of weak leadership is taken for weak leadership itself with ramifications for other nation's behavior.
You're right in that "boldness" alone is a poor measure of leadership, and by itself, it's best labelled "reckless". But the other side is of that is "boldness" combined with measured action, best perhaps described as "decisiveness".
Personally, I think Obama is open to some criticism where he's appeared indecisive, and it's made him look weak. Whether he's *right* is another matter, but even if he is by some kind of cost/benefit analysis, it still make him appear indecisive and weak, with all of the ramifications that has on other nation behavior.
A common criticism of Obama that seems to transcend political wings has been his tepid foreign policy behavior. Lines in the sand in Syria, weak responses to Erdogan, and so on.
My sense is that Obama is a kind of purposefully analytical leader who only makes measured responses if, and only if, in-depth analysis shows them to be worthwhile. I think this is good on paper and in a lot of situations doing nothing isn't the worst possible choice relative to its nominal cost.
That being said, global foreign policy is a stage where bold leadership has a value that seems to be beneficial even when its outcomes are suboptimal. In so many cases it kind of boils down to a dealing-with-bullies psychology, where the bullies don't back off unless you bloody their noses.
Would the situation in Syria, in total, be worse if Obama had responded to Assad's use of chemical with strikes on his residences or key military assets in response to his chemical weapons use? Might it have undermined Assad enough that he had to settle somehow, or even possibly killed him and prevented the final siege in Aleppo?
Note that mainstream (Intel 3xx / Samsung EVO) and performance (Intel 5xx / Samsung Pro) are both cheap-out solutions, but they filled a need for us.
That's what I'm getting at, though. When I spec out servers and storage for clients with enterprise flash, it's stupid expensive and I always ask myself if *most* workloads wouldn't be just fine on Samsung Pro even if the cost of ownership wasn't 2-3 disks a year needing to be replaced.
Even Samsung Pros will deliver performance vastly beyond 15k spinning rust, especially in arrays.
That was the *promise* of cable TV, but the rebroadcast terrestrial stations would *never* have been commercial free due to all manner of contractual obligations to run advertising.
I'll admit not having an encyclopedia of cable stations, but when I first watched cable in 1983 the non-premium channels had commercials. Maybe less than now, but still they had them. WGN was always a commercial-filled operation.
Regardless of whether the very small handful of "cable only" channels were actually commercial free pre-1983, it was never very many of them, they were likely to be premium channels like HBO and it never lasted.
Premium channels than and now were commercial free, but if there were bundled "cable channels" that were commercial free it was for a very short window of time. I don't know if cable systems sent HBO out to subscribers for free in the early days. They certainly never re-transmitted local channels commercial free.
The *amount* of commercials has grown over time, I do remember there being fewer commercials on cable channels -- but channels like MTV were never commercial free AFAIK, and this goes back to circa 1983.
Don't get me wrong, *as presented* it sounds really shitty of BAE. I can't imagine a situation where someone with a pulse and not a psychopath would fire someone because their wife was dying.
The company I work for has a really awful time off policy and when my son had to be hospitalized on an emergency basis, the owner called me and said "take as much time as you need, don't worry about anything" and he's a guy who thinks time off is a curse on humanity.
I'm curious what models of TLCs you used and how you used them.
I've had good experience with Samsung 850 Pros in Server 2012r2 tiered storage spaces. They get beat on pretty good with daily tiering operations and the default write caching to SSD, but so far no lost disks.
I've always been curious about using 850 Pros in VM hosts or even for repopulating an older iSCSI SAN. I've seen torture tests run against them that show endurance greatly exceeding manufacturer spec.
While I'm sure some might die, with their fairly low cost and high performance I'm kind of inclined to believe that for some uses cases, consuming 2-3 disks a year might be worth it if the payoff was extraordinary performance.
My guess is he works on cryptographic code and if an urgent fix is needed in crypto code (I know, my heartbleeds over this idea..) in defense systems, well, then they need him to work outside normal hours.
Corporate data hoarding and surveillance is kind of scary, but I often think people think of privacy as mattering less and less the further away from their personal spheres it goes. That some details on them may exist in some database far away doesn't matter, but if their co-workers knew they smoked pot and enjoyed anal sex they would be mortified.
My guess is that jet airliner wreckage is a problem for the people it lands on, period. The presence of lithium batteries probably is a negligible risk factor.
I'd also add -- where is our long-tail library of older content *at least* for on-demand rental?
Why are they still keeping content decades old away from us? I'm sure there's all the usual arguments about how on-demand streaming was never included in the rights negotiations, but in many cases every other format including Super-8 was negotiated so what makes on-demand rental so much harder?
A lot of Hollywood content is not available, not just more obscure stuff like Japanese shows.
Diane Keaton and Richard Gere were in Looking for Mr. Goodbar but it hasn't been released since VHS and that's not the only film that's languished in obscurity.
They seem to get buried in rights problems, although I'm never quite sure why it remains a problem some 20, 30, or even 40 years or more after the film was released. What kind of rights/income can they be fighting for 40 years later? Many of the people involved are dead and even if they weren't, I don't understand what they're holding out for in terms of compensation -- it's likely to be peanuts.
And what's really strange is why the digital rental market has so few titles. I get why they wouldn't release DVDs or Blue-Rays of every title, but not distributing them to the on-demand rental market? That's bizarre, it's like asking people to pirate your content.
My problem is that the Government has been repeatedly shown to be involved in mass data collection and with intercept capabilities that almost defy reason and then turning around and dissembling, denying and covering up.
This means that nearly any claim of being wiretapped is partly believable, no matter how far-fetched the scenario seems to be. And any further denials by the Obama administrations or demands to "prove it" sound just too much like all the other denials of mass eavesdropping and data collection.
Trump wasn't wiretapped at Obama's order because he was his political enemy, but there are other more believable scenarios involving pen-testing and meta-surveillance of high value political targets as part of regular counter-intelligence programs, general NSA surveillance of traffic with overseas sources or destinations, and so on.
How do we know something curious didn't turn up in otherwise legitimate counter-intelligence or surveillance activities and somehow bubble up to Obama? There's no nefarious intent, but yet at the same time it makes Trump's claims at least plausible if not true.
When you have an existing x86 VM host farm, how exactly does ARM look appealing? I can't add ARM hosts to the same cluster because they can't run the same VMs as the existing x86 hosts.
What's the need for adding any more overhead in the form of a new CPU category, new hardware, etc, when the marginal hardware cost of adding an additional VM to most existing VM environments is essentially zero?
Maybe this makes sense in niche cases where you have zillions of low-power server images and you're building clusters at rack or aisle scale AND your specific application can run on ARM or x86 just as easily and it comes down to hardware cost only.
But for a lot of places, their existing x86 VM environments are just fine -- node level redundancy, flexible backup and restore, etc, and they need x86 anyway, at least now.
Switching back to the physical server model just because you can use tiny ARM CPUs doesn't make any sense. Maybe something like VMware for ARM, fine, but as long as they need any x86 they won't bother with ARM at all because it means a whole separate cluster.
I think the so-called Gang of Five learned the lesson from IBM experience. Keep a massive pile of cash on hand and simply bribe into submission with stupid amounts of cash any innovator who will potentially disrupt your business model if you can't use or suppress their technology.
Another reason why tech companies with massive piles of cash should have it taxed away. They're not "investing in innovation", they're suppressing innovation by buying the innovators off and maintaining their hegemony. Without massive piles of cash hanging around, they would have to actually *innovate* -- improve their products or come up with new ones. Now they can simply buy off competition and not bother investing in their hegemonic products.
They've turned innovation into something of a lottery -- it encourages not ideas that are good, but ideas that big companies will want or *need* to buy.
Of course, some competition sneaks through, like Snapchat, but probably not because someone at Facebook or Google didn't try. The founders gambled that whatever stupid amount of money they were offered was less than what they could make in an IPO, and they were right. But there's probably not enough long-term business model there, which limited how high the big players were willing to go in paying them off.
I had that experience when I was younger and single but every married man I know over the age of 35 complains about his wife's lack of interest in sex.
I don't know any single, childless women over 35, but I have a theory that bearing children may alter hormone chemistry, that when combined with aging accelerates a decline in libido. This would seem to make some kind of evolutionary sense since having already reproduced they would face less biological pressure to do so and the decline in fertility would also dovetail with a decline in libido.
These married women with children aren't *just* tired, overworked or resentful of their spouses' lack of domestic help, they've *successfully reproduced* -- they've managed to achieve a genetic milestone and combined with the risks of late life pregnancy they simply lose their innate drive for reproduction. It takes conscious effort or some other external motivation (like economic dependency) to motivate them into sexual behavior.
Women who have never borne children might be expected from an evolutionary perspective to maintain a higher drive for reproduction, even as the hazards of late fertility mount, since even a low success rate reproducing is better than a zero success rate associated with remaining childless. The drive to perpetuate one's genes is strong.
Among fertile women who have children under 12 or 13 but unattached, I would expect a higher level libido -- there would be both material economic pressure and some kind of evolutionary biological pressure to capture a mate, and demonstrating a willingness to provide sexual gratification and reproduction with a new mate would be high, since the woman is asking for a mate to aid in providing for someone else's offspring -- a significant demand in terms of biology.
I think you can get into contradictory situations with older, post-fertile women who have no spouse. I think social expectations can lead to paradoxical psychology that runs counter to general evolutionary biology. These women may be sexually active, but it's not a byproduct of reproductive libido, but choices made in response to social or psychological expectations, or even some kinds of neurosis surrounding aging or self-image. The aging woman who refuses to acknowledge her aging and insists on mimicking the behavior of young women in terms of style and associations is a familiar trope, and is often a subject of scorn or pity.
I did read a profile of a researcher who was doing research on what she called "female libido collapse disorder" where she found a large percentage of women over roughly 40 experienced a steep decline in libido, so it's not an idea I've completely made up. It's also interesting to note some of the dissension surrounding Flibanserin, "the female Viagra". Some of it was legitimate questions around the drug's rate of effectiveness or side effects, but there was a lot of it that I would call philosophical opposition, people who were opposed to a drug that treated lack of libido like it was a problem or unnatural -- as if some natural process was being undermined, and that it was normal for women to lose their libido even in the absence of external forces.
My guess is that a system like this acknowledges that most of the time people will be taking off and landing at airfields that support this modular system. When you take off, you leave behind the drive module and when you land you mate with another drive module. "Your" drive module left behind gets used by someone else.
As you point out, it doesn't work for driving to some location, taking off, and landing at an arbitrary location which doesn't have a drive module. But then again, neither does a helicopter. You land in the boonies where there are no cars, you won't be driving anywhere either. And there's no reason you couldn't land at location without a drive module provided you didn't care about not
Even if you assume this system gets developed and widely deployed, I'm sure there would be all kinds of general regulations that basically *required* you to use specific airfields anyway. Maybe the super-rich would own their own drive modules which they kept at their homes or other private locations where they needed availability.
As women move further up the ladder economically they are less and less dependent on men. While women still have their own inherent sexual drive, their sex drive is lower than men for a variety of reasons -- when they are younger, due to the inherent risks of pregnancy and child-rearing, and as they age, due to the decline in fertility and the increased risks of childbirth that come with aging.
I think there's all kinds of evolutionary biology that suggests that sex drive in women is tied to the availability a reliable provider. Pregnant women and women with small children have much greater survival vulnerability -- reduced mobility, increases in risks from physical threats, increased nutritional requirements for both them and any offspring too young to participate in food gathering. And this remains true whether you're talking about a hunter-gatherer community or contemporary American economics -- pregnancy and child-bearing are significant drags on female economic advancement in our economy.
Not only does having a reliable economic provider create the conditions for reduced child-bearing risk and increase innate sex drive, it also creates an environment where women are more likely to meet male sexual demands because of their economic dependency. They have both fewer disincentives for sexual activity and incentives to meet their partners demands for sexual contact even when their own sexual desire thresholds aren't met.
I think this goes some way to explaining why conservatives favor traditional female roles -- increased female dependency leads to increased male access to sexuality.
The way to improve the sagging sexual numbers in the US is probably much stronger economic rights for pregnant women (reduce economic risks associated with pregnancy). It won't help women at the end or past their fertility, though, since nature is already doing its job to reduce desire via declining hormones to prevent high risk pregnancies or because pregnancy is not possible.
Hasn't pop music long been dominated by corporate interests?
There's this cyclic quality where you have a phase of monochromatic, interchangeable artists who are mostly tools of their agents and publishers. Then a handful of artists or some region comes up with some unique twist which gains traction but doesn't always become mainstream.
This "new sound" is then taken up by lots of artists, some of which build on it and others which merely imitate it, the music industry notices it and then heavily promotes it. Some of the early artists "make it" but mostly it becomes another monochromatic trend of corporate driven artists.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It happened in the 1950s -- a few artists mixed up R&B with Country/Swing and more or less created rock and roll. The corporate types got ahold of it, and it became pretty predictable, then you had the Beatles (who were widely cloned and imitated), and then the scene shifted into more hippie blues-oriented music and then that became a corporate product, too.
Then came punk which really tried hard not to even be commercialized -- rude attitudes, hard-core left wing politics, a completely abrasive sound in contrast to mellow 1970s rock, but even that achieved some kind of popularity and simmered through the late 1980s when it finally became a commercialized sound under the label of "alternative rock".
At the radio airplay level it's almost always been a corporate product, it's just that when you're in a trend phase change that good artists manage to sneak into the radio.
Two years ago at my physical was a period of extreme stress and anxiety for me and I actually answered the questions about stress, anxiety and depression at the extreme end of the spectrum.
Of course the doctor never mentioned them to me at all, which leads me to believe the doctors aren't using them as a source of information about the patient.
I think next year when the nurse comes in and fills that stuff out I am going to refuse to answer and cite my previous experience of having my responses ignored and/or irrelevant to the physician. The doctor can ask himself if he believes it is relevant.
How did your suspension last so long? Shocks, struts, bushings, etc? All of that stuff is pretty wear intensive unless you're lucky enough to only drive on new asphalt in a non-freezing climate.
Transmissions these days also seem to be pretty tightly engineered, it seems like a lot of cars I've looked into have sub-par feedback on transmissions.
Slashdot Mirror
How is it not a form of price fixing if Apple is trying to force non-Apple retailers to maintain the same price Apple stores are offering?
It's not even collusion ("hey, let's make extra profit") it's more like extortion ("sell at our dictated price, or else").
Apple can set the prices for its phones in its own stores, but other retailers should be free to set their own prices, even if they are apparently suicidal -- ie, selling below their own cost. If that makes Apple Store look overpriced, that's the Apple Store's problem and they need to correct that impression themselves -- better experience, better support, better accessory selection, etc.
The problem is you have this situation where the *appearance* of weak leadership is taken for weak leadership itself with ramifications for other nation's behavior.
You're right in that "boldness" alone is a poor measure of leadership, and by itself, it's best labelled "reckless". But the other side is of that is "boldness" combined with measured action, best perhaps described as "decisiveness".
Personally, I think Obama is open to some criticism where he's appeared indecisive, and it's made him look weak. Whether he's *right* is another matter, but even if he is by some kind of cost/benefit analysis, it still make him appear indecisive and weak, with all of the ramifications that has on other nation behavior.
A common criticism of Obama that seems to transcend political wings has been his tepid foreign policy behavior. Lines in the sand in Syria, weak responses to Erdogan, and so on.
My sense is that Obama is a kind of purposefully analytical leader who only makes measured responses if, and only if, in-depth analysis shows them to be worthwhile. I think this is good on paper and in a lot of situations doing nothing isn't the worst possible choice relative to its nominal cost.
That being said, global foreign policy is a stage where bold leadership has a value that seems to be beneficial even when its outcomes are suboptimal. In so many cases it kind of boils down to a dealing-with-bullies psychology, where the bullies don't back off unless you bloody their noses.
Would the situation in Syria, in total, be worse if Obama had responded to Assad's use of chemical with strikes on his residences or key military assets in response to his chemical weapons use? Might it have undermined Assad enough that he had to settle somehow, or even possibly killed him and prevented the final siege in Aleppo?
Note that mainstream (Intel 3xx / Samsung EVO) and performance (Intel 5xx / Samsung Pro) are both cheap-out solutions, but they filled a need for us.
That's what I'm getting at, though. When I spec out servers and storage for clients with enterprise flash, it's stupid expensive and I always ask myself if *most* workloads wouldn't be just fine on Samsung Pro even if the cost of ownership wasn't 2-3 disks a year needing to be replaced.
Even Samsung Pros will deliver performance vastly beyond 15k spinning rust, especially in arrays.
Usage frequency broken down by demographics.
But that lasted for maybe a year or two? They definitely had ads in 1983. Not many, but they had 'em.
That was the *promise* of cable TV, but the rebroadcast terrestrial stations would *never* have been commercial free due to all manner of contractual obligations to run advertising.
I'll admit not having an encyclopedia of cable stations, but when I first watched cable in 1983 the non-premium channels had commercials. Maybe less than now, but still they had them. WGN was always a commercial-filled operation.
Regardless of whether the very small handful of "cable only" channels were actually commercial free pre-1983, it was never very many of them, they were likely to be premium channels like HBO and it never lasted.
Premium channels than and now were commercial free, but if there were bundled "cable channels" that were commercial free it was for a very short window of time. I don't know if cable systems sent HBO out to subscribers for free in the early days. They certainly never re-transmitted local channels commercial free.
The *amount* of commercials has grown over time, I do remember there being fewer commercials on cable channels -- but channels like MTV were never commercial free AFAIK, and this goes back to circa 1983.
Don't get me wrong, *as presented* it sounds really shitty of BAE. I can't imagine a situation where someone with a pulse and not a psychopath would fire someone because their wife was dying.
The company I work for has a really awful time off policy and when my son had to be hospitalized on an emergency basis, the owner called me and said "take as much time as you need, don't worry about anything" and he's a guy who thinks time off is a curse on humanity.
What? Cable TV was almost never "commercial free" except for maybe 5 minutes at the dawn of the cable channel industry.
My first sighting of cable TV in suburban Minneapolis showed commercials on the "cable" channels.
And of course re-transmitted over the air channels always had commercials because it was just a closed-circuit feed of the OTA signal.
I'm curious what models of TLCs you used and how you used them.
I've had good experience with Samsung 850 Pros in Server 2012r2 tiered storage spaces. They get beat on pretty good with daily tiering operations and the default write caching to SSD, but so far no lost disks.
I've always been curious about using 850 Pros in VM hosts or even for repopulating an older iSCSI SAN. I've seen torture tests run against them that show endurance greatly exceeding manufacturer spec.
While I'm sure some might die, with their fairly low cost and high performance I'm kind of inclined to believe that for some uses cases, consuming 2-3 disks a year might be worth it if the payoff was extraordinary performance.
My guess is he works on cryptographic code and if an urgent fix is needed in crypto code (I know, my heartbleeds over this idea..) in defense systems, well, then they need him to work outside normal hours.
Corporate data hoarding and surveillance is kind of scary, but I often think people think of privacy as mattering less and less the further away from their personal spheres it goes. That some details on them may exist in some database far away doesn't matter, but if their co-workers knew they smoked pot and enjoyed anal sex they would be mortified.
My guess is that jet airliner wreckage is a problem for the people it lands on, period. The presence of lithium batteries probably is a negligible risk factor.
I'd also add -- where is our long-tail library of older content *at least* for on-demand rental?
Why are they still keeping content decades old away from us? I'm sure there's all the usual arguments about how on-demand streaming was never included in the rights negotiations, but in many cases every other format including Super-8 was negotiated so what makes on-demand rental so much harder?
It's like they don't want to make money.
A lot of Hollywood content is not available, not just more obscure stuff like Japanese shows.
Diane Keaton and Richard Gere were in Looking for Mr. Goodbar but it hasn't been released since VHS and that's not the only film that's languished in obscurity.
They seem to get buried in rights problems, although I'm never quite sure why it remains a problem some 20, 30, or even 40 years or more after the film was released. What kind of rights/income can they be fighting for 40 years later? Many of the people involved are dead and even if they weren't, I don't understand what they're holding out for in terms of compensation -- it's likely to be peanuts.
And what's really strange is why the digital rental market has so few titles. I get why they wouldn't release DVDs or Blue-Rays of every title, but not distributing them to the on-demand rental market? That's bizarre, it's like asking people to pirate your content.
You echo my thoughts exactly.
My problem is that the Government has been repeatedly shown to be involved in mass data collection and with intercept capabilities that almost defy reason and then turning around and dissembling, denying and covering up.
This means that nearly any claim of being wiretapped is partly believable, no matter how far-fetched the scenario seems to be. And any further denials by the Obama administrations or demands to "prove it" sound just too much like all the other denials of mass eavesdropping and data collection.
Trump wasn't wiretapped at Obama's order because he was his political enemy, but there are other more believable scenarios involving pen-testing and meta-surveillance of high value political targets as part of regular counter-intelligence programs, general NSA surveillance of traffic with overseas sources or destinations, and so on.
How do we know something curious didn't turn up in otherwise legitimate counter-intelligence or surveillance activities and somehow bubble up to Obama? There's no nefarious intent, but yet at the same time it makes Trump's claims at least plausible if not true.
When you have an existing x86 VM host farm, how exactly does ARM look appealing? I can't add ARM hosts to the same cluster because they can't run the same VMs as the existing x86 hosts.
What's the need for adding any more overhead in the form of a new CPU category, new hardware, etc, when the marginal hardware cost of adding an additional VM to most existing VM environments is essentially zero?
Maybe this makes sense in niche cases where you have zillions of low-power server images and you're building clusters at rack or aisle scale AND your specific application can run on ARM or x86 just as easily and it comes down to hardware cost only.
But for a lot of places, their existing x86 VM environments are just fine -- node level redundancy, flexible backup and restore, etc, and they need x86 anyway, at least now.
Switching back to the physical server model just because you can use tiny ARM CPUs doesn't make any sense. Maybe something like VMware for ARM, fine, but as long as they need any x86 they won't bother with ARM at all because it means a whole separate cluster.
I think the so-called Gang of Five learned the lesson from IBM experience. Keep a massive pile of cash on hand and simply bribe into submission with stupid amounts of cash any innovator who will potentially disrupt your business model if you can't use or suppress their technology.
Another reason why tech companies with massive piles of cash should have it taxed away. They're not "investing in innovation", they're suppressing innovation by buying the innovators off and maintaining their hegemony. Without massive piles of cash hanging around, they would have to actually *innovate* -- improve their products or come up with new ones. Now they can simply buy off competition and not bother investing in their hegemonic products.
They've turned innovation into something of a lottery -- it encourages not ideas that are good, but ideas that big companies will want or *need* to buy.
Of course, some competition sneaks through, like Snapchat, but probably not because someone at Facebook or Google didn't try. The founders gambled that whatever stupid amount of money they were offered was less than what they could make in an IPO, and they were right. But there's probably not enough long-term business model there, which limited how high the big players were willing to go in paying them off.
I had that experience when I was younger and single but every married man I know over the age of 35 complains about his wife's lack of interest in sex.
I don't know any single, childless women over 35, but I have a theory that bearing children may alter hormone chemistry, that when combined with aging accelerates a decline in libido. This would seem to make some kind of evolutionary sense since having already reproduced they would face less biological pressure to do so and the decline in fertility would also dovetail with a decline in libido.
These married women with children aren't *just* tired, overworked or resentful of their spouses' lack of domestic help, they've *successfully reproduced* -- they've managed to achieve a genetic milestone and combined with the risks of late life pregnancy they simply lose their innate drive for reproduction. It takes conscious effort or some other external motivation (like economic dependency) to motivate them into sexual behavior.
Women who have never borne children might be expected from an evolutionary perspective to maintain a higher drive for reproduction, even as the hazards of late fertility mount, since even a low success rate reproducing is better than a zero success rate associated with remaining childless. The drive to perpetuate one's genes is strong.
Among fertile women who have children under 12 or 13 but unattached, I would expect a higher level libido -- there would be both material economic pressure and some kind of evolutionary biological pressure to capture a mate, and demonstrating a willingness to provide sexual gratification and reproduction with a new mate would be high, since the woman is asking for a mate to aid in providing for someone else's offspring -- a significant demand in terms of biology.
I think you can get into contradictory situations with older, post-fertile women who have no spouse. I think social expectations can lead to paradoxical psychology that runs counter to general evolutionary biology. These women may be sexually active, but it's not a byproduct of reproductive libido, but choices made in response to social or psychological expectations, or even some kinds of neurosis surrounding aging or self-image. The aging woman who refuses to acknowledge her aging and insists on mimicking the behavior of young women in terms of style and associations is a familiar trope, and is often a subject of scorn or pity.
I did read a profile of a researcher who was doing research on what she called "female libido collapse disorder" where she found a large percentage of women over roughly 40 experienced a steep decline in libido, so it's not an idea I've completely made up. It's also interesting to note some of the dissension surrounding Flibanserin, "the female Viagra". Some of it was legitimate questions around the drug's rate of effectiveness or side effects, but there was a lot of it that I would call philosophical opposition, people who were opposed to a drug that treated lack of libido like it was a problem or unnatural -- as if some natural process was being undermined, and that it was normal for women to lose their libido even in the absence of external forces.
My guess is that a system like this acknowledges that most of the time people will be taking off and landing at airfields that support this modular system. When you take off, you leave behind the drive module and when you land you mate with another drive module. "Your" drive module left behind gets used by someone else.
As you point out, it doesn't work for driving to some location, taking off, and landing at an arbitrary location which doesn't have a drive module. But then again, neither does a helicopter. You land in the boonies where there are no cars, you won't be driving anywhere either. And there's no reason you couldn't land at location without a drive module provided you didn't care about not
Even if you assume this system gets developed and widely deployed, I'm sure there would be all kinds of general regulations that basically *required* you to use specific airfields anyway. Maybe the super-rich would own their own drive modules which they kept at their homes or other private locations where they needed availability.
As women move further up the ladder economically they are less and less dependent on men. While women still have their own inherent sexual drive, their sex drive is lower than men for a variety of reasons -- when they are younger, due to the inherent risks of pregnancy and child-rearing, and as they age, due to the decline in fertility and the increased risks of childbirth that come with aging.
I think there's all kinds of evolutionary biology that suggests that sex drive in women is tied to the availability a reliable provider. Pregnant women and women with small children have much greater survival vulnerability -- reduced mobility, increases in risks from physical threats, increased nutritional requirements for both them and any offspring too young to participate in food gathering. And this remains true whether you're talking about a hunter-gatherer community or contemporary American economics -- pregnancy and child-bearing are significant drags on female economic advancement in our economy.
Not only does having a reliable economic provider create the conditions for reduced child-bearing risk and increase innate sex drive, it also creates an environment where women are more likely to meet male sexual demands because of their economic dependency. They have both fewer disincentives for sexual activity and incentives to meet their partners demands for sexual contact even when their own sexual desire thresholds aren't met.
I think this goes some way to explaining why conservatives favor traditional female roles -- increased female dependency leads to increased male access to sexuality.
The way to improve the sagging sexual numbers in the US is probably much stronger economic rights for pregnant women (reduce economic risks associated with pregnancy). It won't help women at the end or past their fertility, though, since nature is already doing its job to reduce desire via declining hormones to prevent high risk pregnancies or because pregnancy is not possible.
Hasn't pop music long been dominated by corporate interests?
There's this cyclic quality where you have a phase of monochromatic, interchangeable artists who are mostly tools of their agents and publishers. Then a handful of artists or some region comes up with some unique twist which gains traction but doesn't always become mainstream.
This "new sound" is then taken up by lots of artists, some of which build on it and others which merely imitate it, the music industry notices it and then heavily promotes it. Some of the early artists "make it" but mostly it becomes another monochromatic trend of corporate driven artists.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It happened in the 1950s -- a few artists mixed up R&B with Country/Swing and more or less created rock and roll. The corporate types got ahold of it, and it became pretty predictable, then you had the Beatles (who were widely cloned and imitated), and then the scene shifted into more hippie blues-oriented music and then that became a corporate product, too.
Then came punk which really tried hard not to even be commercialized -- rude attitudes, hard-core left wing politics, a completely abrasive sound in contrast to mellow 1970s rock, but even that achieved some kind of popularity and simmered through the late 1980s when it finally became a commercialized sound under the label of "alternative rock".
At the radio airplay level it's almost always been a corporate product, it's just that when you're in a trend phase change that good artists manage to sneak into the radio.
Two years ago at my physical was a period of extreme stress and anxiety for me and I actually answered the questions about stress, anxiety and depression at the extreme end of the spectrum.
Of course the doctor never mentioned them to me at all, which leads me to believe the doctors aren't using them as a source of information about the patient.
I think next year when the nurse comes in and fills that stuff out I am going to refuse to answer and cite my previous experience of having my responses ignored and/or irrelevant to the physician. The doctor can ask himself if he believes it is relevant.
How did your suspension last so long? Shocks, struts, bushings, etc? All of that stuff is pretty wear intensive unless you're lucky enough to only drive on new asphalt in a non-freezing climate.
Transmissions these days also seem to be pretty tightly engineered, it seems like a lot of cars I've looked into have sub-par feedback on transmissions.