Since I posted my first post in this topic, I talked to someone I know in the car business and asked him, how, exactly, that car (BMW 750Li) could be sold in that condition for that asking price, and who was eating $40k on the deal, if anyone was really eating $40k.
His thought was that the car was bought deeply discounted to begin with -- list is $110k, but he said if the model in question is slow moving the dealer themselves will get an additional 10% from the ~18% margin they're working with, so the car probably initially sold for far less than list.
"But that still leaves you $30k in the hole.."
He said "I'm sure the new purchaser ate it." He went on to explain that the higher end luxury market is filled with people who turn over expensive luxury cars frequently, insisting on new cars and not caring about the loss on unloading them because they either just don't care or the purchase is funneled through their business and they can write off some of the depreciation, or it's an outright business expense (ie, car is leased for six months for some out of town muckety-muck they're trying to woo).
Is the Chicago Federal DA even bothering to prosecute what would likely be many, many Federal firearms violations (felon with a gun, etc)?
Or is the Obama-Emmanuel-DOJ nexus so strong that they're not bothering with Federal firearms prosecutions because it would look bad for a hard-Democratic city that was the home of the first Black President to have a high rate of prosecution of Black felons? It disrupts the narrative.
Almost all of those are criminally related -- killings of and by criminals in crime-infested neighborhoods.
I'm talking about 4 guys with AK-47s and maybe some explosives in a high-end shopping mall aiming for a triple-digit body count, not a bunch of thugs on a corner someplace shooting each other over money, drugs, pussy or "disrespect".
Tragic though it might well be, it's not really politically motivated violence.
As long as Google is willing to deposit the money into some country's local national bank and keep the deposits stable enough that they can be used for lending and capitalization purposes without a liquidity crisis, I'd guess that Google will always find a country willing to offer whatever tax protection they're looking for.
It's like football stadiums or new factories or anything that involves getting US states to bid against each other. It's a kind of prisoner's dilemma logic where there will be always someone willing to give in to get the benefits.
Hillary Clinton: "I want the FBI to have every tool possible to defeat terrorists and criminals, especially racist, homophobic domestic right wing groups which the FBI tells me are the most immediate threat to public safety. We cannot allow encryption to stand in the way of American civil rights and public safety."
Donald Trump: "I want the FBI to have every tool possible to defeat terrorists and criminals, especially radical Islamic immigrant groups which the FBI tells me are the most immediate threat to public safety. We cannot allow encryption to stand in the way of American public safety."
Translation: "Holy Cow! If they implement weakened encryption, they will use against our side for sure."
When I bought my Volvo, I sought an independent Volvo-specific shop. The car was "Volvo Certified" which meant it had been gone over by their people and as a lease return under warranty from that same dealership, they also had the complete service history of the car (which they printed out for me). Since it was a lease and under warranty, the previous owner had zero incentive to hide defects and since it had an additional 4 years of warranty (2+2) there was little reason for the dealer to sell it with problems since they would be eating the problems.
That being said, my independent pre-inspection mechanic noted that the bumper fascia had been replaced -- he showed the parts label mismatches between the original labels throughout the car and the replacement part and where trim tab hardware was different vintage. Due the absence of any notable collision damage, their estimation was the front end got cosmetically dinged in a parking lot and the owner paid out of pocket for the bodywork vs. the insurance claim which would get tied back to the car's history and possibly affect lease return.
With a little bluster, I turned that into another $750 off my negotiated price since I could point out the alteration and beat them up over the "value" of their certified inspection.
At a certain point, though, modern cars have so many sensors that it's pretty hard for something to be seriously flawed without it throwing codes. A decent shop that can read vendor codes (my shop had the same factory diagnostics as the dealer) can identify even minor problems that aren't visible, and with a compression test and a good and detailed visual inspection for mechanical flaws it's really hard to hide a whole lot of serious problems. Maybe not impossible, but between that and the warranty you'd be hard pressed to have a lemon.
With a brand new car? It's anyone's guess until 10,000 miles. I've known two people recently with bought-new problem cars. One ended up suing the dealer and getting a complete refund and the other the dealer just admitted it was a problem car and gave them a replacement.
I've seen the largest depreciation on luxury cars and I'd guess that this large delta makes depreciation losses into something of a business niche itself with some complex buy-sell-lease-sell arrangement that allows the the depreciation writeoff and a high lease expense to be taken as deductions by two separate companies owned by one person which works to negate the real loss.
Maybe not with a '79 Chevy you don't, but with any *modern* car you take it to a good mechanic and run an ECM diagnostic, compression test and look for any broken suspension components or evidence of repair and you'll know really well what kind of condition its in.
Plus with any late model car (1-2 years old) it still carries the bulk of the factory warranty and most dealer-sold cars are certified and carry an extension of the factory bumper to bumper warranty. Unless its a total lemon (unlikely in my experience), there's almost no mechanical risk if you do your homework.
Also, as a used car buyer, you lose the ability to pick color, any extras, maybe even the engine is not the one you would have chosen yourself.
Unless you're just buying the first one off the lot you find, of course you do. You either shop for the color and trim level/options you want or you go to the damn dealer and tell the used car manager what you want and they will find it for you. Here in Minneapolis we have a used only car dealership that does this. We emailed a salesman what specific Acura MDX we wanted and within two weeks it was on hand in the color and options we wanted. 1 year old, 12,000 miles on the clock and $8,000 less than a brand new model. Absolutely mint condition.
If you have a bee in your bonnet for some weird factory-ordered combination of features you can only find in a new car, you will be paying for that privilege in spades from a new dealer anyway. You will have little flexibility in price and will probably pay a premium for that. That's fine if you're buying a collectible car or what you need for your life to be complete, but otherwise there's little reason for that because all the options you would likely want already are built into most anyway. The maker already know what options people want and put them into standard trim levels. Even if some widget is missing, it's often cheaper to buy without it and find the factory part cheap on the internet and have it installed with a common trim level.
I'm inclined to believe there's some real psychological value to a "new" car with very few miles on it, like maybe 5% of the cost of the car but I think that number has been declining over time as cars have become more reliable and durable.
If anything, cars with no diagnosable problems and something like 5-10,000 miles ought to be MORE valuable than a "new" car. They're still new from a wear and tear and lifespan perspective, but have been largely demonstrated to be free of faulty components and assembly and have more proven reliability than a car from the factory with 3/10 of a mile on the odometer.
If you could return the car brand new in the shinkwrap, never used, then perhaps a refund might make sense.
And how exactly will you know the car has problems if you basically need to have it trailered to a climate controlled storage facility in order to get a refund?
The whole "depreciation once you drive it off the lot" mindset is kind of a self-perpetuating myth that seems to have nothing to do with the actual material value of a car. I've bought used cars with 20k miles on them that were indistinguishable from new cars cosmetically and in every way practically measurable without disassembly, in-depth chemical analysis or the use of a microscope and they were good for the next 110,000 miles (and going strong).
I think the depreciation off the lot concept is a real economic phenomenon -- I've seen $110,000 cars mechanically perfect and guaranteed bumper-to-bumper for 3 years with 5500 miles on the odometer selling for $55,000. Yet it seems un-economic that somehow nearly half the value of the new car is lost somehow. Just who is absorbing that? Even assuming a 20% markup on the new car, *someone* is walking away from $40,000 after two months? Who, exactly, is eating a $40,000 real loss on this?
My guess is that the depreciation concept is a financial gimmick that somebody (lenders, car dealers, car manufacturers, etc) is making money on by turning phantom material depreciation into tax deductions or some other non-real loss that becomes a financial gain.
Is this the kind of thing where most wave 1 devices can be software upgraded to wave 2 devices? Or is it yet another case of tossing out the silicon?
I would guess the glowing vendor support for this on one of TFS links would lead me to believe this will require new hardware.
From an AP support perspective, it really is annoying to have so many active fucking client standards to support. All the gee-whiz latest features are marginal benefits when half the spectrum is used by brain damaged clients vomiting all over the spectrum using old standards.
Please, for the love of all things holy, show me _everything_ my friends post.
They killed that off with various algorithm updates years ago and I doubt you'll ever see it come back. Facebook wants you to see what Facebook wants you to see, messages from your friends is merely the candy between sponsored messages that keeps you coming back.
IMHO, the problem is people complain all the time about the randomness of what they see, so nobody is fooled by the algorithm, only annoyed by it.
It really does make you wonder why the numerous soft targets like malls haven't been hit in the US, especially after Kenya.
Around here, the sporting venues all do metal detectors and handbag searches, so in-the-event is a lot harder, but the side effect is a few thousand spectators jammed up in entry concourses.
I wonder if we'll reach the point where the government will simply take over the entire process of getting to the airport.
24 hours before your departure you will get a text telling you which specific pre-departure screening area to arrive at and what time to arrive. There will be a couple of dozen per metropolitan area and arranged so that there are no vulnerable crowds of more than 10 people. Assignment will be at random, no way to group parties traveling together. You will get pre-screened and inspected and then bused to the airport, which will be completely closed from the outside to the general public. Everything will be brought in by security contractors, including employees and airport supplies.
My uncle lives in Florida, so the picture isn't easy for me to obtain, but he has an 8x10 B&W print of it.
They were able to keep all kinds of photos. My uncle had a thing for waterfalls, he has dozens of waterfall photos taken with the plane's cameras. I don't think there were a ton of restrictions on what they could do with photos that didn't have a specific military value. I was just surprised they didn't get yelled at for wasting what was surely extremely expensive film and processing.
The photo of the SAM being dodged wasn't sensitive from some national security or military perspective, and the missile is kind of blurry owing to its speed.
I always wondered what the death of the low-end access router for Internet access meant. There was a time when pretty much every business with Internet had a 2500 or 2600 access router with either a standalone CSU/DSU or WIC for Internet access.
The switch to broadband made those devices redundant. While Cisco kept making money through ever expanding infrastructure, I wonder if they just got fat and lazy on enterprise dollars and forgot about the lessons from competing on the lower end.
Even in places where they are aggregating T1s due to no other facilities, it's almost always Adtran and never Cisco.
My uncle flew reconnaissance F4s in Viet Nam and he has a copy of a belly camera photo taken by another pilot as he dodged a SAM. He rolled his plane just right and the camera captured the missile flying by.
The response to piracy was entirely pusillanimous.
Shipping companies should have been allowed armed guards, you might have even called them "marines" and if fired upon by a pirate ship they should have been allowed to return fire. Even in Somalia, piracy would have been filed away as a bad idea and would have come to an end before it became a thing.
Any oceangoing ship in calm enough waters to board from a small boat is a stable enough platform to fire.50 BMG rounds from and.50 BMG rounds have enough distance and power to be a highly effective deterrent. They'll punch right through the shitty little boats the pirates use at distances beyond their AK47s or RPGs. You'd end up with dead pirates either way, shot or drowned.
The moral trepidation of the shipping companies and the governments is mystifying -- nearly all of them allow for all manner of armed private security. If I start shooting at an armored car crew unloading cash at the strip mall and try to take the armored car, the guards will shoot back and if they kill me it will barely make the back pages of the metro section in the newspaper.
Yet for some reason there was resistance to the idea of shooting government-less militia members pirating an entire ship and its crew? That's pathetic. Worse yet was the military's police response of detaining pirates. They should have just shelled them and let them sink. We can show our modern restraint by not hanging them from the superstructure, sailing into their harbor and shelling their ports.
I noticed it months ago when I got friend requests for client employees, people I only knew by face or first name in passing. The biggest clue was when our nanny started showing up as a potential friend.
I noticed that iOS has a location right for "use your location all the time" or "use your location only when using the app" and mine for Facebook had been set to "all the time".
I switched it to "only when using the app" and have gotten fewer suggestions that feel geographically related.
I think the backup thing is compounded by people who do backup but leave the backup disk connected all the time. It's reasonable protection for most system failures, but of course completely at risk for malware. The same goes for cloud sync systems and so forth.
You and I know that backups should be offline to be safe, but a lot of people don't, including people who should.
Almost all these ransom schemes involve Bitcoin as a form of payment. What would happen to ransomware if Bitcoin collapsed and became worthless?
Maybe it's like asking what the night sky would look like if the stars went away (ie, unlikely), but maybe its use in ransom schemes would be one more reason for the Feds to "ban" it or make it so prohibitive to exchange currency for Bitcoin that asking for ransom in bitcoin would be like asking for it in moon rocks.
Ours is branded a Sears, who knows what's under the hood.
It's worked well, with the only problem being the loss of a controller board about 5 years ago. Literally the day it happened we got a card to sign up for a year of extended service for $99 and I knew that fixing it would cost more, so I signed up, and sure enough the technician said this repair on a T&M basis it was $300-odd dollars.
The guy said the really expensive part was the main bearing -- as a part alone it was hundreds of dollars and he said they'd only do one under any warranty and after that if it failed it would be a purchase credit.
The door seal gets super moldy as does the soap dispenser, but I just wipe the seal down with a little bleach and then clean water, and run the soap dispenser through the dishwasher once in a while. The tub itself seems perfectly clean and odor free, which I'd kind of expect considering I wash a load of whites with bleach once a week and the entire thing gets run about 10 cycles a week.
We were offered $50 cash and I think a larger "credit' award was an option, but as long as mine works I'd rather have the $50. I figure until/if the controller dies or the bearing quits I'll still be using it.
...then the forced upgrades ought to be worth at least that.
Not a couple of weeks ago, I got a card in the mail saying there had been some kind of settlement over front loading washing machines. I went to the web site, clicked some options (it seemed legit; they asked for no personal information, and you had to enter two validation codes from the card) and it seems I'm to get $50 for some defect or other related to mold and my washing machine, a machine which never stopped working and I still use (there is some mold on the door seal, I just wipe it off periodically, other than that it cleans just fine).
If my desktop computer which worked acceptably began downloading a new operating system and then quit working right after, shouldn't I be entitled at least $50 in a class action? My guess is Microsoft didn't quit this lawsuit because it just didn't feel like litigating that day, they did to halt the contagion of a precedent of four or five figure legal decisions over their Win 10 upgrade.
For a lot of use cases, it's not hard to see high costs: new machine, new application version(s) to be installed, data migrated, loss of use, $10k isn't entirely out of range in many business use cases.
I just kind of hope MS ends up with one of those disclaimers in their financial report explaining how they are setting aside $500 million to handle lawsuits resulting from their forced and negligent forced upgrades.
We spend most of our time in privately owned spaces -- malls, web sites and so on. They may have the private property right to suppress speech, but it feels like increasingly repressive corporate rule.
It's especially repugnant when ostensibly private spaces like shopping malls, built with public money, restrict speech. They *are* the public square now, and if you can't climb your soapbox there, nobody will see your message and you might as well stay at home.
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Since I posted my first post in this topic, I talked to someone I know in the car business and asked him, how, exactly, that car (BMW 750Li) could be sold in that condition for that asking price, and who was eating $40k on the deal, if anyone was really eating $40k.
His thought was that the car was bought deeply discounted to begin with -- list is $110k, but he said if the model in question is slow moving the dealer themselves will get an additional 10% from the ~18% margin they're working with, so the car probably initially sold for far less than list.
"But that still leaves you $30k in the hole.."
He said "I'm sure the new purchaser ate it." He went on to explain that the higher end luxury market is filled with people who turn over expensive luxury cars frequently, insisting on new cars and not caring about the loss on unloading them because they either just don't care or the purchase is funneled through their business and they can write off some of the depreciation, or it's an outright business expense (ie, car is leased for six months for some out of town muckety-muck they're trying to woo).
Is the Chicago Federal DA even bothering to prosecute what would likely be many, many Federal firearms violations (felon with a gun, etc)?
Or is the Obama-Emmanuel-DOJ nexus so strong that they're not bothering with Federal firearms prosecutions because it would look bad for a hard-Democratic city that was the home of the first Black President to have a high rate of prosecution of Black felons? It disrupts the narrative.
Almost all of those are criminally related -- killings of and by criminals in crime-infested neighborhoods.
I'm talking about 4 guys with AK-47s and maybe some explosives in a high-end shopping mall aiming for a triple-digit body count, not a bunch of thugs on a corner someplace shooting each other over money, drugs, pussy or "disrespect".
Tragic though it might well be, it's not really politically motivated violence.
Poquet Auto in Golden Valley, MN. BMW 750Li.
As long as Google is willing to deposit the money into some country's local national bank and keep the deposits stable enough that they can be used for lending and capitalization purposes without a liquidity crisis, I'd guess that Google will always find a country willing to offer whatever tax protection they're looking for.
It's like football stadiums or new factories or anything that involves getting US states to bid against each other. It's a kind of prisoner's dilemma logic where there will be always someone willing to give in to get the benefits.
Hillary Clinton: "I want the FBI to have every tool possible to defeat terrorists and criminals, especially racist, homophobic domestic right wing groups which the FBI tells me are the most immediate threat to public safety. We cannot allow encryption to stand in the way of American civil rights and public safety."
Donald Trump: "I want the FBI to have every tool possible to defeat terrorists and criminals, especially radical Islamic immigrant groups which the FBI tells me are the most immediate threat to public safety. We cannot allow encryption to stand in the way of American public safety."
Translation: "Holy Cow! If they implement weakened encryption, they will use against our side for sure."
I guess it depends on the mechanic you use.
When I bought my Volvo, I sought an independent Volvo-specific shop. The car was "Volvo Certified" which meant it had been gone over by their people and as a lease return under warranty from that same dealership, they also had the complete service history of the car (which they printed out for me). Since it was a lease and under warranty, the previous owner had zero incentive to hide defects and since it had an additional 4 years of warranty (2+2) there was little reason for the dealer to sell it with problems since they would be eating the problems.
That being said, my independent pre-inspection mechanic noted that the bumper fascia had been replaced -- he showed the parts label mismatches between the original labels throughout the car and the replacement part and where trim tab hardware was different vintage. Due the absence of any notable collision damage, their estimation was the front end got cosmetically dinged in a parking lot and the owner paid out of pocket for the bodywork vs. the insurance claim which would get tied back to the car's history and possibly affect lease return.
With a little bluster, I turned that into another $750 off my negotiated price since I could point out the alteration and beat them up over the "value" of their certified inspection.
At a certain point, though, modern cars have so many sensors that it's pretty hard for something to be seriously flawed without it throwing codes. A decent shop that can read vendor codes (my shop had the same factory diagnostics as the dealer) can identify even minor problems that aren't visible, and with a compression test and a good and detailed visual inspection for mechanical flaws it's really hard to hide a whole lot of serious problems. Maybe not impossible, but between that and the warranty you'd be hard pressed to have a lemon.
With a brand new car? It's anyone's guess until 10,000 miles. I've known two people recently with bought-new problem cars. One ended up suing the dealer and getting a complete refund and the other the dealer just admitted it was a problem car and gave them a replacement.
I've seen the largest depreciation on luxury cars and I'd guess that this large delta makes depreciation losses into something of a business niche itself with some complex buy-sell-lease-sell arrangement that allows the the depreciation writeoff and a high lease expense to be taken as deductions by two separate companies owned by one person which works to negate the real loss.
As a buyer, you do not know that.
Maybe not with a '79 Chevy you don't, but with any *modern* car you take it to a good mechanic and run an ECM diagnostic, compression test and look for any broken suspension components or evidence of repair and you'll know really well what kind of condition its in.
Plus with any late model car (1-2 years old) it still carries the bulk of the factory warranty and most dealer-sold cars are certified and carry an extension of the factory bumper to bumper warranty. Unless its a total lemon (unlikely in my experience), there's almost no mechanical risk if you do your homework.
Also, as a used car buyer, you lose the ability to pick color, any extras, maybe even the engine is not the one you would have chosen yourself.
Unless you're just buying the first one off the lot you find, of course you do. You either shop for the color and trim level/options you want or you go to the damn dealer and tell the used car manager what you want and they will find it for you. Here in Minneapolis we have a used only car dealership that does this. We emailed a salesman what specific Acura MDX we wanted and within two weeks it was on hand in the color and options we wanted. 1 year old, 12,000 miles on the clock and $8,000 less than a brand new model. Absolutely mint condition.
If you have a bee in your bonnet for some weird factory-ordered combination of features you can only find in a new car, you will be paying for that privilege in spades from a new dealer anyway. You will have little flexibility in price and will probably pay a premium for that. That's fine if you're buying a collectible car or what you need for your life to be complete, but otherwise there's little reason for that because all the options you would likely want already are built into most anyway. The maker already know what options people want and put them into standard trim levels. Even if some widget is missing, it's often cheaper to buy without it and find the factory part cheap on the internet and have it installed with a common trim level.
I'm inclined to believe there's some real psychological value to a "new" car with very few miles on it, like maybe 5% of the cost of the car but I think that number has been declining over time as cars have become more reliable and durable.
If anything, cars with no diagnosable problems and something like 5-10,000 miles ought to be MORE valuable than a "new" car. They're still new from a wear and tear and lifespan perspective, but have been largely demonstrated to be free of faulty components and assembly and have more proven reliability than a car from the factory with 3/10 of a mile on the odometer.
If you could return the car brand new in the shinkwrap, never used, then perhaps a refund might make sense.
And how exactly will you know the car has problems if you basically need to have it trailered to a climate controlled storage facility in order to get a refund?
The whole "depreciation once you drive it off the lot" mindset is kind of a self-perpetuating myth that seems to have nothing to do with the actual material value of a car. I've bought used cars with 20k miles on them that were indistinguishable from new cars cosmetically and in every way practically measurable without disassembly, in-depth chemical analysis or the use of a microscope and they were good for the next 110,000 miles (and going strong).
I think the depreciation off the lot concept is a real economic phenomenon -- I've seen $110,000 cars mechanically perfect and guaranteed bumper-to-bumper for 3 years with 5500 miles on the odometer selling for $55,000. Yet it seems un-economic that somehow nearly half the value of the new car is lost somehow. Just who is absorbing that? Even assuming a 20% markup on the new car, *someone* is walking away from $40,000 after two months? Who, exactly, is eating a $40,000 real loss on this?
My guess is that the depreciation concept is a financial gimmick that somebody (lenders, car dealers, car manufacturers, etc) is making money on by turning phantom material depreciation into tax deductions or some other non-real loss that becomes a financial gain.
Is this the kind of thing where most wave 1 devices can be software upgraded to wave 2 devices? Or is it yet another case of tossing out the silicon?
I would guess the glowing vendor support for this on one of TFS links would lead me to believe this will require new hardware.
From an AP support perspective, it really is annoying to have so many active fucking client standards to support. All the gee-whiz latest features are marginal benefits when half the spectrum is used by brain damaged clients vomiting all over the spectrum using old standards.
Please, for the love of all things holy, show me _everything_ my friends post.
They killed that off with various algorithm updates years ago and I doubt you'll ever see it come back. Facebook wants you to see what Facebook wants you to see, messages from your friends is merely the candy between sponsored messages that keeps you coming back.
IMHO, the problem is people complain all the time about the randomness of what they see, so nobody is fooled by the algorithm, only annoyed by it.
It really does make you wonder why the numerous soft targets like malls haven't been hit in the US, especially after Kenya.
Around here, the sporting venues all do metal detectors and handbag searches, so in-the-event is a lot harder, but the side effect is a few thousand spectators jammed up in entry concourses.
I wonder if we'll reach the point where the government will simply take over the entire process of getting to the airport.
24 hours before your departure you will get a text telling you which specific pre-departure screening area to arrive at and what time to arrive. There will be a couple of dozen per metropolitan area and arranged so that there are no vulnerable crowds of more than 10 people. Assignment will be at random, no way to group parties traveling together. You will get pre-screened and inspected and then bused to the airport, which will be completely closed from the outside to the general public. Everything will be brought in by security contractors, including employees and airport supplies.
My uncle lives in Florida, so the picture isn't easy for me to obtain, but he has an 8x10 B&W print of it.
They were able to keep all kinds of photos. My uncle had a thing for waterfalls, he has dozens of waterfall photos taken with the plane's cameras. I don't think there were a ton of restrictions on what they could do with photos that didn't have a specific military value. I was just surprised they didn't get yelled at for wasting what was surely extremely expensive film and processing.
The photo of the SAM being dodged wasn't sensitive from some national security or military perspective, and the missile is kind of blurry owing to its speed.
Wasn't John Daly really good at distance driving?
I always wondered what the death of the low-end access router for Internet access meant. There was a time when pretty much every business with Internet had a 2500 or 2600 access router with either a standalone CSU/DSU or WIC for Internet access.
The switch to broadband made those devices redundant. While Cisco kept making money through ever expanding infrastructure, I wonder if they just got fat and lazy on enterprise dollars and forgot about the lessons from competing on the lower end.
Even in places where they are aggregating T1s due to no other facilities, it's almost always Adtran and never Cisco.
My uncle flew reconnaissance F4s in Viet Nam and he has a copy of a belly camera photo taken by another pilot as he dodged a SAM. He rolled his plane just right and the camera captured the missile flying by.
The response to piracy was entirely pusillanimous.
Shipping companies should have been allowed armed guards, you might have even called them "marines" and if fired upon by a pirate ship they should have been allowed to return fire. Even in Somalia, piracy would have been filed away as a bad idea and would have come to an end before it became a thing.
Any oceangoing ship in calm enough waters to board from a small boat is a stable enough platform to fire .50 BMG rounds from and .50 BMG rounds have enough distance and power to be a highly effective deterrent. They'll punch right through the shitty little boats the pirates use at distances beyond their AK47s or RPGs. You'd end up with dead pirates either way, shot or drowned.
The moral trepidation of the shipping companies and the governments is mystifying -- nearly all of them allow for all manner of armed private security. If I start shooting at an armored car crew unloading cash at the strip mall and try to take the armored car, the guards will shoot back and if they kill me it will barely make the back pages of the metro section in the newspaper.
Yet for some reason there was resistance to the idea of shooting government-less militia members pirating an entire ship and its crew? That's pathetic. Worse yet was the military's police response of detaining pirates. They should have just shelled them and let them sink. We can show our modern restraint by not hanging them from the superstructure, sailing into their harbor and shelling their ports.
I noticed it months ago when I got friend requests for client employees, people I only knew by face or first name in passing. The biggest clue was when our nanny started showing up as a potential friend.
I noticed that iOS has a location right for "use your location all the time" or "use your location only when using the app" and mine for Facebook had been set to "all the time".
I switched it to "only when using the app" and have gotten fewer suggestions that feel geographically related.
I think the backup thing is compounded by people who do backup but leave the backup disk connected all the time. It's reasonable protection for most system failures, but of course completely at risk for malware. The same goes for cloud sync systems and so forth.
You and I know that backups should be offline to be safe, but a lot of people don't, including people who should.
Almost all these ransom schemes involve Bitcoin as a form of payment. What would happen to ransomware if Bitcoin collapsed and became worthless?
Maybe it's like asking what the night sky would look like if the stars went away (ie, unlikely), but maybe its use in ransom schemes would be one more reason for the Feds to "ban" it or make it so prohibitive to exchange currency for Bitcoin that asking for ransom in bitcoin would be like asking for it in moon rocks.
Ours is branded a Sears, who knows what's under the hood.
It's worked well, with the only problem being the loss of a controller board about 5 years ago. Literally the day it happened we got a card to sign up for a year of extended service for $99 and I knew that fixing it would cost more, so I signed up, and sure enough the technician said this repair on a T&M basis it was $300-odd dollars.
The guy said the really expensive part was the main bearing -- as a part alone it was hundreds of dollars and he said they'd only do one under any warranty and after that if it failed it would be a purchase credit.
The door seal gets super moldy as does the soap dispenser, but I just wipe the seal down with a little bleach and then clean water, and run the soap dispenser through the dishwasher once in a while. The tub itself seems perfectly clean and odor free, which I'd kind of expect considering I wash a load of whites with bleach once a week and the entire thing gets run about 10 cycles a week.
We were offered $50 cash and I think a larger "credit' award was an option, but as long as mine works I'd rather have the $50. I figure until/if the controller dies or the bearing quits I'll still be using it.
...then the forced upgrades ought to be worth at least that.
Not a couple of weeks ago, I got a card in the mail saying there had been some kind of settlement over front loading washing machines. I went to the web site, clicked some options (it seemed legit; they asked for no personal information, and you had to enter two validation codes from the card) and it seems I'm to get $50 for some defect or other related to mold and my washing machine, a machine which never stopped working and I still use (there is some mold on the door seal, I just wipe it off periodically, other than that it cleans just fine).
If my desktop computer which worked acceptably began downloading a new operating system and then quit working right after, shouldn't I be entitled at least $50 in a class action? My guess is Microsoft didn't quit this lawsuit because it just didn't feel like litigating that day, they did to halt the contagion of a precedent of four or five figure legal decisions over their Win 10 upgrade.
For a lot of use cases, it's not hard to see high costs: new machine, new application version(s) to be installed, data migrated, loss of use, $10k isn't entirely out of range in many business use cases.
I just kind of hope MS ends up with one of those disclaimers in their financial report explaining how they are setting aside $500 million to handle lawsuits resulting from their forced and negligent forced upgrades.
We spend most of our time in privately owned spaces -- malls, web sites and so on. They may have the private property right to suppress speech, but it feels like increasingly repressive corporate rule.
It's especially repugnant when ostensibly private spaces like shopping malls, built with public money, restrict speech. They *are* the public square now, and if you can't climb your soapbox there, nobody will see your message and you might as well stay at home.