Just to hang a number on it, according to a web site that cited the US Treasury, $1 million in $100 bills (10,000 bills) weighs about 22 lbs., or 10 kg. So a metric ton (1000 kgs.), aka 'tonne', would be about $100 million. If one uses $1 bills then it's only about $1 million.
Oddly enough, your example reminded me of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, particularly [handwaving-description]Gödel's method of assigning integers to sentences in logical systems, which he used as part of his proof of the Incompleteness Theorem.[/handwaving-description]
Or, better, a percentage of the gross revenues. Even gross profit can be manipulated. And have all politicians' pay defined as a function of individual oil receipts. Actually if I had a say, I would suggest that they reduce their oil production as much as possible consistent with reasonable economic development and diversification. It's an appreciating asset, just sitting underground. The longer they wait to haul it up and sell it, the more valuable it's going to be, and the longer until they have to survive without it.
Haha. One system I had to build and maintain at a previous employer, not that long ago (1999): PC.BAT job runs a Qualcomm application that dials up Qualcomm periodically to connect to their satellite truck monitoring system, capture session into a file in a special directory PC.BAT job looks periodically to see if a new file has come in; uses TFTP to transfer it to a Sun workstation - call it Sun-1. Sun-1 shell script mails the file to a special email account on another workstation Sun-2 uses fetchmail and procmail to filter the incoming data (now timestamped by dint of having been emailed) into a Perl script that logs into a database server and inserts the data. Sun-2 cron job runs all the Perl scripts that collect, doing the inserts. Sune-3 (a web server on the DMZ supported with an outbound-only tunnel from the database server) runs queries on the database and tells the user where the truck is at, where it's been and what it's doing, displayed as a graphic layer on a mapping system (we got our map data directly from the feds.)
All this mostly because the Qualcomm application only ran in DOS, and only worked via dial-up. For the web user it was really sexy, but underneath it was a complete kluge, of necessity given the available tools.
I think this has been tried. Attempting to enforce local labor standards overseas has been defeated at the WHO as an artificial barrier to trade, or at least I think so.
However 'peer' pressure (for lack of a better word) and the limited effect of US law on multinationals has done amazing things. WalMart for example has made great strides in requiring their contractors to follow their criteria for labor. You may recall the stink a few years ago when some celebrity (Kathy Lee Gifford?) got a bunch of heat because her clothing line was according to reports being made in sweatshops. Companies the produce and sell branded items generally tend to be best, while commodities, being mostly untraceable to the end product, would naturally be more subject to abusive labor practices.
Economists have looked at this question for many decades. The conclusion is that while particular jobs go away, the end result of the technological advance is a net increase in jobs. It doesn't usually happen over night, but it's fairly rapid. The typewriter and adding machine eliminated thousands of clerical jobs, and also brought millions of women into the workforce because it was possible to produce much better work faster, and companies could operate much more efficiently and grow bigger.
Even tech bubbles work out OK. When a bubble bursts there is a huge wave of businesses failing - sometimes the number of businesses in the market drops by over 90%. But the survivors do OK. 10 years after a tech bubble bursts the size of the market is generally four times as large as at the peak of the bubble.
Electrical engineers have been trying to work themselves out of a job for 100 years. But every time they come up with an innovation that eliminates their job, the productivity of the products goes up so much that the market expands to require twice as many EEs to work on the new hot stuff.
But the days of doing the same thing every day for 40 years - yeah, that's pretty much gone unless you're a gardener.
..it dawned upon them a very long time ago. But at the end of the day they'll get to keep their own jobs if they outsource something to lower the costs.
FTFY.
If they don't, some upstart in China or elsewhere will just build a new company that builds it for cheaper, and the company will go out of business.
Some folks (who know such things) say that the flush toilet (and the required plumbing to go with it, whether septic tank or city sewer) has saved more lives than all the doctors in history. Tech FTW!
I worked in a company building graphics systems back then (actually a few years before that), and used to talk about the "gray tie boys" working in glass enclosures.:O It was a big deal when IBM allowed shirts other than white, and ties other than blue and gray. Back then you could always spot the Harvard Computer Graphics Lab guys - they wore three piece suits and sneakers. And Jim Blinn said in his keynote at SIGGRAPH (1978?), (approximately), "Computer graphics - as the technology matures, the hair gets shorter.":)
Technological advance => standard of living is Economics 101. You're confusing the mean with questions of distribution. Prior to these technological advances, there was much less wealth to go around, and those who owned outright the biggest companies of the day were orders of magnitudes wealthier than their employees - much more than today. Technology has no inherent force toward or away from capital - for example, much of recent IT tech advances has given individuals much more power over information (vis. the 'Arab Spring'). During the period from the early steel industry through the 1950s much of tech advance had to do with industrial scale, which did have that effect. But that's not always, or even commonly, the way it works. The typewriter is considered by some to have been the single single factor in the emancipation of women and bringing them into the work force (but the need for processing paperwork due to large scale corporatism was also a factor.)
CEOs are not really related to the rise of the 'professional management' class - they existed before under different names, but until publicly-held corporations they were either the owner, or answered only to a small group of owners. IOW, that class existed before, and were previously much more isolated from the mundane than they are now (if one can imagine that). But flacid corporate boards (generally composed of the same group) have certainly allowed too much distortion in the last few decades.
I'm not sure of your point re Marxism, but I was a freshman in high school when I did a comparative analysis of communism and capitalism, and came to the conclusion that Marxism can not succeed, as it fails to provide a stable feedback loop - "To each according to his needs, and from each according to his abilities" is constructing two isolated unstable systems that are doomed to fail. In practice, as we have seen in the last century, the feedback loop ends up running through the political structure, engendering a corrupt bureaucracy. In fact one can argue that is the problem with the internal structure of corporations - internally they operate as Marxist centrally-planned bureaucracies that encourage cronyism, corruption and competition based on political machinations rather than competence and performance.
Welcome to VAX clusters circa late 1983. Most of IT for the last three decades seems to have been focused on poorly reimplementing the VAX.
Funny, I remember a quote from whathisname who ran DEC, about Unix. He (more or less) said, "Yes, unix is fun and cute. And eventually all those folks will finally realize they want to work on a real operating system.":D
Oddly enough, the Chinese economy is at least an order of magnitude more stratified than the US economy. Nearly every medium to large business in China is owned by the PLA, its friends, and a few zillionaires. While the mean individual income is about $7500 pa (way up in the last three decades), something like 90% of the people live on one or two dollars a day. And independent unions are illegal.
Oh, and by the way - I don't have the numbers handy, but the wealthy in the US are more likely to have started out poor than in any other country in the world. A huge percentage of millionaires in the US made the money themselves, and another large percentage are in the second generation.
Actually that's a popular myth. It's a lot more complicated, but the biggest factor was the usual one - in a mature economy the only thing that increases the standard of living is technological advance. One of those advances was that the size of businesses such as the railroads required the creation of publicly-held corporations (a fundamentally democratic institution) and the need for a professional management structure. One can even see the institution of labor laws (which were indeed largely the result of labor lobbying and a popular sense of rightness) as one of those advances.
It's arguable that the unionizing of the late 19th and early 20th century accelerated the process of diffusion outwards from the centers of wealth, but it's not certain. The big labor strikes of the early 1900s can be seen just as easily as the last gasp of the old methods, rather than the first wave of the new.
Actually if the unions really wanted to protect/raise wages here, the most successful strategy would be to organize over there. This would have the effect of increasing labor costs in those third world countries, which would relieve pressure on costs here.
It's worth noting that Walmart has on its own account and through its suppliers brought more people from dirt-grinding poverty into the global middle class in a few decades than any other institution in history. The so-called 'poverty line' in the US even today is approximately at the same standard of living as the mean in Europe, and would be considered wealthy by 80% of the people in the world. What we are experiencing these days is the rather painful (for us) restructuring of the global economy to something more closely approximating parity.
Why should a North American programmer have a higher standard of living than an Indian programmer (assuming the same productivity, etc.)? There is no fundamental rule that makes that true - it's a historical accident. It's one that I enjoy the benefits of, but I have no illusions that I deserve it. Is it better to feel virtuous for sending $100 to Save the Children, or to support the potential rise of Ruanda as an IT center, giving those same children a possible future opportunity to compete for business against you? It's not an easy question to answer, but it's going to happen no matter how we feel about it.
The fact is that the American economy has not had to compete on a level playing field with the rest of the world for at least a century, and now that's changing, it's an open question whether we are any good at it. I personally think that our innate creativity, diversity, craziness and desire to explore will be a powerful force, but it's not going to be a simple flat-water canoe ride, more like class four rapids.
In fact, unions (the ones that get their heads back into the sunshine) could be a useful factor in that progress, if they begin to look at things in an entrepreneurial way, as a business whose market is those businesses that need the services of their members. They should be looking to increase their markets, improve their competitiveness, "increasing the size of the pie" - the metalworkers are a good example. One direct result of that school was that at least two small fabrication companies canceled plans to move their operations overseas, which had appeared necessary because they could not find the necessary skilled workers here. That was about 100 jobs that stayed here.
I think the long term work of Americans and others to bring the rest of the world into the classical 'liberal free enterprise' world view has in large part succeeded, and begun to bear fruit. The outcome will hopefully be to bring the rest of the world up more than it brings us down.
One truth remains - large institutions of all types prefer to deal with other large institutions. Big government, big business, big education, big unions, all feed with and depend on each other and work to structure the system to encourage each other. All of them are against the interests of the small and the individual.
I have been in two recruiting situations in which the fact that the company's software developers were unionized was a major factor in my decision not to go there. If nothing else, my own observations have shown that if a company's policies are so screwed up that the workers feel the need for a union I don't want to work there; and also that in some cases (for some particularly in the northeast US) many unions seem to still have a greedy, self-destructive attitude that continues to drive entire industries out of business, and throw artificial barriers between (for example) firefighters and police against the people, making it difficult for individual members to maintain a constructive relationship with their populace - their ultimate employers.
Having said that, I am aware that in some industries unions have a valuable role. I grew up in the construction business, and for certain trades the union hiring halls act in a sense as brokers for their members, and provide somewhat of a guarantee that their tradesmen are competent. And back in the 1980s (IIRC) in Portland OR the metal fabricating companies and the metal workers unions became concerned that the schools were no longer producing potential apprentices, and worked together to build an associate degree program in metal working. I'm not a musician, but from my limited long-ago experience, there are similar benefits with the musicians' union.
I've suggested privately that one possibly beneficial union role would be as the representative and hiring agency for Central and South American nationals coming over the border to work in low-level jobs in the US - much like the construction trades unions. The union could maintain responsibility for the individuals, protection of them against unfair practices, and assisting in handling their legal and financial relations. I haven't thought this through thoroughly but it seems like it might help.
This reminds me of some discussion back (IIRC the late 1970s) when the US Social Security dept. was upgrading. They finally had to rewrite their code for the new 3000 series (3090?). Supposedly, the code that they were running was originally written in Autocoder (a kind of assembly language) for the IBM 702 or IBM 705. Then it was moved to a 1620, which ran an emulation of the 702. Then it was moved to an IBM 360, which simulated the 1620 running the emulation. Then it was moved to VM, which could run multiple instances of the 360 program simultaneously. Then, finally, they were going to have to rewrite the program because there were so many changes to it and nobody knew how to write Autocoder any more, and anyway the emulations took up too many cycles. It's apocryphal, but I'll bet it's not far off the truth.
I was thinking about this a few days ago. I don't know much about HTML5, but if it has similar capabilities as JS and Flash, how am I going to have the equivalent of NoScript and AdBlock? I _hope_ someone is working on suitable countermeasures.
About 10 years ago I did a website for a local bookstore, and learned a bit about the book business. Among other things, not only did Costco sell best sellers for less than the bookstore could buy from the wholesaler, sometimes Costco (no doubt together with a couple of other big-box stores) bought out the entire first run, so the local bookstore couldn't buy the best seller at all. I suppose Amazon does that now.
And a local major-label franchised gas station was forced by the company to buy gas at a particular wholesaler, at a price that was higher than the independent across the street was retailing it for. The independent was buying the same gas at a different wholesaler. The company eventually forced him to sell the franchise back to them, and they turned it into a company-owned station.
Not only that, but the excess heat (efficiency of a nuclear power plant is only about 33%) could also be used to distill more water, improving the total efficiency somewhat. Then all we have to worry about is the localized salt pollution.
Maybe they can also use the salt somehow, with some of the excess heat and some of the energy, to absorb CO2 from the air??? taking clues from the Solvay process, maybe make sodium carbonate and ammonium chloride, both useful products.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to hang a number on it, according to a web site that cited the US Treasury, $1 million in $100 bills (10,000 bills) weighs about 22 lbs., or 10 kg. So a metric ton (1000 kgs.), aka 'tonne', would be about $100 million. If one uses $1 bills then it's only about $1 million.
Oddly enough, your example reminded me of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, particularly [handwaving-description]Gödel's method of assigning integers to sentences in logical systems, which he used as part of his proof of the Incompleteness Theorem.[/handwaving-description]
Or, better, a percentage of the gross revenues. Even gross profit can be manipulated. And have all politicians' pay defined as a function of individual oil receipts. Actually if I had a say, I would suggest that they reduce their oil production as much as possible consistent with reasonable economic development and diversification. It's an appreciating asset, just sitting underground. The longer they wait to haul it up and sell it, the more valuable it's going to be, and the longer until they have to survive without it.
Haha. One system I had to build and maintain at a previous employer, not that long ago (1999): .BAT job runs a Qualcomm application that dials up Qualcomm periodically to connect to their satellite truck monitoring system, capture session into a file in a special directory .BAT job looks periodically to see if a new file has come in; uses TFTP to transfer it to a Sun workstation - call it Sun-1.
PC
PC
Sun-1 shell script mails the file to a special email account on another workstation
Sun-2 uses fetchmail and procmail to filter the incoming data (now timestamped by dint of having been emailed) into a Perl script that logs into a database server and inserts the data.
Sun-2 cron job runs all the Perl scripts that collect, doing the inserts.
Sune-3 (a web server on the DMZ supported with an outbound-only tunnel from the database server) runs queries on the database and tells the user where the truck is at, where it's been and what it's doing, displayed as a graphic layer on a mapping system (we got our map data directly from the feds.)
All this mostly because the Qualcomm application only ran in DOS, and only worked via dial-up. For the web user it was really sexy, but underneath it was a complete kluge, of necessity given the available tools.
I think this has been tried. Attempting to enforce local labor standards overseas has been defeated at the WHO as an artificial barrier to trade, or at least I think so.
However 'peer' pressure (for lack of a better word) and the limited effect of US law on multinationals has done amazing things. WalMart for example has made great strides in requiring their contractors to follow their criteria for labor. You may recall the stink a few years ago when some celebrity (Kathy Lee Gifford?) got a bunch of heat because her clothing line was according to reports being made in sweatshops. Companies the produce and sell branded items generally tend to be best, while commodities, being mostly untraceable to the end product, would naturally be more subject to abusive labor practices.
I'm assuming your tongue is firmly in cheek. :)
Economists have looked at this question for many decades. The conclusion is that while particular jobs go away, the end result of the technological advance is a net increase in jobs. It doesn't usually happen over night, but it's fairly rapid. The typewriter and adding machine eliminated thousands of clerical jobs, and also brought millions of women into the workforce because it was possible to produce much better work faster, and companies could operate much more efficiently and grow bigger.
Even tech bubbles work out OK. When a bubble bursts there is a huge wave of businesses failing - sometimes the number of businesses in the market drops by over 90%. But the survivors do OK. 10 years after a tech bubble bursts the size of the market is generally four times as large as at the peak of the bubble.
Electrical engineers have been trying to work themselves out of a job for 100 years. But every time they come up with an innovation that eliminates their job, the productivity of the products goes up so much that the market expands to require twice as many EEs to work on the new hot stuff.
But the days of doing the same thing every day for 40 years - yeah, that's pretty much gone unless you're a gardener.
..it dawned upon them a very long time ago. But at the end of the day they'll get to keep their own jobs if they outsource something to lower the costs.
FTFY.
If they don't, some upstart in China or elsewhere will just build a new company that builds it for cheaper, and the company will go out of business.
Thanks! :D
Some folks (who know such things) say that the flush toilet (and the required plumbing to go with it, whether septic tank or city sewer) has saved more lives than all the doctors in history. Tech FTW!
Haha. reminds me of this bit about Girlfriend 2.0. :D
I worked in a company building graphics systems back then (actually a few years before that), and used to talk about the "gray tie boys" working in glass enclosures. :O It was a big deal when IBM allowed shirts other than white, and ties other than blue and gray. Back then you could always spot the Harvard Computer Graphics Lab guys - they wore three piece suits and sneakers. And Jim Blinn said in his keynote at SIGGRAPH (1978?), (approximately), "Computer graphics - as the technology matures, the hair gets shorter." :)
Technological advance => standard of living is Economics 101. You're confusing the mean with questions of distribution. Prior to these technological advances, there was much less wealth to go around, and those who owned outright the biggest companies of the day were orders of magnitudes wealthier than their employees - much more than today. Technology has no inherent force toward or away from capital - for example, much of recent IT tech advances has given individuals much more power over information (vis. the 'Arab Spring'). During the period from the early steel industry through the 1950s much of tech advance had to do with industrial scale, which did have that effect. But that's not always, or even commonly, the way it works. The typewriter is considered by some to have been the single single factor in the emancipation of women and bringing them into the work force (but the need for processing paperwork due to large scale corporatism was also a factor.)
CEOs are not really related to the rise of the 'professional management' class - they existed before under different names, but until publicly-held corporations they were either the owner, or answered only to a small group of owners. IOW, that class existed before, and were previously much more isolated from the mundane than they are now (if one can imagine that). But flacid corporate boards (generally composed of the same group) have certainly allowed too much distortion in the last few decades.
I'm not sure of your point re Marxism, but I was a freshman in high school when I did a comparative analysis of communism and capitalism, and came to the conclusion that Marxism can not succeed, as it fails to provide a stable feedback loop - "To each according to his needs, and from each according to his abilities" is constructing two isolated unstable systems that are doomed to fail. In practice, as we have seen in the last century, the feedback loop ends up running through the political structure, engendering a corrupt bureaucracy. In fact one can argue that is the problem with the internal structure of corporations - internally they operate as Marxist centrally-planned bureaucracies that encourage cronyism, corruption and competition based on political machinations rather than competence and performance.
To emphasize: I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft moved to the Linux kernel in a few years time and nobody would really care or even notice.
For the record, in 1998 I predicted that by 2004, "Microsoft NT would be just another form of Unix, with different skin." :D
Welcome to VAX clusters circa late 1983. Most of IT for the last three decades seems to have been focused on poorly reimplementing the VAX.
Funny, I remember a quote from whathisname who ran DEC, about Unix. He (more or less) said, "Yes, unix is fun and cute. And eventually all those folks will finally realize they want to work on a real operating system." :D
I think it was Boss Tweed who said, "I believe in free elections - as long as I get to nominate!"
Oddly enough, the Chinese economy is at least an order of magnitude more stratified than the US economy. Nearly every medium to large business in China is owned by the PLA, its friends, and a few zillionaires. While the mean individual income is about $7500 pa (way up in the last three decades), something like 90% of the people live on one or two dollars a day. And independent unions are illegal.
Oh, and by the way - I don't have the numbers handy, but the wealthy in the US are more likely to have started out poor than in any other country in the world. A huge percentage of millionaires in the US made the money themselves, and another large percentage are in the second generation.
Actually that's a popular myth. It's a lot more complicated, but the biggest factor was the usual one - in a mature economy the only thing that increases the standard of living is technological advance. One of those advances was that the size of businesses such as the railroads required the creation of publicly-held corporations (a fundamentally democratic institution) and the need for a professional management structure. One can even see the institution of labor laws (which were indeed largely the result of labor lobbying and a popular sense of rightness) as one of those advances.
It's arguable that the unionizing of the late 19th and early 20th century accelerated the process of diffusion outwards from the centers of wealth, but it's not certain. The big labor strikes of the early 1900s can be seen just as easily as the last gasp of the old methods, rather than the first wave of the new.
really? Any references?
Actually if the unions really wanted to protect/raise wages here, the most successful strategy would be to organize over there. This would have the effect of increasing labor costs in those third world countries, which would relieve pressure on costs here.
It's worth noting that Walmart has on its own account and through its suppliers brought more people from dirt-grinding poverty into the global middle class in a few decades than any other institution in history. The so-called 'poverty line' in the US even today is approximately at the same standard of living as the mean in Europe, and would be considered wealthy by 80% of the people in the world. What we are experiencing these days is the rather painful (for us) restructuring of the global economy to something more closely approximating parity.
Why should a North American programmer have a higher standard of living than an Indian programmer (assuming the same productivity, etc.)? There is no fundamental rule that makes that true - it's a historical accident. It's one that I enjoy the benefits of, but I have no illusions that I deserve it. Is it better to feel virtuous for sending $100 to Save the Children, or to support the potential rise of Ruanda as an IT center, giving those same children a possible future opportunity to compete for business against you? It's not an easy question to answer, but it's going to happen no matter how we feel about it.
The fact is that the American economy has not had to compete on a level playing field with the rest of the world for at least a century, and now that's changing, it's an open question whether we are any good at it. I personally think that our innate creativity, diversity, craziness and desire to explore will be a powerful force, but it's not going to be a simple flat-water canoe ride, more like class four rapids.
In fact, unions (the ones that get their heads back into the sunshine) could be a useful factor in that progress, if they begin to look at things in an entrepreneurial way, as a business whose market is those businesses that need the services of their members. They should be looking to increase their markets, improve their competitiveness, "increasing the size of the pie" - the metalworkers are a good example. One direct result of that school was that at least two small fabrication companies canceled plans to move their operations overseas, which had appeared necessary because they could not find the necessary skilled workers here. That was about 100 jobs that stayed here.
I think the long term work of Americans and others to bring the rest of the world into the classical 'liberal free enterprise' world view has in large part succeeded, and begun to bear fruit. The outcome will hopefully be to bring the rest of the world up more than it brings us down.
One truth remains - large institutions of all types prefer to deal with other large institutions. Big government, big business, big education, big unions, all feed with and depend on each other and work to structure the system to encourage each other. All of them are against the interests of the small and the individual.
I have been in two recruiting situations in which the fact that the company's software developers were unionized was a major factor in my decision not to go there. If nothing else, my own observations have shown that if a company's policies are so screwed up that the workers feel the need for a union I don't want to work there; and also that in some cases (for some particularly in the northeast US) many unions seem to still have a greedy, self-destructive attitude that continues to drive entire industries out of business, and throw artificial barriers between (for example) firefighters and police against the people, making it difficult for individual members to maintain a constructive relationship with their populace - their ultimate employers.
Having said that, I am aware that in some industries unions have a valuable role. I grew up in the construction business, and for certain trades the union hiring halls act in a sense as brokers for their members, and provide somewhat of a guarantee that their tradesmen are competent. And back in the 1980s (IIRC) in Portland OR the metal fabricating companies and the metal workers unions became concerned that the schools were no longer producing potential apprentices, and worked together to build an associate degree program in metal working. I'm not a musician, but from my limited long-ago experience, there are similar benefits with the musicians' union.
I've suggested privately that one possibly beneficial union role would be as the representative and hiring agency for Central and South American nationals coming over the border to work in low-level jobs in the US - much like the construction trades unions. The union could maintain responsibility for the individuals, protection of them against unfair practices, and assisting in handling their legal and financial relations. I haven't thought this through thoroughly but it seems like it might help.
And you almost always have to work through the "friendly" GUI, that have more of a goal to look shiny, rather than being helpful.
Sigh.
This reminds me of some discussion back (IIRC the late 1970s) when the US Social Security dept. was upgrading. They finally had to rewrite their code for the new 3000 series (3090?). Supposedly, the code that they were running was originally written in Autocoder (a kind of assembly language) for the IBM 702 or IBM 705. Then it was moved to a 1620, which ran an emulation of the 702. Then it was moved to an IBM 360, which simulated the 1620 running the emulation. Then it was moved to VM, which could run multiple instances of the 360 program simultaneously. Then, finally, they were going to have to rewrite the program because there were so many changes to it and nobody knew how to write Autocoder any more, and anyway the emulations took up too many cycles. It's apocryphal, but I'll bet it's not far off the truth.
I was thinking about this a few days ago. I don't know much about HTML5, but if it has similar capabilities as JS and Flash, how am I going to have the equivalent of NoScript and AdBlock? I _hope_ someone is working on suitable countermeasures.
About 10 years ago I did a website for a local bookstore, and learned a bit about the book business. Among other things, not only did Costco sell best sellers for less than the bookstore could buy from the wholesaler, sometimes Costco (no doubt together with a couple of other big-box stores) bought out the entire first run, so the local bookstore couldn't buy the best seller at all. I suppose Amazon does that now.
And a local major-label franchised gas station was forced by the company to buy gas at a particular wholesaler, at a price that was higher than the independent across the street was retailing it for. The independent was buying the same gas at a different wholesaler. The company eventually forced him to sell the franchise back to them, and they turned it into a company-owned station.
Not only that, but the excess heat (efficiency of a nuclear power plant is only about 33%) could also be used to distill more water, improving the total efficiency somewhat. Then all we have to worry about is the localized salt pollution.
Maybe they can also use the salt somehow, with some of the excess heat and some of the energy, to absorb CO2 from the air??? taking clues from the Solvay process, maybe make sodium carbonate and ammonium chloride, both useful products.