The "Mediterranean people don't eat meat" thing started when an American researcher decided to prove vegetarianism is better for you than eating meat. So he went there to do a health study, since they were known at the time to have long, healthy lives.
He chose to do his study during Lent. Which, especially at the time, meant the Catholics (almost all of the study subjects) were "giving up meat for Lent."
So that study was bogus, and he KNEW it....and, by the way, he later went on to be very influential in Washington, and was behind the whole movement that later pushed the Food Pyramid and other bad ideas.
On a similar note, the actual Okinawan diet (that people live a long time on) is very meat-heavy, and the trendy "Okinawan diet" doesn't have much to do with it other than the way they cook things. The actual Okinawan diet "starts with pig and ends with pig."
The obesity epidemic really started when the government told us to start taking fat out of the diet and replace it with bread.
I was in high school and college when this really started to kick off (late 1970s), and the comment was "don't eat meat and butter, eat bread and rice. It's good for you."
When the Food Pyramid hit, the diagrams always had a small chunk for meat and fish, with the entire base was made up of bread and rice and potatoes, and a tiny part at the top for sweets and fats. It was usually something like "2-3 servings of meat, fish, and nuts, 6-11 servings of bread, cereal, rice."
That's the problem, not sugar. While people say "sugar is poison," plain old carbs aren't much different, especially in those proportions.
Yeah, there are the people at the bottom of the economic ladder - but when I ride my bike past Home Depot, and all of the guys hanging around trying to get work are playing with their smartphones, it's hard to pretend that "poor people don't have them." When I ride the bus, the people who get on the bus in poor neighborhoods, and who spend the trip talking to their friends about their minimum-wage jobs? Smartphones. The only ones who have old-school phones are the Luddite sorts (like my very-definitely NOT-poor friend, who refused to get a newer phone until his old flip phoneliterally fell apart in his hands) and the technically-inept.
There are a lot of "no down payment, cheap plan" smartphones. Please don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone has to have a $1000 iPhone, same as you.
More likely they destroyed themselves. I look at the insanity on this planet and I'm pretty sure that nuclear war is inevitable. When it was 3 nations it was controllable. Now we have nations like Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. How long before Syria, Venezuela, Somalia. Once building a nuke was a challenge requiring SuperPower status. Now it just requires maniacal determination.
If we fired off every single nuclear weapon ever built - every nuke in all of the world's arsenals - we couldn't come vaguely close.
At most, with perfect targeting of population centers and no evacuation before hand, we might lose as many as a billion people. Which is a lot, but that would leave about six billion people to pick up the pieces. And yes, that includes ALL weapon effects, from the initial blast to fires to fallout.
Even assuming that another billion would die from starvation and other indirect effects (a massive overassumption), you're still looking at a surviving population greater than the Earth's population in the early 1990s.
The ultra-silly gloom-and-doom scenarios like "Nuclear Winter" have long since been disproved (their catastrophic models were too simple, and made some crazy assumptions).
I know it's fun to pretend that "if you don't listen to us, everyone's GONNA DIE," but it's just not happening. We're not anywhere near powerful enough to manage it.
When you turn off of the main road, it looks like a simple uphill stretch. There is a slight slope to the street, but it also narrows several feet at the same time, and the hill masks the narrowing part. People tend to maintain their lane spot by watching clues on the driver's side (like where the left-hand curb is compared to the window pillars), so they miss the right-hand curb getting closer.
About once a month, someone hits the curb across the street hard enough to shake my house and either give the car a flat - or break the right front wheel.
The simple solution would be to paint a white line to show people the narrowing, but it's a brick street, and the city won't paint anything on it.
As noted in the article, the problem isn't "have internet," but "have cheap and fast internet." Having a handful of people, spread across a large area, does a lot to make cost-effectiveness an issue.
People way out in the boonies often DON'T have grid electricity - they either use generators or do without, because running a single power line out to a single house twenty miles from anyone is not cost effective. Solar power is also an option. Organizations like the World Bank say that 100% of Americans have electricity, but they really mean "almost 100%."
Even if those people DO want internet, they can get it, often through satellite services. Basically, the only thing preventing someone out in the middle of nowhere from having reasonably good internet is wanting it - or wanting to pay for it.
Many people don't. Really. Yes, even in cities.
A lot of people in remote areas have phone internet, by the way - and those broadband surveys usually don't count that, even though good cell phone connections have pretty fast speeds (I get 50 megabits on my phone in most big cities).
So, those people who decided to live way the heck out in the middle of nowhere to get away from civilization need internet access? Why?
It would probably be cheaper to find the ones who actually want high-speed internet and give them money to move.
It's hilarious to see these "the US has a lot of people who don't get 10 megabit internet, when compared to other countries," while noticing that the countries they compare us to generally don't have a lot of wide open spaces to cover. There's a whole lot of countries that don't have (for example) places like Death Valley or the mountains of Colorado.
You're comparing a business with a similar model to another business with the same model but on a smaller scale.
Yes, they have often negotiated better prices. That's how it works. Wal-Mart has been doing that for decades.
You also need to start paying more attention to things like:
"Note: Available at a lower price from other sellers, potentially without free Prime shipping."
If you order a Rosewill mechanical keyboard through Amazon with Prime, it's $89. If you order direct from Rosewill, with normal "free" non-Prime shipping, it's $85.
Rosewill could charge you $80 for that keyboard and $4.99 shipping, instead, but it looks better as "free shipping."
Here's the fun part: who owns Rosewill? Who owns NewEgg? Surprise!
Yeah, you can find examples where someone undercuts prices for various reasons, but if you pay attention, you note that Prime is seldom the best price. What it IS, though, is convenient. It's called the "time value of money." If you consider your time valuable at all, it's usually cheaper to but a thing off of Amazon than to drive a half hour across town to pick it up and then drive back.
When you buy that amazing $9.99 doohickey from Amazon, the actual cost to them was closer to $2, with a couple of bucks per package for the actual shipping cost. A $400 graphics card probably cost them $300, but didn't cost much more than the $9.99 item to ship. Yeah, they're going to have "loss leaders," especially in those remote shipping areas, but they can afford a short-term loss on some items because they make so much money on the rest. They do notice that they're losing money on the "ship a ton for nothing" items - but they take care of that with a simple "no free shipping to X location."
The thing is, Amazon finally noticed that, due to the effects of not having to pay quite so many people, they can actually sell that cheap gadget for less than a typical store, even to semi-rural areas.
Manufacturer -> marketing to wholesalers -> wholesaler -> marketing to sellers -> seller's warehouse -> seller's stores -> stock in store -> you
(Wal-Mart cut out a lot of this, which is why they're cheaper) Manufacturer -> ship to Amazon -> ship to distribution center -> ship to you
(marketing went from "paying dozens of people to sell our product" to "paying a couple of people to work on the Amazon page content")
When you cut out so many marketing and handling and stocking steps, things cost less.
Back when I bought my Apple IIe in 1983, it cost $2400 with a floppy drive and a color monitor.
That's about $5900 in today's dollars. You can buy a Vive with a reasonably overbuilt desktop to run it for about half that (I did).
A "cheap" Commodore 64 with a floppy drive in 1984 was about $1000.
That's $2300 today - about the cost of a decent Vive headset and a basic VR computer.
How niche was my Apple IIe? Or the Commodore 64?
I guess the whole "computer revolution" never happened then, right?
I know a lot of people who spent a couple of thousand dollars, just a few years ago, for a big-screen TV. Niche? Yet they still make large, expensive sets - and that ubiquitous iPhone is basically a thousand bucks, replaced every couple of years...
In the early 1980s, when I was in the Air Force, I worked on jets in Victorville, California.
One hot day (it was only 115 F or so), a buddy of mine brought a fancy digital thermometer with him because he was curious about how hot it was where we worked.
It was 140 degrees.
So yeah, the difference between shade temperature and "on the concrete" can be pretty stark.
"It's a lot cheaper for us to hire some really awful people to find you and get the money back, so why don't you just hand over the encryption keys right now?
VR takes a lot of horsepower, and the expanded bandwidth and I/O channels with these chips (and the new chipset that comes with them) will help a lot, especially when VR makers expand past current resolutions.
The big expansion in PCIe lanes is a big plus: going from 16 with the current "mainstream" 7700K to 28 or 44 lanes will have a big impact in some applications. Being able to shoehorn in more than one or two M.2 drives will be fun, too.
It's also not a horrible device for adults. It's a great "oh, well, I lost it" machine.
I have a Fire 7 from last year, and it's really a decent device. Not for serious work, but for watching videos and such. Slap a memory card in it and you can kill a lot of time with no risk to a more expensive machine.
Heck, for older stuff, it's not like you need a lot of resolution. I have a bunch of old TV shows and movies that came off of DVD, and you don't require a 1920x1080 screen when the content is natively 640 x 480.
Slashdot Mirror
Giffords' shooter was supposedly non-political, but had actually worked on her campaign at one time.
He was certainly not a "right winger."
Sorry, but not really true.
The "Mediterranean people don't eat meat" thing started when an American researcher decided to prove vegetarianism is better for you than eating meat. So he went there to do a health study, since they were known at the time to have long, healthy lives.
He chose to do his study during Lent. Which, especially at the time, meant the Catholics (almost all of the study subjects) were "giving up meat for Lent."
So that study was bogus, and he KNEW it. ...and, by the way, he later went on to be very influential in Washington, and was behind the whole movement that later pushed the Food Pyramid and other bad ideas.
On a similar note, the actual Okinawan diet (that people live a long time on) is very meat-heavy, and the trendy "Okinawan diet" doesn't have much to do with it other than the way they cook things. The actual Okinawan diet "starts with pig and ends with pig."
The obesity epidemic really started when the government told us to start taking fat out of the diet and replace it with bread.
I was in high school and college when this really started to kick off (late 1970s), and the comment was "don't eat meat and butter, eat bread and rice. It's good for you."
When the Food Pyramid hit, the diagrams always had a small chunk for meat and fish, with the entire base was made up of bread and rice and potatoes, and a tiny part at the top for sweets and fats. It was usually something like "2-3 servings of meat, fish, and nuts, 6-11 servings of bread, cereal, rice."
That's the problem, not sugar. While people say "sugar is poison," plain old carbs aren't much different, especially in those proportions.
Congressman Scalise is improving, and is undergoing physical therapy so he can walk again.
After, you know, a Bernie Bro shot him and some other people.
And the former professor - again, a leftist - who slammed a bike lock into four people's heads, is still awaiting trial.
Not to mention the 200 or so leftists who are facing charges after their violent riots in Washington, DC.
You're confusing "poor" with "homeless."
Yeah, there are the people at the bottom of the economic ladder - but when I ride my bike past Home Depot, and all of the guys hanging around trying to get work are playing with their smartphones, it's hard to pretend that "poor people don't have them." When I ride the bus, the people who get on the bus in poor neighborhoods, and who spend the trip talking to their friends about their minimum-wage jobs? Smartphones. The only ones who have old-school phones are the Luddite sorts (like my very-definitely NOT-poor friend, who refused to get a newer phone until his old flip phoneliterally fell apart in his hands) and the technically-inept.
There are a lot of "no down payment, cheap plan" smartphones. Please don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone has to have a $1000 iPhone, same as you.
Poor people nowadays don't have home computers - they have cell phones.
Which, even for the lowest-price plans, have better data speeds than 1.5 mbps. And no, they're not all bandwidth-starved.
(I was in a crappy part of New Orleans recently and was getting 50 mbps on my phone... which didn't need that much to stream videos, by a long shot.)
Most people in the technologically advanced nations, that is.
About 90% of the planet would do just fine.
More likely they destroyed themselves. I look at the insanity on this planet and I'm pretty sure that nuclear war is inevitable. When it was 3 nations it was controllable. Now we have nations like Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. How long before Syria, Venezuela, Somalia. Once building a nuke was a challenge requiring SuperPower status. Now it just requires maniacal determination.
If we fired off every single nuclear weapon ever built - every nuke in all of the world's arsenals - we couldn't come vaguely close.
At most, with perfect targeting of population centers and no evacuation before hand, we might lose as many as a billion people. Which is a lot, but that would leave about six billion people to pick up the pieces. And yes, that includes ALL weapon effects, from the initial blast to fires to fallout.
Even assuming that another billion would die from starvation and other indirect effects (a massive overassumption), you're still looking at a surviving population greater than the Earth's population in the early 1990s.
The ultra-silly gloom-and-doom scenarios like "Nuclear Winter" have long since been disproved (their catastrophic models were too simple, and made some crazy assumptions).
I know it's fun to pretend that "if you don't listen to us, everyone's GONNA DIE," but it's just not happening. We're not anywhere near powerful enough to manage it.
It's an EU thing, which means, politically, it's either left or far-left.
It's certainly not US conservatives who are pushing for it.
Yeah, someone screwed up. There's no way in hell there's over 2000 cameras per person right now.
The press keeps calling it "leaked," but it's been freely available for months, if you were paying attention.
They're still working on it, which is why it hasn't been released.
$13.46 from Amazon Prime.
The problem is that it's the nasty kind.
When you turn off of the main road, it looks like a simple uphill stretch. There is a slight slope to the street, but it also narrows several feet at the same time, and the hill masks the narrowing part. People tend to maintain their lane spot by watching clues on the driver's side (like where the left-hand curb is compared to the window pillars), so they miss the right-hand curb getting closer.
About once a month, someone hits the curb across the street hard enough to shake my house and either give the car a flat - or break the right front wheel.
The simple solution would be to paint a white line to show people the narrowing, but it's a brick street, and the city won't paint anything on it.
As noted in the article, the problem isn't "have internet," but "have cheap and fast internet." Having a handful of people, spread across a large area, does a lot to make cost-effectiveness an issue.
People way out in the boonies often DON'T have grid electricity - they either use generators or do without, because running a single power line out to a single house twenty miles from anyone is not cost effective. Solar power is also an option. Organizations like the World Bank say that 100% of Americans have electricity, but they really mean "almost 100%."
Even if those people DO want internet, they can get it, often through satellite services. Basically, the only thing preventing someone out in the middle of nowhere from having reasonably good internet is wanting it - or wanting to pay for it.
Many people don't. Really. Yes, even in cities.
A lot of people in remote areas have phone internet, by the way - and those broadband surveys usually don't count that, even though good cell phone connections have pretty fast speeds (I get 50 megabits on my phone in most big cities).
So, those people who decided to live way the heck out in the middle of nowhere to get away from civilization need internet access? Why?
It would probably be cheaper to find the ones who actually want high-speed internet and give them money to move.
It's hilarious to see these "the US has a lot of people who don't get 10 megabit internet, when compared to other countries," while noticing that the countries they compare us to generally don't have a lot of wide open spaces to cover. There's a whole lot of countries that don't have (for example) places like Death Valley or the mountains of Colorado.
Only took twenty years...
I can practically hear the GPU prices dropping!
You're comparing a business with a similar model to another business with the same model but on a smaller scale.
Yes, they have often negotiated better prices. That's how it works. Wal-Mart has been doing that for decades.
You also need to start paying more attention to things like:
"Note: Available at a lower price from other sellers, potentially without free Prime shipping."
If you order a Rosewill mechanical keyboard through Amazon with Prime, it's $89. If you order direct from Rosewill, with normal "free" non-Prime shipping, it's $85.
Rosewill could charge you $80 for that keyboard and $4.99 shipping, instead, but it looks better as "free shipping."
Here's the fun part: who owns Rosewill? Who owns NewEgg? Surprise!
Yeah, you can find examples where someone undercuts prices for various reasons, but if you pay attention, you note that Prime is seldom the best price. What it IS, though, is convenient. It's called the "time value of money." If you consider your time valuable at all, it's usually cheaper to but a thing off of Amazon than to drive a half hour across town to pick it up and then drive back.
Really.
When you buy that amazing $9.99 doohickey from Amazon, the actual cost to them was closer to $2, with a couple of bucks per package for the actual shipping cost. A $400 graphics card probably cost them $300, but didn't cost much more than the $9.99 item to ship. Yeah, they're going to have "loss leaders," especially in those remote shipping areas, but they can afford a short-term loss on some items because they make so much money on the rest. They do notice that they're losing money on the "ship a ton for nothing" items - but they take care of that with a simple "no free shipping to X location."
The thing is, Amazon finally noticed that, due to the effects of not having to pay quite so many people, they can actually sell that cheap gadget for less than a typical store, even to semi-rural areas.
Manufacturer -> marketing to wholesalers -> wholesaler -> marketing to sellers -> seller's warehouse -> seller's stores -> stock in store -> you
(Wal-Mart cut out a lot of this, which is why they're cheaper)
Manufacturer -> ship to Amazon -> ship to distribution center -> ship to you
(marketing went from "paying dozens of people to sell our product" to "paying a couple of people to work on the Amazon page content")
When you cut out so many marketing and handling and stocking steps, things cost less.
"Expensive" gear?
Back when I bought my Apple IIe in 1983, it cost $2400 with a floppy drive and a color monitor.
That's about $5900 in today's dollars. You can buy a Vive with a reasonably overbuilt desktop to run it for about half that (I did).
A "cheap" Commodore 64 with a floppy drive in 1984 was about $1000.
That's $2300 today - about the cost of a decent Vive headset and a basic VR computer.
How niche was my Apple IIe? Or the Commodore 64?
I guess the whole "computer revolution" never happened then, right?
I know a lot of people who spent a couple of thousand dollars, just a few years ago, for a big-screen TV. Niche? Yet they still make large, expensive sets - and that ubiquitous iPhone is basically a thousand bucks, replaced every couple of years...
The Urban Heat Island effect is most of that - up until 1965, Phoenix was a minor city, and didn't get much past 100,000 until 1950 or so.
Adding people and buildings makes areas a LOT hotter.
In the early 1980s, when I was in the Air Force, I worked on jets in Victorville, California.
One hot day (it was only 115 F or so), a buddy of mine brought a fancy digital thermometer with him because he was curious about how hot it was where we worked.
It was 140 degrees.
So yeah, the difference between shade temperature and "on the concrete" can be pretty stark.
"It's a lot cheaper for us to hire some really awful people to find you and get the money back, so why don't you just hand over the encryption keys right now?
VR takes a lot of horsepower, and the expanded bandwidth and I/O channels with these chips (and the new chipset that comes with them) will help a lot, especially when VR makers expand past current resolutions.
The big expansion in PCIe lanes is a big plus: going from 16 with the current "mainstream" 7700K to 28 or 44 lanes will have a big impact in some applications. Being able to shoehorn in more than one or two M.2 drives will be fun, too.
It's also not a horrible device for adults. It's a great "oh, well, I lost it" machine.
I have a Fire 7 from last year, and it's really a decent device. Not for serious work, but for watching videos and such. Slap a memory card in it and you can kill a lot of time with no risk to a more expensive machine.
Heck, for older stuff, it's not like you need a lot of resolution. I have a bunch of old TV shows and movies that came off of DVD, and you don't require
a 1920x1080 screen when the content is natively 640 x 480.